“How is it?” I ask. “In here?”
He shrugs as if to say: look around and take a wild fucking guess. I sense an aggression that I don’t hold against him. He doesn’t get why I’m here, or why I’ve brought the face-tattooed delinquent by my side, as if I’m the leader of a Scared Straight program and Donnell’s a human warning to naïve white girls considering careers as black American men.
“I’m here to help,” I say, and he remains silent, brushes nonexistent lint from the breast of his jumpsuit. I tell him about Broder’s arrival last night, relay the subsequent chain of events: Broder’s confession to deaf ears, finding the gun in the toilet, our frustrating meeting with Ryan and Quinn. I highlight positive aspects, like the promise of the coming ballistics report. I look to Rachel for support but her cheeks have turned an even darker green.
“Jesus,” Donnell says. “So this guy’s in Canada. And you didn’t think to alert, say, border patrol?”
“I thought the best thing to do was get here quickly with the gun.”
“That’s what you thought?” Donnell says.
It occurs to me that this morning, in my panic and haste, I may have made some wrong decisions in regard to procedure. And by wrong, I mean selfish. I didn’t want the cops taking prints from the toilet lid and turning my parents’ house upside down. I didn’t want to wait hours for the sketch artist to arrive. I wanted the momentum of my Porsche on the highway. I wanted Em in my ears, Wendy in my zip code, Ricky’s headstone in my rearview. Now Broder’s gone, and Donnell may be screwed until he turns up again. Detective Quinn said he found a partial fingerprint on the SD bracelet retrieved from Donnell’s apartment. If Quinn planted the print on the bracelet, then who’s to say he won’t plant one on the gun?
It all feels surreal: this bizarre causal chain, this week of my life. It’s a nightmare from which I’ve yet to wake, until of course I must accept that I’m already awake. Maybe all causal chains feel surreal to guys like me—derivatives traders, keepers of the status quo—because reality’s a thing we’ve been conditioned to un-see until it’s too late. And then we wake into the ugliness, and we become woke; we wake into our own unbearable wokeness. And we try—half-heartedly and much too late—to fix the messes we’ve made. Only at easing our guilt do we succeed.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” says Rachel. “If Broder stole the bracelet, then pawned it for bus fare, then how did the cops get it and plant it in the first place?”
“Maybe it’s not the same bracelet,” I say.
“Of course it’s not the same bracelet,” says Donnell.
In my mind, police corruption still belongs in the fictional realm, but I’m coming around. I alter my earlier definition of privilege to include the expectation of integrity in dealings with the law.
“We can’t dwell on mistakes,” I say, meaning mine. “We need a plan.”
“What I need is a lawyer,” says Donnell.
“Right,” I say. “A lawyer.”
“Because the one I have is useless.”
“Okay. Then we’ll get you a lawyer.”
He leans across the table.
“And you’re gonna pay for it?”
“Pay for it, right. Huh.”
Donnell crosses his arms.
“No, no,” I say. “I mean sure, I’m happy to pay. The thing is that my finances . . .”
“I see,” says Donnell.
“But we’ll figure it out. I can sell, well—I have assets. I have sneakers.”
“You have sneakers?” he says. “Because lawyers get paid in sneakers.”
Rachel suddenly sprints for the trash. I worry the guardbot will mistake her for an inmate and light up her brain stem with five hundred volts. But she reaches the garbage can safely. Inmates and visitors watch. Her theatrical purge cuts the tension in the room. People laugh and clap. The guardbot wheels to the vending machine. It puts a claw in a keyhole and buys Rachel a bottled water out of the kindness of its humanely programmed heart.
“Look, Michael,” says Donnell. “I appreciate your willingness to help. And I’m glad to know this guy’s out there, and that we know who he is. But what I need right now is money. I’m going broke in here, missing shifts at work, bills piling up. And the kind of legal team I need won’t be cheap. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I’m close enough to see the spreading dampness on the armpits of his jumpsuit, his white-knuckle grip against its loose cotton sleeves.
“It should have been me,” I say. “In here. It should have been me in here instead of you.”
“It shouldn’t be either of us. It should be the guy who’s actually guilty.”
“I’m the constant at the center of the map board, the obvious choice to play the unsuspecting mark. If this were a movie, I’d be the lead. You’d be, I don’t know, the cool best friend.”
“Best friend, huh?”
“Good friend?” I try.
Donnell says, “This is the problem with you finance guys. You think you’re the star of the movie. You always think you’re the star.”
We drive back to the city under smog-painted sky. It’s a balmy evening, a few weeks from Christmas, and the townhouses twinkle once we’re off the highway, and trees are for sale outside the bodegas. Hundreds of drones converge on Columbus Circle, empty of product, returning to base to meet the clear-skies curfew.
Rachel double-parks outside Wendy’s dad’s. She keeps the car running and I head inside.
“Hello,” someone says, when I unlock the door. I don’t recognize the voice, and can barely hear
