by Roger Hobbs
And Ribbons’s stolen hunter-green 2009 Mazda Miata was sitting beside it.
The car had been through hell. The front lights were smashed out and there was a dent over the left-side door as long as a small desk. The vehicle was parked halfway behind the bushes in such a way that the license plate was facing away from the street. I could make out little specks of blood and dirt on the driver’s-side window. The car was there, but Ribbons wasn’t in it, of course. At least he’d made it inside. I’d hate to die in a Japanese car.
I walked up and kicked the front door hard enough to knock the bolt through the frame. The door practically fell off its hinges. Then I gave the plywood a couple kicks and the whole mess caved in on itself.
As I said, the place had once been beautiful. The wallpaper was an expensive floral pattern full of lush leaves and ripe fruits. Along the ceilings ran ornate crown molding, depicting plum vines twisting off in all directions. It was beautifully done, but the walls were dark and stained brown with watermarks and the lights were all broken. In one corner someone had spray-painted Nothing is stronger than habit.
The inside of the house was dark and hot and wet and rotten. Thick particles of dust hung in the air, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I flipped the nearest light switch, but nothing happened.
There was a trail of black blood dried into the carpet.
Right after I saw the blood, the smell hit me all at once—something like rotting fish, feces and gunpowder. The drops of blood got more frequent toward the center of the house, down a short hallway and past a closet and bathroom. It looked like someone had painted a long black brushstroke on the carpet.
Ribbons.
His Kalashnikov was leaning against the doorframe. The action was blocked with blood and covered with gunpowder residue. There were other things strewn along the blood trail. A latex glove. A Colt 1911 magazine. A 7.62 × 39mm bullet. A black ski mask.
He was here, all right.
And he was still alive.
46
When I found him, Ribbons looked more like a corpse than a human being. His eyes were glazed over and his breath was shallow. The rise and fall of his chest was the only sign that he was still alive at all. His voice was a hoarse, parched whisper.
“Water,” he said.
He was slumped against a wall in the living room in a pool of blood. His Kevlar vest and sweatshirt were soaked. His face was pallid and his feet were swollen. He looked peaceful, except for his eyes. They were leaking a green pus from the sides. The bullet had hit him three or four inches or so above the belly button and punched a hole through his vest. Two other bullets that hadn’t gone through were safely lodged in the vest. I could see the dots of crumpled lead sticking out from the ceramic trauma plates. A long streak of blood ran along the wall where he’d fallen against it and slid into his current position. The blood was now so old that it was beginning to turn black.
Most people shot in the chest don’t last fifteen minutes. The hydrochloric acid in the stomach usually leaks out into the blood, you see. This causes some sort of shock, which kills fast. The victim goes into a coma and dies minutes later. This bullet, however, hadn’t reached the stomach. The vest had slowed it down too much. It had come to a slow stop in Ribbons’s fat without ever reaching his intestines. It was still lodged inside his abdomen and slowly cutting farther into him every time he breathed.
Maybe twenty hours ago a surgeon, a very good surgeon, could’ve saved him. Not now. The color was already gone from his face. The gunk forming in his eyes was a sign of infection. So was the sound in his lungs. Now he was just waiting to die.
“Cop?” he whispered.
“No,” I said. “Father sent me.”
“Water,” he said. “Please.”
I didn’t respond. Just stood there.
“Water.”
I looked back down the hall. I told myself I was looking for the money, but that wasn’t it. If the money were in the hallway, I would’ve noticed it already.
“Please,” he said. “Water.”
Ribbons’s face was marked with dried blood and his hands were caked with it. His lips were as dry as sand. He made eye contact with me and his gaze didn’t waver. “Please, man,” he said.
“Where did you put the money, Ribbons?”
“Please.”
“I need the money first,” I said.
Ribbons didn’t say anything. His fingers twitched and he pointed farther down the hallway. I turned my head and followed the line of his gesture out of the room, down the hallway, then stood up and went that way, deeper into the silent house. The bedroom still had an old bed frame and dresser, but it felt empty, and all the shadows gave me a sense of unease. Ribbons had never gotten a chance to live here. The place never had a soul.
I waded through the darkness by sense of touch. The light from outside came through the cracks in the plywood like red laser beams. In the distance I could hear cars rushing along the highway.
The money was in the closet.
I knew what it was without having to open the bloodstained blue Kevlar bag. I picked it up and started toward the front door, but stopped before I got there. Ribbons could barely lift his head to look at me standing there in the doorframe. It was like he was weighed down by a thousand bricks and every little movement took a monumental effort to complete. His lips moved, but no words came out. Praying, maybe.
“Water,” he said.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I’ll get you water.”
I left him alone in that room, but just for a minute. The kitchen was two doors down, next to the dining room, and it had a breakfast nook. I waded through the darkness and turned on the tap and it sputtered for a bit, but then water came out. I opened drawers, but they were all empty. I made a makeshift cup with my hands and let them fill with water. I waded back through the shadows to the living room. Ribbons’s fingers twitched when he saw what I was doing.
“Please,” he said.
I swore and knelt next to him in the pool of blood and vomit. I held my hands to his lips until the water ran into his mouth and down his chin. He drank like he couldn’t get enough. He asked for more. I made another trip and gave it to him. I didn’t say anything. Just watched him drink. When he was finished, we were silent for a while. The old house creaked and whispered. I knelt next to him and he tried to keep his eyes on me. It was quiet.
Then Ribbons said, “Shot.”
“Yeah,” I said. “One got through. You’re dying.”
He shook his head a little and twitched his fingers again. I followed his gaze over to a black nylon bag in the corner of the room, just out of his reach.
“Shot,” he whispered.
I pulled the bag over to us. Inside was a box of nitrate gloves, a lighter and a syringe. He slowly and painfully gestured at the side pocket. Inside was a sandwich-sized plastic bag with a twist-tie filled with a few crumbles of a brown substance the texture of pancake batter.
“Shot,” Ribbons gasped.
I was looking at half a gram of heroin.
“Please,” he said. “Shot.”
There are few things in the world I hate more than heroin. I hate it more than people who sell children for sex. I hate it more than killing a woman. I hate it more than the feeling I get when I’ve been alone for so long that I have to stare in the mirror and practice speaking until my words sound human again. There are very few things in this world that trigger that part of me, but there it was. In my hand.
Ribbons was asking me to kill him.
A shot of heroin would be fatal. Ribbons had lost enough blood that his system wouldn’t be able to handle it. A normal dose would hit him twice as hard, like drinking a whole bottle of tequila after giving blood. Even the smallest amount of junk could cause an overdose or, if it didn’t, at least slow his breathing. In his condition, he might suffocate under his own weight. If I left him alone to bleed out on the floor, he might make it another six or seven hours. If I gave him
the shot, he’d be dead in a matter of minutes. Seconds, if I didn’t get the dose just right. And I wouldn’t get the dose just right. I’d never measured out heroin before in my life.
Ribbons didn’t take his dull, bloodshot eyes off me the whole time. He breathed in and out. I could hear the sickening sound of the fluid settling at the bottom of his lungs.
“If I give you this,” I said, “it won’t kill the pain. You’ve lost too much blood for that. You’ll be dead before I can pull the needle out.”
His voice was barely a whisper. “Please, man.”
I took out the silenced Beretta and put it to his head.
At this range, a single bullet would put him out of his misery before he would know what was happening. He’d be dead instantly. I pressed the barrel into the soft spot between his eyes until I was sure he understood what I was offering him.
Ribbons shook his head.
“Please,” he whispered. “Shot.”
I hesitated. I could handle putting a bullet in his head, but not this. I’d shot people before. I knew how it would happen. The trigger would resist, then lock back, the hammer would fall, the muzzle would bark and Ribbons’s brains would splatter across the wall. It would be like flipping a switch. He wouldn’t even feel it. A fatal overdose was something else entirely, though. I didn’t know how long it would take. I didn’t know how much to give. I wasn’t ready for that. I told myself that I didn’t want to fuck it up, but that wasn’t the real reason I didn’t want to do it. That wasn’t the real reason at all.
My mother died of a heroin overdose.
Ribbons whispered something, but it was too faint to hear. The sound pulled me out of my thoughts. The pool of blood around him was spreading. It wasn’t noticeable before, but I could see it now. Every few minutes it grew a few fractions of a centimeter wider like water from a pinpoint leak in a drainage pipe. His lips were moving but he didn’t make a sound. Maybe he was talking to someone who wasn’t there. Maybe he was saying good-bye, if only to himself.
His breath wheezed in and out, in and out.
I picked up the heroin off the floor.
There was a soup spoon in the nylon bag next to the ammunition, and a travel pack of cotton swabs. I put the syringe, the heroin and the swabs on the floor next to Ribbons. I took a small amount of the brown substance and placed it in the bowl of the spoon, then carried it into the kitchen and dribbled a little bit of water over it from the tap. I used the lighter and placed the spoon over the flame. It didn’t take long for the water to come to a frothing boil and for the heroin to dissolve. I took the spoon off the heat, tore a little bit of cotton off one of the swabs and put it in the spoon. I sunk the needle into the cotton and carefully pulled the heroin solution into the syringe, using the cotton as a filter. I knocked the air bubbles out of the needle and looked up at Ribbons. His mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping for air.
I took off my belt and crawled forward until I was beside him.
He put his right arm between my legs. The blood on his hands smeared onto my pants and soaked my knees. I rolled up his sleeve and slowly wrapped my belt around his upper arm as a tourniquet. I tapped the inside of his elbow until the veins appeared under his skin. He had tracks up through to his shoulder from where he’d shot up again and again. It took me the better part of a minute to find a usable vein. If I missed I might accidentally shoot into his muscles, and his death would be even slower and more painful because the injection itself would burn until the moment the overdose killed him.
I stuck the syringe into his arm. The needle went in sideways along the length of the vein until it hit the dark brown wrinkle where I could tell he’d shot up before. I pulled the plunger back slightly. A little blood went into the needle and blossomed out into the brown liquid like a flower.
“Please,” Ribbons whispered.
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
I pressed the plunger down. I could see the surface of his skin begin to flush red. Once the syringe was empty, I pulled it out and laid it on the floor. I took my belt off his arm. It was done.
It’s hard to watch a man die. A few seconds after I gave him the shot, Ribbons started to feel it. The pain drained away from his face. His eyes opened wide, like he was waking up, and he let out what sounded like a sigh of relief. For a moment, just a moment, all the pain was gone. His pupils tightened up into pinholes and his head rolled back. He stared at the ceiling with such intensity that it looked like he was seeing god himself up there. The moment passed, though. Ribbons’s face went red and his eyelids drooped down again. Beads of sweat formed all over him. After a few minutes, he went limp against the wall. Soon the seizure started. His eyes closed and his head slumped down to his chest. His mouth frothed up bits of spit. I watched his breath get slower and slower until the shaking stopped and he was dead.
I was kneeling in a pool of his blood.
I went back to the doorway and picked up the blue lead-lined Kevlar bag. Inside was a little more than $1,200,000, forty GPS trackers and seventy explosive ink packs. I walked out the door and went to the green Mazda Miata in the driveway.
I looked at my watch. Four p.m.
Fourteen hours to go.
47
KUALA LUMPUR
The secure elevator opened right up. Once we were inside, Hsiu took a can of black spray paint from her bag, shook it and fired a long black stream into the camera dome. It didn’t matter if security saw the blackout, because nothing could stop that elevator once the cards had been swiped. Once we were in, we were in.
We wasted no time. Once the camera was done, Vincent, Mancini and I dropped to our knees and started changing into our bank costumes. Each of us had a different disguise. Mancini had a baggy old olive-drab military surplus jacket and a black high-fiber balaclava to cover his face. Vincent wore a bright blue shaggy wig, a hooded sweatshirt and a Ronald Reagan mask. I had a black shirt, a tan jacket and a Guy Fawkes mask. Angela had a plain blue pantsuit and a hockey mask. Joe Landis had a full-face welding mask with just enough room for his glasses and Hsiu had a clear plastic thing that obscured all of her features. When we cased the joint, we’d calculated that it would take the secure elevator one minute and twenty seconds to reach the top floor. We could change into our costumes in half that.
The Halloween shit wasn’t just for show. Heisters who wear gaudy costumes are less likely to be remembered than robbers who wear plain, forgettable ones. The masks and jackets give hostages something to look at. If the robber wears something bright and flashy, the hostages won’t remember anything else. That way, once the costume is discarded, so is the memory of the man. Without the costume, the robber is just another face in the crowd.
I strapped on a pair of white latex gloves. We all had to wear gloves, even though Angela and I didn’t even have fingerprints. We didn’t want to leave any shred of biological evidence behind, including formless smudges. The only exception was Joe Landis, our boxman, because he couldn’t do his job wearing gloves. It takes some serious finesse to open a bank vault, and we weren’t about to handicap him. Instead, he had a gallon jug of ammonia. He’d splash that on everything he touched and it would work just as well. While we were getting our gloves on, he was in the back of the elevator attaching an oxygen tube to a six-foot thermal lance.
Vincent nudged me on the arm and held out the butt of the money handler’s G36 assault rifle we’d retrieved from under the armored car, as well as a small belt full of magazines. I gave him a look and hung the gun by the strap around my back. I could tell he was beaming at me through his Reagan mask when he cocked the slide on his sawed-off 12 gauge. Mancini gave me the thumbs-up and grunted with similar enthusiasm. They were more than prepared for this. They were ready to rock.
I turned away and chewed my lip, watching the floor numbers ratchet slowly up above the control panel. Twenty-five stories. Twenty-six. There was a faint bing every time the number changed. Twenty-seven stories. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine.
 
; My palms were sweating under my gloves. I always get the shakes right before I go into a bank. I closed my eyes and tried to focus all my anger. We were nearly there.
Bing.
The elevator came to a jerking halt and the doors slid open. A young vault manager was waiting for us. She looked up and then froze in fear, dropping the papers she was holding. I don’t remember much else about her, but I’ll never forget her scream. It wasn’t even particularly memorable. Like most, it started like a high-pitched yelp and ended in hysterical sobbing. The timing was what threw me off. During most robberies, it takes a few seconds before someone lets out a yelp. Sometimes there is even this strange pregnant silence through the whole thing because everyone’s too shocked and scared to move. But not this time. As soon as the elevator doors opened up, the woman started screaming.
I grabbed her by the hair and threw her into one of the teller windows.
This was a good thing, actually. Malaysia has several different major languages, and her scream transcended all of them. Everyone in the bank knew instantly what was going on, even if they couldn’t understand a word of what I was about to say. I swung the assault rifle around and raked the ceiling with a burst of automatic fire.
“Nobody move!” I yelled. “This is a robbery!”
A lot of things happened at once after that. Vincent jumped over the bulletproof plastic shields onto the counter behind them and pointed his shotgun at the tellers. He told them to move away from their stations and not touch the money. There were silent alarm buttons under the counter, and even if the tellers didn’t have the nerve to touch those there were passive alarms triggered to the money in the drawers. If ever the last bill was taken out of a cash drawer, the alarm would go off.
At the same time, Mancini took to the main floor. He moved from the back of the bank to the front, pointing his shotgun at everyone in sight and herding them all into the lobby. Once he got to the emergency-stairway exit door, he opened it up, pulled a tear-gas grenade from his bandolier and tossed it through. Within twenty seconds the gas filled the entire stairwell, down at least two stories. Without ventilation, the stuff would stay there for an hour and it would be nearly impossible for anyone to climb up those stairs without a gas mask. As a further measure, Mancini jammed the door closed and sealed it with a heavy-duty bicycle lock. Nobody in, nobody out.