Ghostman by Roger Hobbs

Author:Roger Hobbs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307959966
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-02-11T18:30:00+00:00

30

When I passed May’s Landing, I punched Marcus’s number into another phone and waited as the screen turned from black to green. The phone rang and Marcus’s man picked up before the third ring, like he was sitting there waiting for the call. I glanced at my watch. It was almost 1:30 a.m. in Seattle, so Marcus should’ve been fast asleep. Instead his man was poised and ready. The reception was low.

“The Five Star Diner,” he said.

“Put him on.”

“Who is this?”

“Nobody.”

Things were quiet as he walked the phone into another room. People like Marcus can afford to have a guy with a flat Midwestern accent screening all the calls. This one’s voice was like cough syrup. The diner had three lines that I knew of, and each was always answered the same way. The guy would say the name of the diner, and if you didn’t convince him you were important in thirty seconds or less, he’d hang up and you’d never get the boss on the line.

Marcus came on a few seconds later. He sighed and sounded tired, but there was something else in his sigh. He sounded afraid.

“Hello?” he said.

“Marcus, it’s me.”

“Jack. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for hours. What happened?”

“You tell me, Marcus.” I said. “You think I don’t know you set me up?”

He went quiet. I took the exit that would take me back through the pine barrens.

Marcus had stopped breathing for a beat or two, then let out a breath to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The Wolf knew your plan long before Ribbons and Moreno even got close. Now, you’re too smart to underestimate a man like him, so either you’re working an angle on this I don’t understand or you’re much stupider than I thought.”

“That’s not possible,” he said. “There’s no way the Wolf knew the plan.”

“I talked to him myself. He tried to kill me.”

“Jack, he’s got to be reaching. He has to be. If the Wolf really knew I planned to rip him off with the federal payload, why did he agree to the deal? Why did he even let Moreno and Ribbons into the city? He would have put bullets in their heads before they even got past the pine barrens.”

“He said he was planning on double-crossing you. He was going to leave you holding the money when it blew, so you’d take the fall for it. Now he’s asked me to put the wired money on your plane and wait for it to blow up. But you knew he’d try that, didn’t you? You were working another angle.”

“What the hell did he do?”

“Have you been watching the news? Do you know about the third shooter? The Wolf told me that was his hit.”

There was silence over the other end of the phone for a second.

“You met with him,” Marcus said.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Jesus,” Marcus said. “You’re working for him.”

I sniffed.

“For all I know,” Marcus said, “the Wolf’s wired into this call right now, coaching you through this conversation word by word.

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