Cuffed in stiff cotton, his hand is a dull, cumbersome pincer. It pokes into and rummages through the dogmonger’s pockets. First it finds a Bic. A crumpled comet of receipts and gum wrappers. A flip phone. A smartphone, too. Careful to keep his fingertips covered, he rolls the dogmonger onto his side. The dogmonger is beyond protest. Just makes a weak gavel with his heel against the ground, and then a second pistol, a snubnose, slips out of his boot. Henry can’t risk touching it let alone taking it to pawn tomorrow. No wallet square in the back pockets. First one empty. In the other he finds keys latched to a severed rabbit’s foot dyed clover green, then a single dollar bill rolled into an unfurling tube, which is the only thing he takes before leaving.

$50,000.00

Didn’t seem fair, didn’t seem right. Not the legal implications, or compromising some sense of integrity. It was the ease of it that rattled Henry.

He and Al were back in the truck, safe, unscathed, pulses slowing and palms drying. A minor victory when the trembling key slid into the ignition and the engine turned, its grumble melding with the crinkle of paper as Al reached inside a brown grocery bag.

“Here’s your half,” Al said, and that was that. With this commonplace gesture, like passing a diner menu to a stranger, Henry’s callused hands cradled five bands of hundred-dollar bills. Fifty stacks. Half a hundred grand. It had heft. Girth. A paperback Bible cut in half.

And it’d been so easy.

He and Al had put in the hours but hardly the sweat. Maybe a few icy shocks of adrenaline, but not a drop of the tarry perspiration of manual labor. After he talked it over with Michelle, it hadn’t sat right with him—making Al do all the prep on top of running all the risk—and so every day after work and over the last two weekends, he’d gone over to Al’s to help measure and press the counterfeit oxys. All twenty-five hundred of them, and then some. Even though Henry hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to drive to Canada and then cross back over the border with a quarter kilo of pure, powdered fentanyl, packed in a catalog envelope with a strained red string, he hadn’t been able to let Al make tonight’s handoff in the city alone. Despite the risk, or perhaps to protect their investment, Michelle had assured Henry it was the right thing to do.