I quirk an eyebrow at him. “I don’t know how I grew up.”
A sharp exhale. “Shit, I’m sorry. You’re right. But my point is, I grew up poor as dirt. Skipping school, smoking pot, running in a gang. I watched guys OD, watched my best friend die in front of me because of drugs. So, those kinds of crime, they have victims, to me. I see the effects. They’re immediate. You sell coke, that means someone is hooked on coke. And if you’ve ever seen a real-deal cokehead, it’s not pretty. So I’d never do that shit. I’d never sell drugs. But flipping houses, that was good hard honest work. I was making decent money, and no one was shooting at me, I wasn’t gonna step on or drive over an IED, or have a rocket shot at my helo. But it wasn’t, like, lucrative. I was making good money, but it all went back into the next flip. So when I made that big sale and was actually flush with real cash, I wanted out. I had that tip on a parts facility, and I smelled money, you know? There’s always money in technology. Always. You just have to suss it out and figure out how to sell it. Well, I went into the deal with Caleb skeptical, but at first it seemed legit. And it was big money. The idea of a big payout, like two or three commas and a lot of zeroes in your account? For a hood rat and ex-grunt like me, that was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. And he worked me into things gradually, kind of like how you cook frogs, you know? Start ’em out in the water, keep it warm, and gradually turn up the heat until they’re cooked, and they never even realize it. Caleb did that with me. Hooked me in, bit by bit.”
“How well did you actually know him?” I ask.
A shrug. “Not well. He was always a mysterious sort of cat. You rarely saw him in person, usually just talked to him on the phone, or got an e-mail from him. So did I know him, personally? No. I met him maybe three times, and each of those times was for maybe twenty minutes, max. He was just . . . cool and aloof.” He pauses, takes a breath, and continues. “So that’s how I got involved in a crooked business, and went to jail for it.”
“And you blame Caleb for that.”
He bobbles his head. “Yes and no. I knew what I was doing was wrong after a certain point, but by then I was making so much money that I couldn’t make myself back out. Once you’re clearing a million here, a million there, it’s hard to stop. So in that sense, no, I don’t blame Caleb. I can’t. It was all me. But I do blame him for setting me up, letting me and the other twelve people who went to jail take the fall for him. But then again, we were the dumbasses who let ourselves be taken, so can we blame anyone but ourselves for that, in the end?”
“I see your point. It’s a very mature way to look at it, I would say.”
A snort of laughter. “I had five years to think about it. At first, yeah, obviously I placed all the blame squarely on Caleb’s shoulders. I spent hours just dreaming up ways I’d get even with him when I got out. But as time went on and I started to really think about it, I came to the conclusions I just shared with you. Yeah, he’s culpable, and I do hold him accountable for me doing jail time. But the real blame falls on my shoulders. Both for doing dirty business and for being an idiot about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pissed off at him, and I was even more so when I first got out. I went looking for him, planning on exacting some kind of revenge, I guess.”