This time, I slid the crate of smartphones all the way to the back of the trunk, then grabbed the handle on the pliable trunk bottom and yanked up. The pull told me to do it, and still I expected to find nothing. But I did. I did. The bottom came up easily, revealing the compact spare tire, tire jack, tire iron, and twenty small bricks of brown heroin neatly wrapped in cellophane.
I closed the trunk instinctively and looked around, then pretended like I wasn’t looking around, on the off chance someone was watching me. I tried to play cool, failed miserably and sat on the ground, leaning against the trunk. Heroin. Even if I didn’t know exactly what it was yet, I got the gist. I knew enough. I was a drug smuggler. And I was in deep shit.
I reopened the trunk again and rearranged the contents the best I could. I had to make it look normal. My hands were numb. My feet were numb. My head was light. I touched the brown packages as little as possible. Fingerprints. I remembered fingerprints halfway through stuffing them back where they came from, and halfheartedly wiped each package with my shirt.
31
After that, I entered into paralyzing fear. From the time I returned the car to the drop point, I expected to be caught. By the police, by Vince’s men, by Vince. According to the law, I wasn’t supposed to be smuggling drugs across the state, and according to my employer, I wasn’t supposed to know I was smuggling drugs across the state. They’d tricked me into moving drugs without knowing it, and now I’d committed numerous felonies. I pictured how the ignorance defense would play in a courtroom. Not well.
I drove the car to that hidden property in the hills like normal, and there I expected to be caught. I waited, to be confronted or handcuffed or clubbed over the head. But there was nothing. I got in the car with the silent man, expecting him to pull off the road and shoot me in the head and dump my body in a drainage ditch. But he did not. He drove me back to my apartment as we listened to classic rock on low, like always. I expected someone to be waiting at my apartment. I expected someone to be there when I woke up. And so on. And so on. For a week.
I stayed in my apartment, for the most part, and worried. I avoided open spaces if I could, even secluded ones; there were no hikes, no exploring. I didn’t go back to the coffee shop. I stayed by myself and looked over my shoulder, and thought. I worked through it in my head, trying to figure out what my next step should be. I thought about asking for advice, wondered who I could have asked, and mentally meandered through all my old relationships that I had either destroyed or that had dissolved through simple negligence. I felt very alone. I didn’t see Suzanne until she showed up unannounced one afternoon.
“Thought you could use some company, soldier,” she said through the screen door, holding a six-pack. I invited her in.
“You’ve been discreet,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was soft, unguarded. Not her normal flamboyance. “I haven’t seen you. No one’s seen you.”
“No one? Who else do I see that often?”
“No need to get defensive,” she said, and sat down on my loveseat. She opened two beers and I sat next to her. “How’s work?”
It felt like a knife jabbed into my ribs. The conversation could not go there. I hadn’t figured out my plan of attack, and until I did, I couldn’t risk telling her. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell anyone. But she was still one of them, and I didn’t know how far it went.
“Fine,” I said, and took a long gulp. “Slow right now. Nothing this week.”
This was true, and only put me further on edge. There had been no runs since the night I found the heroin. I could not imagine a world in which this was a coincidence.
“Something seems off,” she said.
I shrugged.
“Is everything okay, Julian?”
“Yes.”
“Are you unhappy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to…figure out what I’m going to do.”
“In what way?”
“Like, how long I’m going to stay here.”
She looked around. “In your apartment?”
“No. Here. I might be leaving.”
It was an idea I’d been kicking around for days; it struck me immediately after seeing the drugs and had stuck in my mind. It was the easiest solution to all this, and to most things. Cut and run. Bail. Grab a few belongings and jump in the car in the middle of the night or the middle of the day or whichever time would draw less attention, and head east. Back to New York or Boston or even Hanover, and put thousands of miles between myself and this mess. Just get away from it. Try to resurrect my old life or start a completely new one, either way. Figure it out when I got there.
These were thoughts I had, and really, I should have acted on them. It would have been easiest.
She sighed. “I didn’t know it was this bad.”
“It’s not…bad,” I said, trying to avoid the real issue. “I’m just not sure if it’s going to work out for me. Here.”
“And may I ask why?”
“A few things.”
“And they are?”
I shook my head. “Nothing specific.”
She took a drink and looked at the floor. “It’s me.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not.”
“I understand you trying to spare my feelings. Valiant.”
“It really isn’t.”
“I suppose I just don’t understand.”
“Suzanne.”
“How can it degenerate this quickly? In the beginning—recently—it was so good.”
“Suzanne,” I said, “it really isn’t that.”
“Have I not been giving you adequate space?”
“Well, yes.”
“Do you need it to continue?”
“The space?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, that would be nice.”
She frowned. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“That this was a precursor to the end of our relationship.”
“What relationship?” I asked, louder and meaner than I should have.
She stood up and put a hand on her chest. “How dare you?”
“You’re kidding, right? You call this a relationship?”
“And just what would you call it?”
I threw my hands in the air. “Convenience? A fling? Those seem to sum it up.”
That hurt her. I knew it right then, but didn’t care, at least not at the time. I didn’t have the energy to sugar coat it. Later, after everything that happened, I’d look back on these comments and feel a terrible amount of regret. But at that moment, I just needed to get rid of her.
She stared at me and shook her head, and her eyes glassed over. I didn’t know she could cry. She didn’t, totally, but she got about as close as a person could without. She looked to her left, drank her beer quickly, threw the bottle on the floor, and left my apartment.
For most of the night, I paced the floor and forced my brain into motion, making plans then poking holes and scrapping them. The easiest fix was to just leave, and it seemed no matter what maze my mind wandered through, each time it ended up at the same solution. I didn’t want to leave; the options were starting over again somewhere completely new, or—even less appealing—returning east with my tail between my legs. I liked the mountains, and I had fallen in love with the new, simple life I was making, until I opened that trunk.