The Dope Thief (24 page)

The moment passed, and Theresa finally shook her head as if waking up and asked if they could help her.

Janet Evanovich, the woman said, and Ray waved her back to the mysteries, where she began to paw through the stock. She prattled on about her niece who had recommended the books and said she had one of them and wanted the next one and wasn’t it great they took place in Trenton?

When she came to the register, Bart stepped behind the counter and opened a paper bag. Theresa opened the register, which was empty, and then the three of them patted their pockets until Theresa went into her purse and counted out the change. Bart took the woman’s ten and stuck it in a small frame and balanced it on the windowsill, and Theresa took a picture. The woman with the cap got into the spirit of the thing and waved the book at them from the door.

The woman left, and the three of them stood in the silence afterward and shrugged at each other. How hard could it be? The bell over the door clanged again, but it was the woman, scowling. She held up the book.

“I read this one.”

Ray shook his head. Theresa opened her hands helplessly. Bart grabbed the frame from the sill and smacked it open on the counter with a chime of thin glass breaking, then handed the woman back her ten.

WEEKS WENT BY
and the days were dark and cold. Ray worked alone in the empty store, ripped the shelving out and replaced it in pieces, creating painted built- in shelves with finished edges and molding and painted a creamy white. He spent hours looking at track lighting at the Home Depot and finally settled on small, blue- shaded spots that he tied to a bank of dimmers near the register. He got up early each morning, made lists of tasks for himself on the backs of envelopes, and started noticing how the stores he visited were laid out and the merchandise displayed.

Bart got sicker, and Theresa stayed away more and more to stay with him. Ray would open later and close earlier. He sat for hours in the back of the shop and heard people come by the front doors, sometimes rattling the handle. He took the books off the shelves and then restacked them, lining them up with soldierly precision and making lists of his stock. The woman who had sold him the store, a long, bent woman with a lesbian vibe named Elizabeth, had given him pages with long lists of contacts for book resellers who bought up stock from closing stores and libraries, a constant reminder that there was nothing guaranteed in what he had begun. With the shop closed he spent hours calling people, looking for more of the westerns and crime novels he loved, and every day brought cardboard boxes from Scottsdale or Presque Isle or Waukegan that smelled of ink and old paper and mold. But the store was open less and less.

In January Bart stopped getting out of bed, and Ray put a small sign in the window, help wanted. Theresa had talked with him about a decent wage, and he added a few bucks to it in his head and the next Monday he sat in the store and tapped his cane against his boot and read
Hombre
for the ninth time, looking up occasionally to watch people moving down streets lashed by rain, their heads tucked into their chests.

He had just nodded off when the bell rang and he jerked upright and Michelle came in, shaking the rain off of a plastic kerchief and smiling at him as if this were the date they’d set up months before. He stood slowly, putting weight on his hands until he could get steady on the cane, and took one long step out from behind the counter.

She looked around and nodded her head. “Wow. It looks great.”

“Oh,” he said and raised one hand dismissively, “a little car-pentry, new rugs.”

“No, it looks wonderful. Liz would never spend any money on the place.”

“You know her?”

“Oh, yeah. I worked here. Before the other place.”

“So you know the operation.”

“Sure. Well, the way Liz did things, anyway.”

He nodded his head, keeping his hands down to resist the impulse to reach out and touch her.

She pointed to the sign in the window. “You need help?”

He let his smile get away from him, the muscles in his face stretching in unfamiliar ways until he brought a hand up and massaged his cheek. He did move, then. Leaned into the cane and reached past her and took down the sign. Waved it and threw it behind the counter.

He closed early that night, anxious for the time to pass and for Michelle to start. Couldn’t bring himself to stop hoping, playing out different ways it could go. In the moment he’d stood on the sagging wooden porch watching her go up the street, head tucked against the rain, he let himself know he’d taken Theresa’s money, bought the store, put up the sign, all of it hoping she’d walk in off the street. Let himself run a hundred changes in his mind, let himself feel stupid and impatient and something else that might be happiness at just breathing.

He stood on the street, looked back up at the store one last time to make sure the lights were off, and was nearly knocked off his unsteady feet by Edward Gray’s daughter coming down the sidewalk, listing to one side and paddling at the air with one stiff arm. He searched his mind for her name. She held up her hands and spoke with deliberation.

“I’m so sorry.” Adrienne, that was her name. She smelled like sour fruit and was underdressed for the weather in a sweater and scuffed jeans. She said, “A little dark out here to night,” and smiled. Drunk, he realized. Her eyes were shadowed pits in her head.

“My fault,” he said and meant it. “Standing around in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking traffic.”

She patted hair the color of foam on a lifeless pond. “Not at all. Not at all.”

She kept moving along the street, downhill to wherever she lived, he hoped. He watched her go.

HE HAD AN
open house in February and invited Manny, who didn’t come, and Ho and Tina, who did. Theresa was there, and Bart, skin the color of mustard and sitting in a wheelchair, though he smiled and held a glass of white wine and snapped pictures with Theresa’s little digital camera. Ray showed Ho the Web site Michelle had put together for the store and her brochures for the children’s parties she wanted to host, letting the kids make books of their own. Ho looked from the computer to Ray and then at Michelle where she sat on the floor, her ankles tucked under her as she guided Ho’s five- year- old, Ly, through an Alexandra Day book where a black dog danced with a smiling infant. Ho shook his head and smiled, and Ray opened his hands.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.”

“Oh, you know? Don’t start.”

“Did I say a word?”

“I get this enough from Theresa.” He inclined his head and dropped his voice, a hand held out as if to signal stop. “She doesn’t know. Anything.”

“So?”

“So I don’t want to go down that road.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to get into anything.”

“You think what, she’s here for six bucks an hour?”

“Fourteen. I can’t dump my life on some kid from Ohio who works in a bookstore. That life? Where I’ve been and what I’ve done?”

“Then don’t.” Ho poured more wine into his glass, waved at his daughters. “But you got this far, man. You going to spend the next fifty years dating massage parlor girls?”

Ray dropped onto the sill of the window behind the counter, massaging his thigh and grimacing, and Ho stood with his back to the room.

“I’m just saying think about what you’re going to say. You don’t have to sign a full confession to tell someone you’ve been in trouble and aren’t anymore. If you think you got to say anything except you own a bookstore in Doylestown.”

Ray looked across at her, and she turned her head and smiled and then looked down, and he felt the floor dropping away and a thudding in his head.

Ho motioned him out to the porch and looked up and down the street, then told him Cyrus was dead.

“The guys from New En gland?”

“No. That’s over.”

“Over?”

“That guy, Scott? He was making this move on his own, took some of the guys from the Outlaws and came down here on his own. With his end of an armed robbery at an Indian casino. That’s what the cash was.”

“How do you know this?”

“A friend showed me some transcripts.”

“Transcripts?”

Ho looked around again and lowered his head. “Federal wiretaps.”

“Jesus.”

“It was everything he had, his own money.”

Ray nodded. It explained the way things played out. He shook his head. “How did it show up on wiretaps?”

“The FBI was on him up there. They scooped up everybody on the New Hampshire end of it.”

“Then who got Cyrus?”

“That wasn’t business.” Ho smiled. “He was screwing around

and his old lady caught him.” Ray saw the woman at the aban

doned house. Tattoos of the sun and moon on her hands and ice-

blue eyes.

Ho turned to go back inside, shivering and pulling in his shoulders.

“Does this mean it’s over?”

Ho shrugged but smiled. “There’s no one left.”

“How do we know?”

Ho looked at him. “The only people you got to worry about chasing you are all up here.” He reached out and tapped Ray’s forehead.

LATER HE WAS
alone with Michelle, and he moved along the table they had set out, throwing empty plastic wineglasses into a plastic bag. Michelle fiddled at the CD player she had set up, and the gentle electronic music she liked started up. Quiet voices and lush sounds that were like being wrapped in something soft. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but he was getting used to it, starting even to depend on it. Like her sweet perfume and the quotes she put up on the board near the door every day. Admonitions to be brave and alive. Rilke and Emerson and Rumi. That made him secretly siphon off books and try to parse out the meaning of the poems she loved.

He became aware of her behind him and stopped. He turned and she took the plastic bag from his hand and dropped it on the floor and moved into his arms and they were dancing. He was stiff and moved slightly to the beat, and she rested her head on his shoulder, and after a minute he lost the sense of the music and just swayed with her. He tried out different things in his head. Telling her where he had been and what he had done. Wondering what she needed to know to know him.

She finally said, “What happened?”

“What?”

“In August?” She kept her head tucked against him, her breath warm on his chest. “Was it the accident?”

He had been waiting for this question since they day she had come in about the job but still wasn’t ready for it. “Yes. No.” He shook his head. “I was in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” She picked her head up, and suddenly it was much more difficult and there was something guarded in her eyes.

His eyes flicked over her face and he looked down again. “I’ve made some mistakes in my life.”

She stopped moving, and then he did, a beat too late.

“Tell me.” But her face was different, harder, and it was an interrogation and his mind was blank.

The door chimed and they both looked up, Michelle pulling away and moving to the stacks, collecting paper plates left by Ho’s kids. He looked after her, his hands still in the air, then turned to the door to see two kids, thirteen or fourteen or fifteen. One short and blond, the other long, with black hair hanging lank over his eyes. They moved to the counter and dropped a pillowcase on it, spilling hardback books, and Ray pawed through them while the short kid fidgeted and the tall kid stared hard at him. The tall one wore a thin black jacket with duct tape on the elbow, and Ray remembered he’d seen them before, by the side of the road in Warrington. The tall kid had a runny nose, and they both had red cheeks from the cold. The short one was just getting fuzz on his chin and had spots of something purple and sticky-looking on his army coat.

There were some old books that looked like they were worth something. Jack London,
The Iron Heel
and
Call of the Wild.
Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night.
Some others he didn’t recognize. Some of them in plastic covers. First editions or something. He took more out of the pillowcase and found two candlesticks and a bell that looked to be real silver.

The short kid flicked the bell with his finger, miming plea sure at the bright sound. “Gimme a hundred bucks. And you can keep all that shit.”

Ray looked them up and down and smiled.

“Yeah? That ain’t much for all this swag.”

“No, it’s like a deal.”

Ray put sunglasses on the tall kid in his head and laughed. Manny and Ray, a month out of Lima, scoring from empty houses near the Willow Grove mall and trying to dump the stuff in the pawnshops along 611.

The blond kid snapped his fingers under Ray’s nose and pointed. “Fitzgerald, you know him?” He looked into the corner of the room as if something were painted there. “ ‘All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.’ “ He pantomimed laughing, like a dog panting, and looked over his shoulder at his friend, who smiled and nodded as if the blond kid had done a card trick he’d seen before.

The tall one looked at Michelle, who had stopped what she was doing and stood listening. His face changed and he looked hard at Ray. “Don’t fuck with us, man. Just pay us or let us be on our way.”

Ray nodded slowly. “Where did you get this stuff?”

The blond kid snorted, but the tall one reached over and started snapping the books back into the case. “We’re out of here, Lynch.”

Ray held up a hand. “Wait a minute, okay?”

The tall kid moved toward the door, wiping at his nose with his free hand, and Ray snapped the register open and he stopped. The shorter kid stood up and angled his head to see. Ray came out with two twenties and held them out to the kids. Michelle sighed and disappeared into the back of the store. The blond kid, Lynch, pointed at his friend and the pillowcase. For the first time, Ray noticed a bruise on the tall kid’s face, the shape of a hand etched in faint and fading blue.

The blond kid said, “What? This shit is worth like ten times that.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Then what?”

“Take the money.”