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up to the roof and throw me off, and who would blame him? Maybe he'd feel sorry for it afterward, add my death to his list of regrets, but that wouldn't do me much good.
     
     
I made a few calls on my cell phone while the cab was stuck in traffic. They had a vacancy at the Halloran House on Lexington, so that's where I wound up. That's not the name of the hotel anymore, but Halloran House sounds much cooler than the Sheraton or whatever the hell it is now, so that's how I always think of it. That must be what it's like to get old, you keep seeing things the way they used to be instead of how they are now.
     
     
I sat in my hotel room eating room service and watching television while I tried to figure out what to do. The movie The Fugitive was on. Tommy Lee Jones knew that Harrison Ford was going to be running downhill, knew how fast he could run and how far. I had to think about that. My first impulse had been to head for Miami—Miami is like Brooklyn with palm trees, and there are a lot of guys there that look like me, I could fit right in. If someone was looking for me, though, if they knew me and wanted me bad enough, Miami would be a good place to start. I liked the place and had been there a few times. That's how they get you. They watch how you move, they keep track of what you've done before, assuming that's something like what you'll do next time. So what would Tommy Lee Jones expect from me? He'd expect me to head south in someone else's car.
     
     
It took me a few days to put it together. I went back out to Jersey, there's one place about ten minutes from the George Washington Bridge, has to be the center of the used-car universe. There's even a place that specializes in exotics, Maserati, Lotus, Vette, Ferrari. I was sorely tempted, I got the money, right? But I wound up buying a Ford minivan from the guy across the street. It's the last thing anyone would ever expect me to drive, but I'm running away from Tommy Lee, right, and I'm going uphill. I paid the guy cash, told him what I wanted, and he was more than happy to take care of the whole transaction, tags, insurance, and all.
     
     
    * * *
The next day I had an appointment to see a guy named Michael Timothy Buchanan. Dude is supposed to be a lawyer, that's what it says on his office door. You wouldn't want him making out a will for you, though, or closing a real estate deal, or much of anything else. He was a crook, and a good one. The cops have never bagged him. I don't think he's ever even shown up on their radar screen. I had dealt with the guy twice before, and both times I worried if this deal was gonna be the one that put us all away. What Buchanan did was solve problems. You take a guy like me, my problem is that I got cash, and I need to get it into the system. Cash is just one kind of money, but it can be inconvenient. The other kind of money is the kind that doesn't really exist except for a row of numbers on a piece of paper, a check or a statement of some kind. Changing cash to the other kind of money is a common problem. Uncle Sam keeps a sharp eye out for guys trying to do that. They watch banks and casinos and brokerage houses, and if you start moving large amounts of cash through a place like that you will be visited by a couple of guys who will ask you a lot of questions about where you got it. I worked for it, motherfucker, but any time Uncle Sam's minions catch you with a fat wad of green they automatically assume you got it from some nefarious activity, and they take it. You want it back, you got to demonstrate to their satisfaction that you earned it in some socially acceptable fashion. How is that fair?
     
     
What Buchanan does is broker a deal with two other crooks who have different problems. You take a guy that owns a used-car lot or a candy store, say it's worth a half a million bucks, and the guy is looking to sell. He sells it straight up, the IRS is gonna want about a hundred and fifty grand from him in taxes after the deal