Mule (11 page)

From the dirty motel in De Funiak Springs that night, I called Kate. "We're in the same state," I told her. She yelled at me, "This is a fucking nightmare!"

Later, I called Eric Deveny. He said, "I'm ready and waiting for you, my man."

I didn't sleep, hadn't in days. Still, I took my time in the morning, as though I didn't really want to leave that room. This was it, the whole thing at hand. I thought of that gun Eric had. What if he wouldn't give me my money?

At one o'clock that afternoon, I pulled onto his street. There was his same big house, his same long, black car. Suddenly I felt like I was dreaming.

"I'm outside," I said when I called him.

"Side door's open," he told me.

I left the weed in the car, went in through the unlocked side door to the kitchen. The gun wasn't there this time. Eric was wearing a white tracksuit, like he was heading to the gym. "Welcome back, my man," he said and winked at me.

"Your brother here?"

"I sent him away."

"I'm freaking out."

"Believe me, I know that."

The coffee table in the den had been cleaned and cleared; the gun wasn't in that room either. The orange Nike box was open on the table with the money in it. "James, there's your money. Doesn't it look pretty? It's still short a couple Gs. I have to run out right now and finish it. If you want, you can drive around town and I'll call you when I'm done. Or you can just chill right here."

What should I do? If it was a sting, I was busted already. If he was going to rob me, there was nothing I could do. I said to him, "You want to see it?"

He said, "If you're ready to show it."

I went out to the car, looked around the neighborhood. No one else was there. I pushed the button on the clicker, the hatch popped open. I carried the duffel bag in on my shoulder, unzipped it, dumped the pounds out onto Eric's couch.

Eric picked one up, squeezed it, fingered a bud through the plastic. Then he tore it open. "Beautiful work," he said as he smelled it.

He left me alone in there. If the cops were going to rush in, now was the time. But a minute passed, then another, and the cops did not rush in. The house was silent around me. I sat on the couch beside the weed, took the rubber bands off the stacks, counted the money. Forty-five thousand in tens and twenties. It took me twenty minutes.

I was numb, cold, exhausted. I zipped up my jacket. What was taking him so long? Was I really alone in here?

I began to walk around the house. The rooms in the front were as dark and empty as they had been before, his loft upstairs the same as it had been with the flag. Behind the flag when I pushed it aside was only the bare wall. The unfinished basement was empty and silent. When I went back upstairs to the den, the weed and the money were still there.

A few minutes later, Eric came in through the kitchen and tossed two more bundles in the Nike box. Then he closed the lid and gave it to me. "You want to have lunch?" he asked.

"I want to go home," I said.

We went out on the deck, had a cigarette together to end it. I held the money in the box under my arm the whole time. Eric told me, "There was a day when I'd done all the work and my first big payoff was sitting right in front of me. I was exactly like you—I couldn't believe it. There's so much about this that isn't about the money. You know what I mean yet? You will. Enjoy the moment, James. Inhabit it. It only feels like this once."

As I left, he grinned and said, "Call me when you've settled down, my man. I know you'll want to do it again."

The money was in the shoebox on the passenger seat, JoJo Bear sitting on top of it. When I added the money I'd collected from Rita and Mason, the total came to $54,000; $29,000 of that was profit.

I counted down the mile markers to Sarasota, drove perfectly. The last five hours wouldn't end. I had to suck down these big, big breaths every inch of the way. What if I got busted now, with the money in my hands? The Texas plates were a long, long way from home. I could still easily get pulled over.

But I didn't get pulled over. I coasted up to my mother's house in the night, and Kate opened the front door as I did. She touched her finger to her lips when I walked in. "Everyone's sleeping," she whispered.

We tiptoed through the house to our room. Kate locked the door behind us. I looked at my baby asleep in her crib. I set the shoebox down on the bed.

I opened the lid.

There was the money.

I fell on my knees and pumped my fists. I let out a long and silent "Yeeeeeeeessssssss!" Kate and I leapt into each other's arms. Then we threw the money all around us in the room.

T
HREE AND A HALF
months later, I had a new career. I was a full-time drug mule. I'd done the run six times, always dropping off weight in Tallahassee, Sacramento, and Austin. Kate and I had nearly $175,000 in dirty drug money sitting in two anonymous safe-deposit boxes the size of microwave ovens at the Florida Vault Depository. Gone were the days when we'd kept $25,000 in a shoebox hidden under a pile of clothes in the dryer in the little house across town from my mother's that we'd since rented, another $25,000 in a plastic grocery bag under the pots and pans in the dishwasher. Safe-deposit boxes at banks were out of the question because you had to give them personal information to get one. Then I found the Vault Depository online.

It was in downtown Sarasota, five blocks south of the city jail, in a solid concrete building with a luxury antiques shop on the ground level. The entrance to the Vault was under a discreet awning on the side, like the doorway to a private club. First you were locked in a small vestibule facing a bulletproof glass window. When you punched in your secret code on a keypad, the guard behind the window looked up your account in his file. He'd pass you the sign-in sheet through the slot; you'd mark an X, a squiggle, whatever you liked; and he'd buzz you in through a thick metal door.

The guard's name was Duke—it said so on the plate beneath his badge. He was burly and balding in a neat uniform, always polite, always kept the conversation on the weather. "Former law enforcement?" I'd asked him immediately. He'd shaken his head and said, "Nope." He never once asked me who I was or what I did for a living. He'd give a cookie to Romana that she'd grab tightly in her little fist, tell me how much she'd grown since the last time he had seen her. She was six months old now, a happy, baldheaded kid. Did he ever want to know my name, I sometimes asked Duke. He'd just shrug at me and say, "I'd only forget it."

The Vault wasn't a busy place; no one else was ever there. Inside, Duke would walk me down a carpeted hallway, lined with framed oil paintings of thoroughbred racehorses, and let me in through a last metal door. In the steel-lined vault itself, I'd put my keys in the slots of my boxes, Duke would put his in beside mine, the little metal doors would swing open, and he'd leave me alone with whatever it was I had.

What I had was cash, hundreds of bundles of tens and twenties folded in half and secured with a rubber band, each bundle a thousand dollars. I'd put one heavy box on the rolling cart they had there, then the other box, lift Romana in her car seat onto the cart, and wheel us into the counting room like we were going grocery shopping. I called it the counting room because I liked to count my money in it, but it was really just a small room with a locking door where the clients could have privacy with their things. It was always silent and peaceful inside the Vault, no more so than in that little room. Duke had told me when I'd first checked the place out that they'd put so much reinforced concrete into the building, it would survive a category 5 hurricane.

In the counting room, I'd lift Romana out of her car seat. She'd crawl around on the carpeted floor, sit up, clap her hands, and I'd toss her a few thousand-dollar bundles to play with. I brought her with me to the Vault almost every time I went because I always had a ton of cash on me. I had the idea that people might be watching who went in and out, that someone would jack me there. I figured with the baby in my arms, at least they wouldn't shoot me. I also started wearing sunglasses around town, as though that would somehow protect me. On the drive home from the Vault, I'd take a zigzag route on side streets until I was sure no one was following. Why had somebody built the Vault? The cocaine trade in the eighties? Retired tax evaders? It wasn't even expensive; my two boxes cost less than a thousand dollars a year.

The muling was never easy, but there were times on the road when I'd fall into a deep and meditative state. A hundred miles would pass in an instant, and I couldn't recall thinking about anything. Other times I had trouble keeping myself awake. JoJo Bear was always beside me to make me feel safe. "We're passing Window Rock," I'd tell him. He'd tell me, "I love you." "We're crossing the Big Muddy," I'd tell him. He'd tell me, "I love you." Billboards along the way were blank of advertising now. Every time I came home from another run, Kate and I were thirty thousand dollars further away from all of that.

Could I do this forever? I asked myself. Sometimes I felt like I could. I knew I'd never have another chance in my life to make this kind of money. I had all these crazy goals now that didn't seem that far out of reach: to put away a hundred thousand dollars in a deposit box just for Romana, and another hundred thousand for the new baby. A couple hundred grand in a box for Kate and me. Money for my mother, more money in case anything else bad should happen. Once I got all of that done, maybe I'd put a little away for Kate's parents, too. Out-of-work guys were spinning signs on corners everywhere now. I'd glance away whenever I'd see one. I'd never let what had happened to Kate and me ever happen again.

"Chance of a lifetime," I'd tell Kate. She'd shake her head at me and say, "Is that what you're going to say when you get caught?"

"You know I'm not going to get caught, baby."

"Isn't that what they all say, James?"

 

Just before Easter, we had our first problem. Mason had fronted two pounds to a kid named Russell, a guy he grew up with in Biloxi. It soon became clear that Russell had stolen our weed. It surprised me, wasn't something I would have done. But what kind of imaginary world had I been living in? The cost on Mason's end was eight thousand, the cost on mine, five. Not a lot of money to either one of us anymore. But it wasn't about the money. "This guy was my own blood, James," Mason said. "We went through the hurricane together. If he really did this to me, I'll fucking kill him." It brought all this anger out of him that I hadn't seen before; it was like the hurricane was still tearing around inside him.

Mason and I had become tight during those months. He and Emma were making over six grand a run, on track to make more than $130,000 for the year, all without doing any driving. One night on his porch, after I pulled into Austin with another load, he said, "Life is so amazing, James, you know what I mean? One day a hurricane takes away everything you have, the next day a guy comes running up the stairs with bags full of gold. Sacramento, Austin, Tallahassee. Man, we have to come up with a name for this shit."

"The Cross Country Couriers," I said and laughed.

"The Capital City Capitalists." He laughed back.

"The Capital Cities of Chronic."

"You know anyone in Santa Fe? You know anyone in Jackson? We should try to move weight in every capital of the states we run through, connect the dots, own the whole southern half of the country."

"The Capital Cities Connection," I said.

"That's it. That's who we are. Man, we've got to get some T-shirts made."

"Baseball caps."

"Fucking business cards, bro."

What could we do but laugh and laugh? I was running so much weed through Mason's apartment it felt like an assembly line, a repeating scene in a dream: get to Austin late at night, hurry up the stairs, dump twelve or thirteen pounds of weed on his living room floor. We didn't even get excited about it any longer, it might as well have been potato chips. Mason was working hard, had gotten to know a lot more people in Austin since we started. Still, Eric Deveny was the key to our whole operation. If he decided to bail on us at some point, the Capital Cities Connection was over, and we both knew it. Rita and her crew couldn't handle more than a pound or two a run. Mason couldn't move enough weight to make just a Sacramento-to-Austin delivery worth the risk. So we tried to come up with new ideas on how to move more weight in case Deveny quit.

That was how Russell had come into the picture. He lived in Biloxi, a few blocks inland from the beachfront casinos, two miles south of I-10, a perfect drop-off point halfway between the Texas-to-Florida leg of the trip. It was also a great place to melt bulky drug cash down to hundreds. I could hit three or four casinos, trade in a few thousand dollars for chips at each one, play the Pass Line at the craps table, win a little, lose a little, who fucking cared? Then I'd take my chips to the window and get the precious hundreds I needed to strap on my body and fly out to California.

Russell was a big Mississippi bubba, thick-lipped and fat. He had a piggy set of eyes and his dirty-blond hair spilled out of the edges of his threadbare Peterbilt cap. His cover story was that he installed carpeting for a living, but he mostly sponged off his girlfriend, LaJane. She was a bigmouthed redhead, sharp-nosed but nice-looking, a croupier at Treasure Bay, attractive in her black-and-white casino outfit. She and Russell had two big dogs and a filthy house; when I stopped by there the first time and opened their fridge for a beer, there was nothing in it. Mason and Emma had come along to visit and make the introduction. It had also been a chance for me to show Mason how to do the drive.

Emma had gone ahead in their Corolla with Bayleigh in the backseat and scanned the road for cops. Mason and I trailed ten miles behind in my latest rental car. "So we're coming up on this semi," I told him during that training run. "You want to leave at least five car lengths ahead of you so you don't get pulled over for ‘following too close.' Now you want to start your signal, leave it on as you make the switch, otherwise they can get you for ‘improper lane change.' You've got to make sure no one is coming up fast on you or they can get you for ‘impeding traffic.' I like to keep my speed the same—don't accelerate to pass, the speed limit isn't any different in the fast lane. Signal again, and now we're in front of the truck. Being in front of a truck is a great place to be. It's like a wall at your back, and you only have to worry about what's waiting up ahead."