Free We Live in Water by Jess Walter Page A

one-time donation, especially when the kids say they’re trying to raise four grand to go on the big Greenpeace ship that disrupts whaling. I’d printed up some tax-deduction receipts off the IRS website, and it was amazing how this convinced people we were legitimate. This was the cash side of the business: fives, tens, twenties, a few fifties. On the first day alone, Kevin got almost four hundred and Julie took in six-and-a-half. I chopped half, five-twenty-five for running the thing, and then sold Kevin some weed for the rest of his take. I tried to sell Julie some, too, but she shook her head. I need money more than I need weed, Danny .
    Of course, some shoppers got nervous or suspicious and didn’t want to give cash, or claimed they had none. This was fine. Like I told the kids: Make them want to give you the thing you’re taking. So the kids would reluctantly mention credit cards and checks, but say that Greenpeace discouraged it. And they said they’d need to see some ID. Nothing kills suspicion like suspicion.
    That was the real haul: credit card numbers and checks. I gave the kids twenty bucks for every card number but I got four hundred dollars each from a guy in Mexico; in two weeks I had given him seventeen. Give me your number and I can have four grand run on your card in Mexico before you’ve put your wallet away.
    Checks were even easier. In Seattle I had a dude did nothing but print up phony checks. He had an ID template that made temporary driver’s licenses and soon we were running phony checks all over the state.
    This was all a nice diversion from my real business, running bud down from BC. My territory was Washington and Oregon, from Bellingham all the way down I-5. I had seven stops: Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Portland, Eugene, Salem, and Ashland. Two trips a week, up and back, meant two nights a week in the midpoint, Portland. People have a certain picture in their mind of a bud smuggler—white-boy dreds, Marley T-shirt—but I’d be a moron to dress like that for fifteen hundred miles a week with six kilos in the trunk. So I wore a suit and kept my hair short, hard-parted on the side, like a fifties superhero. But the key was my car: I had to be the youngest man in America in a loaded gray 2006 Buick Lucerne. Cop could pull me over blazing a spliff, coke spoon up my nose, syringe hanging from my tied-off arm, dead hooker in the passenger seat and still just tell me to ease off the gas and have a nice day.
    No game works forever, of course, and I knew the Greenpeace thing could bust a hundred ways: kids steal from me, marks get suspicious, credit card companies get a whiff, real Greenpeacies get pissed. I put the half-life at three months. This was early November, so I figured I’d run the game at least through Christmas—when the banks and credit card companies are too busy to notice the extra draws—make a little side money and move on. In the meantime, I was careful. On my return run through Portland I always collected the Greenpeace material so the kids couldn’t freelance. I moved Julie and Kevin around and worked hard to stay away from real fundraisers.
    And once each, I had the kids strip in front of me, to make sure they weren’t holding any money back. This is drastic shit, but you do it right, it only has to happen once. It makes a real impact, kid standing in front of you freezing his ass off while you go through his clothes. You make him stand a long time too, while you ignore him. Then, at the end—so he knows how far you’ll go—you have him spread his ass cheeks, like a jail search. This is always necessary with drug dealers, but even if it weren’t I’d do it anyway, to remind these kids that they’re nothing. Meat.
    I’ll be the first to admit I was looking forward to this with little Julie. It wasn’t like she had a stripper’s body; she was small. I wasn’t into the waif thing. But there was something about the way she moved, like poured syrup, and I couldn’t