Guilty as Sin by Joseph Teller Read Free Book Online Page A

minding my own business. Says he’s been out a month and can’t catch a break. Can I help him out?”
    Jaywalker could only wince. He knew where this was going.
    â€œSo I reach into my pocket,” said Barnett, “fish out whatever I’ve got on me and offer it to him. I think it was maybe eighteen dollars, something like that.”
    Reminded Jaywalker of some of his fees.
    â€œâ€˜I don’t want no charity,’ Hightower tells me.
    â€œI ask him what he does want.
    â€œâ€˜You know,’ he says. ‘I been outa action all this time, I don’ know who’s doin’ what, who to see, who to go to.’
    â€œI ask him, ‘For what?’
    â€œâ€˜To get hooked up,’ he tells me. ‘I need to get back in the business.’ The bidness, he called it. Which is right when I tell him he’s got the wrong guy. I give him the eighteen dollars or whatever it was. I wish him luck. I stand up and I go inside. Lock the door behind me.”
    Oh, thought Jaywalker, what a wonderful ending to the story that would have been. An act of charity toward an old friend, a debt repaid. But of course it wasn’t the end of the story. Jaywalker knew that every bit as well as Barnett did. Had it been the end of the story, the two of them wouldn’t be sitting where they were today, talking through the bars.
    No, Clarence Hightower would keep coming back. He’d come back five times, six times, each time with a slightly different story. Only they all had the same ending. “He needed to find a connection,” Barnett explained. “He understood that I was finished with that stuff, and he saidhe was okay with that. But he also knew that I knew who was still around, who was still doing.”
    Doing.
    â€œHe kept saying that all he wanted was for me to hook him up, to put him together with someone who was in action. He had this customer, he said, a real live one who was looking to buy weight. Had all sorts of cash money. All I’d have to do was find somebody to cut him into. Once I’d done that, I could walk away from it. Keep a piece of the pie if I wanted to, turn it down if I didn’t.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œAnd I kept saying no.”
    â€œUntil…” said Jaywalker.
    â€œUntil the seventh time, when he started crying like a baby and threatening to kill himself and all that. Until he played his hole card, and reminded me how he’d saved my life when no one else was going to. And telling me that because of that I owed him now. And you know what?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHe was right,” said Barnett. “He had saved my life, and I did owe him. When it came right down to it, that was the truth. And it was a truth that no matter how hard I tried to look away from it, it kept looking me in the face.”
    â€œSo…?”
    â€œSo I said okay. The next day I made a few phone calls and found out who was doing what. It wasn’t hard. And I paid off the favor, just like he asked. Just like he told me I owed him.”
    They talked for another forty-five minutes about what had followed. Jaywalker jotted down some details on a yellow pad. But he hardly needed to. He knew the story. He’d known it before he’d become a lawyer ten years earlier. He’d known it from his undercover days as a DEAagent. Unbeknownst to both Clarence Hightower and Alonzo Barnett, the customer—the “real live one” with all sorts of cash money, the one looking to buy weight—was the Man. And the story wouldn’t end until both men had been arrested, Hightower for possession and Barnett for sale.
    As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
    Â 
    Replaying the story in his mind that night, Jaywalker was struck by the almost tragic aspect of it. Here was a guy who’d done everything right. Given up drugs, found a job and a place of his own, kept his nose clean, even reestablished contact with his daughters. And