Mule (15 page)

"Even for snow?"

"You're the mule. I'm the money. It's not my problem, my man."

Kate was waiting for me when I pulled in. She grabbed a chunk of the latest round of Deveny's cash, hurried through town and across the bridge to Siesta Key. Had the extra day lost her the place? she asked the old guy when she ran in. He accepted the money from her, first month, last month, security deposit, $10,000 total, and said, "Not in this awful market, my dear." We had chestnut leather couches now, a walnut sleigh bed. We brought over the baby's crib, and we never stayed at the 8th Street house again.

After Romana went to sleep in her own room that night, Kate and I spent the evening on the patio, enjoying our view of a flock of white ibis stalking with their curved beaks as they foraged in our yard. We sipped a Napa Sangiovese, the 2006 Altamura; Darren had sent me a case of it via Billy in Sac when we'd made the switch. "He's thinking of you over in Thailand," Billy had told me in the motel room when he'd dropped the case on the bed. "He wants you to know he appreciates everything you've rolled our way, hopes you won't be too put out that his numbers have to go up for a while."

Darren and I hadn't spoken in almost two months. I was finally established, and the mentoring part of our relationship had come to an end. I said to Billy, "His numbers have to go up?"

"It's almost summer, dude. The numbers always go up in the summer, until the harvest starts coming in. A lot of his stuff is in bunkers—he could keep his prices flat if he wanted to, but he's a businessman before anything else. You'd be wise never to forget that, James."

Anger had shot through me. Yeah, I'd known from the start that Darren was a businessman. But I also knew Deveny wouldn't pick up the costs on this and I'd be down a couple Gs a load for now. Then again, did I really care? A thousand dollars had become like a hundred to me; I knew I'd still be making huge money. So I'd let the anger go, uncorked one of the bottles with Billy's Swiss Army knife. We slugged the warm wine together in the motel room, celebrating how much money I was making for all of us. Were he and I friends? He'd said, "You going to remember us when something else comes your way?"

"When something else comes my way?"

"Moving the kind of weight you've been? Tons of people would love to meet you now, James."

I was on my way to rolling Darren Rudd half a million dollars from something that hadn't existed six months before. I was aware of it, thought about it all the time. What kind of windfall had it been for Darren? I knew exactly what kind of windfall it had been for me. A life changer. The chance to become the person I'd always known I was meant to be. Sitting on the patio sipping wine with my wife that late-spring night, I let the success of what I'd done settle into me for the first time. I'd never lived in a place as nice as this one. I knew my parents had never had as much. Kate and I were doing so much better than everyone else out there right now, and I knew there was something tragic about that. Were we going to miss out on some kind of collective pride everyone was going to feel for having survived this worsening economy at the end of the day? And how bad was it going to get? At the same time, we'd already gone through plenty of it ourselves, and I'd worked hard for what we had. A thought passed through my mind like a whisper: You're risking your life. But the night was lazy and wonderful, and I put that thought away.

"Don't you feel like we're moving too fast, James?" my wife asked from across the glass table.

"Don't think about it, Kate."

"But don't you ever get afraid?"

"I'm not afraid right now."

She was quiet a moment. Then she said, "What do you really think of this place?"

"I think I'm happier than I've ever been."

"You're not upset about the money?"

"I know we're going to make more."

Kate was quiet again. She set her hands on her belly like she was thinking about the baby growing inside her. She said, "Is it really always going to be like this? Couldn't we have had this some other way?"

"You know the answer to that."

The car, we told my mother, was bought with my income from the yacht-detailing crew. The house on Siesta Key we didn't even try to explain. We visited her at her place; when she'd ask us why no one was ever home on 8th Street the times she'd dropped by, Kate said, "We have busy lives now, Lynne. We're not the homebodies we were when we first got here."

"Then I'm so happy for the two of you."

No one from the business would ever know about the Siesta Key place; we didn't want any of them to figure out how much money we were making. We paid Nick to stay at the 8th Street house from time to time, to babysit our weight. Then we just enjoyed our lives. I liked swimming endless laps in my pool. I liked staring at
Cops
in my boxer shorts on my big-screen TV. I liked watching my daughter learn to stand up against the coffee table. I liked it when my wife crawled across our big bed with something really randy on her mind. Sometimes when I checked my beard patches, I imagined they were growing in. Whenever I pressed his belly where I kept him on my nightstand, JoJo Bear would always tell me, "I love you."

***

The last thing Kate and I did with our new money before Mason and I dealt with Russell was plan a vacation in Europe. Sarah and Kyle went there often, and Kate had been nagging away at me. Why shouldn't we go, too? Besides working so hard at the business, she was getting straight A's in school. On top of that, she'd be having her birthday soon, number twenty-nine. Okay, okay, okay, I said at last. Of course I hadn't mentioned to her the shit with Russell I'd been dealing with. We applied for passports, circled the dates in June. Then I went to talk to Eric Deveny.

I'd been telling myself from the beginning that I didn't work for Deveny, but the truth was more complex. He was the one who had the money; I was the one who wanted it. It's not like he was hard to please: he wanted color in his weight, he wanted stickiness and stink, and he wanted his deliveries on time. I'd tell him the names of the stuff Billy gave me in Sac: Lamb's Breath, Silver Needle, Blueberry, Diesel, OG, Orange Crush, so many different names, which ones were indo, which ones were outdo. But Deveny didn't care about any of that; he made up his own names. "On time" is what he needed more than anything else. Except for that one ice storm in New Mexico, I'd had no trouble giving him that, and he always sent me home safe with the money.

"Europe, my man?" Eric said when I brought it up to him in May. "That sounds really great. But let me ask you this: How am I going to get my weight while you're gone?"

"What if someone else drives it?"

"No one comes to my door but you."

"What if we went to Europe anyway?"

"I wouldn't be here when you got back."

We were having Greek food, calamari, souvlaki, saganaki, at a quiet place near Governor's Square Mall when I talked to him about it. I was budgeting a couple hundred bucks into every trip to pay for those lunches with him. Kate had been supplying me with clothes to wear in upscale restaurants: Sevens, Diesel, Volcom; we both had piles of designer labels now. Before I'd meet Deveny at the end of the runs, I'd strip off my lucky driving clothes in the last motel room outside Tallahassee, pull all the new stuff on. I'd also long since been wearing my hair short, to look innocent on the road. At a French place, in late February, the hostess had glanced at the two of us and said, "You guys aren't brothers, are you?" I hadn't missed the shadow that had crossed Eric's face. And he never seemed to want to give me credit for anything. When I'd explained how I moved the money through the airports in pantyhose, he'd shrugged and said, "That's not new." When I'd told him about walking the rental car lines and going back in to get Texas plates, he'd said, "That's just common sense."

In the French restaurant he'd looked me up and down and said, "You've cleaned yourself up, my man."

"Taking after the Superstar," I'd said.

Now, at the Greek place, a few months later, when I asked him if I could have some time off to take my family to Europe, Eric shook his head. "Having you gone right now would cost me too much money."

"What do you do with all your money, Eric?"

"All the same things you do with it, James."

"Ever think about getting out?"

"I'll get out when I've made enough."

"How are you going to know when that's going to be?"

He looked at me a moment with this strange grin like he was trying to figure me out. Then he said, "Worried I'm not going to have enough work for you, my man?"

The waiter brought our lamb dishes and refilled our glasses with retsina. When he was out of earshot again, Eric looked at me and said, "How do I know you'll come back?"

"We need the money now."

"Are you going to give me your connection if you get out?"

"We'll talk about that then."

Deveny nodded. "How does your wife feel about all of this?"

"I think I have to take my wife to Europe."

"You like being married, my man?"

"I like it well enough."

We picked up our cutlery and began to eat. Eric said, "There are a lot of fucking hassles involved in marriage, aren't there?"

"Not when it's working right."

"Would you ever want a girl up here?"

I shook my head.

He looked at me a long time then, sipped from his glass. He said, "Good answer, my man. I like all the things I'm learning about you. Stay out of trouble, stay focused on the work. You've got Cali, you've got me. Nobody has a setup like you. People would love to take it from you if they knew you had it. But nobody knows you have it, do they? I'm glad you're working it right, James. Other guys would have gotten distracted by a whole lot of ego-stroking bullshit."

At the end of the meal, he wiped his mouth, tossed his napkin on his plate. "Thanks for the feed, my man. You are granted my permission to go to Europe. You're working as soon as you get back. Then you're going to New York for me."

I watched through the window as he peeled away in his car. Would I ever be as cool as that handsome man? Dressed all in white? Driving that long black Mercedes?

When I got back to Sarasota in the evening, I checked in at the 8th Street house. Nick was lying on the couch in his boxer shorts and staring at
Cops
on TV.

"Everything going okay?" I asked, tossing him Kate's new pound.

"Just fucking driving all the time now, Jimbo," he said and pitched me a roll of money.

"How's the shit moving?"

"The shit's moving great."

"Anything else going on?"

"I want a goddamn raise."

"You'll have to take that up with Kate, my man."

At home in Siesta Key, I put the shoebox full of money Deveny had given me in the dishwasher, then stuffed Kate's roll of money from Nick in the pocket of her jeans on the patio as she kissed me to welcome me back. She had dinner waiting on the table, pesto linguine with garlic shrimp. I held my daughter on my lap as we ate, and Romana stuck her fingers into everything.

"So can I book those tickets already?" Kate asked.

"Go ahead. Out on June sixteenth, back on the twenty-ninth. We'll have two full weeks over there. I have to work right up to the day we leave. I have to be on the road the day we get back."

"What do you think about driving up to see the Alps after we're done visiting Rome, James?"

"Driving, Kate? Are you fucking kidding me?"

 

The passports came, the tickets were booked, and we told my mother we were going to see Kate's parents in California. Then it was time for the last run before Italy, and to go to Biloxi with Mason and finally do something about Russell.

I flew out to Sacramento with the money, grabbed a rental car, picked up the weed from Billy, the same old things. Two days later, I pulled into Mason's lot late in the night. I'd been putting off this thing with Russell for so long because I really had no idea what to do. What I hoped more than anything was that when we rolled into Biloxi, Russell wouldn't be there. At least then I would have satisfied my obligation to Mason. Because what if Russell was there? Were we really going to fuck him up? Just like that? How would that get us our money? I'd only agreed to go so I could put the goddamn thing to bed before our trip.

I sat in the car. I started thinking all these other things. What if we had enough now? What if Kate and I didn't come back from Europe? Could we hide enough money in the baby's diaper to stay over there a good long time? To do the things I was doing, I'd had to build lies into myself. The main one, I knew, was that I'd never get caught. But there were a lot of others, too. That we'd had to start doing this because of the economy. That we had to continue doing this because of the economy. Yes, we were scared when we lost our jobs. But that seemed like a lifetime ago. Because weren't we buying all this other shit now? Because weren't we doing all these other things? So what if I was good at the muling? Hadn't I been scared every single time? More scared than I'd ever been about anything else in my life? Wasn't I scared right now, just sitting in this car? What I felt in that car outside Mason's that night was that I should just stay in it, turn around and drive home without seeing him or anyone else, go to Europe with my family and never, ever look back.

Then I thought about the money. God, how I wanted the money. I stepped out of the car, carried the duffel bag up the stairs.

"It's time, James," Mason said when I went inside. "It's tomorrow. I'll follow you there. We'll wait outside his place. We'll stake him out until he gets home, then we'll fuck him up. Then you'll go to Europe and have a good time with Kate and Romana, and nobody will ever fuck with us again."

I dropped myself onto Mason's couch. Where was Emma? Asleep in the bedroom with Bayleigh. I'd told Billy again about our problem in Sacramento; Billy had said what he always said: "Don't think so much, James. Hit the motherfucker in the face with a lead pipe." I'd also long since known what Eric Deveny thought I should do about it. God, what was so wrong with everybody? Now I said to Mason in a voice as exhausted by it all as I felt, "So we're just going to go there, wait for him, and then fuck him up?"