Chapter Seventeen

Thursday, October 19, 8:10 a.m.

“Road trip?” Barry echoed Don’s invitation. “Just like old times, huh?” They were standing in the alley behind the Burnside branch of Java Jiant, leaving only the sullen red-headed girl inside to deal with the morning rush all by herself. Barry held his palm out and said, “Give me five, my man!”

Don’s hand met only air as it descended. Barry laughed while he jerked his hand back. The ritual was as old as their friendship.

Barry could always make Don smile, and there wasn’t much Don could say that about anymore. Basically, Barry was still the same person he had been in fifth grade, when he had moved into the apartment across the hall. He still had shoulder-length blond curly hair, only now it was held back by a ponytail and the front had retreated into an M-shape high on his forehead. He still had a child’s love of physical humor. (His favorite movie was There’s Something About Mary.) And he was still the closest thing Don had to a best friend.

Despite the fact the two were the same age and lived in the same apartment complex, it had taken Don and Barry a long time to become friends back when they were kids. They both had a lot to hide, but slowly they figured out each other’s situation. Don had no dad, just a mom who worked two jobs and drank in between shifts. Barry had a succession of “dads,” and a mom who believed that bad love was better than no love, even if she was telling Barry that through a split lip and a mouth full of cracked teeth.

To the outside eye, they had been as different as two boys could be. Don dressed neatly in the clothes he washed and ironed (and originally shoplifted) himself. He got good grades thanks to his natural intelligence (supplemented, when necessary, by cheating). He always had plans to go someplace far away from Southeast Portland.

Barry wore whatever clothes he found on the floor, and barely managed to pass each grade as they grew older. He had no plans past the next hour. He had a sweet spirit, though, and an easy-going attitude. And he could work hard when he wanted to.

The most striking thing about Don was his lack of body hair. Around the age of thirteen he had noticed a bald spot on the back of his head about the size of a quarter. Over the next six months, it just kept growing, and his hair got thinner and thinner and finally vanished altogether. The hair on his arms slowly disappeared, as did the hairs on his legs. Even his pubes. Even the hairs in his nose. In the end, he was as slick as a seal. After some puzzling, the school nurse diagnosed alopecia areata. In a medical dictionary in the library, Don found out that he wasn’t contagious and nothing worse was going to happen to him. Still, he beat up the first kid who dared tease him about it. And he spent as little time in the locker room as he could.

Even before he turned into the hairless wonder, as he sometimes thought of himself, Don had already begun to feel a certain distance from other people. Part of him was always separate from whatever was going on, looking on and making comments. The alopecia only exaggerated this feeling. He watched as people stared at him, sometimes openly, sometimes trying to be subtle. He could and did wear a hat most of the time, but without eyebrows, his face looked perpetually displeased. He tried using an eyebrow pencil of his mother’s, but the results just looked strikingly weird. When he was thirty, he heard about a tattoo artist who had a sideline, tattooing eyebrows on people with alopecia. He endured the pain without a murmur. Up close, he still caught people eyeing his brows, but from a few feet away it wasn’t noticeable.

Before he lost his hair, Don had been friends with Barry and a few other kids. Afterwards, only Barry saw past his face as smooth as an egg. That had been true for a long time, until he met Rachel. Ultimately, though, even she had left him.

Although Don was seven weeks younger, Barry had always looked up to him as if he were a big brother. And as they got older, Don did get big - bigger than the other boys his age, both in height and in the way he filled out with slabs of muscle. Twice he even made it clear to Barry’s latest “dad” that neither Barry nor his mother were to turn up with any more bruises. The first guy was scared by this strange bald kid who was supposedly fourteen, but looked and acted like he was forty, and who had such a calm, methodical way of talking that every word was freighted with quiet menace.

The second guy wasn’t as smart. Not one week after Don had delivered his message, Barry showed up at school sporting a new black eye. That had been the last anyone saw of that particular “dad.” Barry never even asked Don what had happened to the guy. He didn’t want to know. He was just happy that he was finally being left alone.

Don had planned on going to college, and then becoming a lawyer, making lots of money in a genteel way. But his plans took a left turn when he was sixteen and was caught cheating by a teacher on a math test. The teacher offered to forget about everything – just as long as Don consented to a blowjob. A hot anger welled up in Don, breaking through the calculated approach he took to most things. Plastic surgery was able to restore most of the teacher’s face, but in the meantime Don was arrested, expelled and sentenced to sixteen months at MacClaren, Oregon’s detention facility for juvenile offenders. Knowing it was hopeless, Don let the teacher’s version of events stand, barely speaking during sentencing except to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.”

After his release, Don had started rebuilding his life. He had gotten his GED at MacClaren, but he knew that his old dreams were just that. No college would want him now. But he still intended to get rich, to get away from his mother’s drunken rantings and the frequent shootings and knifings in their part of town. So he looked around for other ways to make money. The best way, he figured, was to offer a service to people who were more than happy to pay for it.

And in Don’s neighborhood, that meant drugs. First he worked on the corner, but then he moved up, taking the job Jamie would twenty years later. Once a month, Don drove the circuit, starting with a couple of kilos of cocaine and a few other drugs and ending up with stacks of money. It paid well, because any one who took the fall with that amount of coke was going to end up doing hard time. Don didn’t let anyone else’s drugs go up his nose or anyone else’s money stick in his pocket. When he wasn’t running drugs, Don offered his services running errands, mostly following girlfriends to make sure they were staying faithful, and co-workers to make sure they weren’t skimming. And he took the money he made and looked for an investment, something that provided a service that others needed. Something legit.

In the early 1980s, Don opened a copy center near the Portland State campus. He started small, with two copiers in a room not much bigger than a walk-in closet, but he kept it open twenty-four hours a day. Soon he had a lot of money coming in, but it seemed to go right back out again. The machines were always breaking down, or he would spend money to train someone who quit two weeks later. On paper it looked like Don should be making quite a bit of money, but it never quite worked out that way.

On paper. The thought gave Don an idea, and he took that idea to his bosses. He knew that one of big problems with selling drugs was it was a cash-intensive business, generating vast amounts of payments in the form of bills in small denominations. But you couldn’t just go and deposit the money in the bank, or buy a new car with cash, not without triggering an investigation. The government was very interested in asking questions about people who had a lot of unexplained cash.

Don’s copy business offered a way to change that money into something that looked, at least from the outside, above of covers for the laundered money. Fake invoices. Loan repayments on money he had never borrowed. And on paper, at least, Don always had a lot of customers who paid in cash.

Over time, Don added more businesses that were also good places to hide cash. He caught the West Coast wave for coffee early, opening a Java Jiant next to the university. Outside the store, he put a campy statue that looked something like the Jolly Green Giant dipped in brown paint. He wholesaled coffee beans, too, to two dozen restaurants in town. The coffee business offered a carefully calculated side benefit. Everyone knew that coffee beans were grown south of the border. So if Don had occasional dealings with dark-skinned businessmen with soft Spanish accents, well, that was to be expected.

Three years ago, Don had opened up a couple of high-end steak restaurants, one downtown for the businessmen, one in Beaverton for the folks who didn’t want to venture out of the ‘burbs for their celebrations. A steak sitting on a plate, naked except for a piece of parsley, cost thirty-nine dollars. And that was for one of the less expensive cuts. You wanted the creamed spinach, you wanted a baked potato, you wanted a glass of red, you wanted the flan for desert - pretty soon you were talking $100 a person. Easy. And with the way the economy had been going for the past ten years, people were willing to pay that. Even now, with the stock market down, there were still plenty of people with cash and the desire to spend it.

And as his various businesses grew and prospered (both on paper and in reality, although there was a difference) Don built a tangle of legal and illegal enterprises that intersected in ways only he knew. To create even more confusion, he added a complex web of transfers, both domestic and international, that made tracing the original source of funds virtually impossible. The money got changed around eight ways to Sunday, and came out smelling as sweet and innocent as a chocolate chip cookie.

The whole time, Barry was like a little fish swimming in Don’s wake. Back when Don was working his way up, he used to bring Barry along on the circuit where drugs were exchanged for money and money for drugs. After being jumped one too many times, Don had wanted someone who could watch his back. It had been strictly against the rules – just like Jamie’s bringing this girl with a shaved head along for the ride had been strictly against the rules.

Then Barry started helping Don out with little favors. At first, he just got Don whatever was needed. License plates to replace some on a stolen car. Hookers who could serve as human party favors, but who weren’t all used up and clapped out. Given a liter bottle of Diet Coke, Barry could watch someone’s front door, happily, for hours. Don joked that Barry had a bladder the size of a five-gallon bucket. He was protective of his old friend, though. He tried not to let Barry know so much that he would be a danger to himself or others. And although the syndicate knew about Barry’s errand-running by now, Don kept him away from the dirtier work. Barry had never had to wash blood from his hands, because Don knew that would destroy his old friend.

About five years back, Don had been between managers at the original Java Jiant. In desperation, he turned to Barry. To the surprise of both men, Barry actually turned out to be pretty good at it. He got along well with the teenagers who worked the counters, and he could tell the difference between Arabica and Robusta beans with just a single whiff.

“How many days will we be gone? Barry asked now. He jittered from foot to foot, one of the occupational hazards of drinking espresso concoctions all day. The rain had come in the night before, and now it drizzled steadily. The two men ignored it like the native Portlanders they were.

“I don’t think any more than two. Can you get us a car?” Don was sure there were no listening devices in Barry’s office, but he was always careful. That was why they were outside. You didn’t survive and prosper for twenty years without being careful. He would never even ask how Barry had gotten the car, whether it was stolen, purchased or borrowed, or some combination of all three.

“No problemo. What kind?”

“Something boring, I’m afraid. Four-door dark-colored sedan, say about ten years old? I want something no one will look at twice.” The first step, Don had decided, was to check out Jamie’s car, or what was left of it. If it were a burnt-out heap, then maybe the money had turned to ashes inside of it. If it wasn’t, then the next step would be to find this girl with the buzz cut and the nose ring.

“You just took all the fun out of it,” Barry tried to pout but couldn’t hide his grin. When was the last time they had done anything together? Don couldn’t remember.