It’s almost impossible to believe, but true: when nobody was looking, he fired up his nerve and pedaled right past the Walmart greeters into the parking lot, up the frontage road, and back to the halfway house where he now lived, tired of begging bus tokens off his parole officer. Nobody chased him. Nobody even noticed him. If the sight of a gleaming new bicycle had not waved itself like a red flag, proud and patriotic among the secondhand wheels his housemates owned, he might have pulled off this heist, olly olly oxen free.
If he were not a repeat offender, and if he did not appear again years later for forgery charges in another county, I might argue, before the assistant district attorney or the judge, that Derek Green was an innocent man deluded simply by the fantasy of never growing up, Peter Pan in a world of hard knocks. It’s actually really difficult to make enough money to support a child—“never mind three and counting,” Ryan would say.
How many times had Ryan yearned for the days of his own youth, nostalgic for endless bike rides and hours of trading baseball cards, when money was neither suspicious nor dirty but exciting and hot, burning a perfectly patchable hole in his jeans pocket? What wouldn’t any father give to relive the indiscretions of his adolescence, long since left behind in the backwind of parenthood? I knew Ryan well enough to know he would not turn around, but I didn’t know yet how much further, how many babies more, I could push him forward, running along behind, having wrenched free and ditched the safeguard of our training wheels.
CHAPTER 2:
Brown-Sugar Skies
Just as I was realizing how addicted I’d become to pregnancy and childbirth, Ryan was beginning to realize that drugs were the epicenter of his clients’ crimes. Rob McNally described himself as the quintessential junkie. When McNally was a little boy, his old lady, owned by Hells Angels, would ferry him to the nearest amusement park once a year, but no roller coaster compared to McNally’s first joyride when his mom “gave him wings.” She spiked his arm, and McNally, just fourteen years old, rose up, leaving their nest for brown-sugar skies. What did she say, as she pushed the plunger, heroin filling his veins? “Baby, it feels good” was a mantra she repeated daily. “Blood-red, skull-white” was a lullaby she sang.
When McNally was five, at the pediatrician’s office she finagled a prescription for Ritalin to personally abuse. When McNally was ten, she revealed a secret: What he assumed were Pixy Stix were actually straws drained of sugar and replenished with cocaine. He swallowed the granules and played video games, all jacked up. When he was thirteen, she mentored him in cooking up the family recipe for motor-oil meth. They manufactured it together, mother as master craftsman, son as apprentice, in the bathroom where gangsters pissed in the sink, and together they indulged.
But their mother-son bond was not all highs and hoopla. One time, McNally recalled, sadness like phlegm in his throat, he found his mother at the Hells Angels clubhouse strapped with jump ropes to a kitchen chair, beat up like an old shoe box, begging to die. Thank God for a needle chamber filled with sweet dreams, which might just as easily as death alleviate Mama McNally’s problems and her son’s too. As every parent knows, pleasure is the opposite of pain.
“What’s the latest on McNally?” I asked Ryan. I’d met Rob McNally, and he’d told me his story, appearing grateful when I listened.
“Fuck, I don’t know,” he said. “The guy’s probably dead.” Ryan had developed a habit of cursing at home, all manner of four-letter words, including D-E-A-D. One of our small children was attempting to smuggle chocolate chips from the pantry and piped in, “Who’s probably dead?”
“Mind your own business,” Ryan snapped.
Since he had begun his criminal-defense practice, it always seemed clients were dying—a fatal car accident, complications from alcohol and obesity, a couple of drug overdoses. Winnebago County had become a labyrinth of drugs. Wisconsin law enforcement blamed major thoroughfares between Chicago, the central hub for heroin in the Midwest, and northeast Wisconsin. Smack traveled one way from Chi-Town to the Fox Valley in three hours. In Winnebago County alone, dozens of heroin overdoses per year resulted in death, and statewide, users were dying from drug overdoses by the hundreds. Paramedics drained dosage units of Narcan, the antidote to heroin overdose, by the thousands. Arrests for heroin-related offenses spiked more than 50 percent between 2010 and 2012, and an abundance of those users became Ryan’s clients. His job was to allay charges against his habitués while maintaining face with district attorneys, which meant, from time to time, convincing people like Rob McNally and another woman named Darlene Eaves to become confidential informants, or CIs, in an effort to keep them in their self-described normal lives as Wisconsin citizens.
Unlike McNally, Darlene Eaves, also facing felony charges for possession with intent to deliver heroin, appeared on the road to recovery. She would admit, “I shot heroin,” always in the past tense, whereas McNally described the ritual as ongoing. Eaves’s safest option, for the sanctity of her health, was to help build a conspiracy against three known drug kingpins by recreating a paper trail of purchases and submitting it to Lake Winnebago Area Metropolitan Enforcement Group (MEG) officers. Eaves worked with drug agents from within the refuge of Ryan’s office. Rob McNally, however, would need to complete so-called fieldwork. Facing six years in prison for three counts of delivery of cocaine and two counts of delivery of heroin, McNally was assigned to hit the streets, seedy back-alley apartments, and bars like Tony’s Deluxe where haggard patrons stood smoking over their graves.
“We could drop him into any social circle in the valley, and he would produce a dealer
