Ghostman (35 page)

Angela took a vial of cocaine out of her jacket pocket and poured half of it into her palm, which she then clamped over my mouth and nose. The powder rubbed into my face and smeared into my stubble. I felt the cool numbing sensation of the drug. I breathed in. The pain in my chest subsided and the world snapped into focus. Everything that had been black and white was suddenly in bright Technicolor. Angela pointed at me with her other hand and said, “Are you going to be cool?”

I nodded.

I was better than cool. I felt like a wounded god.

Angela took her hand off my mouth. She grabbed a radio from somewhere and shoved it in my face. It took a moment in my dazed, coked-up state to recognize it as the large black police scanner that Hsiu had been carrying.

“It just said your name,” said Angela.

“What?”

“The goddamn police scanner just said your name. They’ve got helicopters coming in, and the police frequencies are shouting your name around like you’re the one running the show.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Goddamn it.” Angela shoved the radio in my face again. “How do they know about Jack Delton?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about at first. I was dumbstruck and couldn’t focus on anything except the ringing sound of Mancini’s gunfire. It took me a few pregnant seconds to put all the pieces together. My eyes went wide when I realized what I’d done. I finally knew the magnitude of the mistake I’d made. I finally recognized the mistake, the simple mistake, that would haunt me for the next five years. I couldn’t hear anything but Angela’s voice.

“How the hell do they know about Jack Delton?”

Right then, I knew.

56

ATLANTIC CITY

I got into the Bentley and drove. As soon as I pulled out onto Kentucky Avenue I grabbed a cell phone from my overnight bag, powered it up and slammed in Rebecca Blacker’s digits. The phone rang and rang, but nobody picked up.

The Wolf had finally offered me a straight deal: 150,000 clean dollars for 1.2 million dirty ones. That didn’t mean I trusted him, however. I’d done everything short of killing him. I’d killed three of his men and put another two in the hospital. Men like that are replaceable, sure, but it’s rare for any gang to suffer that many casualties in such a short period of time. There would be enormous pressure on him to take care of me, one way or another. If I wanted to come out of this alive, I had to run. And, hell, I wasn’t even considering what he might do to Blacker. I swore and tossed the phone on the passenger seat.

I looked at my watch. A little after 9 p.m.

Nine hours to go.

I drove north of the city along the Absecon Bay back to the self-storage
center in the marsh. The rain eased up and then stopped, leaving fresh puddles on the concrete. The air wasn’t salty anymore. It smelled as fresh and clean as a shower after a workout. The potholes sucked up the water and asked for more. The heat was coming back. Even in the dark the thermostat on the side of the manager’s office was in the high eighties. The place was closed for the night, but there was a gate where anybody with an access key could get into their container whenever they wanted. Twenty-four-hour access is essential to the industry. I punched in the code the kid had used to spring the lock.

I emptied the rucksack. The ammunition boxes and the Uzi case and the gun parts and the bundle of twenties and the plain white pills fell out, plus the phone Ribbons never got a chance to use. I took the Uzi out of its case. It was sturdy and the barrel and chamber looked clean for a gun that had been sitting in the heat for a few days. If I needed to, I could fire it with one hand.

I knelt on the floor and snapped bullets into the magazines. There were three mags total, with twenty-five bullets in each. An Uzi fires at least one thousand rounds per minute. Even a short love tap on the trigger could send out a clip-emptying hail of lead. After the muzzle jump and the recoil, accuracy would be an issue. I’d have to keep it down to short bursts. Three clips of ammunition felt like a lot. It wasn’t. Three clips meant three trigger taps, or about three seconds of pure fury. Just like roulette, playing the spread is the only way to win.

It took me five minutes to load all the magazines. I tucked the spare clips in my pockets and put one in the butt of my gun. I made sure the safety was on before I hooked the Uzi on my belt loop. My jacket wouldn’t cover it if someone was looking, but on passing glance I looked all right. When I left the storage unit, I saw my reflection in the Bentley’s windshield. I was looking at a sleepless man with a two-day beard and an expensive new suit with a submachine gun hanging out of it.

I got back in the Bentley and took off again.

I was barely out of the parking lot when a phone started vibrating
in my overnight bag. I fished it out with one hand and held the wheel with the other. I recognized the number on the screen.
Rebecca Blacker
. I pressed the green button.

“Tell me you’re okay,” I said.

“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

I shot by the place where windmills with blades twenty stories tall spun endlessly all day and all night. My headlights were the only lights except for the distant glow of the casino towers. I was two minutes away from the beach where I’d stashed the money. I could pick it up and be back downtown in less than twenty.

“I just met with the Wolf,” I told her.

“You’re admitting to that now?”

“Yes,” I said. “Are you tracing this call?”

“What?”

“Are you tracing this call? Yes or no.”

“I don’t know why it matters.”

“I’m going back to the casino,” I said. “And I need your help.”

57

I arrived at the Atlantic Regency twenty minutes later. Somehow it didn’t feel right being there. Even if the promised money was waiting for me inside all wrapped up with a bow, this location didn’t feel safe. There were still bullet holes from the heist in the glass doors of the side entrance, and a rent-a-cop stationed outside telling people to move along.

I hate returning to a takedown point. I even hate returning to the scene of a crime I didn’t commit. It plays into all the worst stereotypes about people in this line of work. Only the most hubristic, prideful thieves would ever go back to gloat. To me that’s just embarrassing. A thief is supposed to do the job and get the hell out. Hanging around afterward increases the potential for jail time, nothing more.

I slid the Uzi under the flimsy flap of the blue Kevlar bag. I fitted the bag’s strap to my shoulder and practiced pulling the gun out as quickly as I could, at least as far as the dashboard. Assuming the penthouse was a presidential-style skyloft, that would mean five or six bedrooms, a large living room and a dining room or maybe even a kitchen. The money would probably be in a wall safe inside a closet in the master bedroom. I made some quick calculations. There could easily be half a dozen guys
up there. Something made me think that even with five of his guys down for the count, the Wolf wouldn’t have any problems finding volunteers. He’d run out of guns before he ran out of men to hold them.

I got out of the car. The Regency was lit up like the Fourth of July, even though it was almost ten on a Sunday night. I could hear the music and jackpot alarms going from the street. Atlantic City prime time. I looked at my watch.

Eight hours to go.

I passed through the casino floor toward the hotel main lobby, carrying the bag over my shoulder. There weren’t any metal detectors, so I had no problem getting the gun through. It felt strange bringing the money back where it was supposed to go in the first place. The strangeness of the situation excited me, in a way. It was like stealing the payload all over again, just by walking past the blackjack tables. I was starting to get why some men liked to go back to their old targets. It was like being able to see in a room full of blind people. I knew things they couldn’t even imagine.

There were three receptionists on duty, with a queue forming in front of them. I slid into line behind a group of tourists in white cabana shirts. When I got to the front, I gave the receptionist the best smile I could muster under the circumstances. “I’m supposed to pick up a room card,” I said.

“What room are you in?”

“I’m with the group in the penthouse.”

“What’s the name on the reservation?”

“Turner,” I told her.

I checked for floor security and pit bosses on instinct, then scanned the ceiling for security cameras. There were far too many to count. Every five feet there was a black dome on the ceiling. I must have been on six or seven cameras at once, all told. The receptionist printed me a new card and handed it to me with a smile.

I took the elevator up to the top floor. The top floor had only one
room, where a long hallway led to a single set of thick mahogany doors. The penthouse. I swiped my card and walked right in.

The doors opened onto a Roman-style atrium. In the center was a still pool of water with a plaster sculpture of the goddess Juno rising out of it. The ceiling was held up with massive Doric columns, and the walls were covered in frescoes that evoked antiquity. The floors were inlaid black-and-white marble with more mahogany doors on either side. It was the sort of place you’d expect the Wolf to stay. Every detail was extravagant to the point of garishness. The gold leaf and plaster gave it an air of fast money and grotesque overindulgence.

Behind the pool were two men in suits.

They didn’t look like the Wolf’s other heavies. These men were neatly dressed, clean-cut and well manicured. Their suits were custom-fitted. They both wore plain, gold-rimmed glasses and didn’t seem surprised to see me. One stood nearer the statue with a black duffel bag on the floor in front of him. The other stood a few feet away holding a 9mm Beretta at his side and when I’d come through the door he’d raised his gun and taken a bead on my head.

“I’m here to make a trade,” I said.

58

KUALA LUMPUR

Liam Harrison wasn’t dead.

I merely assumed he was. At the time, I thought this was a pretty reasonable assumption. There aren’t a whole lot of bulletproof vests that can withstand a .44 Magnum round at point-blank range. Hell, even if I’d known he was wearing a bulletproof vest, I still would have assumed he was dead. That amount of force carried by that bullet should have broken his ribs and collapsed his lungs. He should’ve been dead twice over.

He
should
have been.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone over that moment in my head. Sometimes, when I’m up at night, the scene plays on repeat, over and over again. I feel like there’s still a part of me lying on the floor of that armored truck with two nostrils full of coke and a trio of hollow points in my chest. For years now I’ve been thinking about that moment. Maybe if I’d been paying better attention, I might have saved myself a lot of trouble and pain. If only I’d been more careful, I could have saved Joe Landis’s life. I could have saved Jack Delton’s.

Over the years I’ve tried to justify the mistake to myself. I had no idea that Liam Harrison had survived, after all. How was I supposed to know that he’d lived through our encounter and was then able to figure us out? But after a while, I came to see it from Marcus’s perspective. Marcus couldn’t afford to tolerate failure. On a heist, even the slightest mistake can have consequences beyond the wildest imagination. If he ever saw me again, he’d have to kill me. It was the only way the system worked.

That one simple action—showing my fake passport to a police informant—ruined the Asian Exchange Job. After all my worries, the heist didn’t go bad because Marcus set me up. It didn’t go bad because we planned something wrong. It didn’t go bad because we bit off more than we could chew. No. It went bad because of a bullet-resistant vest, a fake passport and a bag of soy crisps.

I slammed the door to my scatter and locked it.

A guy’s not supposed to return to his scatter after a heist except under extreme circumstances. These qualified in spades. After our bloody breakout in the armored truck, everybody in the city would be looking for us. The small room behind the laundry was the only place I knew where I could lie low for a few hours. I knew damn well I couldn’t stay there. The police have ways of figuring that shit out. I put the chain on the door and my brain went into high gear. New plan. Right now.

I hadn’t left myself much in the scatter. The soap and razor I’d used were still there, of course, but I’d gotten rid of everything else, like my spare clothes and petty belongings. I went to the bedroom, turned on the radio and switched it over to the local news broadcast. I put the police scanner next to the radio and turned it on as well. I wanted to hear both broadcasts at the same time. I needed to know everything the police knew at the moment they learned it.

The rest of the getaway was completely shot. If the police knew about Jack Delton, they must have figured out who came in with him through customs. They’d get warrants for them too. All of our aliases were burned, not just mine. Police would be waiting for us at every point
of egress—airports, train stations, harbors, highways. If they knew who we were, they’d be waiting for sure. Going to the airport was a deathtrap now. We wouldn’t even make it to the gate before security would take us down. Our only shot coming out of that bank was to break up and take our chances separately.

This would mean I’d never see Angela again, but I didn’t have time to think about that. The last time I ever saw her was in the back of that armored truck.

First, I needed to get the hell out of these clothes. Getting rid of the guard uniform wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t keep anything that had gone into that bank. The costume wasn’t the half of it, either. My face was on the security cameras, and in a few hours those images would be on every newscast in the country. I had to find a way to get rid of everything that could tie me to the heist, from the passports to the bulletproof vest. Do you know how hard that is? Ballistic Kevlar is part of a class of synthetic fibers that don’t ever burn. Hell, unless you’ve got an industrial furnace, they don’t even
melt
.