Mule (12 page)

"Got it, brother, getting it all written down," Mason said, cribbing notes on the legal pad he brought with him.

"This isn't fucking college, Mason. Don't write it down. Just try to make it part of who you are. You have to constantly check your rearview for cops. Pretty soon you'll be able to spot them by their shape. At night, you'll figure out what their headlights look like—they're different from other cars'. When you see one, don't change your driving. Your heart'll start racing, you'll want to throw up. Pull off at the next exit if they aren't up on you, and calm down. But never, never pull off when they are, or they might think something is up. You have to get ready for it, it happens on every trip. Have faith in your lucky charms and eventually they'll pass." At that, I patted the head of JoJo Bear, seated on my lap. By that point I had all kinds of lucky charms: fortunes in my wallet from Chinese restaurants I had eaten at along the way, pennies I'd found on the ground while gassing up, interesting rocks, a pair of my daughter's pink socks. The fortune I liked best read, "A long, even journey lies before you."

"So when am I doing the drive?" Mason was always asking me.

"We'll talk about that later," I'd tell him. The truth was I never wanted him to do the drive, because I didn't want to give up any of the money.

When we reached Russell's that night, it was all hugs and kisses between the redhead and Emma, a long hug between Mason and his friend, a rib barbecue out back, stories about their lives in Biloxi before Katrina had wrecked them. Russell's and the redhead's Mississippi accents were indecipherable, and the half dozen friends of theirs who came over talked like that, too. There was a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking blunts. It was hard for me to evaluate Russell in that environment. I liked that Mason vouched for him, but I didn't like it that Russell wasn't married, didn't have any kids. And then there were all those bright casinos beckoning five short blocks away.

Midway through the party, when we were alone, Mason asked me, "What do you think about him?" I stared at fat-lipped Russell and told Mason, "You know I'll take your word for it."

When Russell's friends left to hit the casinos at the end of the night, I went out to the rental, a Mazda 6 with Alabama plates, brought in the duffel bag, and unzipped it in the bedroom for Russell to see. The redhead was passed out on the couch, the dogs were on the floor and snoring. Emma and Bayleigh were sleeping in the dark and quiet living room down the hall. Russell's face did what everyone's did the first time they saw that much weed: his eyelids snapped open like he'd been hit with a cattle prod.

How much did he think he could move? Mason asked him. Russell rubbed his stubble-covered chin, said he guessed he could move a pound pretty quick. The very next run, our greed made us front him two pounds, and then ten days went by with no word from him.

Something in me knew from the start what had happened. I said to Mason on the TracFone, "You think he could have ripped us off?"

Mason said, "Who ruins a lifetime friendship for a measly eight grand?"

When I passed Biloxi on my next run, I pulled off the highway and drove by Russell's house. The shotgun dump that it was looked dark and empty; his crappy truck out front was gone. Should I call Mason and let him know? I decided to leave it alone. I went to the casinos, got my hundreds. In the evening I was on the road.

 

A distance had sprung up between Kate and me; we didn't have time to lie on top of each other all day anymore. She was busy taking classes, I was gone every other week. And even the times I was home, I was caught up in my head, getting ready for my next run, turning things over about the business. In the beginning, we had arguments about it, about continuing to do it at all. But I wanted the money from the first, and there was nothing she could do. Besides, Kate liked the money, too. Once it really started pouring in, she thought we'd already made enough to go out and spend some. I shook my head. "Didn't what happened frighten you at all?" I asked her. She said, "It not like I never had to live that way. Besides, why are we even doing it if we can't spend the money?"

"Can't we just have it to have it, Kate?"

"What kind of life would that be, James?"

We were having a boy; we'd paid cash for a sonogram to find out. Kate had hired a holistic midwife. We were going to have a water birth this time.

This pregnancy was like the last one: Kate was sick all the time. On my second run from Cali, I'd brought her a pound of weed. It was supposed to be for her to sit on and smoke, to help her keep down food, but sometime between the day I gave it to her and the end of my next run two weeks later, she'd started selling it at the college. There'd be bags from Saks and Macy's on the kitchen table when I'd come in. I knew she wouldn't have dipped into our savings to go shopping like that.

"You selling that pound?"

"Maybe I sold a couple ounces to some stoners I met at school."

"A couple ounces let you go shopping like this?"

She blushed. "Maybe it was more than a couple ounces. You knew when you gave it to me I couldn't smoke it all."

"First of all," I said in a condescending tone that even I hated, "this is a terrible idea. Why would we take on an additional risk? For nickels and dimes? When I'm making what I'm making? Secondly, you're pregnant. What kind of people are we supposed to be if you're dealing when you're pregnant?"

Kate made a face at me. She said, "What's being pregnant got to do with it? Are you really that much of a jerk? Besides, I'm not showing yet, nobody knows but you and me. And it's not nickels and dimes, James. I'm pulling in double an ounce compared to what you get."

"Double?"

"More than that. I've already cleared three Gs and have over half the pound left."

I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, "What if somebody figures you out over there?"

"I say I have a hookup, a friend of a friend. Nobody knows that the friend is me."

"You'd better not let them know where we live."

"Do you think I'm stupid?"

Kate never had to do it. Even after we were set up at the Vault, we kept a few thousand dollars for groceries in a teapot on the stove. But it was how the thing worked. It paid in cash, was an instant reward, and more than anything else, it was easy. So Kate wanted to make some spending money? Fine with me. I knew if she was as into it as I was, she'd stop complaining and I'd be able to operate however I wanted.

Because Kate wasn't completely into it yet. I'd be sitting at the laptop booking flights for my next trip, and she'd be standing beside me with Romana, whom she was stuck with all day. "Ever going to find any time to help me with this kid, Mr. Big-Time Drug Dealer?"

"I'm not a big-time drug dealer," I'd say and wave her away with my hand. "I'm a freelance courier—learn the difference."

"You're going to get caught."

"I'll get a slap on the wrist."

"A felony will ruin you for any other kind of work."

"If you'd let me work in peace, we won't have to work again."

The idea of getting rich was already growing in me, had started with something Billy had said. When I met him the first night of my third run in Sacramento, he had a room waiting for me at the Days Inn downtown. He came in through the adjoining door when I unlocked it, the duffel bag over his shoulder.

"What was it you did before this, James?" Billy asked me, his feet, in muddy work boots, up on the desk as we drank our way through a twelve-pack of Fat Tires. "Writing? This is better than writing. This is something that can actually make you rich. I've seen a dozen guys do it. Work hard, pay your dues, don't think too hard about the money. One day you'll wake up and realize you're loaded. Then you don't have to deal with the world again."

"So why aren't you rich, Billy?"

He rubbed the scar on his chin. "I make plenty of money, don't worry about me. But not everyone in the world gets the kind of opportunity you have. With the guy you have over there taking the weight he does? A connection to Darren on this end? You'd better not let them meet, James. They'd cut you out. Or pay you less than half. Then you'd just be a slave to them. Keep yourself in the middle and the only question is, how much are you going to make off it?"

"How rich have you seen people get?"

"I knew this big-balled Asian chick who socked away a million and a half over a couple of years doing SoCal runs twice a month. She was smart, got herself a HazMat license—they never check those trucks. Then she opened a couple of nail salons, cleaned up all her money. She's way into skydiving, the last I heard."

 

Kate, too, had made a friend, a woman her age, one of the academic counselors at the community college. They sat down together at the beginning of the semester, mapped out the courses Kate needed to take to get her degree. I was away on the road at the time. Kate took Romana with her, and the counselor fell in love with our baby. When I came home, Kate told me to shave off my beard patches, that we were dropping Romana off at my mother's, going out on a double date.

At dinner, we quickly understood that this couple was rich—at least the husband was. The wife, Sarah, had worked for a jeweler in Tampa, met the husband, Kyle, when he came in to shop for a birthday present for his mother. His family owned a chain of liquor stores up and down the state, Sarah explained to us, smiling at Kyle, but that hadn't stopped him from getting a law degree. From Duke. He hadn't made partner at his firm yet, but they both knew it was on the way. We had upscale Thai food at St. Armand's Circle on his expense account, then followed them over the bridge to their place on Longboat Key.

"What do you do for a living?" Kyle asked me at dinner.

"I did journalism before the publishing world tanked. Now I'm doing this import-export thing."

"Import-export?"

I glanced at Kate, then said, "Spices from the Orient. Supplying Chinese takeouts in half a dozen states."

"On the road a lot?"

"Every other week."

"Doing well?"

"Doing great."

"That's great to hear. Not a lot of stories of people landing on their feet out there right now."

In the car on the ride over to their house, Kate shook her head and said, "Spices from the Orient? That's what I'm always going to have to say?"

I smiled and said, "What's wrong with spices from the Orient, Kate?"

Their place was a gargantuan Spanish-style manse on the water. Kyle drove a Porsche, Sarah an Audi SUV. The house was decorated straight out of a lifestyle magazine. Sarah showed us their master bedroom, the electronic fireplace in it. In back of the house was an infinity pool that seemed to flow right into the bay. Kyle turned on the lights so the water glittered before us. He said, "I haven't jumped in it all year."

We sang eighties songs on their karaoke machine, drank red wine at their wet bar. Sarah was so happy to meet Kate, she said again and again, someone real, someone like herself. She was going to introduce Kate to the Young Professional Women's Club she was in. They could go to charity fundraising events together, laugh about the pretentiousness of it all.

When we left their house, Kate said to me in the car, "What did you think of them, James?"

"I think they're nice."

"Sarah only works because she wants to."

"He hasn't been in his pool all year."

We grabbed Romana from my mother's, drove across town to our rental house on 8th Street. Kate had found the place while I was away on the second run; it was a simple one-bedroom in a working-class Hispanic neighborhood, cars parked on the lawns, kids running in the streets. The rent was low because every third house was a vacant foreclosure now. We were still trying to be frugal back then; the day we moved in, Kate tied on a blue bandana, pulled on rubber gloves, and attacked the walls with bleach. "It's cute, right?" she kept telling me, as if trying to convince herself it was true.

As we pulled up on 8th Street, she muttered something under her breath.

"What did you just say?" I asked.

"I can't fucking believe we live here."

***

Three weeks into our mess with him, Russell finally called Mason, woke him up in the middle of the night. Mason wasn't convinced yet that Russell had burned us, was more concerned that something had happened to his friend. The story Russell told him was this:

"I got pulled over by a trooper, Mason. He busted me with an ounce. I had to spend a week in jail. They raided our house, tossed around all our shit. They found both them pounds. It's gone, man. Gone forever. I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am. Both me and LaJane. Now I have to get a lawyer and go to court. My life is fucked up. I'm worse off than before."

Mason told me about it on the phone as I was gassing up a rental in a Flying J off the 40 in Albuquerque. I was already in a crappy mood. It was a bright and cloudless day, a stressful day for driving because when the weather was nice like that, you knew the donut shops were empty. What could I say to a story like that? Panic shot through me and I said, "Is he going to talk?"

"Man, he'd never rat on us."

"How do you know for sure?"

"He's my own blood. Same as family."

"People can get crazy in times like this, Mason."

"We went through the hurricane together, James."

Darren Rudd had been giving me advice on Skype from Thailand. As the Capital Cities Connection grew, he said I should start setting aside a portion of my take for legal fees, to protect "my people" in case anyone ran into trouble. Knowing the emergency cash was there would give my people confidence; they'd work better when they knew they'd be taken care of. What he did was set aside five percent. On my last run, I had told Mason we should do the same thing, set aside money for a lawyer in case one of us went down. Now Mason brought up our legal fund. "Maybe we should front him some cash," he said. "I know it was the first time we did something with him, but he got busted out there while he was slinging for us."

Something about this smelled off to me. I told him, "Let me think about it and call you back." I hung up and scanned the traffic on the highway. Then I went inside the station, scarfed down a PowerBar by the postcard rack. I was always eating peanuts, trail mix, energy foods. I was always throwing the wrappers away before getting back in the car.