The Dope Thief (14 page)

He put his hands up in front of him. They were mottled with bruises and traced with old scars. He stuck them in his pockets, but he could still feel them, swollen from what he had done. He watched her for a long time. She sipped at the coffee and looked at her watch, but she never looked up. There was something about the way she looked around her, something he recognized. Stealing glances at people and avoiding eye contact. He had taken it for flirtatiousness, but it was something else. He became conscious of the sun going down, of the street darkening. He willed her to look up and wave to him, wave him in so he could go inside and sit down, but she kept her eyes on the paper.

A couple with a baby sat down at the table next to her in a shower of pastel- colored toys and diaper bags, and she turned to look at the back of the baby’s white head. Michelle’s eyes were blank and unreadable, and Ray got that she was seeing things that weren’t in the room.

He looked up the street to his left, and when he swung his head right there was a young guy wearing sunglasses just past his elbow. He had one of those complicated- looking goatees with skinny lines of hair running alongside his mouth and down along his jaw. Ray could see a pimple under the kid’s ear and could smell his breath, fruity and sour from what ever he’d been drinking. The guy was smiling, his head cocked, and he had a jacket on and his hand in his pocket. Ray stepped back, away from the window, hoping that now wasn’t the moment Michelle would finally look up. The guy leaned into him and shook his head, and Ray turned toward him. He sensed someone move behind him, then felt a big hand on his left shoulder and heard breathing close to his ear. The kid raised his eyebrows and nodded as if Ray had asked a question.

“I seen a lot of stupid people, but you’re right up there.” The kid looked up and down the street and kept his voice low. “Man, you walk around like you got no cares. Are you really brave, is that it?” The kid moved the bulge in his jacket where his right hand lay and nodded toward the street. “You Bruce Willis, is that the thing?” The hand on his shoulder squeezed, and Ray flinched. They got closer to the curb, and Sunglasses put a hand up and gestured to someone down the street. Ray heard a throaty engine. He watched a van creep along the curb toward them.

Ray looked up and down the street. There were people around, but no one was closer than a half block away, and it was almost dark. He saw a young couple standing in front of the movie theater, the boy with curly brown hair, the girl gesturing toward a poster. They began to sort money out in front of the ticket booth, and Ray thought that by the time they got out of the movie he’d be in a hole in the woods somewhere and this kid would be kicking dirt and leaves over his face.

“You’re like a goldfish in a bowl, you know it?” The kid shook his head at Ray. “You don’t even hide from us? Come right back to your house, drive around in your own car?” The van pulled up, and Sunglasses put his free hand on Ray’s arm. He was conscious of the big man behind him moving, and then the guy stepped into view, reaching for the sliding side door of the van. He was big across the shoulders and had a shaved head, a black T-shirt, a shelf of gut over his jeans. The kid was still talking. “Eldon called me, told me your name, I figured we’d never see you again.” He started to laugh and swung his head up and down the street. “Is this, like, your job? Nine to five you’re a scumbag thief, then what? You like, punch out, go home, go see a movie?”

The big guy was turned to the door, standing in a gap between two parked cars. The kid was crowding Ray into the gap, trying to jab him with the gun hidden in his coat. There was a buzzing noise and the streetlights came on. The kid reached up and grabbed his sunglasses and began to lift them off his eyes. Ray dropped almost to his knees and then snapped up straight, cracking the top of his head against the kid’s chin and knocking him off balance. The big guy with the bald head was still turned to the van, and Ray pushed with both hands against the kid’s head, smacking it against the hood of the car behind him. The sunglasses rattled onto the car’s hood, the kid blinking, stunned.

Then he ran. He didn’t turn to look behind him, he just took off running as fast as he could down the street, past the theater. He heard the kid’s high voice, yelling something, a low grumble from someone else, and then the squealing of the van’s tires as the driver gunned the engine. He felt like his back was a target a mile wide under the lights. He saw the faces of people down the street and wanted to call to them, signal them somehow, but his throat was frozen and he couldn’t force any sound out of it.

He saw a gap between the stores on his right that resolved into an alley as he got closer, and he pivoted as he reached it and poured on as much speed as he could as he made the corner. He was a few steps down the alley when the van screeched its brakes and stopped on the street behind him. Then he could hear it bumping over the curb, trying to jockey into the alley. He could hear the footsteps, too, the kid’s lighter ones and the heavy clomp of the big guy’s boots farther back.

Ahead of him the alley emptied into a small parking lot with meters. Past the lot the town was dark and he tried to move faster. He was about five yards from a white Lexus SUV trying to make up his mind which way to break at the end of the alley, the van’s engine getting louder, when he heard a popping sound and the side window of the Lexus blew in. Two more shots smacked into the car, leaving black holes the size of quarters, and he involun-tarily jumped left, away from the shots, and cut between a Mer-cedes and another SUV, a Lincoln Navigator big enough to give him some cover as he kept going, the air burning in his mouth and lungs.

He heard a roar behind him, and he looked over his shoulder in time to see the van two feet behind him hit the massive Lincoln dead on the rear end with a popping noise of breaking glass and grinding metal. The Navigator rocked on its springs, and Ray dropped and clawed his way under the Mercedes. He could smell oil and metal and fried food from the kitchens of restaurants. There was shouting now and the sound of feet scraping along the asphalt, a civilian getting into it with whoever was driving the van.

“What the fuck?” he heard a raspy voice say, a man, maybe in his fifties. “That’s my fucking
car.”
Ray shimmied back and forth, trying to see what he could from under the Mercedes. It was a tight squeeze. His hair caught on something; flecks of rust drizzled into his eyes. The older man was loud, and his voice echoed from different points around the small, boxed- in lot.

“What the fuck are you doing?” To his right he saw oily black boots and then a pair of white bucks, probably the guy with the raspy voice. He heard someone hitting the buttons on a cell phone. “Don’t go anywhere,” he heard the guy say. He heard two low voices conferring, then a pop and a scuffling noise. The white bucks tilted, and a face slapped the ground, inches away from his, and Ray almost shouted. It was a man with white hair slicked back from his face. The face was tan, freckled, the eyes blue. The features were empty and slack, and a red arc of blood poured out of his temple and hit the ground. Ray had to cover his mouth with his hands to keep from making some kind of sound.

“Dumb fuck!” He heard a young voice, out of breath, probably the kid with the sunglasses. “You are the dumbest dumb fuck I ever saw.” There was more of the other voice, low, and then running steps and the van engine roared. He saw the van tires backing up and heard a sound of tearing metal and plastic, and the rear bumper of the Navigator hit the ground. There were sirens now and more running feet and screaming somewhere away to his left.

He could see the van tires arcing away to his right, and then it vanished from view. He began shimmying again, pushing with his feet against the tires of the Mercedes and slowly extracting himself from under the car on the driver’s side, away from the body of the man with white hair and his terrible blank eyes. He got free and lay there for a second, his chest scraped raw, his heart hammering.

There was a guy in a white apron holding a meat cleaver standing a few feet away who jumped a little when he saw Ray trying to pull himself upright. “Jesus Christ, are you all right?”

Ray made a dismissive wave with his right hand. “Okay,” he finally got out.

“Did you see them shoot that guy? Jesus Christ. They just shot him.”

“I, uh.” Ray was suddenly dizzy, out of breath, the words hanging somewhere in his brain he couldn’t get to. “I just . . .” He made a diving motion with his hand: himself crawling under the car. “When I heard the shots.”

“No shit.” The cook nodded; he’d have done the same thing. “Who needs that shit? That big fuck must be crazy.” A crowd was starting to form, people coming out of a restaurant, a bar, a candy store and taking tentative steps toward what ever was going on in the lot.

Ray moved toward them, bending over, trying to look as stricken as possible. “I have to . . .” He pointed vaguely toward the bar door he could see open.

“Sure,” the guy in the apron said. He waved with the knife. “The cops are on their way. Fucking shot, over a fender bender. Christ.”

Ray walked through the crowd. The first few people he passed looked at his face, but farther back in the crowd people were just trying to see past him, craning their necks, moving around him. He picked up the pace as he reached a sidewalk, a path between some shops that led toward the street. He walked faster, then began to jog. Where was his car?

He moved north along a tree- lined street, looking for a way to cut back toward where he had left the Camaro. He walked a long block and turned left and there was a police car, its lights on, stopped at the curb. Ray’s breath caught in his throat. A young kid with long hair was bent over, hands in his pockets, talking to the cops through the open window. Ray tried not to react, walking purposefully, trying to look as interested as any passerby would be in a cop car with its lights on, slowly blowing through his nose to keep his breathing under control. The block was short, and he kept moving up a hill as if he knew where he was going. He kept his eyes straight ahead and resisted the urge to turn and look at the cops. He passed a low building, some kind of club or lodge or something. One of those places that Ray imagined was full of dark paneling and leather chairs where men smoked cigars and talked about business. Past that he came to where another small alley opened out to the street. He turned left and saw the cop car coming out of a three- point turn and then heading up the hill toward him. No siren, but the lights going; blue, red, white.

When he was out of sight of the cops Ray began to run, his steps echoing between the close- set houses, and he looked for a place to disappear. He passed two low stone houses and jogged left and pushed through a waist- high wood gate and followed a cement path green with mildew into the dark behind a three- story Victorian haunted house, the windows dark and empty. He stopped and listened but didn’t hear the cop car or see its lights. They might not even be looking for him, might not know he was involved in what had happened in the parking lot. He stood for a while in the dark, listening to faint sounds from other parts of town. Sirens, kids shouting, music from a house somewhere nearby. A party maybe. He took his time threading his way through an abandoned garden of flattened tomato plants, gray and dead in the heat. He stepped over a low fence of iron bars and came out into a small space between two massive hedges. It was full dark, the street in front of him lit orange- white by a streetlight.

He was standing in the shadow, trying to orient himself to the street he had parked on, when Michelle appeared two feet away. She was walking uphill, a book under her arm. Her head was down, and she looked lost in thought, her lips moving silently. He put his hand out but didn’t touch her or speak, just watched her pass slowly, inches away. If she had raised her eyes, turned her head, anything. If he had made a sound, cleared his throat, moved suddenly . . .

Then she was past, and he stepped out. He watched her move up the street and turn a corner, the light catching in her hair, her face in silhouette for a moment. Then she was gone.

RAY SLIPPED OUT
from the darkness and moved back down to the busy street where he had parked. There were cops out on the sidewalks, an ambulance at the head of the alley where the bikers had shot the man with white hair. He could hear voices from police radios, and he struggled to stay calm and look like he belonged. He got his keys out and held them in his fist, tried to keep them from rattling. He passed the ambulance crew, young kids in blue jumpsuits carrying metal clipboards and leaning against a parked car, and a cop carrying a shotgun at port arms who looked at Ray hard when he passed.

Back in the Camaro, he cranked the ignition with shaking hands and felt around on the seat for his cell phone, grabbed it, and started to dial before realizing it was the one they had taken off the dead biker out in Delaware County. He tossed it away and snapped open the glove compartment, pulled the black automatic, and sat for a minute, looking compulsively up and down the street and breathing fast. Finally he decided it was better to be in motion, and he put his car in gear and pulled down the street, turned south, and picked up speed.

He dialed Manny and told him what had happened. The telling was out of order, distorted by his fear and adrenaline. He kept touching his chest and feeling his heart beat, touching his temple reflexively at the place where the hole had been in the man’s head. That man, someone’s father or grandfather was dead, and wasn’t it his fault? He hadn’t wanted any of it to happen, but if it wasn’t his doing, whose fault was it? Was everything that had happened just his fucked- up life spilling out over everyone he came across?

“How the fuck?” Manny wanted to know. “Did they follow you, or what?”

“They picked me up at my house. One of them said. Those guys at Danny’s must have called them.” He kept checking the rearview, looking for the van or anyone trying to get to close to his bumper. So taking the piece of paper with their names on it hadn’t stopped anything. How stupid, how fucking stupid could he be? The guys had called Scott, and everyone knew who they were. And who was everyone? Were there ten guys, twenty, a hundred? He was sweating but felt cold. “Fucking motherfuckers.”