The Dope Thief (9 page)

“Where was he from?”

“New En gland somewhere. He had that ‘pahk the cah’ voice.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know, maybe it means something. If he’s in a club from up north and he’s going up against one of the local clubs or something?”

Ray heard Manny light a cigarette, blow the smoke out. He turned to see Manny pointing at him with it, the end glowing red.

Manny said, “Or working with them, so he’s that much more plugged in. Or he moved here twenty years ago and the accent don’t make a fucking difference.”

Ray shook his head. “Yeah, maybe. But if anyone knew him down here, Ho would have told us to back the fuck off.”

Manny jumped up and picked up a pistol from the low chest of drawers and stuck it under the pillow on the other bed, then stretched out again. He put the cigarette on the edge of the night-stand between the beds. “Man, what happened back there’”

“Yeah, I don’t want to think about that for a while.”

“Think about this, though, okay?” He held the cigarette in his hand without lighting it, then dropped it back on the table. “I know shit happens and you can only plan so much. It wasn’t anybody’s fault except maybe Rick, and he paid for it.” They could hear cars hissing by on the wet highway. “But here’s the thing, okay? Next time someone shoots at us? Fucking shoot back.”

HE LAY IN
bed a long time before drifting into a thin sleep broken by sounds from the highway and the low, resonant rumble of thunder that seemed to come from the ground beneath him as much as the sky.

He’s sixteen and standing in a dark living room in Abington in De-cember. It’s late, maybe two in the morning, and Manny is climbing over the sill in the window behind him and trying not to laugh. The house is big, full of massive furniture looming in the dark rooms and throwing crazy shadows from the lights on the Christmas tree, the headlights of passing cars. Manny gets his boot caught in the curtains and goes over, jamming his hand in his teeth to keep from laughing out loud while Ray grabs his shoulders and drags him onto the carpet. He shakes his head at Manny, who finally pulls himself up and makes his way out to the kitchen, pulling sweat socks onto his long hands like gloves. The room is full of Christmas shit. Little houses with lights inside them. Holly wreaths set out on the tables.

Ray wanders down a hallway off the living room, passes a bathroom lit blue by a humming nightlight, pushes a door standing ajar with one elbow and finds himself in the master bedroom. A man and a woman are sleeping, two humped shapes under blankets. The room is darker than the rest of the house, and he stands a long time, his eyes adjusting. The woman is snoring slightly, her mouth open, blue-gray hair splayed out over the pillow, and the man is curled beside her, one slack white arm over hers. On a low dresser are pictures of kids he can barely make out. Grown kids and little ones that must be grandkids. On the table are the woman' s glasses and a picture of a man and woman that Ray picks up and turns in his hands till he can see it’s the woman and he guesses the man, too, only they’re young and skinny and the man wears a white jacket that’s too big for him
and the woman is wearing dark lipstick and has a flower in a thing on her wrist like the girls wear to prom.

He wants to go get Marletta and bring her here. He has the crazy thought that she could explain it to him, act as a guide somehow to the kind of life where people get old together and have kids and grandkids. He reaches into his thin coat and brings out a pint of 151 and quietly unscrews the cap and takes a small sip and makes a face. Something about the way the man’s arm touches the woman’s arm makes him think he could wake them up and ask them if him and Marletta could live here until she graduates and he turns eighteen and can get a job somewhere.

Finally he walks back out, passing Manny standing on a chair trying to get the star off the tree, fishing drunkenly with a fireplace poker and making a tinny musical clinking noise every time he hits one of the ornaments. Ray doesn’t say anything, just goes back to the window and is climbing out when Manny sees him caught in the yellow glare of headlights, and as Ray lets himself down onto a dead azalea bush, he can hear his friend whisper, “Man, what’s wrong?”

Manny dropped him back at his house at about five. Ray jumped out of the van and kept his hand stuck in his pocket, the Colt rat tling in his shaking fist. He tried not to run to the house, but he had an itch between his shoulder blades and couldn’t keep him self from looking up and down the street over and over as he closed the distance to the door of his apartment. There was a bad moment when he realized his keys were in the gym bag over his arm and had to dig around in the bag while trying to look over his shoulder every other second. Finally he got the door open, jumped inside, and slammed it behind him, turning the lock and dropping the bag on the landing. He ran up the stairs and pulled the pistol out of his pocket, pointing it into every corner of the living room. He checked the bedroom, the closets, and behind the couch, finally closing the curtains and sitting in the darkened room for a minute, waiting for his heart to slow.

He picked up the remote and turned on the stereo, clicking through the CDs in the changer until he settled on old Stan Ridg-way. After a while he got a chair from the dining room and took it down the stairs to the front door. He wedged it under the doorknob and checked the dead bolt and chain, then carried the bag upstairs. He went into the closet, reached up, and knocked back a trapdoor in the ceiling. Balancing on a Rubbermaid storage box full of stuff from his father’s house, he reached through the hole in the ceiling and brought down a shotgun wrapped in rags and a box of double- aught shells. The gun was dusty and smelled of oil and old metal, and he sat down on the bed and wiped it clean, then loaded it and racked the slide. Stan Ridgway was singing about a lonely town, and Ray wished he could get high and let the rest of the day go by. Instead he stripped off his clothes and threw them in the trash can in the kitchen and pulled out the bag and left it on the kitchen floor.

The shower felt good, and he kept making it hotter and hotter, standing under the nozzle and letting the water pulse on his head while he tried to figure angles and means and whether it was possible to run or if he had to stay and slug it out with whoever was out there wanting him dead. He had to fucking calm down, is what he had to do. No matter how bad the guy in the Charger wanted them, it would take days for him to get to someone who could give him their names. They could make some kind of rational decision about what to do and where to go and how long they could stay there with the money they had.

He couldn’t help thinking, though, how did he think this was going to play out, anyway? Even before they fucked up at the farm house, where was it going? How did shit like this ever end? Either they stopped or they got killed or they got locked up. Upstate he had known guys who were stone thieves, and they had all of them spent more of their lives behind bars than on the street. Ray was thirty, and he felt like he had come to the end of the life he’d been leading. He just didn’t know if that meant he was going to change or if he was going to die.

He got takeout from the Golden Palace on 611 and sat in the dark listening to music. He ran through his Stan Ridgway CDs, grabbed by the strange mood of songs about loners drifting on western highways and people on the run from big trouble or fucked over by the ones they loved. He wanted to get into the last of the heroin, but he had things to do, so he loaded up the one-hitter with some coke Ho had given him the last time he had been at the big stone house in Chestnut Hill where he lived with his wife, Tina, and three kids. Ray had brought coconut rum and pineapple juice, something they were drinking that summer, and Ho and Tina kept bringing dishes out of the kitchen that smelled of tamarind and lotus and laughing gently at Ray’s attempt to pronounce them.

Manny pulled up in front of the house at about midnight. Ray was already in his car and blinked the headlights when Manny pulled up. He followed Manny up 611 and then north on 202 into Jersey. The night out here was black except for the lights of farm-houses and little developments far away. There was lightning in the clouds but no rain, and Ray put the window down and smelled wet grass and asphalt, the smell of country roads.

It reminded Ray of riding the back roads with Manny when they were kids. Alternating long sips of vodka from the bottle with swigs of orange soda. A girl with a black eye they had picked up in Bristol. White- blond hair and Kmart perfume. They had pulled into a turf farm somewhere off Swamp Road and run around, drunk and high, screaming and rolling in the grass. Manny turned the radio up, and they lay on the cooling hood of the car and passed a beer- can bong back and forth and talked about running away to California. He remembered that he couldn’t stop looking at the girl’s small hands, fixed on them moving white in the dark, in that way that you sometimes did when you were high.

Now they pulled off the road into a soybean field. Ray stopped just off the road, and Manny pulled the van about fifty yards in and got out. Ray killed the lights and waited, and after a couple of minutes he could see Manny’s silhouette against the orange haze in the sky from the cities to the north. There was a yellow glow visible through the rear window of the Ford that grew until it filled the back of the van. As they backed onto the road, Ray saw the windows blow out. They headed back down 202. Halfway across the bridge, Manny cranked down the window and sailed the plates out over the Delaware.

They stopped at a diner in New Hope and had a cup of coffee. They sat in silence, and Ray watched the young waitress come and go. She had a big ring on her left hand.

“Tell me about the guy who put you onto the house.”

“Yeah, I been thinking about that. Danny Mullen, from down in Charlestown, over near Valley Forge. I saw him about three weeks ago down at the Neshaminy. He put us on the place in Marcus Hook, remember?”

“I remember. What did he say this time?”

Manny lifted his shoulders, spread his hands. “I don’t know. He said he knew this place up north, a meth lab where some buddies of his had copped, and did I want it.”

“Nothing weird?”

“He did say the guy was crazy, but I figured what the fuck did that mean? Who’s in that business, you know? Sane people?” They watched the waitresses carrying plates of pie to a table of giggling teenagers at the front of the diner.

Ray tapped the table twice with his index finger, tried to look decisive. “Okay, we see Ho and we see Danny. Try to figure out if there’s a way to know who we’re dealing with. Did you talk to Sherry?”

“Yeah, I told her stay with her ma a few days. She was pissed, but she’ll get over it.”

“I figure I’ll try to get Theresa out of town for a while.”

“Yeah, good luck with that. When was the last time she was out of town?”

“She likes Atlantic City. She goes down on the bus with her

girlfriends. I could stick her in a hotel down there for a couple

days, I guess.”

“How long do we do this? When is this, you know, over?” Ray shrugged and looked out the window, trying to keep the feeling like he had a plan and it was going to lead somewhere. He kept dancing around the end of it in his mind. Could they talk to the guy? Scare the shit out of him? Get something on him that made it more of a pain in the ass to come after them than it was worth? It was like a chess game where all the other guy’s pieces were invisible while his own sat out in plain sight, waiting to get taken off the board.

The deal with Ho was supposed to keep this kind of shit from happening. Some crazy fucker might blow up at them, but mostly they were closing down people who would slink away and never be heard from again, or pull up stakes for some place where any tweaker with some ambition and a few charcoal briquettes could go into business.

THE NEXT MORNING
was Sunday, and Ray got up early, restless and fidgety. He took a shower and went out to his car and pulled out, not knowing where he was heading until he found himself on 611 going north toward Doylestown. He cranked the window down, and the warm air felt good after all the rain of the days before. When he reached the town he parked and sat for a minute. As soon as he stopped the car, the air inside began to heat up and he began to sweat. He thought about putting on his jacket anyway, the better to carry the little .32 he had with him, but in the end he just left the pistol in the jacket and the jacket in the car. He walked by the bookstore again, but the dark- haired girl wasn’t there. He prowled around the aisles for a while and bought himself a book on classic horror films, the kind of movie he hadn’t been able to stay away from when he was a kid, even though thoughts of the monsters kept him awake at night.

He took his book and walked up the street, stopping at a Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee and then walking aimlessly past craft shops and jewelry stores. He liked the town. There were gaslights on the street and nice old buildings with a little character in the details. He walked and sipped at the coffee and sweated till he came to a bench in the shade of a tree and sat down and paged through the book. He was trying to find a reference to the movie the girl had recommended when he looked up and there she was. She was walking along with a paper cup of coffee and stopped to sip out of it, wearing a blue oxford shirt with long sleeves and what he thought of as a peasant skirt that hung almost to her ankles, some kind of reddish- brown print from India or someplace. He smiled and watched her walk toward him and almost didn’t say anything as she got closer, until she was right beside him, looking distracted.

“Hey,” he said, and held a hand up. She looked at him for a minute with a frown, and he began to feel nervous and maybe a little disreputable, and then her faced changed and she cocked her head and gave him that crooked smile again.

“Hey,
Night of the Demon
.” She laughed and shook her head. “I’m sorry! I don’t remember your name.”

“No, I’ve been called worse. Anyway, I don’t think I ever said it.”