by Tony D'Souza
5 Mule in the Traces
IN MID-SEPTEMBER, I MANAGED to put off Eric Deveny on his New York run one last time. Two days later, my mother called and said a letter had come to her house for me. She let me in when I arrived, went back to watching the news. "Are you following what's happening, James? The Lehman Brothers bank last week, and today this AIG."
"Sounds like more of the same to me, Ma."
"What a bunch of assholes."
The letter was in a plain white envelope, no return address, no postmark, no stamp. When I tore it open, there was a single sheet of paper folded inside; on it was a photocopied picture of a turn-of-the-century western pack mule. The mule was loaded with baggage and ready for travel. There was nothing else in the picture but the mule. Under the mule was printed: "Operators of working animals generally find mules preferable to horses. Mules show less impatience under the pressure of heavy weight. The stereotype of a mule as being stubborn is unfair and inaccurate."
Under that was a line of handwriting: "Stop being so fucking stubborn!!!"
"What'd you get?" my mother asked.
I rubbed my beard patches. "An invitation to this thing at work."
"Is your job safe? Are you and Kate worried about all of this?"
"We've been through it already. Besides, rich people still want their boats cleaned. I'm even managing my own crew over there now." I folded the letter into my pocket. Then I said to her, "You have a valid passport, by any chance?"
She nodded. "I had to get one for my cruise to Nassau."
"Maybe we'll all go on a trip together someday."
When the Cali load came in two Mondays later, I drove up to Tallahassee in the morning, met Emma at her hotel, grabbed the weight from her in the lot. I apologized again for what I'd done at UT, asked if her cousin Sam had taken the $500 I'd asked her to give him from me to say sorry to him, too. Emma shrugged. "He wouldn't touch it. He said he doesn't want our filthy drug money."
I nodded. "What about that stupid liar kid?"
"Stop worrying about it. He knows he can't say anything. Just keep an eye on your mental state, would you? You're getting to be as high-strung as Mason."
I gave her the cash for the next run, then drove the weight to Deveny's. His house was as dark and foreboding as always when I pulled up to it. I took my usual deep breaths, hopped out, and ran the duffel bags inside. Eric was standing in his wood-paneled den, dressed in white, his remote in his hand, watching the news on his projection TV. "Can you believe this shit?" he said, smiling when I walked in. "It gets crazier every day. It's down eight hundred points right now. What did they think would happen, wasting their money blowing up shithole countries? Who's laughing now, my man?"
I dropped the duffel bags on his couch, pulled the letter out of my jacket pocket, tossed it on his coffee table. The picture of the mule looked up at us in the dark room. When he noticed it, he picked it up and made a face like he was seeing it for the first time. Then he grinned at me and said, "An amazing animal, don't you think? Much better than a pig, for example."
"How'd it get down there?"
"My brother was passing through."
"You sent your brother to my mother's house?"
He turned back to his TV. He said, "Relax, my man. It's not like he knocked on her door. Sometimes people just need a kick in the pants. You're not the same guy who first came up here anymore, are you? That guy would've begged me for the chance to do some work. In fact, I think you did beg me, remember? Where is that guy now, that guy who was born in my house? Have you made enough money, James? Even with all this new shit that's going on? Fine with me. Give me your connection and go the fuck away. You'd make me very happy."
"You're not getting that."
"Then you're going to New York."
What could I say, No? Or better yet, Make me? I shrugged, said the only thing I knew I could: "How much are you going to pay me?"
He nodded as he watched the Dow Jones plunge. "Good news, my man. Great news, in fact. We've had such a productive working relationship, haven't we? Making money for each other. Getting our hands dirty for one another. Besides, I have this strong feeling you're going to enjoy yourself up there. All right, water under the bridge, back to business. Where are you taking me for lunch today? The restaurants are going to be fucking deserted I bet."
When I crawled into bed that night, Kate rolled over and whispered what she always did: "Everything going okay out there?"
I whispered back what I always did: "Everything's going just fine."
"Did you stop and see Nick?"
"Yeah, I picked up your money, Kate."
"How's Nick?"
"Nick's good."
"He doesn't want to stop working for us anymore?"
"No, he managed to get himself over that."
"What do you think was the matter with him?"
"People get frightened out there sometimes."
Kate said, "Did you look in at the babies?"
"You know I did."
"Aren't they getting big?"
"Yeah, so big."
"You're not going to see them grow up if you go on working like this, you know."
Then Kate asked, "Are you going to be home for a few days?"
"Why are you asking?"
"There's a function—"
"Take Cristina."
One part of my life really was going just fine: Jerome and Emma were conducting the cross-country runs from California like symphonies, bringing in the weight, taking out the money, passing JoJo Bear back and forth between them like a baton. I'd finally let Jerome and Billy meet in Sacramento, to save myself the hassle of having to fly out there. If they'd cut any side deals between them, which I assumed they had, I hadn't noticed yet. The dream of the Capital Cities Connection was up and running, tossing me eighteen to twenty Gs every two weeks for doing nothing more than putting up the cash. I should have been able to kick back, grow out my hair, get to know my kids, maybe even start writing again. But of course I couldn't do that. Now I was working for Eric Deveny.
The New York run was a three-day roundtrip up the eastern seaboard that took me through High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas in Jacksonville, Washington, D.C., and Trenton, and overnighted me in Richmond on the way up and Savannah on the way back. Eight more states to add to my muling résumé, 2,200 more miles, and lots of congested traffic to hide in—so much easier than anything I'd done before that I didn't mind that JoJo Bear wasn't riding along with me.
I was carrying twenty-five-pound loads, made up of a little of my Cali kush and a lot of Eric's Miami haze, in two big suitcases in the back of our old Forester. At Dulles, I'd switch out the car for a rental with New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania plates. When I reached Newark, I'd park in the short-term lot, catch a prearranged town car to the city, finish the run at a Manhattan address on the north side of Gramercy Park. The building was old and beautiful, the ceiling in the lobby paneled and high, the brass banisters polished and gleaming. The liveried doorman would hand me a heavy gym bag, I'd unzip it and see that it was packed with cash, then he'd whisk the suitcases away into the elevator. Should I hang out for a while in the city? Have a little fun like Deveny seemed to want me to? I'd just earned another eight Gs, after all. But I'd take the same town car back to Newark, hop in the rental, get myself back on the road. Down in Tallahassee, I'd give Eric his money and go home with mine: $58,000. I was having to wait to get my fifty Gs from him for the Cali pounds out of those New York gym bags now, too.
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 th
ousands 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.