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Chapter 49
CARL SWITCHES TEAMS
The smell of coffee lingered in the air as Carl sat in his cubicle at the DEA offices in Baltimore,
working away on his laptop. Out of the silence his cell phone rang, again. He knew exactly
who it was before he even picked up the phone, which displayed a Spanish Fork, Utah, area code. It
was Curtis Green again, the Gooch! This must have been the eighth time today that Green had called,
and it was getting really fucking annoying.
“I can’t believe you think I stole DPR’s money,” Green said on the phone in a high-pitched
murmur. “I swear I didn’t steal anything from him.”
Carl disagreed. “You’re a liar.” After listening to Green whine some more, Carl told him to chill
out and continue to lie low, as DPR still believed he was dead, and, twisting some fear into him, he
warned that if the leader of the Silk Road found out Green was really still alive, you could be sure
that wouldn’t last long.
“How long am I supposed to stay hidden for?” Green pleaded. “I haven’t been outside in
months.” He then whimpered that he had nothing to do with the stolen money. Carl, fed up with this
nonsense, hung up.
After the fake-but-not-so-fake torturing in the Marriott Hotel, DPR had asked Nob to have his
“thugs” kill Green. Carl couldn’t be bothered to fly out to Spanish Fork, Utah, again, so he told Green
to fake his own death. The instructions were simple: Dunk your head in water, as if you’ve been
drowned. Then pop open a can of Campbell’s soup. A tomato flavor. And then pour that soup out of
your mouth, like you died from being held underwater and there was a mucuslike eruption from your
mouth. Finally, so we have something to show, have your wife snap a picture of your lifeless body
with your cell phone.
Nob had then sent the grainy photo to the Dread Pirate Roberts as evidence that the thieving
piece of shit Green had been murdered. “Died of asphyxiation / heart rupture,” Carl wrote to Dread.
That was supposed to be the end of it. Yet shortly after that interaction, Carl had noticed a change
in Dread. It was as if the act of taking another man’s life, or at least believing he had done so, had
given DPR a taste of power and control that he had never felt before. The leader of the Silk Road had
started to become more demanding and more confident than ever. When Carl—in a friendly “I’m on