Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  I raised my arm and brought my elbow down like a hammer on the soft part of his inner arm. I nailed him right below the junkie vein, between his track marks, and heard a bone snap. He let go and stumbled away from me in agony.

  I followed up with a jab to the nose. The cartilage shattered and the skin on my knuckles opened up and spattered his face with blood. I followed through with a cross like a freight train. The skin on that hand opened up too. He went like he was going to trip me, but I already had too much of an advantage. I landed another elbow on his skull in that spot where all the bone plates meet up. The old head jog. He stumbled away, stunned. I jumped on him and wrapped an arm around his neck. I pressed my other elbow into the back of his head between his spine and his skull and held it there. I had to keep this choke hold for ten seconds. That’s as long as it takes. The sleeper hold cuts off blood to the brain, so it works faster than suffocation. It’s like pressing the power button on a laptop. After a few seconds, the whole thing goes dead.

  The skinhead stumbled around the room, trying to pry my arm off his neck. He slammed me against the wall again but couldn’t dislodge me. The blood from my hands dripped down his skull and ran into his fluttering eyes. He couldn’t make a sound. He opened his mouth like a fish drowning in air, then his whole body drooped forward and went limp. I let him go and he fell to the floor like a sack full of rocks. He’d wake up in a few hours with the worst headache of his life.

  In the meanwhile, the Wolf had unpinned himself and was scrambling for the plastic automatic the dead guy had dropped. I ran over and kicked as hard as I could just as his hand reached the gun. The gun slid across the floor and dropped through a hole in the floorboards. There was a splash as it hit the water in the basement.

  The Wolf looked up at me, shaking the hand I’d just kicked, and scrambled a few feet toward the door, but stopped when I stood in front of him. His suit was ruined. I picked him up by the collar and said, “Give me one good reason.”

  “A hundred and fifty grand,” he managed. “In my hotel room. Give me an hour. If that’s not enough to satisfy you, I’ll see you in hell.”

  “What room number?”

  “Penthouse,” he said. “No games this time.”

  Then I dropped him back on the floor and walked out.

  55

  KUALA LUMPUR

  Everything about the getaway went wrong the moment the elevator doors opened. As soon as we arrived in the second subbasement, I was hit by a giant ocean wave of light and sound. I didn’t know exactly what was happening to me, but I knew one thing.

  It was a goddamn police trap.

  I don’t know how it happened. Right before we got in the elevator going down, Alton had given us the all-clear. No police in the garage. Police were barricaded outside the garage, sure, and on the street all around the building, but the second subbasement was completely open and clear. Somehow in the minute and forty seconds since then, the situation had changed.

  Now I was on the receiving end of a grenade.

  The blast didn’t take me off my feet, but it blinded me. I couldn’t see or hear anything. I could feel someone grab my shoulder and pull me out of the elevator. I could feel the pavement under my boots. Finally I could make out gunfire. It sounded soft, at first, but soon became roaring. My vision started to come back. There were heavy muzzle flashes from the foot of the garage. A skirmish line of Royal Malaysian police officers was firing at us from behind a barricade of police cars. The muzzle flashes lit up the corner like shooting stars. A tear-gas grenade between us poured out billows of thick yellow smoke.

  I pulled up the G36 assault rifle, pressed it against my hip and let loose a stream of bullets at the barricade. I was firing blind. Each shot sounded like the low punch of a bass drum instead of the intense crack of a gun. Hsiu still had me by the shoulder. The armored car was just a few more feet away. We were all running toward it. I hoped like hell that Alton hadn’t been hit.

  Then I watched Joe Landis go down. A bullet struck him in the head maybe two steps in front of me. His body didn’t so much fall as slump over given all the equipment on his back. He was dead before I could do anything, and his pack was still loaded with nitroglycerine.

  The Italian brothers came out of the elevator next with their shotguns raised. They pumped the actions so fast the red shotgun shells collided with one another in the air.

  The police had made a choke point at the garage opening. They must have rushed down at the last minute in Unimog police trucks. I couldn’t see them all, but from this distance I could make out two men in black berets crouched on the bed of the second truck. They let out steady bursts of gunfire from automatic MP5A2 submachine guns. A bullet clipped Angela’s pack.

  My mag was out. I hit the release and pulled it off, then fumbled another one from under my shirt. Before I could pull the bolt spring, I felt a heavy punch in my chest. I was hit. The bullet knocked the wind out of me and I stumbled back. I couldn’t breathe. Another one hit me, then another in quick succession. I was weighed down by the equipment on my back and still shocked from the first hit, so I fell over. I rolled back and forth on the pavement for a few seconds. I inhaled as hard as I could, but nothing happened. My lungs wouldn’t let in air. It was like someone was sitting on my chest.

  Hsiu and Vincent saved me. They came from behind and grabbed me by the arms and dragged me over to the armored truck. Vincent loaded me in the back while Mancini knelt next to us and licked shots out the back of the truck. He pulled the G36 from my arms, finished reloading and opened fire at the police in quick, controlled carbine bursts. He switched targets like he was blowing up glass bottles on a shooting range. Once I was secured, he tapped the roof twice, shut the doors and the car took off squealing.

  I glimpsed Alton through the small window into the cab. He veered left, hard. I was thrown against the right wall. Angela climbed next to me over the bags of supplies. She started to say something, but the words never came out.

  The armored car plowed through both of the police trucks, which didn’t stand a chance. They crumpled against the armored car’s grille and were dragged sideways for ten feet up the ramp until they were launched apart in different directions.

  The standard armored truck is equipped with sixteen gun ports that look like little mail-slot windows. You slide them open from the inside by a handle and they’re just barely large enough to squeeze a shotgun muzzle through. They work on the principle that it’s almost impossible to shoot a target that small from the outside, unless you’re standing right next to it.

  There were two on the rear doors.

  Mancini slid one of them open. He took careful aim down the aperture sights through the little metal hole and emptied round after round into Joe’s body. I could feel the vibrations of a car crash behind us, then an explosion. The nitroglycerine in Landis’s kit went. That shock wave coursed through the pavement. Muzzle flashes filled the dark space, then the smell of burned gunpowder and vaporized concrete. It was so thick it seemed like smoke. Hot brass poured out of Mancini’s action. He reached down and pulled a clip from my vest and charged the G36.

  I was in a special universe of pain. I writhed around on the floor of the truck, taking short and fast fish breaths. I could barely see. Everything was dark. I peeled my hat off and clawed at my chest until the shirt came open. Under it was a tactical vest with two titanium trauma plates designed to stop assault-rifle bullets. A trio of 9mm hollow points were stuck inside the left plate. They’d cut through the Kevlar just over my heart. I picked one of them off. It looked like a mushroom.

  Angela screamed something in my ear, but I couldn’t hear it. The only thing I could hear was a high-pitched ringing, like a fire alarm going off inside my skull. She tapped me on the ears and her gloves came away with red specks. The blood was dripping down from my eardrums and soaking into my shirt collar.

  She screamed and screamed at me until I could hear her.

  “Did one go through?” she was saying.

>   “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Keep calm!” she shouted into my ear. “You were shot three times and hit by a flashbang. I don’t see any other blood, so you should be all right. Maybe broken ribs, that’s all.”

  A flashbang grenade emits a sound ten thousand times louder than a shotgun blast and a sudden flash of light as bright as the sun. It uses magnesium and ammonium nitrate. Makes the target wish he was dead. I felt like I was swimming in static. I can best describe it as a migraine headache that was happening over my entire body.

  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 th
e 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.