Way Past Legal by Norman Green Read Free Book Online

can I reach you? It will take me a few days to get set up with this guy, but I've got to get to you before the FDA goes public."
     
     
"You can leave a message on my voice mail." I gave him my cell number.
     
     
"Okay, great," he said. He was actually beginning to sound excited—usually, talking to him was like talking to an undertaker. I guess the guy loved making deals. "How do you want to handle the cash end of this? I'll need to have it when he gives me the word."
     
     
I pictured it, inside those two big green bags, sitting on a table inside that storeroom in Hackensack. "It's out in Jersey," I told him. "You tell me the day and the time, and I'll meet you there. You can do a count, and after that it's yours." And your problem, I thought.
     
     
"Oh, man," Buchanan said, "I hate New Jersey. Can't we do this in Manhattan?"
     
     
"I don't want to move it again. It's too dangerous. There's too many things that can go wrong. You want my opinion, leave it where it is. I'll give you the key and walk away, and then when it's time to pay your boy, you give him the key and do the same thing." Working with Buchanan depended on trusting him. Now I would find out if he would trust me not to go back and rip him off.
     
     
"All right," he said, after a moment. "We can do it that way. I'll call you when it's time. Meanwhile, don't forget to make those trades."
     
     
I hung up the phone and went back to where the van was parked. I'd left it in a spot on a concrete bridge spanning a good-sized, fast-moving stream. Nicky was glued to his window, watching the water cascading down the hillside and passing underneath on its way to the Kennebec River. It was a weird feeling, letting go of that business with Buchanan, getting my head back to me and Nicky, and Gardiner, Maine.
     
     
"Pretty, huh?"
     
     
He turned to me and nodded, but he didn't have words for it, and I guess I didn't, either.
     
     
    * * *
Back out on the road, Nicky and I made up a game to pass the time. It was called "bird." If Nicky spotted a bird and I either missed it or didn't know what it was, he got a point. If I knew the name of the bird, I got a point. The game got more complex as we went along. He didn't believe me when I identified a seagull as a great white bug-eating stinkbird, so he got ten points for that one, and I got penalized a hundred points for making up stories, not that it mattered, because Nicky was keeping score and his math system was idiosyncratic, to say the least. He got bored with that game after a while, so we made up another one, the "what color is the ugliest car" game. He could pick out ugly cars with no problem, but he really didn't know the colors too well. That game went on a lot longer than the bird game. His attention would flag from time to time, and he would start telling me about cartoon characters or the people in his building, but he always seemed to go back to the color game. Kid's five years old, right, already he's playing catch-up. See, that's the way it goes. You grow up the way I did, the way Nicky had been, you're on your own in a lot of ways, and of course no kid can make up for the lack of an interested adult. You wind up deficient, and that's not a value judgment, it's just how it is. You reach school age, one of the first things you learn is that you're not like the other kids. As a matter of fact, you're way behind, and you begin trying to compensate, you have to try to be cooler than anyone else, or tougher, or wilder, you start doing everything you can think of to catch yourself up to where you think you are supposed to be. I had been playing that game for as long as I could remember, and of course you can't win. In fact, it gets worse as you go along, because you lose track, the gap between what you were supposed to be and what you are becomes wider instead of narrower until you can no longer see any way across. You wind up with the conviction that you might somehow cross the finish line if you keep