The Dope Thief (15 page)

It came to him that it could have been Michelle standing with him when they pulled the guns, and that put more terrible pictures in his head that crowded his thinking and made his heart race. He pulled over to the side of the road, and it dawned on him they knew his car, had in fact followed him to Doylestown. The kid had said it. Jesus. He wasn’t thinking, wasn’t planning. He needed to slow down, get right in his head. He was on 611, near a big shop ping center at Street Road, and he pulled in and told Manny to get away from his own car, find another one, and come for him.

He cruised through the lot, pulling behind a Genuardi’s and nosing toward a Dumpster. He switched off the car and looked around him, grabbing his small duffel and checking the Colt. He pulled the slide back to put a round in the chamber, then slowly let the hammer down and stuck it into his belt, an awkward move sitting down.

On the dark floor, something flashed green. He stopped and watched. After maybe thirty seconds, he saw it flash again. He leaned toward the pool of darkness in front of the passenger seat and put his hand on the dead biker’s cell. He flipped it open and looked at it. The display had bars for battery life, a little graph for signal strength. There was a symbol, a 1 and an
X,
which meant nothing to him, but then he noticed a flashing letter
G
in the lower left hand corner. Was that for GPS? Did that matter? Did these guys have some kind of software that could track the cell phone or something? Were they right now boxing him in again?

He jumped out of the car and looked around. Two kids in green aprons sat smoking on overturned milk crates. One of them, a big kid with red hair, waved with his cigarette. Behind the car, Ray saw a slight grassy rise, a driveway leading away toward an exit; across the driveway the ground sloped down to what looked like a creek, a black line in the dark sketched through a stand of trees. He took two steps and fired the cell phone hard over the road and down toward the creek.

The kid with red hair pumped his cigarette hand in the air. “Fuck, yah.”

The other kid laughed, nodding his head. “Toss that bitch.”

Ray jumped back into the car and sat with his head in his hand for a minute, thinking.

The red- haired kid took a few steps closer, eyeing the Camaro and Ray. “Nice ride,” the boy said, and the silent one sitting on the crate shook his head in agreement. “Want to get wasted?”

“Yes,” said Ray and put the car in gear.

HE LEFT HIS
car in another shopping center farther east down County Line, by a dark and empty Dunkin’ Donuts. He got out and locked the car under feeble lights that left the parking lot the dull green of a lake bottom. He called Ho and told him what had happened while he walked across the dark lot to stand in the shadow of a Sunoco station. It had all happened fast, he told Ho, and chances were the guys they killed hadn’t told Scott about Ho, but he should take what ever steps he thought were right. Ho thanked him and hung up, and Ray watched the street and kept his hand in his pocket, on his pistol, clicking the safety off and on, off and on.

He thought about Ho’s kids, and Tina, and that made it tougher to think straight, but Jesus, was everything bad that could happen his fault? Ho was in the life, ran massage parlors and dope houses, and had a cousin who sat at an upstairs window with an AK, so there was already the possibility hanging out there for Ho, and Ho knew it. But Ray knew even as he had those thoughts that it didn’t get him off the hook. This shit had gotten away from him, and he had to make it right somehow.

Manny took him by his own place, and Ray took Sherry’s old Honda and drove it slowly home, taking a long route around Warminster and through Horsham. Later he sat in the dark car by his building and watched the traffic go by, the headlights throwing twisted silhouettes of trees onto the fronts of the houses, tangles of shadow that moved and broke apart into nothing.

He tried to see into the cars going past, caught glimpses of dark figures going home, going out. He thought about regular life, tried to think of people he knew who just went to work and came home, went to sleep, got up, and did it again. Just about everybody he knew was in the life except Theresa and her retired friends from the neighborhood who got together at the Ukrainian church to play Bingo on Wednesdays. Tough old broads who had raised kids and buried husbands, worked at Acme or the post office or Warminster General.

He had worked straight jobs, but never for very long. He had worked in pizza joints when he was a kid, liked the smell of the dough and flirting with the waitresses and the girls who came in for a slice and a Coke. But then he’d just blow it off; he’d go get high with his friends, and the next thing he knew, he’d be driving someone else’s car to the Oxford Mall, or sneaking around a dark house, high, drunk, banging into things and trying not to laugh, or running through black yards at night with a pillowcase full of cheap costume jewelry he took off someone’s bureau while Manny took cold cuts from the fridge.

Could he stop being who he was? He thought about Marletta, about the last time he saw her. What had they said? She wanted a normal life for him. If things had gone different with her, would that have been his way out? She was in his thoughts more and more now, working on his head. The way she loved him and thought he could be more. Gone all this time until that picture brought her back, the picture in the house on Jefferson Avenue of the young girl in the cap and gown.

Marletta had died, and they’d sent him up for it, and he’d let them. He’d picked her up from graduation and they’d driven around, went to a park, gone to his house and made love, and when he was driving her home a drunk had crossed the center line and she’d been killed. Thrown from the car into a field full of tiny white flowers whose name he couldn’t remember. Her old man was a state trooper, and he’d hated Ray even before that day. They’d taken Ray to St. Mary’s with a concussion, and her old man would sit in the parking lot in his car. Every time Ray had gone to the window, her old man would be there. At night, he’d see his cigarette going in the dark, a slow red pulse as her father breathed.

Her old man had pushed the case about the stolen car, and they’d locked him up. He sat in Juvie for months, waiting, and one night her old man came for him and took him out and beat him with a tire iron and took him back with a thin story about Ray falling in the dark. So when they finally convicted him, sent him upstate as an adult, he’d had two busted arms. Ray had let it happen, let it all come, and none of it, no matter how bad it got, was as bad as he thought he deserved for losing Marletta.

After a few minutes he gave up the idea of going back for his shit. Instead he drove west to Montgomeryville to get more clothes, toiletries, and a couple of CDs to calm him down and help him think. It was late when he finally pulled into a motel on 611 near the turnpike. Standing in the bright lobby by the highway brought his paranoia on hard again, and he drummed his fingers and hunched his shoulders waiting for the sleepy clerk to appear from the back. He checked in, then drove around the back of the place, twitching with fear. He ran upstairs, his insides turning to water, and then sat in the dark with the pistol in his lap.

What would Marletta think of him now? What would she say? He was so far from the things he had let himself want when they were together, but he felt like he wanted something like a normal life now more than ever. Was it just that things were so fucked up? That he was afraid and looking for a way out?

He rummaged in his bag and pulled out some CDs and threw them on the bed, then chose one and put in the CD player on the bed table. Henryk Górecki. Classical music. What he called it, anyway. It had been playing when he walked into a Tower Rec ords in King of Prussia, and he asked the girl behind the counter what it was, and she pointed to a stack of CDs near the counter.

He had looked up the music online and knew that the words were from a prayer, and they sounded that way. Someone pleading or crying, he guessed in Polish. He thought all pleading was the same in what ever language. Help me. Forgive me. Don’t leave me. Don’t kill me. He thought about the white- haired man and the terrible red arc streaming out of him, and Rick Staley slipping around in his own blood on the floor of the dope lab in Ottsville. He wanted to let himself go, start screaming and breaking things. He wanted to get high. After a while, he fell asleep.

HE GOT UP
at eight and had coffee in front of the window, watching the street. A woman jogged by; a man in one of those spandex outfits he didn’t get rode by on an expensive- looking bike. He got awkwardly to the floor of the room and did a few sit-ups and wanted to puke. He thought about being in Juvie, where he met Manny, and work details hauling trash and clearing brush.

They had been tough little fuckers then, tanned and fit, ready for anything. They got out six days apart and started boosting cars and stereos together. They shaved their heads, and Manny gave Ray his first tattoo, SS lightning bolts on his right arm done with a homemade gun with the motor from an electric razor and a guitar string. They’d split the money from stealing and get high and go to the movies. They watched
Predator,
he remembered, over and over, doing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura to each other, capping bad guys in the jungle. “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” How different was his life now, when you broke it down? He had stopped spending money on candy and soda but still bought movies and CDs and books compulsively. Didn’t understand savings plans or IRAs, hadn’t worked forty hours in years. The year before, he had gotten his last tattoo, dope thief in heavy black Germanic letters high on his left arm. At the time maybe committing himself, or maybe just letting go of every wish he ever had for a normal life.

Ho Dinh called Ray around ten, told him to come by. He took a shower, got dressed, and put on a sweatshirt and a sport coat to help hide the automatic. He spent a last ten minutes watching the street, his face tight, before he finally jogged to Sherry’s Honda and took off.

WHEN RAY PULLED
up, Ho came out of the house and jumped in alongside him.

“Keep going, down to Green Street.”

“Where we headed?”

“West. We’re going to see a guy I know about your problem.”

“What’s he know?”

“So far, nothing. And we should talk about what you’re going to tell him. He doesn’t have to know your business, just the part about the guys from New Hampshire.” Ho took a piece of paper from his pocket and called the turns. They made their way along Kelly Drive, slaloming along the edge of Fairmount Park toward the Schuylkill River. Ho wore a light jacket even though it was in the eighties and expensive- looking sunglasses that he pushed up on his head whenever he consulted the paper.

Ray asked him if the guy they were going to see was with one of the clubs that controlled the meth business in the Delaware Valley.

Ho waggled his head back and forth. “I don’t know that he’s with any of the biker clubs, exactly, but he knows them and does business with them. They have some kind of deal together. I think he cooks for them and they distribute his product.” Ho took his glasses and cleaned them, which made him look momentarily even younger. “So if we’ve got guys from up north pushing into his area, he might care enough about that to make your fight his fight.”

“You think?”

Ho looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “You got a gun with you?”

“Under the seat. And in the glove compartment. I got more in the trunk, it comes to that. We going to need them?”

“I hope not. This guy’s a little nuts, is all I know. You can’t hang around that shit as much as he does and not be a little cooked yourself.” Ho opened the glove compartment and pulled out the Colt. He worked the slide to see that it was loaded and put it at his feet.

THEY CROSSED THE
river and made their way down Route 1 for a while, finally turning off and heading north. Ray stopped recognizing things as soon as they were out of Philly. The houses got more spread out, the yards big and green. He saw a sign for Blue Hill, and they made some more turns and came to a dirt road. When they pulled in, Ho told Ray to stop and handed him the pistol. He wedged it in his belt and pulled his sweatshirt over it.

He put the car in gear again and rolled down the rutted track that led to what looked like an abandoned shack. There was a new- looking red pickup truck pulled in next to the house and a big guy with a shaved head sitting in the bed. He had wraparound shades, and his hands were under a blanket that covered his lap. He worked a toothpick in his mouth and stared at them as they turned the car off and sat, listening to the engine tick.

Ray raised his eyebrows at Ho. “Should I have worn the vest?”

“Think bulletproof thoughts.”

Ray shook his head.

Ho looked at the big guy in the pickup. “Tell me, what’s with the shaved heads? Too much to look tough and comb your hair, too?”

“I did it once. Me and Manny, when we were young.”

“Remember why?”

“No. If I had a nickel for every stupid thing we did when we were kids.” He considered this for a minute. “Wait, I probably do.”

Ho sighed and opened the door. He kept his hands in plain sight and nodded to the guy in the truck, who inclined his head toward the open door of the house, his own hands still under the blanket.

Ho disappeared into the house for a minute, then came back to the front door and waved to Ray. He slowly pulled himself out of the car and stretched, Pickup Truck Man watching him intently. Ray wished he had a toothpick to push around in his mouth; it would keep his mind off wanting to scratch himself and causing an accidental bloodbath.

It took a long time to reach the door, but eventually Ray closed the distance and made his way in past Ho and let his eyes adjust to the darkened interior for a minute. It was hot inside, airless, as if the house had stood empty a long time. Ray took in yellowed wallpaper, a dusty coffee table, a crumbling piano, keys going brown with age.

There was a tall, thin guy folded into a chair at the table and wearing a leather jacket. He had wiry gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, and his eyes looked cloudy to Ray, like the eyes of something that lived underground. His face was long and thin, and he had his hands flat on the table. The left hand was scarred, mottled with pink lines, and his left ear looked slightly melted. A woman stood behind him cradling a Remington pump gun. She was tall, too, and probably had been beautiful once. She had tattoos on her hands, yellow sun and bright clouds on one hand, stars and a smiling blue moon on the other. There were deeply etched lines running back from her hooded eyes, which were a brilliant green. The guy outside might be paid help, Ray thought, but this one was here for love. She was the one to watch if things got weird.