The Racketeer

I never doubted you.”
    “There were doubts, lots of them.”
    We’re both stunned at the fact that we’ve pulled it off, and at that moment our success is overwhelming. We embrace again, and each of us admires how thin the other looks. I comment that I’m looking forward to eating again. Quinn says he’s tired of playing the lunatic. “I’m sure it comes natural,” I say. He grabsmy shoulders, stares at my new face, and says, “You’re almost cute now.”
    “I’ll give you the doctor’s name. You could use some work.”
    I’ve never had a closer friend than Quinn Rucker, and the hours we spent at Frostburg hatching our scheme now seem like an ancient dream. Back then, we believed in it because there was nothing else to hope for, but deep down we never seriously thought it would work. Arm in arm, we climb the steps and enter the condo. I hug and kiss Vanessa, then reintroduce myself to Dee Ray. I met him briefly years ago in the visitors’ room at Frostburg when he came to see his brother, but I’m not sure I would recognize him walking down a street. It doesn’t matter; we are now blood kin, our bonds solidified by trust and gold.
    The first bottle of champagne is poured into four Waterford flutes—Dee Ray has expensive tastes—and we chug it. Dee Ray and Quinn stick guns in their pockets, and we quickly unload my car. The party that follows would seem implausible even in a fantasy film.
    With champagne flowing, the gold bars are stacked ten deep in the center of the den floor, all 524 of them, and we sit on cushions around the treasure. It’s impossible not to gawk and no one tries to suppress the laughter. Since I’m the lawyer and the unofficial leader, I commence the business portion of the meeting with some simple math. We have before us 524 little bricks; 5 were sold to a Syrian gold trader in Miami; and 41 are now resting safely in a bank vault on Antigua. The total taken from our dear pal Nathan is 570, worth roughly $8.5 million. Pursuant to our agreement, Dee Ray gets 57 of the glowing little ingots. His 10 percent was earned by fronting the cash Quinn was caught with; for paying Dusty’s legal fees; for supplying the four kilos of Nathan’s cocaine, along with the pistol and the chloral hydrate I used to knock him out. Dee Ray picked up Quinn when he walked away from Frostburg, and he monitored Nathan’s releasefrom prison so we would know exactly when to start the project. He also paid the $20,000 deposit to the rehab center near Akron for Quinn’s phony cocaine problem.
    Dee Ray is in charge of the yacht. As he’s getting drunker, he hands over an itemized list of his expenses, including the yacht, and rounds it all off at an even $300,000. We’re assuming a value of $1,500 an ounce, so we vote unanimously to award him another twenty bars. No one is in the mood to quibble, and when you’re staring at such a fortune it’s easy to be magnanimous.
    At some unknown and unknowable point in the future, the remaining 488 bars will be equally divided among Quinn, Vanessa, and me. That’s not important now—the urgency is in getting the stuff out of this country. It will take a long time to slowly convert the gold to cash, but we’ll worry about that much later. For the moment, we are content to pass the hours drinking, laughing, and taking turns telling our version of the events. When Vanessa replays the moment in Nathan’s house when she stripped naked and confronted his buddies at the front door, we laugh until it’s painful. When Quinn recounts the meeting with Stanley Mumphrey in which he blurted out the fact that he knew Max Baldwin had left witness protection and left Florida, he imitates Mumphrey’s wild-eyed reaction to this startling news. When I describe my second meeting with Hassan and trying to count 122 stacks of $100 bills in a busy coffee shop, they think I’m lying.
    The stories continue until 3:00 a.m., when we’re too drunk to go on. Dee Ray covers the gold with a quilt and I volunteer to sleep on the sofa.

CHAPTER 44
    W e slowly come to life hours later. The hangovers and fatigue are offset by the excitement of the task at hand. For a young man who has lived on the fringes of an operation adept at smuggling illegal substances into the country, the challenge of smuggling our gold out is light lifting for Dee Ray. He explains that we are now avid scuba divers, and he has purchased an astonishing collection of gear, all of it stored in heavy, official U.S.