Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

“Yeah. I’m just tired. Haven’t been sleeping much.” Or at all-

Ike checks his watch. “Shit, I gotta go.” Ike stands wearily. “I’ll say this about your new life, Matt. You’re the only person I know who has anything to talk about right now other than budget deficits and layoffs and the death of newspapers.”

Ike nods at one of the stripper-baristas on his way out; she makes his day by continuing to ignore him. Then Ike sticks his head back in the kitchen, where Marty is making pies and sandwiches for the afternoon rush. I can hear Marty’s gravelly, light East Coast accent: “Hey paperboy. How’s the news business?”

“Insolvent,” Ike says, and with that, he’s gone.

I should get going too, but it feels like something is caught in my throat (why should it be so troubling, a simple yawn?). I swirl the last of my latte, drain it and-

“Mind if we join you?”

I look up. Two tall guys loom over the table, the bright ceiling lights behind them. I have to squint to see their faces. One guy is my age, balding, wearing glasses, a sports coat and open-collared shirt. The other guy is younger, with hard-parted brown hair, and a leather bomber jacket over a sweater.

“No, I was just leaving. You can have the table.” I start to gather my stuff.

“We don’t want to drive you away.” The younger guy smiles. “Why don’t you sit down with us for a minute, Matthew?”

Oh shit. Shit, shit. Cops. Anyone who ever worked as a newspaper reporter can spot cops. Especially when there are two of them; in pairs, they give off a vaguely threatening Kafkaesque civil servant vibe.

No, I tell myself, don’t be paranoid. They’re not cops. It’s this season of paranoia, that’s all. No reason to think they’re cops.

They sit and I get a better look at them. The older one-shiny head, half-smile and glasses, the toughest accountant at the firm-slides a card forward. The card has a shield on it.

Yep. Cops.

Shit shit shit.

They smile.

I clear my throat. Pick up the card. Greg Reese. Lieutenant. State Police. Coordinator, Regional Drug Task Force. Shit shit shit shit.

The younger guy is one of those people who smiles for no reason. He picks up the napkin I have set down. He shows it to the older one. “Ten pounds? Of what?”

“Concrete,” I say. My face flushes. “For my driveway.”

“Come on.” Lt. Reese frowns. “You’re paving a driveway with ten pounds of concrete?”

“Patching it.”

I nonchalantly reach over to my messenger bag, on the chair next to me, and lower it to my sweating, twitching feet. Inside that bag, next to the empty journal that I began not writing in when I lost my job, sits a Ziploc baggy with three ounces of what I hoped would be the first blocks of my pyramid of wealth, my recovery, my last hope, three ounces of recently harvested grade-A knock-off B.C. bud. I slowly scoot the bag away with my foot.

“Hey man, you okay?” asks the bald one, Lt. Reese. He must be the good cop.

“Fine.” Okay, think: (A) They would need a warrant or something, wouldn’t they, some kind of cause before they arrested me? (B) And how could they possibly know? (C) They can’t just search people (can they?). (D) Don’t panic. (E-I) Deny, deny, deny, deny, deny. (J) Yes, nothing to worry about. (K) Don’t give them permission to search your bag. (L) Don’t panic. (M) Stop panicking.

“I’m gonna get some coffee,” says the younger one, still with that inane cult smile. “You want some, Matthew?”

“No. Thanks.” My heart beats in my temples. “I gotta get going.”

Most suspects make their mistakes in the first five minutes. Be coy. Quiet. Reserved. Wait, did I just think of myself as a suspect? Shit, shit-

“You don’t remember me, do you?” Young Cop asks.

(N) Don’t talk unnecessarily; guilty people ramble.

I shake my head no.

“You work for the newspaper, right,” he says through those perfect white teeth. “I was media liaison officer for the SWAT Team. We busted this big meth house and burglary ring a couple years ago? You interviewed me. I think you must’ve been working a weekend shift or something. You wrote it up in the Sunday paper. My mom has the story framed on the wall, that’s why I remember. I can still see your byline. By Matthew Prior. Staff Writer.”

“Oh…yeah…sure,” I say, even though I don’t remember.

And a wave of relief washes over me. That’s why he called me Matthew. My old byline. (For a while, it was all the rage in my newsroom to add an initial, New York Times style, to the front of our bylines, I was R. Matthew Prior.) Of course! These guys aren’t here to arrest me-how could they possibly know what’s in the bag? They’re just cops in a donut shop, that’s all. They’ve just recognized me from my reporter days. I smile.

Still, this close call, this scare, has taught me a lesson. That’s what my yawn was-a gentle warning. So that’s it for me. I’m done selling pot. Too scary. I take a deep breath. Smile like the young cop. “So…how did I do on your story?”

“Oh, you did great,” the young cop says. “Got everything right. You still at the paper?”

I can feel myself relaxing. “No, I took a buyout.”

“I read about the layoffs there. It’s crazy, what’s happening to newspapers.” Young cop shakes his head again and turns to older cop. “Can you imagine a world without newspapers?”

“Happily,” says the older cop.

Then the young smiler turns back to me: “So what are you up to now-”

“Other than being a drug dealer,” interjects the older, bald one, Lt. Reese. His voice is flat, chilling. He is staring at me. No…he’s staring through me.

“Wha…what?”

Lt. Reese leans forward. “Maybe we should look in that backpack you keep pushing away with your feet… Matthew.”

I feel my jaw trembling.

“You sure you don’t want some coffee?” the younger guy asks.

And all I can think is: Huh, so they really do play good cop/ bad cop.

So young cop gets me coffee. And for the next few minutes, I try not to vomit as I listen to gruff old state cop, Lt. Reese, and grinning young city cop, whose name turns out to be Randy Martinez, explain that: (A) For the past four years, they’ve worked together on a federally funded drug task force charged with infiltrating and breaking up the pipeline of British Columbian marijuana that has flooded the West. (B) Near the end of this very successful four-year tour, they arrested a suspect who, hoping to avoid prosecution, became a CI-a confidential informant-and told them about a quaint little farming town where a local grow-op wunderkind and his skeezy lawyer friend managed to shave off a slice of the legitimate smoke market with their home-grown knockoffs. (C) And while it’s not in the task force’s direct mandate to break up baby grow-ops like this-they would normally just turn such information over to local police-this one was big enough to warrant their attention.

“So here we are, all ready to make a case against this farm,” says young Randy, “and who should come along?”

I’m pretty sure it’s me, but my voice is too weak to contribute to this conversation, and anyway, I’m still half-afraid I might throw up if I open my mouth. My hand twitches around the coffee that Randy has gotten me. I just shake my head.

“Some asshole takes a verbal shit all over our wiretap,” says old Lt. Reese, “bragging that he can sell weed to middle-class fat-fuck hypocrites like himself.”

I don’t remember bragging that, but I’m not really in the position to deny my middle-class fat-fuck hypocrisy.

The young cop reminds me of someone as he puts out his hands soothingly. “Here we’ve been working four years to bust a bunch of kids and…what? Now their parents want in?”