Mule (29 page)

Then I'd called out to Kate, "What are people doing for New Year's this year? Are they even going to celebrate? If the Ritz is doing something, we can do that. Or we can go out on one of those boats out of St. Pete. What about your friends, Kate? Don't you want to do something with them?" Then I'd looked up. Kate had been standing before me, her long legs bare, her hair over her shoulders, hiding her breasts with her folded arms. How long had she been standing there? Had she seen me hiding those clothes? Then she'd closed the door behind her against the children.

"Hey," she'd said to me in her quiet voice.

I'd stood up. I'd been naked, too. "Hey."

"My name is Kate. It's nice to meet you."

Had I been willing to go along with it? I had. "My name is James."

"Maybe we could get together sometime. What do you think about that? Maybe spend the rest of our lives together."

"I think I'd like that."

"Maybe we could have a couple of kids."

"I think I'd like that, too."

"Just two, though, okay? I've heard they're a lot of work."

"I've heard that about kids, too."

"They say it can be good if both the mother and father are there. But I wouldn't know, you know? My parents are drunks."

"Yeah, my dad was a workaholic."

"I'd want to do it differently."

"I would, too."

We'd looked at each other then, my wife and I. The moment had come upon us at last. Kate had said, "I've been missing you."

"I've been missing you, too."

"There's something I want you to do now."

"What's that?"

"I want you to make it stop."

 

In bed that night, I'd said to Kate, "Have you thought about where you'll take the kids?"

Kate had said, "I haven't wanted to think about it. I guess I've always had the idea we'd stay right here with you."

"You can't stay here. You have to take the kids and go. You can't even stop to look back for me. You have to trust I'll follow you."

"I've thought about the cabin, but we can't go there, can we? And I know we can't go back to Austin. Where can we go where we can be safe? Where can I take the kids where you'll know how to find us?"

"We'll have to go someplace we both love. We may have to stay there for a long time."

"There's one place I've been thinking of, James. It's a place I think both of us loved, a place where we were in love. Do you remember the place I'm talking about?"

"It's in Europe."

"Yes, in Europe."

"Near the mountains by that beautiful lake."

"Do you remember the name of the little hotel?"

"Bellagio something, wasn't it?"

"Do you think you could find it again?"

"Of course."

"We have to get Evan a passport."

"We'll do the express application tomorrow."

"I'll get an international driver's license this time, too."

I'd smiled at her in the dark and said, "Yeah, you will. The only thing I know for certain is once we get there, I'm not doing any driving."

For New Year's 2009, we stayed home with our kids. It was what we both wanted.

T
HE END CAME LIKE
this: On Wednesday, January 14, 2009, the Interagency Narcotics Task Force in Siskiyou County pulled the trigger on its five-and-a-half-month investigation. One hundred heavily armed law enforcement officers, deployed in tactical teams across the rugged, sprawling mountain county, stormed their targets at first light.

It went down just like it does in the movies. They busted in the doors of trailers, apartments, houses, places of business. They surprised people sleeping in their beds, sitting on their toilets, showering, getting their kids dressed for school, jogging, smoking weed, weighing weed, getting money together to buy weed, putting weed in plastic bags for sale. They pulled over people as they drove to work, nailed people at their workplaces. They had dogs, percussion grenades. They had assault weapons and Tasers. They were coordinated from a central location by radio and cell phone; they used laptop computers and GPS. They'd done mock runs of the takedown for weeks at their secret practice locations. When the moment had finally come, they were amped up and ready. Their work was the same to them as ours was to us: Exciting. Deliberate. Methodical. Dangerous.

When the smoke began to clear on the operation at midday, the teams had searched dozens of properties, including the two high schools. They'd found heavy weights of ecstasy, hashish, and psilocybin, all packaged and ready for distribution. They'd also scored twenty-eight pounds of kush: people's orders brought aboveground for shipment. They'd confiscated guns, money, phones, computers, properties, vehicles, animals, and children. They'd made thirty-three arrests, including that fifty-three-year-old Mount Shasta city councilman, who had arranged to sell a pound of kush to the undercover agent. They had him on wiretaps and a video. Even better for them, they'd found two guns at his place and a sawed-off shotgun with the safety removed behind the door of another dealer's home. Most of the weed belonged to Darren's organization. Some of it had been intended for the Capital Cities Connection.

The story and its details would run on the front page of papers up and down California the following day, including the
Los Angeles Times,
where I'd eventually read it online. But that's not how I first found out about it. I found out about it because I received a phone call while it was going down. Neither the caller nor I had any idea yet of what was really happening up there.

What was that morning like for me? It was one like any other. I did some pushups in the bedroom, ate breakfast standing up in the kitchen, oatmeal and blueberries, simple food for my nervous stomach. Cristina and Kate were out at the mall with the kids. It was a cool day for Sarasota, down in the fifties. The sky outside was a flat, gray slate.

I took a shower, dressed, watched television—the Weather Channel for a change. Jerome would be leaving Sacramento two days later, Emma would be coming into Tallahassee on Monday, I'd be heading up to New York the day after that. Snow was a problem for us at this time of year; I wanted to know what I could expect out there. I was tired, nodded off a few times on the couch. I hadn't been sleeping well because of Evan's nighttime feedings. After fighting it off for half an hour, I let myself roll away into the darkened womb of sleep.

On the glass coffee table were the disposable phones I was currently using: one for Deveny, one for Billy and Darren, three more for everyone else. The one I used for Billy began to vibrate on the glass, made a sound like coins shaken in a can, startled me awake. I checked the time before I answered it, to see how long I'd been down. Kate wanted me to meet them for lunch at noon, and fear shot through me that I'd overslept. I'd been trying to be extremely nice to her, to make up for the things I'd done that she didn't even know I had. But the phone said that it was only eleven
A.M.
Why would Billy be calling from Cali this early?

"Yo, Billy," I said into the phone.

"Billy's going down." It was Darren Rudd.

I sat up slowly in the middle of that shrinking room. I thought I'd be prepared for a call like this, realized now I still wasn't ready. How could I be? How could anyone? "What do you mean, Billy's going down?"

"He got stopped a few minutes ago on the I-5 near Duns­muir. He texted. He was dirty. There were a couple units behind him, coming out with a K-9 right away. He hasn't texted since."

Running the K-9 right away? I said, "Were they tipped?"

"Of course they were tipped."

"Who would've done that?"

"You think if we knew, they would've had the chance? For all I know, it was you. He was coming down with your shit anyway."

"You think I would've done something like that?"

"Why not, James? It's not like we really know you. The way you've been acting? The attitude you've had with me? How am I supposed to know what's been going on out there with you?"

"Nothing's been going on out here. It wasn't anyone on my end."

"It better not have been. You know I'll find out if it was."

I shook the threat away with my head. "What's going to happen now?"

"Besides losing one of my best fucking guys? Nothing's going to happen. We've shut it down. Isolated it. We'll pick him up, set him up with counsel. It will drag on for a year or two and then he'll be all right. But he's going to have to find other work. Don't worry about Billy. He's retired now and that's it. Get your people up on new lines. You have a McKinleyville address you were working with? Overnight me a number there. Put it in a couple of envelopes, sign across the seals a few times."

"That's it?"

"That's it. Stay calm. Stay professional. Get back to work. You'll get everything you need on time. This line is dead. I'll be waiting for that number." Then Darren hung up.

Maybe if Darren had had any idea what was really happening in Siskiyou County at that moment, he would have done things differently. Head for the airport without calling me or anyone else, carrying as many hundred-dollar bills strapped to his body as he could, enough money to start a new life somewhere, a life he would have to live quietly forever. Open a sleepy beachfront bar on the coast of Nicaragua, a hole-in-the-wall flophouse for backpackers way out in Mozambique. By early afternoon California time, they'd already be up on him, beginning to freeze his remaining assets, starting what would become a RICO investigation, later evolving into a Continuing Criminal Enterprise or "Kingpin Statute" case with the possibility of capital punishment. People were already flipping on him. In the backs of squad cars, in the interrogation rooms of jails even before they'd been processed. Everybody had been caught dirty for a change. And nobody wanted to go to prison, especially when someone else could.

All I knew was that I had to get that load to Deveny. That though I had to get out of the business now, I hadn't figured out exactly how to do it. Not in a way that wouldn't endanger my family. Not in a way that would let me feel certain I'd go on living among them. I had to send a new number to Darren so he could get the load to Jerome. I had to play the game the way I'd been playing it so that no one could make a move on me before I could make a move on them.

As I sat at the coffee table and looked at those silent cell phones, I began to think about all these other things. That maybe the cops were coming for me now. That maybe Billy would give me up and that they were about to knock on the door. I mean, I knew Billy wouldn't give me up. But still there was the thought of it. That a fuse was being lit out there that would race across the country and reach me here. Why had I done what I'd been doing? Why had I done it over and over?

I sent out texts to Jerome, Emma, Nick, all of them: "dump the phones." Texts began to come back right away: "whats wrong?" "everything cool?" "fing hassle."

Then I did the other things I had to do. I gathered up my TracFones, smashed them under my heel in the kitchen, put the jumbled pieces in two plastic bags, drove across the bridge to the McDonald's on the Trail, threw one bag in a garbage can in the lot there, threw the other one away down the street at the Taco Bell. Nobody saw me do it.

I drove to Wal-Mart, bought half a dozen new phones, charged them up in the lot with the cards, then drove to the post office. I wrote the phone numbers on slips of paper, stuffed them in the security envelopes I'd brought with me, wrote "Don't Open This, Pig" across the sealed flaps. I stuffed those envelopes inside Express Mail envelopes, sealed those, and sent them overnight to all those people under fake return addresses, half a dozen of which I'd long since learned by heart. Then I drove to the 8th Street house, handed a phone to Nick.

"Anything wrong?"

"No."

"Want to hang out?"

"Way too busy."

I went and met my wife and kids at Patrick's on Main Street, where they were running a "Great Recession" lunch special. That's what they were calling it now. Now it had a name. Cristina and my mother were there, too. Could any of them see what was happening on my face? I knew they could not. I sat between my son in his car seat and my daughter in her highchair, ordered a cheeseburger, because you still had to eat, tried to have as fine a time with them as I could.

My mother gave me a look and said, "Shouldn't you be working on the boats?"

"Too cold."

"Don't they heat the warehouse?"

God, my mom. "They don't want to spend the money right now."

"How is Stewart and his new wife?"

Stewart was a friend at work whom I'd made up and mentioned to her once. She'd never forgotten it. "Stewart and his wife are fine."

"Did they enjoy their honeymoon?"

"They had a wonderful time."

Did I want to take the kids to the Mote Aquarium with all of them? they asked. I told them I couldn't—errands. "He's like his father," my mother said, tossing her napkin on her plate.

As we left, I slipped a new phone into Kate's pocket, told her the number I'd already texted to it was one of mine, asked her to give it to my mother and Cristina, too. Kate sensed something was wrong. She grabbed my elbow at the door, said quietly so no one else could hear, "Is everything going okay out there?"

I told her, "Everything's going just fine." Then I stopped, shook my head. "Do you really want to know?"

"Of course I do. I always have."

"Billy got busted a couple hours ago."

"How do you know that?"

"Darren called."

"Did they catch him with anything?"

I nodded.

"Is he going to turn us in?"

What could I say? I said, "My guess is no. But I don't really know."

"What are we supposed to do?"

"There isn't anything we can do."

"Should we get away with the kids?"

"We can't come back if we do."

Kate was quiet as we loaded the kids in the car, that beautiful Subaru we'd bought with our drug money. The backseat was packed with children, their toys, their mess. "This is not going to turn into a grimy kiddie wagon," Kate had told me the day she'd sped us away from the dealership in it. Of course it long since had.