Mule (21 page)

"This is what it is."

"It's dirty," she said and made a face.

What about those lights, those red lights in the sky? I asked her. Emma laughed. It was a wind farm, she told me. They were everywhere out here. Hadn't I seen any on my way in? The lights were to keep planes from hitting them at night. So it hadn't been something wrong with my head? I asked. No, she said.

"Are you going to carry the weight for me, Emma?"

"If you're going to pay me."

"But I haven't taught you how to drive it yet."

"It's a car, James. You drive it. I've been doing it my whole life."

I looked her up and down. Could she do it? Of course she could. "Let's go," I said. "Enough of this screwing around. And enough of this motherfucking San Angelo." I parted the curtains to peek out at the lot. Sitting behind my Mazda was a black San Angelo PD cruiser. I let the curtains fall.

"There's a cop out there."

"There wasn't when I came in."

Fuck fuck fuck! When I peeked out again, he was still there.

"Where's your car?"

"At the McDonald's across the street."

"You didn't bring it here?"

"I'm not stupid."

I took the duffel bags into the bathroom, threw them in the tub, shut the shower curtain over them. Like that would do anything if they came in. But it was better than doing nothing.

"I'm going to go out and drive away. Don't do anything until he leaves. If you have to leave the shit behind, leave it."

"Okay."

"And whatever you do, don't talk."

I left the room, pulled the door shut behind me so it latched like I was leaving it forever. I could hear the sounds on the cop's radio, the pops and beeps and voices and static. He looked at me and I looked at him. This one wasn't wearing mirrored sunglasses. But he was wearing everything else. When I took the key into the motel office, the East Indian was standing at the counter with his hands flat on it as if holding it for support. I took one look at him and we both knew. This slow-motion feeling began and I tossed the key on the counter. "That room was a filthy hellhole," I said. He didn't even twitch his mustache.

"Gonna let me out or what?" I mouthed to the cop from the door to my car; I was trying to be a dick. He looked at me a long moment with that flat face they wear, then nodded almost imperceptibly. I thought, I am a bait fish and you are a shark. I am going to flee from here and you are going to chase me.

I sat in the Mazda, started it. The cop backed up to give me room. Evening was settling down on the town. When I pulled onto the road, he followed me. I drove perfectly all through San Angelo. The cop was right behind me. I stopped at all the lights, kept to the limit. What would his reason be when he pulled me over? Scrupulously obeying the traffic laws? We left town on some highway, I had no idea which one. I had no idea which direction I was heading. I knew none of that mattered now. The cop was in my rearview every inch of the way. Was he weaving, or was that just me? What would the accommodations be like at the San Angelo jail?

Six miles out of town, his lights went on, his siren went
whoop whoop
twice. I pulled over to the side of the road. It was flat and dull in that part of the world—who in the hell would want to live out here? But he did. I was on his territory now. He was white and tall, a big bad boy. He rapped his knuckles on my window and I powered it down. "License and rental agreement, sir," he said. I said, "What are you pulling me over for?"

"Headlights."

"What about them?"

"You haven't turned them on."

"You could see around to the front of my car?"

"License and rental agreement, sir."

Headlights. I closed the window, sat in the car and waited. Why did they make you wait so long? Mind games. To make you sweat. I hurriedly grabbed my phones out of the glove compartment, wiped all the calls off them, all the numbers, all the texts to Kate, then I shut them off. Just like that, I was completely disconnected from my world. I checked around the car for anything else. There was nothing else.

He was back. I powered down the window. He shined his flashlight around me in the car. It was already nighttime out there.

"California to Florida?"

"One way across the country."

"But now you're heading back to New Mexico?"

"Yes I am."

"Why are you heading back to New Mexico?"

"I don't believe I have to say."

"Okay." An immediate change of tone in his voice, a long ratchet down in unfriendliness. "Anything in here you need to tell me about?"

"Nothing that I know of."

"Any large amount of money?"

"No, sir."

"Would you mind leaving the keys in the ignition and stepping out of the car?"

Just this once, I didn't mind. Still, I was fucking nervous. "Happy to," I said.

He patted me down.

"Any sharp objects in your pockets?"

"No, sir."

"Anything else I should know about?"

"No, sir."

He put his hands deep into every pocket I had, pulled out my wallet, my phones.

"Why do you need three phones?"

I didn't say anything.

"Would you mind if I took a look in your vehicle?"

"No, sir."

"Stand over there and wait for me." Then he spoke into his shoulder radio, called for a K-9 as he lined up my stuff on the hood of his car like evidence.

I stood at the side of the road where he told me to, watched him look through all the windows in the car with his flashlight. He didn't talk to me, I didn't say anything to him. No other cars passed us on that road.

When the K-9 came, a second big bad boy came out, and the two of them met and talked. They were robots, no monkey business about them, no "Hey, how are you, Chuck?" The first one said to the second one, "California to Florida, one way. No luggage. Disposable phones. The rental agreement checks out, but now he's heading back to New Mexico."

"Sounds hot."

The first one came back to me and said, "I'm going to put you in the back of my car."

"Am I under arrest?"

"No, you are not, sir."

"Then why are you putting me in your car?"

"A safety precaution for us, sir."

From the cage he put me in, I watched them trot out the dog in the spotlights of their vehicles. I'd already given them permission to search, so why were they running the dog? Looking for secret compartments? Hoping to score some cash? The dog was a calm and obedient German shepherd; it kept glancing up like it was eager to please. I knew there wasn't anything in that car. But what if the dog found something anyway? The handler jogged it around the Mazda once, twice, then the dog jumped up against the rear bumper. The handler patted it, said something to it. When he popped open the hatchback, the dog immediately leapt in. It scratched the carpeting where the duffels had been sitting for the last fifteen hundred miles, barked. I settled into my seat while they called in a bunch more cars.

This went on for a long time. Hours? My heart was in my throat: they would tell me they'd found something, or they'd plant something, and I had no sense of time out there at all. What could I do if they did? They brought out tools, stripped the Mazda down. The paneling. The sideboards. They pulled out the air filter. They set the pieces down on the side of the road. After they'd finished putting everything back, the extra cops drove away.

The first cop let me out, gave me my wallet, phones, a ticket for the headlights. "Our K-9 alerted on the back of the vehicle, sir," the cop said. "At that point we had reasonable enough suspicion to conduct a thorough search."

I raced through the night to Austin. When I ran up the stairs, Mason let me in. Emma had already gone to bed, he told me. My weed was in the living room.

 

Now this thing with Micah, I'd included the weight to do it in the load I'd just brought across. After Deveny's in Tallahassee, I cruised down to Sarasota, dropped the pounds off at the 8th Street house, hid them in a closet there. I'd called Kate from Austin on Mason's phone after what had happened in San Angelo, told her that one of my Tracs had fried; she'd given me all my numbers back. Now I called Nick, told him to get the Orlando deal set up. I threw the duffel bags away in a supermarket dumpster, then went home to Siesta Key. There was a strange beat-up car parked at our place. Kate and Cristina were watching TV when I came in; Romana was in her highchair being spoon-fed by an older Hispanic woman.

Kate sat up on the couch. "This is Mrs. Jimenez," she said.

I said to Kate, "You can't fucking feed her? You're sitting right there."

"What do you know about it, James? Nice thing to say when you've just walked in."

I gave the Hispanic woman a hundred-dollar bill; she took her keys and left. I picked up the rubber-coated spoon, finished feeding my daughter her pureed sweet potatoes. I gave her a bath, put her in PJs, carried her into her room. She laid her head on my shoulder as I held her against me.

"Did you miss me, little girl?"

Romana nuzzled me, sucked on her binky.

"I love you more than you'll ever know."

When I went back out to the living room, Kate told me she'd had contractions while I was away. Cristina had taken her to the emergency room. That was why the nanny had been here, if I'd even bothered to ask.

"Why didn't you call me?"

"I didn't want to worry you."

"But that's the time when I'm supposed to worry."

"I just know how you get when you're working."

Fine, Kate. Fine. I grabbed a Stella from the fridge, cracked it, changed my mood. Was Cristina having a good time in Sarasota? I asked her. Cristina smiled and said she was. "We saw the shark feeding at the Mote Aquarium today," she told me, "then we had brunch on the patio at the Ritz." She was feeling rested and relaxed for a change, grateful to be here. If there was ever anything she could do to repay us, all we had to do was ask.

In bed that night, Kate said, "I don't know why I didn't call you. I wanted to. But I knew it was only Braxton Hicks. You want to feel him kick?" She took my hand and put it on her belly. There it was, kick kick kick.

Was I going to be home for a while? she asked. Maybe I wouldn't leave for three weeks, I said. Why not, was anything going wrong out there? Everything was going fine, I finally found a driver I could trust who was going to do some work for me.

Then I said, "You remember when we were in the cabin, Kate?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"What would you say if I said I really did want to get out of the business now?"

She paused. Then she said, "Do you think we have enough money put away?"

"We have a lot more money than we had at the cabin."

"We have a lot more to pay for now, James."

I didn't say anything. Then I said, "What are we going to say to the kids? What are we going to tell them about the things we did?"

Kate said, "We're not going to tell them anything. Or we're going to tell them that we did what we had to do to survive a frightening and difficult time."

"It was frightening, wasn't it?"

"Fucking frightening."

"And everyone else out there is still going through it."

Kate touched my face in the dark. "Are you ever going to write again? What about going back to a regular life? Are you even going to want that anymore after this?"

"Are you?"

"I haven't done all the things that you have."

"You've gotten used to the spending."

"What else have I had? It's not like you've been around."

"You think you could live without all the stuff?"

"What have I bought that I couldn't live without?"

"How about Europe?"

We were quiet then, thinking about it. I thought about the drive in the beautiful snow-covered Alps.

"Do you remember the little hotel on Lake Como, James? The bath we took with the baby? How big that tub was? How we all fit in it together?"

"I remember the mountains."

"It lived up to every dream I'd ever had."

"I'd go back to see those mountains."

Kate turned to me. She said eagerly, "I've been looking into flats in central London. We could get one next summer, right off of one of the parks. If you could get your work to where other people were doing it for you, you could commute back and forth, bring over the money, spend most of your time with us there. Think about all the frequent-flier miles you'd get. The kids could go to an English school. Then maybe they'd grow up talking like that. 'Morning, Mum. Morning, Dad.' How funny would that be?" She laughed. "What were we talking about again?"

"Going back to a regular life."

"It seems dull now, doesn't it?"

We thought about that a while; I thought about cutting the grass behind some little house somewhere. Did I want that? The stable life my father had had? Yes, I wanted that, at the very least I wanted that. I said, "We'd never have money like this again. No matter how hard we worked at something else."

"I know that."

"So how much do we put away before we're done?"

"I have no idea."

"Does it feel like enough to you yet?"

"I don't know. I guess not yet."

"A million? Two million? Or do we go on until the end?"

"Of course we don't go on until the end."

We were quiet. Then Kate said, "What do you think they're going to say when we really do want to get out of it?"

"I don't know what they're going to say."

"Do you worry about it?"

"We're making them a ton of money."

"That Eric guy, right?"

"Eric, yeah. But Darren, too."

"What would Eric say?"

"Eric wouldn't want it to end."

"Couldn't you let him and Darren meet? Maybe even get paid for it?"

I thought of the dead bodies. I didn't want to be one of those dead bodies. I said, "It may be too late for that."

"Too late?"

"I don't know that he'd want to let me go anymore."

"Not let you go? Why not?"

"I know some ugly things about him, Kate."

Kate was quiet a moment. "Would he try to do something to us if we wanted to get out?"