The Ghost Code

CHAPTER 4

Invisible

Los Angeles

The city did not ask for much. It only asked that you have the right papers, and when you did not have the right papers, it asked that you be useful enough to someone who needed useful people and had learned not to ask about papers.

Miguel was useful.

He found the first job on his third day, through a man at a shelter who knew a man who ran a crew doing foundation work on a new development in the eastern part of the city. The supervisor was a thick-shouldered man named Castellano who looked at Miguel the way he looked at the site plans: as a resource to be allocated. He told Miguel the daily rate, which was sixty percent of what Miguel would later learn he was supposed to be paid, and Miguel said nothing about the other forty percent because sixty percent of something was the entirety of what he had.

The work was physical and loud and required him to be present in a way that left no room for anything else, which suited him. He poured foundations and moved materials and did what he was told with the efficiency of someone who understood that demonstrating competence early was the fastest way to become someone worth keeping.

Within three weeks, Castellano was giving him the work that required more precision. Within six weeks, he was showing two other men how to do it correctly. Castellano did not raise his rate. Miguel did not ask him to. He was learning things he could not yet name, about how men who held the resource made decisions, about how the men who provided the resource were kept in a position that made asking difficult. He filed it.

He lived in a room in a building three blocks from the work site. The room contained a bed, a small table, a window that looked at the wall of the building next door, and four other men who worked similar jobs and kept similar hours and had a collective unspoken agreement to take up as little of each other's space as possible. Miguel learned two of their names and the broad outline of where they had come from. He volunteered nothing about himself.

He ate cheaply and slept enough and spent his evenings learning English from a battered workbook he had found at the shelter, going through it slowly and methodically, building vocabulary the way he built foundations: each piece placed correctly before the next one went on top.

He did not grieve, exactly. Or rather, he grieved in the only way available to him, which was to pour it into the work and the English and the careful management of the few resources he had. Grief that was allowed to move freely through a person in his situation would have destroyed the situation. He understood this without having to be taught it.

He kept the photograph inside his jacket. He did not take it out. Not yet.

The courier work came through Castellano three months in, which should have told Miguel something.

Castellano mentioned it at the end of a shift, offhand, the way he mentioned most things he considered minor: there was an errand that needed running, a pickup and delivery, two addresses, the pay was double the day rate and in cash. No questions.

"What kind of pickup?" Miguel asked.

"The kind where you don't look in the bag," Castellano said.

Miguel thought about it for a moment. Then he said yes, because double the day rate in cash solved a specific problem he had about the end of the month, and because no questions went in both directions.

The first job was simple. A bag from an address in a part of the city Miguel did not know yet, delivered to a restaurant that was closed in the middle of the afternoon, handed to a man who came to the back door and counted what was inside the bag and nodded and went back in. Miguel walked away. Nobody followed him. Nothing complicated happened.

The second job, two weeks later, was not simple.

He was supposed to pick up from an apartment building in a different neighbourhood, third floor, unit twelve. He buzzed unit twelve. No answer. He waited. He buzzed again. Nothing.

A man came out of the building's front entrance as Miguel was considering his options, and the man looked at Miguel in the way people looked at him in this city when they were deciding something, and then the man said: "You're the runner for Castellano."

"I have a pickup," Miguel said carefully.

"There's a problem with the pickup."

"What problem?"

The man looked past him at the street. "The money in that apartment is short. Someone got into it before you came. Castellano's man. The one who was supposed to prep it." He looked back at Miguel. "Castellano doesn't know that yet. His man is saying the runner took the difference. That's you."

Miguel was quiet for a moment. He processed what he had just been told the way he processed the other information the city had been giving him for three months, without reaction, looking at what was actually there rather than what the emotional surface of it wanted him to see.

Castellano's man had taken money from a package that did not belong to him. Castellano's man had redirected the blame to the person who had arrived after the fact. Miguel was the person who had arrived after the fact. The men this money belonged to were not the kind of men who accepted explanations about third parties.

"Who is Castellano's man?" Miguel asked.

"Ramon. The one with the scar on his neck."

Miguel had seen Ramon twice at the site. He knew the scar. He knew also that Ramon had been at Castellano's operation for three years, and Miguel had been there for three months, and if it came to Castellano choosing who to believe, the math was already done.

"How short?" Miguel asked.

"Four thousand."

Miguel looked at the building. He looked at the street. He looked at the man in front of him and understood that this man had come outside specifically to tell him this, which meant this man had a reason to want him to know, which meant this was not a simple warning.

"Why are you telling me?" Miguel said.

The man looked at him for a moment. Then he almost smiled. "Because Ramon did this to someone else before you. Someone I knew." He paused. "I'm not telling you what to do. I'm telling you what's true."

He went back inside.

Miguel stood on the sidewalk. Four thousand dollars he did not take. A man with three years of history saying otherwise. Men somewhere in this city who were going to want an accounting of what had happened to their four thousand dollars.

He did not panic. He thought. He thought about where Ramon would be this evening, and what Ramon's movements looked like, and what the nature of the evidence available to him actually was, and whether there was a path through this that did not end badly.

He was still thinking when someone appeared at the end of the block. Not the right someone. Two men, moving toward him with a purpose that was clear from thirty metres away, and one of them had his phone to his ear and was saying something Miguel could not yet hear.

He heard his name. His actual name. Miguel Ramirez. Said into a phone by a stranger who had no reason to know it at all.

Miguel turned and walked in the other direction. He did not run. Running was information. He walked, evenly, around the corner and into the next block, and he was already thinking about the problem of Ramon and the four thousand dollars with a focus that had sharpened considerably in the last thirty seconds.

He needed someone who knew how this worked. He did not know anyone who knew how this worked.

Not yet.