by Tony D'Souza
It was in downtown Sarasota, five blocks south of the city jail, in a solid concrete building with a luxury antiques shop on the ground level. The entrance to the Vault was under a discreet awning on the side, like the doorway to a private club. First you were locked in a small vestibule facing a bulletproof glass window. When you punched in your secret code on a keypad, the guard behind the window looked up your account in his file. He'd pass you the sign-in sheet through the slot; you'd mark an X, a squiggle, whatever you liked; and he'd buzz you in through a thick metal door.
The guard's name was Duke—it said so on the plate beneath his badge. He was burly and balding in a neat uniform, always polite, always kept the conversation on the weather. "Former law enforcement?" I'd asked him immediately. He'd shaken his head and said, "Nope." He never once asked me who I was or what I did for a living. He'd give a cookie to Romana that she'd grab tightly in her little fist, tell me how much she'd grown since the last time he had seen her. She was six months old now, a happy, baldheaded kid. Did he ever want to know my name, I sometimes asked Duke. He'd just shrug at me and say, "I'd only forget it."
The Vault wasn't a busy place; no one else was ever there. Inside, Duke would walk me down a carpeted hallway, lined with framed oil paintings of thoroughbred racehorses, and let me in through a last metal door. In the steel-lined vault itself, I'd put my keys in the slots of my boxes, Duke would put his in beside mine, the little metal doors would swing open, and he'd leave me alone with whatever it was I had.
What I had was cash, hundreds of bundles of tens and twenties folded in half and secured with a rubber band, each bundle a thousand dollars. I'd put one heavy box on the rolling cart they had there, then the other box, lift Romana in her car seat onto the cart, and wheel us into the counting room like we were going grocery shopping. I called it the counting room because I liked to count my money in it, but it was really just a small room with a locking door where the clients could have privacy with their things. It was always silent and peaceful inside the Vault, no more so than in that little room. Duke had told me when I'd first checked the place out that they'd put so much reinforced concrete into the building, it would survive a category 5 hurricane.
In the counting room, I'd lift Romana out of her car seat. She'd crawl around on the carpeted floor, sit up, clap her hands, and I'd toss her a few thousand-dollar bundles to play with. I brought her with me to the Vault almost every time I went because I always had a ton of cash on me. I had the idea that people might be watching who went in and out, that someone would jack me there. I figured with the baby in my arms, at least they wouldn't shoot me. I also started wearing sunglasses around town, as though that would somehow protect me. On the drive home from the Vault, I'd take a zigzag route on side streets until I was sure no one was following. Why had somebody built the Vault? The cocaine trade in the eighties? Retired tax evaders? It wasn't even expensive; my two boxes cost less than a thousand dollars a year.
The muling was never easy, but there were times on the road when I'd fall into a deep and meditative state. A hundred miles would pass in an instant, and I couldn't recall thinking about anything. Other times I had trouble keeping myself awake. JoJo Bear was always beside me to make me feel safe. "We're passing Window Rock," I'd tell him. He'd tell me, "I love you." "We're crossing the Big Muddy," I'd tell him. He'd tell me, "I love you." Billboards along the way were blank of advertising now. Every time I came home from another run, Kate and I were thirty thousand dollars further away from all of that.
Could I do this forever? I asked myself. Sometimes I felt like I could. I knew I'd never have another chance in my life to make this kind of money. I had all these crazy goals now that didn't seem that far out of reach: to put away a hundred thousand dollars in a deposit box just for Romana, and another hundred thousand for the new baby. A couple hundred grand in a box for Kate and me. Money for my mother, more money in case anything else bad should happen. Once I got all of that done, maybe I'd put a little away for Kate's parents, too. Out-of-work guys were spinning signs on corners everywhere now. I'd glance away whenever I'd see one. I'd never let what had happened to Kate and me ever happen again.
"Chance of a lifetime," I'd tell Kate. She'd shake her head at me and say, "Is that what you're going to say when you get caught?"
"You know I'm not going to get caught, baby."
"Isn't that what they all say, James?"
Just before Easter, we had our first problem. Mason had fronted two pounds to a kid named Russell, a guy he grew up with in Biloxi. It soon became clear that Russell had stolen our weed. It surprised me, wasn't something I would have done. But what kind of imaginary world had I been living in? The cost on Mason's end was eight thousand, the cost on mine, five. Not a lot of money to either one of us anymore. But it wasn't about the money. "This guy was my own blood, James," Mason said. "We went through the hurricane together. If he really did this to me, I'll fucking kill him." It brought all this anger out of him that I hadn't seen before; it was like the hurricane was still tearing around inside him.
Mason and I had become tight during those months. He and Emma were making over six grand a run, on track to make more than $130,000 for the year, all without doing any driving. One night on his porch, after I pulled into Austin with another load, he said, "Life is so amazing, James, you know what I mean? One day a hurricane takes away everything you have, the next day a guy comes running up the stairs with bags full of gold. Sacramento, Austin, Tallahassee. Man, we have to come up with a name for this shit."
"The Cross Country Couriers," I said and laughed.
"The Capital City Capitalists." He laughed back.
"The Capital Cities of Chronic."
"You know anyone in Santa Fe? You know anyone in Jackson? We should try to move weight in every capital of the states we run through, connect the dots, own the whole southern half of the country."
"The Capital Cities Connection," I said.
"That's it. That's who we are. Man, we've got to get some T-shirts made."
"Baseball caps."
"Fucking business cards, bro."
What could we do but laugh and laugh? I was running so much weed through Mason's apartment it felt like an assembly line, a repeating scene in a dream: get to Austin late at night, hurry up the stairs, dump twelve or thirteen pounds of weed on his living room floor. We didn't even get excited about it any longer, it might as well have been potato chips. Mason was working hard, had gotten to know a lot more people in Austin since we started. Still, Eric Deveny was the key to our whole operation. If he decided to bail on us at some point, the Capital Cities Connection was over, and we both knew it. Rita and her crew couldn't handle more than a pound or two a run. Mason couldn't move enough weight to make just a Sacramento-to-Austin delivery worth the risk. So we tried to come up with new ideas on how to move more weight in case Deveny quit.
That was how Russell had come into the picture. He lived in Biloxi, a few blocks inland from the beachfront casinos, two miles south of I-10, a perfect drop-off point halfway between the Texas-to-Florida leg of the trip. It was also a great place to melt bulky drug cash down to hundreds. I could hit three or four casinos, trade in a few thousand dollars for chips at each one, play the Pass Line at the craps table, win a little, lose a little, who fucking cared? Then I'd take my chips to the window and get the precious hundreds I needed to strap on my body and fly out to California.
Russell was a big Mississippi bubba, thick-lipped and fat. He had a piggy set of eyes and his dirty-blond hair spilled out of the edges of his threadbare Peterbilt cap. His cover story was that he installed carpeting for a living, but he mostly sponged off his girlfriend, LaJane. She was a bigmouthed redhead, sharp-nosed but nice-looking, a croupier at Treasure Bay, attractive in her black-and-white casino outfit. She and Russell had two big dogs and a filthy house; when I stopped by there the first time and opened their fridge for a beer, there was nothing in it. Mason and Emma had come along to visit and make the introduction. It
had also been a chance for me to show Mason how to do the drive.
Emma had gone ahead in their Corolla with Bayleigh in the backseat and scanned the road for cops. Mason and I trailed ten miles behind in my latest rental car. "So we're coming up on this semi," I told him during that training run. "You want to leave at least five car lengths ahead of you so you don't get pulled over for ‘following too close.' Now you want to start your signal, leave it on as you make the switch, otherwise they can get you for ‘improper lane change.' You've got to make sure no one is coming up fast on you or they can get you for ‘impeding traffic.' I like to keep my speed the same—don't accelerate to pass, the speed limit isn't any different in the fast lane. Signal again, and now we're in front of the truck. Being in front of a truck is a great place to be. It's like a wall at your back, and you only have to worry about what's waiting up ahead."
"Got it, brother, getting it all written down," Mason said, cribbing notes on the legal pad he brought with him.
"This isn't fucking college, Mason. Don't write it down. Just try to make it part of who you are. You have to constantly check your rearview for cops. Pretty soon you'll be able to spot them by their shape. At night, you'll figure out what their headlights look like—they're different from other cars'. When you see one, don't change your driving. Your heart'll start racing, you'll want to throw up. Pull off at the next exit if they aren't up on you, and calm down. But never, never pull off when they are, or they might think something is up. You have to get ready for it, it happens on every trip. Have faith in your lucky charms and eventually they'll pass." At that, I patted the head of JoJo Bear, seated on my lap. By that point I had all kinds of lucky charms: fortunes in my wallet from Chinese restaurants I had eaten at along the way, pennies I'd found on the ground while gassing up, interesting rocks, a pair of my daughter's pink socks. The fortune I liked best read, "A long, even journey lies before you."
"So when am I doing the drive?" Mason was always asking me.
"We'll talk about that later," I'd tell him. The truth was I never wanted him to do the drive, because I didn't want to give up any of the money.
When we reached Russell's that night, it was all hugs and kisses between the redhead and Emma, a long hug between Mason and his friend, a rib barbecue out back, stories about their lives in Biloxi before Katrina had wrecked them. Russell's and the redhead's Mississippi accents were indecipherable, and the half dozen friends of theirs who came over talked like that, too. There was a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking blunts. It was hard for me to evaluate Russell in that environment. I liked that Mason vouched for him, but I didn't like it that Russell wasn't married, didn't have any kids. And then there were all those bright casinos beckoning five short blocks away.
Midway through the party, when we were alone, Mason asked me, "What do you think about him?" I stared at fat-lipped Russell and told Mason, "You know I'll take your word for it."
When Russell's friends left to hit the casinos at the end of the night, I went out to the rental, a Mazda 6 with Alabama plates, brought in the duffel bag, and unzipped it in the bedroom for Russell to see. The redhead was passed out on the couch, the dogs were on the floor and snoring. Emma and Bayleigh were sleeping in the dark and quiet living room down the hall. Russell's face did what everyone's did the first time they saw that much weed: his eyelids snapped open like he'd been hit with a cattle prod.
How much did he think he could move? Mason asked him. Russell rubbed his stubble-covered chin, said he guessed he could move a pound pretty quick. The very next run, our greed made us front him two pounds, and then ten days went by with no word from him.
Something in me knew from the start what had happened. I said to Mason on the TracFone, "You think he could have ripped us off?"
Mason said, "Who ruins a lifetime friendship for a measly eight grand?"
When I passed Biloxi on my next run, I pulled off the highway and drove by Russell's house. The shotgun dump that it was looked dark and empty; his crappy truck out front was gone. Should I call Mason and let him know? I decided to leave it alone. I went to the casinos, got my hundreds. In the evening I was on the road.
A distance had sprung up between Kate and me; we didn't have time to lie on top of each other all day anymore. She was busy taking classes, I was gone every other week. And even the times I was home, I was caught up in my head, getting ready for my next run, turning things over about the business. In the beginning, we had arguments about it, about continuing to do it at all. But I wanted the money from the first, and there was nothing she could do. Besides, Kate liked the money, too. Once it really started pouring in, she thought we'd already made enough to go out and spend some. I shook my head. "Didn't what happened frighten you at all?" I asked her. She said, "It not like I never had to live that way. Besides, why are we even doing it if we can't spend the money?"
"Can't we just have it to have it, Kate?"
"What kind of life would that be, James?"
We were having a boy; we'd paid cash for a sonogram to find out. Kate had hired a holistic midwife. We were going to have a water birth this time.
This pregnancy was like the last one: Kate was sick all the time. On my second run from Cali, I'd brought her a pound of weed. It was supposed to be for her to sit on and smoke, to help her keep down food, but sometime between the day I gave it to her and the end of my next run two weeks later, she'd started selling it at the college. There'd be bags from Saks and Macy's on the kitchen table when I'd come in. I knew she wouldn't have dipped into our savings to go shopping like that.
"You selling that pound?"
"Maybe I sold a couple ounces to some stoners I met at school."
"A couple ounces let you go shopping like this?"
She blushed. "Maybe it was more than a couple ounces. You knew when you gave it to me I couldn't smoke it all."
"First of all," I said in a condescending tone that even I hated, "this is a terrible idea. Why would we take on an additional risk? For nickels and dimes? When I'm making what I'm making? Secondly, you're pregnant. What kind of people are we supposed to be if you're dealing when you're pregnant?"
Kate made a face at me. She said, "What's being pregnant got to do with it? Are you really that much of a jerk? Besides, I'm not showing yet, nobody knows but you and me. And it's not nickels and dimes, James. I'm pulling in double an ounce compared to what you get."
"Double?"
"More than that. I've already cleared three Gs and have over half the pound left."
I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, "What if somebody figures you out over there?"
"I say I have a hookup, a friend of a friend. Nobody knows that the friend is me."
"You'd better not let them know where we live."
"Do you think I'm stupid?"
Kate never had to do it. Even after we were set up at the Vault, we kept a few thousand dollars for groceries in a teapot on the stove. But it was how the thing worked. It paid in cash, was an instant reward, and more than anything else, it was easy. So Kate wanted to make some spending money? Fine with me. I knew if she was as into it as I was, she'd stop complaining and I'd be able to operate however I wanted.
Because Kate wasn't completely into it yet. I'd be sitting at the laptop booking flights for my next trip, and she'd be standing beside me with Romana, whom she was stuck with all day. "Ever going to find any time to help me with this kid, Mr. Big-Time Drug Dealer?"
"I'm not a big-time drug dealer," I'd say and wave her away with my hand. "I'm a freelance courier—learn the difference."
"You're going to get caught."
"I'll get a slap on the wrist."
"A felony will ruin you for any other kind of work."
"If you'd let me work in peace, we won't have to work again."
The idea of getting rich was already growing in me, had started with something Billy had said. When I met him the first night of my third run in Sacramento, he had a room waiting for me at the Days Inn downtown. He c
ame in through the adjoining door when I unlocked it, the duffel bag over his shoulder.
"What was it you did before this, James?" Billy asked me, his feet, in muddy work boots, up on the desk as we drank our way through a twelve-pack of Fat Tires. "Writing? This is better than writing. This is something that can actually make you rich. I've seen a dozen guys do it. Work hard, pay your dues, don't think too hard about the money. One day you'll wake up and realize you're loaded. Then you don't have to deal with the world again."
"So why aren't you rich, Billy?"
He rubbed the scar on his chin. "I make plenty of money, don't worry about me. But not everyone in the world gets the kind of opportunity you have. With the guy you have over there taking the weight he does? A connection to Darren on this end? You'd better not let them meet, James. They'd cut you out. Or pay you less than half. Then you'd just be a slave to them. Keep yourself in the middle and the only question is, how much are you going to make off it?"
"How rich have you seen people get?"
"I knew this big-balled Asian chick who socked away a million and a half over a couple of years doing SoCal runs twice a month. She was smart, got herself a HazMat license—they never check those trucks. Then she opened a couple of nail salons, cleaned up all her money. She's way into skydiving, the last I heard."
Kate, too, had made a friend, a woman her age, one of the academic counselors at the community college. They sat down together at the beginning of the semester, mapped out the courses Kate needed to take to get her degree. I was away on the road at the time. Kate took Romana with her, and the counselor fell in love with our baby. When I came home, Kate told me to shave off my beard patches, that we were dropping Romana off at my mother's, going out on a double date.