Mule (26 page)

I did the inaugural run the first Friday in October, the second two weeks later. Kate didn't have any idea where I was going or what I was doing; when she'd even bother to ask, which was almost never, I'd tell her I'd been out in Sacramento, dropping off money with Billy. Why should Kate know anything? To feel as threatened as I'd felt when I'd opened that letter? To know that part of me had given up the idea of ever getting out at all? She was busy with the kids, her friends, school; we lived completely separate lives. Which sometimes felt right and good. At least one of us was enjoying the fruits of everything I was risking out there.

"Everything going okay?" she'd ask in her rote and uninterested way whenever I'd come home. I'd just grab the remote from her, plunk myself down on the couch, switch the channel to
Cops,
and tell her, "Yeah, everything's fine."

 

"So what do you think of the dealer up there, my man?" Deveny grinned and asked me in Tallahassee when we sat down to unfiltered Muscadet and escargot at Chez Pierre at the end of my first New York run.

"Didn't meet him. Made the switch with the doorman."

"The doorman?"

A shadow crossed Eric's face; he didn't like something about that. He beckoned the waiter for another bottle of wine, said, "Guess I'm going to have to make a fucking phone call."

"What's with the dealer?"

"Just wait, my man. You'll see," he said. "What about the skyline?"

"It was raining."

"Then you haven't felt it yet. A guy like you? A guy like you is going to love that city."

"What's a guy like me, Eric?"

"Don't you know yet, James? A guy like you is a guy like me."

"What if I said I didn't want to go up there again?"

"Hook me up with Cali."

What could I do but shake my head?

 

Someone else who wanted something from me now was Darren Rudd. Because Darren was back from Thailand and dealing with major problems. The stock market crash had flushed a ton of his cleaned-up money down the drain, along with everyone else's. And those big properties he owned up and down the state of California? Greedy Darren had been flipping them. Now he was caught holding the bag on a dozen jumbo ARMs.

Billy told me on the phone, "You don't want to talk to Darren right now. First he got taken for a big, big ride over in Thailand. Now he's hemorrhaging cash to stay out of foreclosure. I've never seen a dude so stressed out. He's running stuff all over the place to try and make up for it. He's laid off half a dozen guys out here, is doing time behind the wheel himself."

"What happened to him over in Thailand?" I asked, working my way through a six-pack of Yuengling in a dingy smoking room at the Relax Inn, Savannah, returning home from my second New York run.

"What do you think happened to him? Arrogant rich white guy. Underage bride. I told you she was underage, didn't I? He gets the idea he can do whatever he wants over there. He buys her whole village stuff, a fridge for her old man, clothes for the women. He slaughters an ox, marries her, takes her home to his humble abode. He doesn't even get to stick it in her before the Thai police are kicking down his door. Shooting his dog, beating the fuck out of him. Of course they'd seen his money. They'd set him up to get their hands on it. Darren had to pay through the nose to get out of that cell. They confiscated his farm. They confiscated his vehicles. Then he's in a cab with the scumbag Thai lawyer who got him his passport back, sees the girl tooling around in his truck. He pays the cabbie to chase her down, she lifts up her sunglasses, laughs at him. Darren still insists he loves her. Anyway, that's how it ended for him in Thailand.

"He's pissed, James. He's had the shit scared out of him as much as anyone with money right now. But you know what I say? The power's still on. There's still food in the stores, gas at the stations. And even if we get down to a barter economy, what we have to trade will still have value. Anyway, Darren's getting sloppy, Darren's getting mean. He's chewing people out over nothing. Sometimes I ask myself if I want to keep working for the guy. It's not like I need the money, but it's not like they just let you walk away. After everything I've seen? Everything I know? I've watched dudes take that long walk in the woods. The Marble Mountains, the Trinity Wilderness. When the snow melts up there, the Forest Service finds the car, all shot to hell. But they never find the dude. Drive fast and swerve a lot, you know what I mean? I'm not breaking any kind of news flash to you."

I lit another cigarette, glanced at
Cops
on the muted TV, worried my beard patches. I told Billy, "You know what scares me? I'm not afraid of getting caught anymore. I'm frightened by not knowing what people are planning on doing. The guy who takes my weight, he's been playing mind games with me to get me to do more work for him. So I'm asking myself, What happens when I want to be done? How am I supposed to know he's going to let me go?"

"You can always get yourself out of the country."

"Sounds easy enough. But out of the country to where? With what? Thirty or forty Gs? Maybe a hundred grand? What do we do over there when that runs out? All our money is stuck right here. Bricks of it. Bricks and bricks of it. And then there's my mother. What do I do about her?"

"You have to take her with you."

"My mother's in a mahjong league. She's not ready for this."

"You know what I'm doing when it's my turn to run?" Billy said. "First I'm telling Corinne to treat it like I'm dead, that she should go to the donut boys right away if anyone tries to fuck with her. She knows where everything is buried, it's always all been for her anyway. Then I'm grabbing the dogs, heading for the border. I'll go as far as the road will let me. You'll never hear from me again."

"No shit?"

"Oh yeah. I've had it all mapped out for years. Anyway, Darren's going to be calling you soon. My guess is he'll ask you to hook him up with your guy. You already know what my advice is. Don't fucking give it to him. You give him your guy, you got nothing. You always have to have something if you want to have any safety in this."

There was one more thing going on that none of us knew about yet—not me, not Billy, and especially not Darren Rudd. It was gathering like a thunderhead over the Siskiyou Mountains day by day, getting ready to release its mighty clap and drown us all in pain. Up in Siskiyou County, at Yreka High School in August and September, and then at Mount Shasta High School through the rest of the fall, a baby-faced twenty-three-year-old virgin cop fresh out of Narc Academy was posing undercover as a troubled, transferred high school student. Unlike most bacon in the world, this pig had no odor and possessed an actual gift for acting. He'd been setting up weight buys on school property to carry back to his "buddies" in L.A. Unfortunately for the dealers selling to him, his buddies ate donuts.

The bad guys had been quietly taking down all these people through him, leaning on them with the school-zone laws, making them flip, clawing their way up the chain. Just a few months into it, they already had a surprising target in their sights: a Mount Shasta city councilman working the business on the side to pay for his model girlfriend's condo on Russian Hill, her monthly trips to Cabo. By the time Billy and I had that conversation in the middle of October, the cops were choking on their bear claws and Boston creams in their listening vans, knowing they were getting close to something real for once in their frustrating law enforcement lives. Eventually they would amass enough video and wiretap recordings to warrant a hundred-man joint task force operation involving Siskiyou County Narcotics, the California Department of Justice's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Department, and the Yreka and Mount Shasta PDs. In the end, it would all go Fed.

 

As that interagency narcotics task force in Siskiyou County began to assemble their case in their secret war rooms in California through late October and early November, the country went nuts with election fever, Obama won, made his Grant Park speech, and I did a third and fourth run to New York. Had I met the dealer? Eric Deveny wanted to know each time I came back with the money. I had not met the dealer, I told him each time. Then Kate was planning a big Thanksgiving spread at our house, and I did the run once more before the holiday. The drive up was calm and easy; I had a beautiful view of the long and naked city from the back of the town car. When I ran the suitcases up the steps of the building at Gramercy Park, the doorman shook his head at me. He pressed the elevator button and said, "They want you to take it up this time."

I was wearing my lucky driving clothes that day, the same flannel jacket and beat-up jeans from our time in the cabin that had seen me safely through all these months and tens of thousands of miles. Did I care that I was dressed like that, in that beautiful building, in the great city of New York? I didn't. This was just work to me, and this was how I dressed when I worked. The doors of the elevator opened at the third floor. I lifted the two suitcases by their handles and began walking down the long red-carpeted hallway. There was a gilded mirror on the wall, two French armchairs on either side of a demilune table, and on the table a yellow bouquet in a porcelain vase—real flowers, amaryllises. At the door, I pressed the bell, heard the chimes inside. Soon there were soft footsteps approaching behind it. Then the door opened. Standing before me was a beautiful girl.

She looked me up and down. "So you're the famous courier I've been waiting so long to meet." She took the suitcases inside, came back with a heavy gym bag I knew was full of cash. She didn't look at me as she shut the door. I thought about her the whole drive home.

 

"Did you meet the dealer?" Eric Deveny asked me over porterhouse steaks at Shula's back in Tallahassee.

"I met the dealer."

"Her name's Danielle."

 

Two weeks later, Danielle invited me in.

The apartment had high ceilings, dark hardwood floors, faux columns around the arched doorways, ornate crown molding. The style seemed more suited to someone older than she was, but when she lit a cigarette in her living room, it all clearly belonged to her. Looking out the tall windows, I saw a pretty, gated park below; the next room beyond, I could see, was a library. I'd glanced around when I'd followed her in, trying to find her last name written down somewhere. But there was no mail lying about. No diplomas on the wall. The copies of
Vanity Fair
on the coffee table had been purchased off the rack. She was tall and confident, with long brown hair; her dark dress and boots were cut to fit; the silver bangles on her wrists were as slender and polished as she was. She offered to show me the city, and I agreed to let her. In the bedroom she gave me, I changed out of my driving clothes and into the Sevens, Energie, and Asics Tiger stuff that Kate had sent me off with for my lunch with Deveny. The clothing was brand-new, the labels pulled off in the room.

"I know you're pissed he's making you come up here," Danielle said as she led me through the midday crowd when we went out half an hour later. "But he's done a lot for you, so do the route until you get it down, then dole it out to one of your drivers. As long as he makes his money, he'll never know the difference. And that's all that matters, right?

"Have you spent any real time in the city?" she asked as we ducked into a cab.

"A few magazine editors took me out to lunch up here in a life I once lived."

"Did you enjoy that?"

"Of course I did."

"Then you already know," she said as she dabbed on lip gloss.

She was single, didn't have any kids, didn't want any. She described her business to me over drinks at a basement place in the West Village. It was early afternoon, no one else was there. We took off our jackets, sat in our sweaters in a velvet booth. Soon we were on our second bottle of Prosecco.

"I'm just a broker right now," Danielle explained in that quiet bar, "but what I used to do when I had real fun with it was come across Lake Erie in the summers with my brothers. Speedboats, runabouts—you'd stay in traffic, same as on the highway. Our stuff was always BC bud they'd brought all the way across from Vancouver. We'd island-hop down toward Sandusky, tie up with the buyers, take the money back. I did it in my bikini. My oldest brother made the contacts while he was playing in a band in Cleveland. Then he came home to Ontario, pulled the rest of us into it. Seven, eight grand for one day of work."

"How much would you carry?"

"My senior year of high school, I once carried a hundred pounds. But then I had this dumb idea I wanted a future away from the business. I went to Tallahassee for the climate, paid for college with what I saved doing Lake Erie. I met Eric when he came up after his discharge. When we had trust, my brothers started coming down and picking up haze from him. Eric was still getting himself established, but you could already tell he was going to be a superstar. The 'Superstar.' So fucking arrogant, right? I met his parents once. Conservative types. Salt of the earth. They didn't seem too pleased with him. 'Where did we go wrong,' you know? Eric was totally insane from Iraq, it made it easy for him to push around the competition. Plus, he knew what he was doing from growing up in Miami. Plus, he had his brother. You have to have people with you if you want to go anywhere, right? By the time he joined his frat, he was all set. So what about you? You're still brand-new in this, aren't you?"

"Brand-new? Not so much brand-new. My wife and I got hit by the economy. The opportunity fell in our laps, we took it. Now I manage half a dozen people."

"And you guys are all working interstate?"

"California to Florida. All the way across the country."

"Looping the money back?"

"Twice a month like clockwork."

"Who helped you set that up?"

"I built it all myself."

"Got any muscle?"

"I'm the muscle."

"And now you're in Manhattan."

"It feels almost as good as the first time I was here."

Danielle explained how she laundered her money, made even more by doing it. She leased apartments, furnished them, advertised them on Craigslist, let them out by the day to European tourists. A cash business, easy to say the places were rented when they weren't, then she'd slide her crooked money onto the straight books. She had a tax guy who had no idea what she really did. Because what she really did was flip fifty, sixty, seventy pounds a month for her brothers to white-collar dealers all over the city, Connecticut, and Long Island. BC bud, Miami haze, and, most recently, some Cali kush.