Kill Me If You Can

The Ghost lunged and slammed Zelvas’s gun hand down onto the hard porcelain sink. He was hoping to hear the sound of bone snapping, but all he heard was glass breaking as the mirror behind Zelvas fell to the floor in huge fractured pieces.

Instinctively, the Ghost snatched an eight-inch shard of broken mirror as it fell. Zelvas head-butted him full force, and as their skulls collided, the Ghost jammed the razor-sharp glass into Zelvas’s bovine neck.

Zelvas let out a violent scream, pushed the Ghost off him, and then made one fatal mistake. He yanked the jagged mirror from his neck.

Blood sprayed like a renegade fire hose. Now I’m really glad I wore the poncho, the Ghost thought.

Zelvas ran screaming from the bloody bathroom, one hand pressed to his spurting neck and the other firing wildly behind him. The Ghost dived to the floor under a hail of ricocheting bullets and raining plaster dust. A few deft rolls and he managed to retrieve his Glock.

Jumping to his feet, the Ghost sprinted to the doorway and saw Zelvas running across the terminal, a steady stream of arterial blood pumping out of him. He would bleed out in a minute, but the Ghost didn’t have time to stick around and confirm the kill. He raised the Glock, aimed, and then…

“Police. Drop it.”

The Ghost turned. A uniformed cop, overweight, out of shape, and fumbling to get his own gun, was running toward him. One squeeze of the trigger and the cop would be dead.

There’s a cleaner way to handle this, the Ghost thought. The guy with the mop and every passenger within hearing distance of the gunshots had taken off. The bucket of soapy mop water was still there.

The Ghost put his foot on the bucket and, pushing it, sent it rolling across the terminal floor right at the oncoming cop.

Direct hit.

The fat cop went flying ass over tin badge and slid across the slimy wet marble floor.

But this is New York — one cop meant dozens, and by now a platoon of cops was heading his way.

I don’t kill cops, the Ghost thought, and I’m out of buckets. He reached under his poncho and pulled out two smoke grenades. He yanked the pins and screamed, “Bomb!”

The grenade fuses burst with a terrifying bang, and the sound waves bounced off the terminal’s marble surfaces like so many acoustic billiard balls. Within seconds, the entire area for a hundred feet was covered with a thick red cloud that had billowed up from the grenade casings.

The chaos that had erupted with the first gunshot kicked into high gear as people who had dived for cover from the bullets now lurched blindly through the bloodred smoke in search of a way out.

Half a dozen cops stumbled through the haze to where they had last seen the bomb thrower.

But the Ghost was gone.

Disappeared into thin air.

Book One. The Art Student

Chapter 1

I SWEAR THIS is true. My name is Matthew Bannon, and I’m a Fine Arts major at Parsons in New York City.

The first thing you resign yourself to when you decide you want to dedicate your life to being a painter is that you’re never going to get rich.

It goes with the territory. Vincent van Gogh died without a nickel, and that guy could paint rings around me. So I figured I’d spend the rest of my life as a starving artist in a paint-spattered loft in SoHo — poor but happy.

But that fantasy took a total nosedive when I found millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds inside a locker in Grand Central Terminal one night.

That’s right. Found.

I know, I know. It’s hard to believe. I didn’t believe it, either. I felt like a guy must feel when he wins the Mega Millions lottery. Only I didn’t buy a lottery ticket.

I just reached inside locker #925, and there it was.

A leather bag filled with millions and millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds.

One minute I was planning a life of poverty; the next minute I was holding a small fortune in my hand.

Growing up in Hotchkiss, Colorado, I saw my share of rich people. None of them lived there. They would just be driving the scenic route on their way to Vail or Telluride and they’d stop for gas or something to eat at the North Fork Valley Restaurant.

Hotchkiss is about half the size of Central Park, with fewer people than you’d find in some New York City apartment buildings. But it’s in the middle of God’s country. It’s everything John Denver sings about in “Rocky Mountain High.”

It’s where I learned to hunt, fish, ski, fly a plane, and do a whole lot of other macho stuff that my father taught me. He was a Marine. So were his father and his father before him.

My artistic side comes from my mom. She taught me to paint.

My father wanted me to carry on the family’s military tradition. My mother said one uncultured jarhead in the family was enough.

So we compromised. I spent four years in the corps, with three active deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Then I saved up enough money to move to New York. Now at the age of thirty, I was in one of the best art programs in the country.

And suddenly my days of worrying about money were over.

I was rich. Or at least I could be rich if I decided to keep the diamonds. And why not? The guy who owned them wouldn’t come looking for them.

As far as I figured, that guy was dead.

Chapter 2

YOU MIGHT THINK that finding a bag full of diamonds would be the best thing that happened in my life.

But you’d be wrong.

The best thing was finding Katherine Sanborne.

We met at the Whitney Museum.

The Whitney is one of my favorite places in New York, and I was staring at one of my favorite paintings, Armistice Night, by George Luks.

And then I saw her. Midtwenties, a heart-stoppingly beautiful face framed with auburn hair that fell to her shoulders in soft curls. She was escorting a group of high-school kids. As they came up beside me, she said, “George Luks was an American Realist.”

“And I’m a Puerto Rican romantic,” one kid said.

Big laugh from his teen cohorts.

Another kid jumped right in. “And I’m a Jewish pessimist,” he said.