The Book of Lies

“On a guy we found on a homeless call,” I point out.

“Maybe they were donated. We get designer clothes all the time.”

I look at the bottom of the shoes. The leather soles barely have a scuff on them. Brand new. Confused, I once again start to stand up, then quickly sit back down.

When I was little and we had company coming over, my father would buy cheap Scotch at the neighborhood liquor store and pour it into a Johnnie Walker Black Label bottle. He did the same when he first started painting signs at restaurants, pouring discount remainder paint into the Benjamin Moore cans he’d have me fish from the hardware store’s trash. My mother used to tease him, calling it his little CIA trick. He never laughed at the joke. For him, appearances mattered.

“Did he say anything in the ambulance?” Roosevelt asks, eyeing the other people in the waiting area. A teenager on crutches stares our way.

“Not much,” I say, lowering my voice. “He told the medics he was coming out of that dump bar on Third Street when some Hispanic kid with big ears pulled a gun and asked for his wallet. When he refused, the kid took the wallet, pulled the trigger, shoved him into a red Jeep Cherokee, and dumped him in the park where we found him.”

“Okay, so that’s a story. He’s not homeless. He just got robbed.”

I shake my head, still staring at the shirt’s snazzy black label. “People with three-hundred-dollar shirts and four-hundred-dollar shoes don’t go into low-life bars on Third.”

“What’re you talking about? This is Florida. We got stupid rich people everywhere. Besides, even if he’s out of place, doesn’t mean he’s out to—” Roosevelt cuts himself off, watching me carefully. “Oh, you think this is like Miss Deirdre, don’t you? No, no, boy. This is not Miss Deirdre.”

I’ve known Roosevelt for nearly six years. I first met him back when I was an ICE agent (which is just the cooler-sounding acronym for the U.S. government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement). I guarded the ports, stopped terrorist and drug shipments from coming in, and, at least during my first two years, confiscated shipments of fake Sony TVs and counterfeit Levi’s jeans. Until I opened myself up, helped someone I shouldn’t have, and in one horrible moment got fired from my job and plummeted through the second trapdoor in my life.

“Cal, what happened with Miss Deirdre—”

“Can we please go back to my father’s shoes?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing. I know you, Cal. And I know it’s easier to drive around with a van full of strangers where there’s no risk of any emotional investment, but just because you got burned once by letting your guard down doesn’t mean it’ll be the same here. Not everyone you care about will eventually screw you.”

Back during my leap from grace, every newspaper reporter, community leader, and government colleague took me out of their Rolodex. Roosevelt, when he heard the story, invited me in. For that alone, I love him like a brother. And while he knows what it’s like to be excommunicated from your kingdom, unlike Roosevelt, I’m no longer waiting for someone to bring me back inside.

Within a minute, I’ve combed through my dad’s shirt and pants pockets. All it gives me is some spare change and a few tabs of nicotine gum. No secrets. Nothing revealing. That is, until I toss the shirt and pants into the plastic chair on my left and get my first good look inside his other shoe. I notice a tiny yellow triangle peeking out from inside. It’s no bigger than the corner of a stamp, but the way it’s tucked in there catches my eye, as if it’s hidden under the leather.

I yank the insole. It comes right out, revealing what’s tucked underneath—

“What? Is it bad?” Roosevelt asks as I pull out a folded-up yellow sheet of paper. As I go to unfold it, a small laminated card drops and clicks against the floor. He hid this here instead of in his missing wallet. It’s got a photo of my dad on it. A commercial driver’s license.

“Says here he’s a truck driver—double and triple trailers, plus hazardous materials,” I say, reading from the back of the license.

Clumsily, rushing, I unfold the yellow sheet. At first, it looks like an invoice, but when I spot the familiar letterhead up top— Aw, crap.

He’s lucky they took away my gun.

7

I don’t get it. He’s bringing in a shipment?”

“Not just a shipment. A four-ton metal container—y’know, like those ones you see on the backs of trucks.”

“And that’s bad because . . . ?”

“Have you read this?” I say to Roosevelt, waving the yellow sheet of paper that—

Roosevelt grabs my wrist and shoots me a look, which is when I notice that half the emergency waiting room is staring our way. A cop in the corner, the teenager on crutches . . . and a creepy older man with a moon chin, who’s holding his arm like it’s broken but showing no signs of pain.

Roosevelt quickly stands up, and I follow him outside, under the overhang of the emergency room’s main entrance. The sky’s still black, and the December wind whips under the overhang, sending the yellow sheet fluttering back and forth in my hand like a dragonfly’s wings.

“We call them hold notices,” I explain, reading from the first paragraph. “ ‘. . . wish to inform you that your shipment may experience a short delay. This doesn’t indicate there are any problems with your shipment . . .’ ”

“Doesn’t sound so bad—they’re just saying it’s delayed.”

“That’s only because if they say the word hold, all the drug dealers will run away. That’s also why they say there are no problems.”

“But there are problems?”

“Look at the letterhead on top—U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

“That’s where you used to work, right?”

“Roosevelt, I’m trying hard to not be paranoid. I really am. But now my long-lost father just happens to be bleeding in the one park that just happens to be on the homeless route of his long abandoned son, who just happens to’ve worked at the one place that just happens to be holding on to the one package that he just happens to be trying to pick up? Forget the designer shoes—that’s a helluva lotta happenstance, with an extra-large order of coincidence.”

“I don’t know. Separated all those years, then bringing you together—sometimes the cliches get it right: The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“Not for me. And not with my—”

“Cal?” a deep voice calls out behind me as the emergency room’s glass doors slide open.

I turn around just as Dr. Paulo Pollack joins us outside. Like most doctors, he’s got the God swagger. I just happen to know this one, which made it easier to call him from the ambulance.

“How’s he doing, Paulo?” I ask.

“He’s fine. Luckily, the bullet didn’t hit anything organwise. Looks like it went in on an angle and got trapped under the skin, right above his liver. In this case, it’s good he had a little bit of chub on him.”

“But you got the bullet out?”

Two years ago, Roosevelt and I picked up a homeless girl who had done so much cocaine, the cartilage between her nostrils deteriorated, and the bridge of her nose collapsed. The girl was Dr. Paulo Pollack’s seventeen-year-old niece. From then on, he’s waited to return the favor.

“One cleaned-off slug at your service,” Paulo says, handing me a small plastic bag with an old copper- jacketed bullet. “You know the rules, Cal—it’s your dad’s property, but if the cops come asking . . .”

“Send ’em my way,” I say, squinting hard at the contents of the bag. The single bullet is squatty, with shallow grooves that twist left along the bottom half. I don’t recognize the make and model, but it’s definitely got a unique shape. Won’t be hard to find out.

“When he came in, I could touch his stomach and feel the bullet right under his skin,” Paulo points out. “But