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him. Mike was required to disclose this encounter with law enforcement to his probation officer.
    The next day was Mike’s weekly AA meeting, where he was responsible for making coffee. On the way there, he and a friend stopped at a convenience store to pick up some sugar, and Mike decided to fill up with gas. When he popped the gas tank, there was a plastic bag containing a handful of pills and a small quantity of white powder taped inside. Rattled, he ripped it out and threw it in the nearest trash can. It was only later that he realized it probably had been there during his impromptu police search the day before. Someone was setting him up.
    Eventually, Mike’s lawyer told him the cash never showed up, and in his professional opinion, it was never going to. Mike confronted Dalia and accused her of lying, telling her he was moving out of the house because he could no longer trust her. She finally admitted that she’d lost the money. She had tried to make a profit on the wire transfer and she’d been scammed. She promised to make up the loss when she got her commissions on a couple of houses she was selling. Instead of being angry, he felt like they were finally getting somewhere because she had come clean.
    On March 29, a Sunday, they’d been out for the afternoon when, two minutes from their house, they decided to continue driving north and havedinner at CityPlace, an Italian-styled open-air promenade with shops and restaurants in nearby West Palm Beach. At the restaurant, a guy at the bar kept looking over at him—it was like the final scene in The Sopranos . Mike even commented on it: “What’s with this guy?” Returning to the parking garage afterward, they noticed a dozen cops huddled thirty yards from Mike’s slate-grey Chevy SUV. Mike joked, “They must be for us.” But before they reached the truck, a policeman intercepted him, again asking, “Is this your vehicle?” Mike laughed and said, “Before we go any further, this is the second time this has happened to me in two weeks.”
    He went into detail on the previous incident, then gave them carte blanche to search his car. This time, they conducted a thorough search—ten or fifteen minutes, refusing to give up even after it failed to produce any results. For her part, Dalia seemed irritated at having to be there.
    Finally, they brought in a trained German shepherd drug dog that immediately hit on something behind the spare tire at the rear of the car. Mike didn’t even know how to get the spare off, and once they figured it out, they discovered it had been put on backward. Inside the tire well, one of the cops found a cigarette package with a gram and a half of coke in it. Mike was horrified, and some of that shock must have registered with the cops. It wasn’t just that he had alerted them to the possibility that there might be drugs planted on his vehicle beforehand; it didn’t make any sense. Why would you hide two grams of coke for personal use in such a hard-to-reach spot? In the time it would have taken him to get the spare off and retrieve the contraband, he could have snorted that amount and gone to buy more. When one of the female cops took him aside for a chat, Mike told her he was six years sober, and a drug test could verify it. He started to cry—he couldn’t help himself. She confided that an unidentified caller had claimed there would be a kilo of cocaine in the vehicle. In the end, they took his contact info and let him go. (Mike began collecting the police reports of these “random searches” in an envelope in his glove compartment for the next time he was stopped.)
    On the way home, with Dalia driving, Mike asked her, “Did you put that shit in my truck?” Instead of looking at him or proclaiming her innocence, Dalia revved the engine and floored it—she got the car up to maybe 100miles per hour on the interstate. It was the reaction of a child, except one in control of a mortal weapon. He began screaming for her to pull