But for his new job, they got him a brand-new one. Explained to him just what he needed to know about it. “Now look, Joey, you ain’t the swiftest guy around.” (They all knew about his concussions from street fights as a kid, and maybe that’s when he started getting kind of different, and he knew that by “different” they meant slow, stupid, even though he wasn’t, was he?) “So for your Apple ID password, we’re just gonna pick something simple, Joey, something your scrambled brain won’t ever forget. And for your code, look here, Joey, don’t even think of it as a number. Just straight down the middle like this, ’cause this phone’s pretty much staying in your pocket anyway, and this way if something happens to you and any of us need to get into it fast, we can.”

Like Joey couldn’t even be trusted to choose a code for himself, like he couldn’t even remember four numbers of his own birthday or his mom’s or his dad’s. Like they half expected something would happen, and they’d have to get into the phone someday. But that’s what they wanted, that’s how they saw him, so what could he do?

And his bosses disabled something on his new phone called the Cloud, some kind of backup system, so the pictures would only exist on the phone itself. They didn’t want those pictures existing anywhere else. Only for Joey and them. For no one else, anywhere, ever.

“We find you your clients, Joey. We refer them. We take thirty percent for that, up front. And you’re takin’ all the risk here, Joey, so you get the big share, seventy percent, cash straight from the client to you so it never gets connected to us. But you gotta do your job perfectly because it’s a reflection on us, understand?

“You’re gonna be good at this job, Joey. ’Cause you never really connect with people, you know? This is perfect for you, Joey.”

They didn’t trust him, because they didn’t understand him. Everyone was a little uncomfortable with him around. From when he was a kid on the streets, to reform schools, to prison, to now. He didn’t know if it was his IQ, if it was too high or too low, or his being a little different from everybody, or not one of the guys, or what. In prison he learned from the staff psychologist that besides the damage from the concussions, he might also have something called Asperger’s, that he was “mildly autistic,” that he was “on the spectrum,” but he couldn’t tell if that meant he was smarter, or dumber, or both at the same time. The psychologist wanted to give him some tests to find out more but the state said no to the cost.