Mule (13 page)

I turned it over as I ground out the miles toward Tucumcari across the flat and endless plains. What happened to Russell during his week in jail? What had they asked him and what had he said? Should I be worried enough to skip Mason's this time? Mason would be the first one they'd bust. Russell didn't know my last name. So maybe they already had Mason's place staked out, twenty-five jackbooted DEAs hidden in a moving van in their riot gear. Maybe they'd wait for me to pull up, then toss a percussion grenade, loose the dogs, hit me with a Taser. Maybe I should just dump the load somewhere, go home as fast as I could, throw away all the phones, be done with it forever. Take Kate and the baby somewhere safe for a while. Be grateful for the money I'd made, begin a tamer period of my life.

But I liked this period of my life, liked it a lot, the excitement of it, the thrills: pulling on the pantyhose, flying the money out to Cali, jumping in a rental car, making the switch with Billy. Stopping off at Rita's and dumping a pound or two on her, getting myself on the road. I felt challenged and busy like I never had. In fact, I probably wouldn't have taken my old career back even if I could have found any work in it. More than anything else, I liked making all the money.

Then I began to ask myself these other things. If they'd found the two pounds, would they have really let Russell out of jail? What would the bail have been on that? Why had the redhead left him in there so long? And why hadn't either of them called Mason sooner? I looked at JoJo Bear on the passenger seat. I already knew what he had to say about it.

I took the 285 south, pulled off at minuscule Vaughn, parked outside Penny's Diner, pulled out a TracFone, called Billy.

"James? Where you at?"

"Eastern New Mex. You?"

"Santa B. Just came in from the swell. I'm running the dogs on the beach. Beautiful day, free time to enjoy it. All is well, all is well. You?"

"Everything's fine. Listen, we fronted this guy two big ones last month, didn't hear anything from him. Now he called and said they got him, that we hadn't heard from him because he'd been down at county."

"Bad, bad, bad. Nightmare stuff. What do you think? Is he gonna tell a story?"

"I have no idea. He wasn't one of mine."

"Has he got your name?"

"I doubt it."

"Cauterize everything on that end."

"I'll lose my guy in Texas."

"So lose him. Close the wound, stop the bleeding. That's what our friend in Thailand would say. Hell, our friend in Thailand would pay your friend in Texas a nasty visit just for allowing a thing like this to happen. Why'd you let him get you caught up in this stupid shit anyway? Aren't you smarter than that, dude?"

I drove on to Roswell, parked downtown across from the UFO museum, the six-foot bug-eyed alien out front. Would I really have to cut out Mason? A black-and-white cruised down the street. But I was nobody doing nothing, right? Just another dude on the spaceship? I ducked into an alley off the strip, stood by a dumpster, called Billy again.

"Would they have let him out if they found two big ones on him?"

"What state?"

"Ole Miss."

"Were the big ones together or were they split apart?"

"He says they caught him with an ozone in the car. The real weight they found at his house."

"That's intent, bro. That's twenty to thirty. Unless your guy had a big pile of cash lying around, he definitely wouldn't be out on the street."

"Well, he definitely didn't have a big pile of cash lying around."

"Then it definitely sounds like he burned you."

I switched phones, called Mason, began to explain it to him. But he cut me short. "I already know," he said and sighed. "I checked it out online." Since we'd talked last, he'd Googled it and hadn't found an arrest listing or a mug shot for Russell anywhere. "Not in Biloxi, nowhere around there. I called people we know. They say they've seen him around. One dude said he saw him in a bar, putting money on the pool table, buying shots. I feel like my heart's been ripped out by this. Didn't the fucking hurricane mean anything to him?"

I pulled into a Motel 6 in Pecos that night, had a couple Lone Stars in a dumpy cowboy bar on the drag, then grabbed a Modelo six-pack from a gas station to ease me into sleep in the lonely room. When I called Kate, she said, "Everything going okay out there, James?"

"Everything's fine. Hunkered down for the night. I'm missing you guys is all."

"We miss you, too, you know."

Why did Kate sound in love with me only when I was away? At home she could feel like an adversary with how much she nagged at me about quitting. She'd be at her wits' end when I'd get back, would say to me as soon as I walked in the door, "Welcome home. You're on baby duty starting right now."

Baby duty meant the nighttime feedings Romana still wouldn't give up, changing the diapers, never getting a good night's sleep. But it also meant my daughter's pretty eyes on me. Every day when I was home, I'd take her the two blocks over to Avion Park, push her in the baby swing, enjoy her happy laughter as the wind rushed against her face. Then I'd think about all these things. Darren Rudd ruled an empire. Eric Deveny did, too. As long as I could keep them apart, wasn't there plenty of room for me to build a happy little something of my own in the three thousand miles that lay between them? Couldn't I make myself rich for my daughter?

In that motel room in Pecos, the night we knew Russell hadn't been arrested, I thought about Eric Deveny. From things he'd told me, I'd pieced together that he moved his weight through a bunch of different guys, some at the school, most of them not. Almost none of them knew each other. No one had any real idea how big he was. His operation had taken him years to build; it wasn't something just anyone in the world could have done. But for how much I admired him, part of me disliked him, too. I didn't like how cocky he was. I hated the thought that he could end our business.

"So you think you got ripped off, my man?" he'd said to me at the end of the last run, when I'd told him my suspicions. We'd been at lunch together, my way of thanking him for everything, at a Japanese place called Sakura, two blocks from a busy Tallahassee police station. He'd led me there, speeding past the cops on our way, knowing my rental car was full of weed and money, had some kind of weird fetish for making me sweat. He'd been dressed in white, as dark and handsome as always. If he had any loose nerves in him, I hadn't seen one yet.

"Happens to the best of us, James. The thing is, how are you going to handle it if you want to stay alive in this business? Either you can let him get away with it and prove you're the pussy he thought you were in the first place. Or you can do what you're supposed to do."

"What's that?"

He laughed and shook his head. "You're supposed to fuck him up." Then he cocked his chin at two silky-haired coeds sitting at a table across the way; for sure he'd have their numbers before we left. That's how it was with him. Then he winked at me. "Want me to get someone to do it for you? Fucking whack him? It wouldn't even cost you that much.

"You want to know something, James? I feel like I witnessed your birth in my very own house. I really didn't expect all of this from you. In fact, I didn't expect anything from you at all. I thought you'd go home the first time, change your shitty shorts, retire with your one little war story, and I'd never see you again. Aside from all the money you've made me, do you have any idea how happy I am that you manned up?"

The last thing he said to me was "Interested in doing a little side work for me?"

"What kind?"

"I want you to run some stuff to New York."

But in that dirty motel room in Pecos, I knew Eric Deveny was Eric Deveny, and I wasn't like him at all. It was the weed trade, after all, right? Peace, love, and all that jazz? So why couldn't everybody just relax? I turned on
Cops,
smoked and drank in bed, the duffel bag under the covers beside me like a body. Russell had stolen our weed and I had no idea what to do. Couldn't we just be grateful he hadn't really been arrested? Couldn't we just let it go and keep on making money? In Austin the next night, Mason went on and on about it; what could I do but shake my head? I needed a shower, a shave, needed a few hours' sleep on his couch. There would be plenty of time to figure it out later. In the morning, I was on the road.

 

The story I told my mother about where we got our money, could afford to rent our own house, was that I'd landed a spot on a yacht-detailing crew up in Bradenton. They were picking up non-union guys like me in the bad economy, hiring us off the books. The rich still had money; there was plenty of work. The pay was decent enough for what was going on out there; if I stuck around a while, the bosses said, they were going to teach me how to work fiberglass. My mother said, "You should be careful with under-the-table kinds of things, James. One thing leads to another when you deal with people like that." Half the times I'd drop by and visit her, she'd shake her head as she watched the evening news. "I've been prudent throughout my life. But now? What in the world is a credit default swap?"

"If you ever need money, Ma, please just ask."

"I'm the one who's supposed to be helping you."

I didn't like lying to my mother, but what other choice did I have if I wanted to keep on doing what I was doing? I'd never been able to get away with anything with her when I was a kid, but I was certainly getting away with something now. Just before I'd left on my second run, I'd told her the crew had invited me along for a few days' job across the state in Vero Beach. The next run, we were working in Daytona; the run after that, all the way up in Pensacola. They were assigning me work phones, too, a nice perk. We had to check them in and out; my number would be changing a lot. I told my mother the story so often, I sometimes wondered if it was true.

But the story wasn't true. She'd call me after spending the afternoon with Kate and Romana, to tell me all the new things Romana had learned to do. I knew she was in her armchair in her living room, eating a TV dinner on her fixed income. Unbeknownst to her, as we talked I was gassing up the car in the snow in Williams, Arizona, or under the blue dome of the sky in dusky Amarillo, Texas.

"You're missing so much while you're gone," she'd tell me.

"I'm just glad to have work," I'd tell her.

My mother was also watching the baby over at her place the nights Kate had school; she and Kate were getting along much better now that they weren't under the same roof. "I couldn't do it without her," Kate would tell me when I'd come home. "It just makes me feel so dirty to have to hide all my stuff around her."

By "stuff" Kate meant all the things she'd begun buying with her drug money. "When'd you get this?" I'd ask, picking up some new little black dress that still had the tags on it hanging in our closet. She'd shrug and tell me, "I have to go to this thing with Sarah at Saks on Saturday night."

"What's the thing?"

"A fashion show fundraiser for the Humane Society."

Our plan was still the same: if I got caught, Kate would deny knowing anything. Whether that would work or not, neither of us seemed to care. We were making too much money. By the end of March, Kate was pulling in more than a thousand a week, had her own phones, was taking weight from me on every run. She was friendly, could tell a stoner a mile away; she identified a dozen of them in her film class alone. Even though we'd agreed she wouldn't let them know where we lived, a few of them were coming over now. They were kids, girls, eighteen, nineteen. They chewed through gas station candy, talked about problems with their boyfriends, their parents, their minimum-wage jobs, watched black-and-white Hitchcock movies with Kate on the couch. The rest of them needed the weed delivered, and of course I was the one who had to do that. Then she started working with a couple of small-time dealers in Bradenton, who texted her day and night.

"So let's hire somebody," Kate said when I complained about having to drive to their trashy trailer park neighborhoods again.

"Who do you know that we can hire, Kate?"

The kid she wanted to hire was Nick, a pretty, blond-haired skater boy from her statistics class who didn't seem to own a shirt. For an instant when he first came over, I had the idea Kate might be in love with him. But then he pulled out a BB gun, challenged me to a sharpshooting contest in the backyard.

"You ever skate, Jimbo?" he asked as we plinked away at a Coke can.

"Way too old for that," I said, knocking the can off the stump with a shot.

"There'll never come a day when I don't skate," he announced.

There were crumpled lottery tickets and empty water bottles everywhere in Nick's Escort when he came over for his driving lesson. I told him to clean out his car, that the cops could use the mess for "reasonable suspicion" to search. I yanked down the evergreen tree air freshener from the rearview mirror, told him he could get pulled over because it "obstructed the driver's view." As far as the driving he had to do, it was all city traffic, nothing to it really, he simply couldn't speed, had to signal when he turned. And if he ever did get pulled over, I told him, he had to refuse a search.

"Tell them your stepdad told you to refuse, and don't say anything else. Nineteen grams and under is a misdemeanor, twenty-plus is a felony. So figure out when it's worth it to make two or three trips. Stay away from school zones, never drive around with more than one bag. If they nail you, say it's your stuff—they'll charge you with simple possession. Kate will bail you out and pay your fines. If you ask the judge for drug court, your record will be clean in a year. But the other thing that will happen is your driving days will be over."

"I'm not going to get caught, Jimbo."

"Don't call me Jimbo."

"Then Jim."

"Why can't you just say James?"

After the kids left one night and we were cleaning up the candy wrappers, I said to Kate, "Are you having fun with all of this?"

"Fun? I wouldn't exactly call it fun, James."

"Then what would you call it, Kate?"