Mule

by Tony D'Souza

Then I remembered the ring. I said to him, "What did you do with the ring?"

  He dug in his pocket and took it out. He held it up and we looked at it together. He gave it to me and said, "I owe you a ton of money. I'm going to pay you all your money."

  "Something is fucking wrong with you, Mason."

  "I know, I know. I'm sorry."

  "There's no way I can stay here!"

  Mason grabbed my arm. "You have to! What would Emma think if you didn't?"

  Kate saw me looking at the ring in our kitchen a few days later. She said, "Where did you get that?" I said, "Somebody gave it to me who owed me money." She took it, looked at it, then handed it back to me and said, "It's small. It's ugly. I don't want it. I'll let you buy me a better one to make up for how crappy you were in Europe."

  I carried the ring around with me for days because I didn't know what to do with it, didn't want to throw it away. Then Kate and I and the baby were shopping at St. Armand's Circle. All of the stores were having sales because of the economy. Some of the stores were going out of business. I said to Kate, "You sure you want a ring?" Kate said, "Yes." I tossed the dead girl's ring into a garbage can. I bought Kate a nicer one with $4,000 of our drug money.

  Part Two

  4 Skinning Mules

  TO ANYONE WITH ANY sense, it was obvious I'd been doing a lot of things wrong from the start. First, I wasn't taking any breaks. But I also wasn't sharing the workload, wasn't doubling up on weight to reduce my risk on the road. It was tricky: being busted with heavier weight would mean more prison time. And yet they couldn't catch you if you weren't behind the wheel. I continued to use the credit card for flights and cars, had from the beginning because I'd imagined I'd be doing it only once. But since I'd opened that Pandora's box, it had become impossible to shut. With the card, I could book the flights online, didn't have to answer any questions, deal with anyone. And the rental car companies wouldn't easily give me a vehicle any other way. To pay in cash, I'd have to register two weeks in advance, hand them all my information, put down a big deposit. I also knew that renting a car with cash could raise suspicions. So wasn't it just safer to keep using the card? It's not like I had any other options anyway: I was leaving behind a long paper trail documenting all my one-way flights to Sacramento, my quick drives home.

  I did have a story to cover all of that: I'd been having an affair with Rita, couldn't stand my wife, liked driving back to prolong my time away from her. That I'd been telling my wife I was researching a book I was going to write about everything that was going on right now in the country, to be called The End of the Golden Dream: Returning East on the American Highway. I was a journalist in my past life, after all, I'd say to whatever investigators interrogated me in whatever small room they'd shackle me in. Still, I knew it was a ridiculous story.

  I was telling myself all these other things, too: that it was good I was keeping my loads small, that if I got busted it would be only for that one time, we'd only lose the cost of the weight they'd nailed me with, the maximum federal sentence on the weights I'd been carrying was just five years. Just five years? For everything I'd already gotten away with? It didn't seem that long anymore. Not for the safety I was earning for my family. It would be a first-time offense; if they didn't find out about the rest of it, a good lawyer could get me a reduced sentence. We had plenty of money for a good lawyer now. Maybe my prison term would be so short, the kids wouldn't even notice I'd been gone. Besides, didn't a part of me feel that I deserved to go to prison?

  And the money—what were we going to do with all the money? Open a nail salon, beauty shop, massage parlor, laundromat? I knew from Darren Rudd that anything that worked with cash would get the job done, we wouldn't even need customers, the only business we'd really be doing was washing dirty drug money clean in the books. But that felt too complicated to figure out right now, was something I'd sit down and tackle whenever my time on the road was done. Instead I'd been stuffing a grand here, a grand there, into my bank account to pay off the credit card, the new car; I knew they could get me for "structuring"—money laundering—if it all went down. My planned cover story on that was I ran a part-time lawn service, payments in cash. "So where are these clients of yours who paid you all that cash, Mr. Lasseter?" I could hear the investigators asking. I knew I'd just smoke my cigarette and tell them, "I'd like to talk to my lawyer now."

  Even sloppier than all that, to avoid the stress of going through airport security with the money on my body, I'd begun mailing it to Billy instead. I'd split up $36,000 into four $9,000 batches to mitigate losses and avoid a CTR if any of the money was found. And it was all twenties—I didn't have to waste a second of my life in shitty casinos getting hundreds anymore. I'd hide the money in copies of magazines I loathed because they'd never published me, National Geographic, Men's Vogue, wrap all of it in foil, wrap it again with packing tape. Then I'd seal those packages in Express Mail envelopes at the post office. I knew I couldn't use FedEx or UPS because they were private companies and could open anything you gave them—you waived your right to privacy when you signed their bills of lading. But the post office needed a warrant. I'd write "Do Not Bend, Comic Books" on the envelopes, put a phony return address on the forms; I used the address of the downtown shop that really did sell comic books. Then I'd mail them out to the different addresses Billy would give me, in McKinleyville, Mount Shasta, Etna, Montague, Crescent City, Happy Camp, small towns in far northern California.

  I'd feel sick as soon as the packages left my hands. Why was I risking my money like this? Just for an extra minute of peace of mind at the airport? Just to not have to get hundreds? Billy had let me know that while people occasionally mailed him their money, packages could be x-rayed in a random check, and drug dogs at the sorting stations were trained to smell cash. He and Darren couldn't take responsibility if I used the mail. But he'd also told me that if any was found, it would only be "civil forfeiture," wouldn't lead to an arrest. Nobody he knew had lost money in the mail, he'd said.

  I'd track the packages on the computer throughout the night. They'd arrive in Tampa by truck, fly out from there, make pit stops at various sorting stations in the middle of the country—Dallas, Denver—reach Sacramento in the early morning. By noon the next day, they'd be in vans for delivery. I'd swim, watch Cops, worry about losing my money the whole time; Kate had no idea. In the late afternoon my phone would ring and Billy would tell me, "All is well. All is well. Everything got here fine, dude."

  And then there was Eric Deveny. I was having trouble putting him off on his New York run. "Way too busy," I'd tell him when we'd have lunch. He'd narrow his eyes and say, "Too busy, my man? I wasn't too busy to clean up those bodies for you."

  One evening in mid-July, Kate and I dropped off the baby with my mother. We'd told her about the Siesta Key house at last, said we were watching it for one of Kate's professors who was away on sabbatical. My mother had swallowed the story whole, looked around the place and loved it for us—mothers will believe anything their kids tell them. That night, Kate and I went to a black-and-white party at a beach house off Midnight Pass, down the road from where we lived. The place was beautiful, belonged to someone wealthy Kate knew. The party was around the pool; young waiters came by every few minutes bearing silver trays of themed hors d'oeuvres and Oreo cookies, chocolate martinis and sweating flutes of sparkling wine.

  I liked being included in that high society, felt I belonged to it now. Kate was really showing, people told her how pretty she was. Everyone was a doctor, lawyer, or in finance, all in their early thirties. They talked about the presidential election, the car companies, Bear Stearns, the price of oil, the housing market; they asked each other if they thought the stock market would crash. They seemed so surprised, as though what had happened to Kate and me a year and a half ago was happening to them only now. Because of our money in the Vault, I wasn't as consumed with economic fear as they were; for that reason I enjoyed the party all the more. When an attractive woman in a black-
and-white Audrey Hepburn hat and form-fitting dress asked me what I did for a living, I told her, "Import-export."

  "Import-export of what?"

  "Spices from the Orient. Supplying Chinese takeouts everywhere."

  "How's business?"

  "Business is great."

  "Even in this economy? I thought the restaurant business was tanking."

  "We're insulated from it. Everyone still wants their takeout."

  "So where are you keeping your money?" she leaned in and whispered.

  I whispered back, "We're keeping our money in cash."

  Kate said to me in bed that night, "Who was that woman you were talking to?"

  "She was somebody's wife, Kate."

  "What were you two talking about?"

  "We were talking about the economy."

  Kate said, "Were you attracted to her? Did you want to sleep with her? Don't act like you didn't notice how good-looking she was. Don't pretend like you didn't think about it."

  Then she said, "I feel so ugly right now."

  "That's what you felt like the last time, too."

  "Where are you these days, James? Because you're never here."

  "I'm working. I'm busy."

  Kate turned from me. "Don't you know how fucking lonely I feel all the time?"

  A house, a car, a vacation, college—hadn't I given her everything? I wasn't in any mood to console her. I said, "Want me to buy you something, Kate?"

  In the morning, I caught a flight. In the evening, I was on the road.

  Nick had been working hard. He'd had his hair cut, always wore a shirt now. By the middle of summer he was making deliveries all the way up to Tarpon Springs and as far south as Fort Myers. Was he skating anymore? I asked him when we were hanging out over Pabsts at the 8th Street house. Skating? Who had time for that? The only thing he had time for anymore was driving for Kate and making money. He had payments to make on the Impala he'd bought, the twenty-inch rims he'd put on it. He needed cash for fun and women. Would I ever let him drive for me, he wanted to know, cruise out to Cali with forty Gs, come back with the weight?

  "No fucking way."

  "Don't you want someone to give you a break from it?"

  "Not if that someone would stress me out more."

  "But don't you know I could do it?"

  "Even if you could, trust me, you wouldn't want to."

  Nick shook his head. "Of course I want to. I want to make the money, Jimbo."

  Then Nick had this other idea. If he could move a pound at six and a half Gs for me, what would I be willing to toss him on that?

  "Five hundred bucks," I said.

  "What if it was two pounds?"

  I thought about it. I told him, "I'd give you twelve hundred dollars."

  He nodded, was happy.

  "Where's the deal?" I said.

  "Up in Orlando."

  "Who's it through?"

  "My boy at school has boys up there."

  "Fronted?"

  "Cash."

  "A one-time thing?"

  "Regular, if it moves right for them."

  "The money has to come down here."

  Nick shook his head. "My boy says his boys can't travel."

  "Why can't they travel?"

  "They'd get pulled over."

  "Why would they get pulled over?"

  Nick said, "They're, you know, hoods. I know that makes it sound sketchy. But relax, when you meet my boy, you aren't going to think that. Besides, it's thirteen thousand dollars, Jim."

  Before I left that evening, Nick wanted me to see the house next door. The place had been foreclosed on, the family had just been evicted. It was a little yellow block house under a shady live oak. When we went through the plank gate to the yard, the side door was open. Inside, clothes and toys were strewn everywhere. It was hot in there because the power had been cut.

  "We should stash our shit in here," Nick said.

  I shook my head. "And give it away to vagrants?"

  Nick was right, I did want help with the driving, felt almost desperate about it. But I also still wanted all the money. On the transatlantic flight back from Europe, I'd sketched out the details of the loop Darren Rudd had told me to build way back in the beginning. If anybody in Sacramento would be willing to pony up, for example, that person could carry the weight from there to Albuquerque, two days out, two days back. I'd pay that person a pound of weed, $2,800 cost on my end, and he could sell it for between $5,000 and $6,000, whatever he could get. Mason would be waiting in an Albuquerque motel, take the handoff, and drive the weight to Dallas the next day. Emma could pick up his pounds from him there that night; the round trip from Austin to Dallas was only six hours. The following day, Mason could make it all the way to Tallahassee, if he got an early start and could keep himself awake. Then I'd grab the weight from him, take it to Deveny. I'd pay Mason two pounds, the same as ten to twelve Gs to him. The whole thing would cost me only $8,600; I'd make almost twenty grand a run without doing much of anything. If it worked once or twice, I'd send the money back that way, too. I'd done so much for everyone, wouldn't they do this for me?

  When I brought up the idea to Rita and Henry in Sacramento, asked them to drive, they said, "Hell no! Hell no!" as if the cops were already on their way over to bust them just by me saying it out loud. They had kids, they said, jobs. There was no way they needed the money that bad. All right, all right, I said, what about their old buddy Jerome? They said, Jerome? Yeah, Jerome might do it. He'd quit working at the bank, was slinging full time now. He was even carrying weight once in a while to various people he knew down in Riverside and L.A. counties. "Interstate?" he said when I asked him on the phone. "No way. Not everyone's got your death wish, dude."

  Then there was Mason; he'd always wanted to do it. Plus, in theory he owed me fifty Gs, which I knew he'd never be able to repay. "Drive for you?" he said on the phone when I broke my plan to him. "Sorry, James. Not me or Emma. What if we got caught out there, you know?"

  I said, "What do you think I've been doing out there all these months?"

  "I never asked you to do all that."

  "What about the Capital Cities Connection?"

  "You know that was just a name."

  "After everything I've done for you."

  "I know, I know. And I'm sorry."

  "What if I said I'd knock twelve Gs off what you owe?"

  "It's tempting, brother. But not right now."

  "I fucking hate you, Mason!"

  There had been moments when I could be as paranoid about the business as anyone who's ever done it. I'd part the drapes to see if anyone was watching the house, would have the idea that even the grocery store checkout girls were narcs. Now I was making Kate run through our worst-case-scenario plan all the time. The worst case, of course, was if I got pulled over.

  The main part of our plan had to do with the Vault. Our code for the punch pad at the door was 4-2-0, easy to remember, no problem there. Our one-page contract in case we lost our keys was folded and buried in the sawdust insulation in my mother's attic. But the keys to our safe-deposit boxes were the most important thing; they were the only way we could get our money and passports if anything ever went down. For that reason, Kate always carried them with her in her purse. If I was ever to text her the word "Emergency," no matter when, the first thing she had to do was hide those keys. For all we'd know, the cops would already be on their way to get her. And if they got her with the keys, they'd trace them, take all our money.

  "Hide them where?" she'd asked me when I'd explained it to her, the day we'd returned from my first trip to the Vault, back in late February.

  "It has to be someplace no one but us will find them."

  "How about over at your mom's?"

  "They'll toss her place for sure. It has to be someplace not connected to us."

  After a little thinking, Kate had said, "How about Sarah and Kyle's?"

  I thought about that: her rich friends' place. "That might work."
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br />   "I'll drop them in their downstairs toilet tank."

  "That's perfect, Kate."

  The other things Kate would have to do if I texted her "Emergency" were to leave the Siesta Key house and her expensive shit behind in it, throw all the phones and the laptop into Sarasota Bay, call Nick and tell him to dump the weight, his scales, phones, whatever he had, and to disappear. Then she should go to my mother's with the baby, wait there for the cops with her hands in her lap like she didn't know a thing. Whatever money she'd have on her they'd take, so she should never roll with a lot of cash. It wasn't a lot to do, but she had to have it all done in fifteen minutes.

  "Got the plan down?" I was constantly checking with her these days. She'd shrug and say, "Hide the keys, dump the phones, call Nick, wait." Or she'd sigh and say, "Do you always have to remind me we're doing what we're doing?"

  "You've got to get behind the wheel for me," I would say to Mason every time I called.

  "Sorry, James. Even if I wanted to, my smog sticker is expired."

  "Your smog sticker?"

  "And Bayleigh's been down with an earache. I can't leave Emma alone with her right now."

  "An earache? Mason, can I ask you something? Do you even remember what happened in that cotton field?"

  "Easy, brother. Let it go. I'm the one who has to live with that."

  "Let it go? I have fucking nightmares!"

  "Well, I do, too. Besides, I'd have to ask Emma if I could even use the car."

  At the 8th Street house, there were a few pictures of Kate and me on the walls that we hadn't bothered taking down: the two of us in Austin when she'd been pregnant, and in the Duns­muir cabin with Romana just after she'd been born. Whenever I'd hang out with Nick over there and notice them, I'd wonder, How could we have looked so happy when we'd been so worried?

  "Listen to this, Jimbo," Nick said to me one day, telling me his usual drug-dealing stories as we played The Godfather on the Xbox he'd brought over. "The landlord sends over this contractor to fix a gutter at my parents' place. It's outside work, the landlord doesn't tell anybody. The guy comes around the corner while I'm in the middle of a blunt out back. What can I do? I smile, offer him a hit. He's like fifty, older. Right away he rips it. At first he's like 'no big deal,' says, 'Nice stuff, son.' Then he starts laughing, goes, 'This ain't the haze we get around here.' He's been scoring weight off me ever since. Fifteen-five on the Q.P., says the money's saving his family's ass right now.