Ragen’s hiring by Brian Foley turns a meeting arranged for Kevin into a test of force, then into a job: Ragen becomes armed protection for secretive drug deliveries. The episode links the abrupt changes in who occupies consciousness to a practical criminal enterprise, and shows Ragen applying his own idea of himself as a protector in the service of a business whose cargo and destinations are deliberately concealed.

The Meeting at Blacklick Woods

When the mix-up time reached its peak, Kevin asked Gordy Kane to introduce him to a drug connection because he was ready to deal full-time. Kane called an hour later with instructions to go to Blacklick Woods, near Reynoldsburg, east of Columbus. He explained that the contact, Brian Foley, wanted to meet Kevin alone and assess him. The encounter was therefore framed as an opportunity, but its isolation and the demand that Kevin arrive by himself also left him exposed.

Kevin followed the directions carefully and arrived ten minutes early at a location near a culvert. He had never been in the area. He waited in his car; nearly half an hour later, a Mercedes arrived with two men, while someone remained in the back of the vehicle. One of the newcomers was tall, with a pitted face and a brown leather jacket; the other was of medium height, bearded, and dressed in a pinstriped suit. The tall man’s jacket showed a bulge beneath his left arm. Kevin was already uneasy, sweating behind the wheel and wondering whether he should leave, before the meeting’s danger became explicit.

When Kevin got out, Foley emerged from the Mercedes’s back seat, appearing about eighteen, with shoulder-length blond hair, a camel-hair coat, and a matching muffler. Kevin began walking toward him. The tall man spun Kevin around and held him against his car at gunpoint while the bearded man started to frisk him. At that point Kevin disappeared from the scene: Ragen took over. The planned assessment of a prospective dealer had become an armed confrontation, and the new arrival reversed who controlled it.

Ragen Turns the Test Around

Ragen caught the bearded man’s hand, spun him, and flipped him toward the tall gunman. He then jumped the armed man, took the gun, and held him as a shield while aiming at Foley. Foley, who had been watching from the Mercedes, raised his hands. Ragen’s intervention was not simply a show of strength: by using one attacker as cover, he made the other man at the meeting—the employer with the power to decide whether Kevin had a job—answer to him instead.

Foley tested Ragen’s ability with a firearm, and Ragen asked for a gun to demonstrate. Foley reached beneath the seat and handed him a .45. Ragen weighed and balanced it, noting his preference for a nine-millimeter weapon but accepting the available pistol. When Foley began to identify a beer can across the road as a target, Ragen fired before the description was finished. The can fell, and he hit it twice more as it bounced away. The sequence gives Foley a direct demonstration of the qualities the work requires: composure with a weapon, speed, and accuracy. Foley responded by saying he could use a man like him, though Ragen had not arrived under his own name or as the person Kane expected.

Terms of the Job

Ragen told Foley that he needed money and would do the work. When Foley addressed him as Mr. Milligan, Ragen said that people called him Billy and that he did not like the name Milligan. Foley accepted the name Billy and described the qualities he wanted: speed, intelligence, strength, and skill with a gun. The position was to ride shotgun for drivers in Foley’s shipping business. Ragen did not initially understand the phrase; Foley explained that his drivers needed protection. Ragen identified himself as a protector, making the assignment fit the role he claimed for himself even as it placed that protective capacity at the service of illegal trade.

The arrangement depended on compartmentalization. Foley asked for a number where he could reach Ragen and said that Ragen should sleep at the premises a day or two before each delivery. He would not be told what was being shipped or where it was going until he was already on the road with the driver; Foley presented this as a way to reduce the chance of a leak. Ragen agreed. On the journey back to Lancaster, he slept while Allen drove, unaware of where Ragen had been or what he had done. The job thus began with sharply unequal knowledge: Foley controlled the schedule and information, while Ragen supplied armed protection without knowing the route or cargo in advance.

Deliveries and Their Consequences

In the following weeks, Ragen rode shotgun on narcotics deliveries to dealers and customers around Columbus. He was amused to discover that marijuana and cocaine were being shipped to prominent people whose names he had repeatedly seen in newspapers. His work therefore brought him into contact not only with the mechanics of a criminal delivery system but with its unexpected social reach. The surprise was Ragen’s; the account does not identify those customers or specify their actions beyond receiving the drugs.

One particular assignment involved a shipment of M-1s to a group of Black men in West Virginia. Ragen wondered what they wanted them for, but the account supplies no answer. The episode extends the job beyond narcotics and makes Ragen’s ignorance of the cargo more consequential: Foley’s secrecy keeps the hired protector from understanding the purposes of what he guards. Meanwhile, at the apartment, Ragen sometimes found open containers of barbiturates and amphetamines and once discovered one of his guns left out on a dresser. He suspected that Philip or Kevin had experimented with LSD, and feared that carelessness could put the children in danger. These discoveries sharpen the contrast within the arrangement: Ragen rejects hard drugs and objects to unsecured weapons at home, yet he continues to escort Foley’s narcotics shipments. His hiring is both a new source of work and a collision between his stated protective rules and the enterprise he has agreed to serve.