Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Chapter 17<br />
CARL FORCE’S TOMORROW<br />
Most people go through life thinking that tomorrow they’re going to do something great.<br />
Tomorrow will be the day that they wake up and discover what they were put on this earth<br />
to do. But then tomorrow comes—and goes. As does the next day. Before long, they realize that there<br />
aren’t that many tomorrows left.<br />
Carl Force knew this feeling well. He never thought he’d end up this way, sitting in a mauvecolored<br />
cubicle in a nondescript skyscraper in downtown Baltimore, staring at his computer until the<br />
moment he could collect his things and leave.<br />
Another day, another tomorrow.<br />
Carl was what’s known in law enforcement as a “solar agent,” a guy who works only when it’s<br />
light outside. (He often referred to himself this way, half joking and half proud of the title.) When the<br />
clock struck three, Carl would slip out of the office and drive back across Baltimore to his wife and<br />
kids in his government-issued Chevy Impala.<br />
To anyone who walked by his cubicle, Carl looked like the kind of person he was trying to scrub<br />
off the streets: a drug dealer. He almost always wore a black beanie over his bald head. His sunken<br />
dark eyes and a peppery beard of stubble hid the wrinkles in his stout face. And then there were the<br />
tattoos covering his body, including the black Celtic tribal pattern that swerved across his back and<br />
down his arms.<br />
Like most of the old-timers at the Drug Enforcement Administration, Carl was in his midforties<br />
and jaded. Sure, he was a narcotics cop, but his job was as mundane as any other corporate office<br />
worker’s. He spent most of his days staring at his desktop computer, sipping stale coffee from one of<br />
the promotional mugs he had picked up at DEA conventions over the years. Sometimes he listened to<br />
Hope 89.1, a local Christian radio station that would whisper the Lord’s Prayer into his ear,<br />
promising that if Carl followed the ways of the Bible and did the right thing, he would be granted the<br />
life he had always wanted.<br />
Life hadn’t always been this way. Thirteen years earlier, in late 1999, when he joined the<br />
administration, he ate, slept, and shit the DEA. In those early days he absolutely loved the thrill of a<br />
bust. Waking at 4:00 a.m., slipping on his bulletproof vest, checking the chamber of his gun, and
Change language