time than I wanted to give. He was a skinny white kid who'd been busted for meth distribution in West Virginia, and he was adamant that I review his case, snap my fingers, and get him out. I liked Nattie, so I looked at his papers and tried to convince him there was nothing I could do. He began talking about a payoff; at first there were vague references to a lot of money stashed somewhere, and some of it might be mine if I could only get Nattie out of prison. He refused to believe I could not help him. Instead of facing reality, he became more delusional, more convinced I could find a loophole, file a motion, and walk him out. At some point, he finally mentioned a quantity of gold bars, and I figured he had lost his mind. I rebuffed him, and to prove his point he told me the entire story. He swore me to secrecy and promised me half of the fortune if I would only help him.
As a child, Nattie was an accomplished petty thief, and in his teenage years drifted into the world of meth. He moved around a lot, dodging drug enforcement agents, bill collectors, deputies with warrants, fathers with pregnant daughters, and pissed-off rivals from other meth gangs. He tried several times to go straight but easily fell back into a life of crime. He was watching his cousins and friends ruin their lives with drugs, as addicts and convicted felons, and he really wanted something better. He had a job as a cashier in a country store, deep in the mountains around the small town of Ripplemead, when he was approached by a stranger who offered him $10 an hour for some manual labor. No one in the store had ever seen the stranger, nor would they ever again. Nattie was making $5 an hour, cash, off the books, and jumped at the chance to earn more. After work, Nattie met the stranger at a pre-arranged spot and followed him along a narrow dirt trail to an A-frame cabin wedged into the side of a steep hill, just above a small lake. The stranger introduced himself only as Ray, and Ray was driving a nice pickup truck with a wooden crate in the back. As it turned out, the crate contained a five-hundred-pound safe, too much for Ray to handle by himself. They rigged a pulley with a cable over a tree branch and managed to wrestle the safe out of the truck, onto the ground, and eventually into the basement of the cabin. It was tedious, backbreaking work, and it took almost three hours to get the safe inside. Ray paid him in cash, said thanks and good-bye.
Nattie told his brother, Gene, who was in the vicinity hiding from the sheriff two counties away. The brothers became curious about the safe and its contents, and decided to investigate. When they were certain Ray had left the cabin, they attempted to break in but were stopped by heavy oak doors, unbreakable glass, and thick dead bolts. So they simply removed an entire window in the basement. Inside, they could not locate the safe but did manage to identify Ray. Riffling through some papers at a worktable, they realized their neighbor was a big-shot federal judge over in Roanoke. There was even a newspaper article about an important trial involving uranium mining in Virginia, with the Honorable Raymond Fawcett presiding.
They drove to Roanoke, found the federal courthouse, and watched two hours of testimony. Nattie wore glasses and a baseball cap in case the judge might get bored and look around the courtroom. There were plenty of spectators and Ray never looked up. Convinced they were onto something, the brothers returned to the cabin, reentered through the basement window, and again searched for the safe. It had to be in the small basement because that was where Nattie and the judge had left it. One wall was lined with shelves and covered with thick law books, and the brothers became convinced there must be a hidden space behind the wall. They carefully removed each book, looked behind it, then replaced it. It took some time, but they eventually found a switch that opened a trapdoor. Once it swung open, the safe was just sitting there, at floor level, waiting to be opened. But that proved to be impossible because there was a digital keypad that, of course, required a coded entry.