Ghostman by Roger Hobbs

all?”
    “I don’t,” I said. “But I barely know anything about you, and I’ve known you for almost eight years now. Do you know something I don’t?”
    “I know he’s very intelligent,” she said.
    I nodded. “He seems to have everything figured out. I like that. He looks like he knows what he’s doing.”
    “But you don’t know if he knows what he’s doing.”
    “You’re right, I don’t.”
    She pursed her lips and put her coffee down on the study desk next to us. She crossed her legs and bit her lip as she considered something in her head. She took her time before she said it, like she wasn’t completely sure what to say, or how to say it.
    “I told him about you,” she said after a moment.
    I didn’t say anything.
    “He said he wanted options, so I gave him your blind e-mail. I thought you wouldn’t come. I thought you wouldn’t even consider it. The way you pick jobs isn’t normal. I’ve seen you pass up jobs that another man would’ve waited his whole career for. I thought he’d send you a message and you wouldn’t even respond . You’d be off in the Mediterranean somewhere, reading one of your books, waiting for something more interesting to come along. Sketching old Roman wall paintings or something.”
    “I’m here,” I said.
    “You are,” she said. “And I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
    I looked down at my coffee and didn’t say anything. Angela dug her feet into the carpet like she was thinking something over that was too big to put into words. We were quiet for a moment. She was lost somewhere in her thoughts.
    Then she said, “I want you to draw me a dollar bill.”
    “What?”
    “I mean right now, draw me the best American one-dollar bill you can.”
    “Is this a hypothetical thing, or do you actually want me to do it?”
    “No. I really want you to do it. You probably see a dollar bill dozens of times every day. You’ve probably spent more time looking at the dollar bill than you’ve spent looking at your own toes. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I just want you to draw me one.”
    “What for?”
    “Consider it part of your education.”
    “I’m really no good at forgery.”
    “I didn’t ask you to copy a dollar bill, I asked you to draw me one.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “This is about the dollar bill in your head,” she said. “Not the one right in front of you. Think of it as an exercise in perception. I want to see what you remember, not what you see. I can look at a map and memorize it in an instant. That isn’t just something I was born with. I taught myself to do that. I studied mazes until I could copy them after just a glance. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. I want to see you do the same thing, starting with the front of a dollar bill. Look, I even have a pen in the proper color.”
    She opened her purse and took out a green fine-point, felt-tip pen. She put it on the desk next to the pad of hotel stationery. I stared at her. She stared right back at me.
    “Okay,” I said.
    I picked up the pen and started with a rectangle, roughly two and a half times longer than it was wide. At first I thought it would be easy. Who doesn’t know what a dollar bill looks like? But as I tried to put it all together in my head, it started falling apart. There were a lot of details. I could remember the general layout. I put the number one in all four corners. I remembered that the top left number was surrounded by a floral design, so I circled it. I remembered that the number at the top right was surrounded by a shieldlike thing, so I added something like that. I put an oval in the center and drew Washington’s portrait pretty simply, then put the words The United States of America above it. Under the portrait I wrote One Dollar . I turned the piece of paper around and showed it to her.
    “No,” she said. “Try it again.”
    I took another look to evaluate what I’d done wrong, then ripped off a new page.
    I started with the same