Don Winslow - A Long Walk Up the Waterslide

“It has been… uh… ten years… since my last confession,” Chuck said, promising himself that he would never, ever do another undercover job as long as he lived. Why didn’t the priest say something? “Uh… it’s been so long because… I’ve been in a coma.”

The priest mumbled something incomprehensible.

Chuck attached the suction cup to the underside of a piece of molding, then pressed it to make sure it stuck.

He thought he heard the priest say something about sin.

“I… I’m in love… with a woman who’s not my wife,” Chuck confessed, because he felt he had to say something.

Then it all came tumbling out, how he had come to work for the woman and her husband, how the husband cheated on her, how he had come to see a softer side of her, how…

The priest kept trying to interrupt with some mumbo jumbo, but Charles kept spewing guilt about how he had constant carnal images of the woman that he couldn’t suppress and how he wished that her husband would die and his own wife would run off with a Gentile and then he could persuade the woman to convert and stuff, until he ran out of breath and the priest said something that sounded like “Hentile?”

Charles felt better as he went to the old truck parked around the corner.

“Does it work?” he asked Culver.

Culver took off his headset and asked, “You’ve got a boner for Candy Landis?”

Evidently it works, Chuck thought.

Joey Foglio went back to the car with a shiny new soul and a fresh resolve to take more advantage of Jack Landis’s crumbling empire. He had ridden Jack about as far as he could. It was time to change horses.

“Did you arrange a clean phone?” he asked Harold.

“Joey, don’t you think-” Harold started.

“No, I don’t think,” Joey said without a trace of irony. “Carmine’s been acting like a banker so long, he thinks he is one. That’s the crucial difference between him and me. I know who I am. I’m a criminal. I commit crimes.”

The crucial difference, Harold thought, is that Carmine has several hundred soldiers to do his bidding and you have several.

“Carmine isn’t going to like you messing around in the middle of a deal,” Harold said.

“He’s the one who’s messing,” Joey said.

“You’ll still make money.”

“I don’t want to make money,” Joey answered. “If I wanted to make money, I’d sell insurance. I want to take money. That’s who I am. It’s the me of me.”

Harold took him to a phone booth on Flores Street and handed him the phone number in Rhode Island.

“What is this phone?” Joey asked.

“Another phone booth.”

“Clean?”

“Guy promises it is,” Harold assured him, aware of Joey’s paranoia about wiretaps.

The guy answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” Joey said.

“Hello,” Hathaway answered. “Why am I talking to you?”

“Because you like to make money,” Joey answered. “Because you’re tired of working like a donkey and giving the money to Marc Merolla.”

He outlined his proposal to Hathaway.

Hathaway was definitely interested when he heard the profit margins. Joey let him drool over the potential riches for a minute before he said, “There’s a problem, though.”

“What’s that?”

“That broad that says she was raped?” Joey said. “I was paying her to shag Jack.”

There was a long silence, so long that Joey was afraid he had blown the deal.

“Jesus,” Hathaway said. “You, too?”

Are you really afraid of these people?” Karen demanded as Neal packed.

“Do you mean really in the sense of actually, or really in the sense of very?” Neal asked.

Karen looked annoyed.

“First one, then the other,” she said.

“Okay. I am actually very afraid of these people,” he answered. “Really.”

She sat down on the bed.

“I thought they only killed their own,” she said.

“Did you tell that to the guy in the ski mask?” he asked.

“No,” she answered. “I hit him with a bat.”

He turned from his packing.

“You’re saying we should-”

Polly came into the room.

“You guys should see this,” she said.

“What?” Neal asked.

“Jack!”

They followed her back into her room, where Candy sat transfixed, watching Jack standing all by himself, center stage on their set.

“What’s up?” Neal asked.

Candy shook her head.

Jack Landis stood stock-still, looked at the hushed audience, then said, “You’re probably wondering where Candy is.”

The audience assented.

“So am I,” Jack said.

There was some nervous laughter in the crowd.

“Earlier today,” Jack continued, “I stood in the shadow of the Alamo and thought about those brave men who stood up for what they believed-and died for it.

“Well, I’d rather die than tell you what I have to tell you, but that would be the coward’s way out, and I guess I wouldn’t want to go out a coward. The ghosts of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett would haunt me.”

“What’s he doing?” Karen asked.

“They’re playing the card,” Neal said.

“What?”

“Watch.”

Jack looked directly into the camera. “What I have to stand up and say is that I did have an affair with Polly Paget.”

The audience gasped.

“Holy shit,” Karen said.

“Miss Paget seduced me in my office in New York…”

“Lying sack of crud,” Polly said.

“… and I regret to say that I fell to temptation. The affair was short-lived, but it happened, and I am deeply, deeply sorry.”

“He’s good,” Neal said.

“He sold used cars in Beaumont,” Candy said.

The camera zoomed in for a tighter close-up as Jack’s eyes brimmed with tears. His voice broke as he blurted, “I have betrayed you. I have betrayed you. I have betrayed my family… my audience… and my God…”

He broke down, dropped his head into his hands, and sobbed. His shoulders heaved up and down as members of the audience wept and cried, “No!” A woman in the front row fainted and had to be carried out.

The camera eased back to a head-and-shoulders shot as Jack struggled to compose himself, then continued. “I have decided to take a leave of absence from my duties at FCN.”

More shouts of “No!”

Jack continued, “I want to use that time to seek spiritual counseling and take a long hard look to find out just who is this man named Jackson Hood Landis.”

He bowed his head.

When he lifted it, he tightened his jaw, aimed his focus an inch higher, and said, “One thing I know about Jack Landis, though…

“ ‘He’s not a rapist,’ ” Neal murmured.

“He’s not a rapist,” Jack said. “That charge is utterly, completely, and absolutely false. I’m sorry to say that Miss Paget is a far sicker individual than I ever thought, and when I told her that I was going to end our relationship, she made up this horrible story for revenge. She told me that’s what she was going to do, and that’s what she did.”

“In your dreams,” Polly growled.

The camera tightened in on Jack’s tear-streaked face.

“One word more,” he said, “to my beloved wife, Candice.”

The tears poured down his face and little snot bubbles came out of his nose as he stared into the camera and choked out, “Candy darling, I know I’ve hurt you… but I love you… and if… you could ever find it in your heart… to forgive me…”

He broke into sobs, shook his head, and walked off the stage.

A stentorian voice announced, “And now, on FCN, ‘Flipper’!”

Jack Landis came off the stage.

A weeping apprentice handed him a towel and said, “That was beautiful, Mr. Landis. Deeply moving.”