The Dope Thief (16 page)

Ho moved a hand between Ray and the table. “This is Cyrus.” The man nodded at Ray, who nodded back. There was one chair, and Ray stepped forward and sat in it.

Cyrus tilted his head at the wall. “My grandfather built this place in the thirties. He built it himself from plans he saw in a Sears, Roebuck catalog. In them days you could order a house from Sears and they’d build it for you.” Cyrus had a deep, cracked voice to go with the lined face. Years of breathing chemicals.

“It’s real nice.”

“It’s all beat to shit now, but it was a good house to grow up in. My pop got killed in some rice paddy in 1963.” He nodded at Ho. “Probably by your uncle.” He put his eyes back on Ray, tilted his head. “Where’d you do your time?”

Ray thought for a minute about how much to say to someone he didn’t know. “Rockwood. Some other places.”

“I figured you for a yardbird. That where you met Luke the Gook here?” Ho chuckled and shook his head. Cyrus was quiet and intense, and Ray was on edge. He couldn’t figure whether the guy was going to blow up or if this was just how he was.

Ray shook his head. “You been inside?”

“Nope. I figure that’s what separates me from you retards. I’m ready to die to stay free.”

“That’s one way to go.”

“You should die proud when you can’t live proud.”

“Nietz sche. You’re into Nietzsche, you’d love the joint. It’s all psychos who figure they got permission from a dead German to skip on their child support and shoot their girlfriend’s dog. I don’t get it myself. I figure you want to rob a fucking gas station, go nuts. Why do you need quotes from
Twilight of the Idols
to make it cool?” Ray looked at Ho.

“Cyrus, my friend has a story to tell we thought you’d want to know.”

“I’m all ears.”

Well, Ray thought, an ear and a half, but he let it go. “There’s a guy cooking dope in farm houses in Bucks County and Montgomery County.” Suddenly, Ray wasn’t sure what he wanted from this guy.

“There’s a lot of guys cooking dope around there. What, you want a cookie?” Cyrus stood up, his left eye twitching, and Ray put his hands on the arms of the chair, closer to the pistol. “This is costing me money, parlaying with some yardbird thinks he knows shit.”

Ho said, “This guy’s got people from New En gland clubs with him.”

Cyrus was still and his face went slack. “And?”

Ray held up a hand, but Ho went on. “He’s got guys down here from Massachusetts and New Hampshire.”

“Who’s moving his shit?”

“That we don’t know.”

Cyrus sighed and looked up like they were exhausting his infinite patience.

Ho pushed his glasses up on his sweat- slick forehead. “Tell him the last bit, Ray.”

“I don’t know. I want to think about this.” Things were moving fast, and he couldn’t think. What did it mean to tell this guy everything?

Ho looked at him but kept going. “We can draw you a map.”

“You can fucking take me there.”

“Yeah, screw that.” Ray made a wiping gesture with his left hand. He was having trouble keeping it together, the guy’s hard stare working on his head. “I already seen enough of these fuckers to last me a lifetime.”

“So you want me to take care of some shit for you. You owe these guys money?”

Ray sat up straight. “That’s none of your business, Merlin.”

Cyrus slapped the table with his hand. The woman behind him pulled the shotgun down from port arms, ready to go to work.

Ho put his hands up. “Okay, let’s all take a breath.” After a long moment, Ray and Cyrus sank back into their chairs. Ho looked at Ray, who nodded. “We’ll take you there. You can look things over, see what you think.”

Cyrus breathed through his mouth. Was thinking, maybe, or just short of breath. “I’ll call you in a day or two.” Ray stood up slowly. Cyrus raised a finger. “You’re fucking with me, or you get me hung up or waste my time, you’re going to find your way to a deep hole in the dirt.”

ON THE WAY
back Ho looked at him. “Man, what the fuck was that?”

“Ah. I just can’t stand that shit. Guys like that who think they’re in charge of shit and like to lay down the law.” Like his old man, he almost said.

“Shit, Ray.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry.” He had almost lost control of things, pushed the crazy fucker too hard and made something bad happen. Something was happening to him, he could feel it. Old feelings and resentments were just beneath the surface of his skin, like barbs he couldn’t get out.

Ho looked over at him. “Ray, this guy might be our ticket out of this thing.”

Ray thought about that, about the fact that Ho’s name was on the paper he had taken off the dead biker and what that might mean. He thought about Tina and the kids and got a sick feeling. He knew there was no ticket out, but a chance, maybe, and he’d have to take it or other people would pay for his stupidity.

He decided that what ever happened, he’d try to keep Ho and Manny at a distance. As they drove, he and Ho talked about what Cyrus might do and about other characters they had known in their business, most of them locked up or dead. Ho told Ray about his cousins who lived in Thailand and worked protection for Thai warlords moving meth from Burma.

Ray frowned. “Meth? Really? I think of opium or heroin coming out of there.”

“Who knew? Turns out they can make it and move it here and it’s still cheaper than the stuff made by those hillbillies you take off.”

“The invisible hand, huh? I guess if it works for sneakers and T-shirts it works for dope.”

Ho said, “Still, it’s kind of depressing, isn’t it? Another line of work for high school dropouts closed off by foreign competition.” They laughed.

“It’s the same everywhere, isn’t it? You’ve been overseas.”

“Yeah, I guess in most places it’s only worse. It’s a crappy deal for people with nothing no matter where you are.”

Ray looked up as they got back into the city, and he saw a row of tired- looking people waiting for a SEPTA bus on Roosevelt Boulevard. He thought about how the fact that he was outside of the law and straight life didn’t control his reaction to the way the world worked. His father had started off a working man, and Ray still thought of himself as working class, distrusted the rich, still thought there was something worse about Enron and country club crime than what he did.

He tried to put it into words, couldn’t get it straight in his head, but said, “I mean, you got thousands of years of human history, people thinking about how to get organized, how to distribute work and money, and what? This is it? This is the best we can do?”

He made a gesture that took in everything around them. The Korean dry cleaners and the Mexican kids standing outside the car wash, the lined and anxious faces of the women at the bus stop. Maybe the fix he was in, too.

“Every man for himself?”

“Worse. Worse than that.” What his mother had always said, bent over the unpaid bills like a galley slave over an oar, her face bruised with worry: “Dog eat dog.”

FOR TWO NIGHTS
Ray stayed in a motel in Marlton across the river in Jersey. Clean, but the towels were like sandpaper and the bed sagged in the middle. He called Theresa on the cell phone the first morning. She’d won eight hundred dollars playing nickel slots.

“Christ, Ma, that’s like sixteen thousand nickels. What do they bring, a wheelbarrow?”

“They pay in cash, smart- ass.”

“Keep it somewhere safe, that’s all.”

“Don’t worry about my money, dope fiend. I’m saving it to spend on my grandchildren.”

“Okay, I can see where this is going. I’ll check in later.”

“I talked to the lawyer about your father.”

“That’s great. I’ll talk to you later.”

She started to tell him something else, and he hung up.

AT NIGHT HE
cruised up and down 73 in Sherry’s Honda. He’d stop and get a drink at an empty bar, then get antsy and leave. He ordered from the drive- through at the Taco Bell. He felt like a shark circling in black water. Moving up and down from Marlton to Berlin, restless, jumpy, watching his rearview mirror and not knowing what to expect. The stations on Sherry’s radio were tuned to Jesus and teenage- girl pop, and he dialed around until he found a black gospel station promising hell but offering full-throated music against the Day of Judgment. He went around the circle at 70 and followed it west. He passed dark industrial parks and convenience stores, finally pulled in at a strip joint in Pennsauken that billed itself as an International Gentlemen’s Club. He sat in the car and pulled a one- hitter from under the seat and filled his nostrils with coke. He felt his pulse begin to race and his gums went numb. The car began to get hot, and when he opened the door he could smell the tar from the parking lot and the exhaust from passing trucks.

He sat at the bar and ordered a vodka and tonic and then turned to watch a short, wiry girl in a half- T move languorously up and down along the pole, her back arched. Her hair was a sooty, unnat ural black, and all he could think about was how different she was from Michelle. Her eyes were half- closed, her movements as slow as if she were a sleepwalker, or moving against a current in a dark sea. Waitresses with hair tortured blond moved from table to table under dim red and blue spotlights that made it look as if they were being alternately frozen and then roasted alive. He finished the first drink fast and took another to a table in a corner. There was a black light overhead that made his shirt an unnatural white. He had more drinks and went to the men’s room to do more blow, navigating the tables of gray- haired businessmen and kids with baseball caps doing a frantic pantomime of desire for their friends.

The girl from the stage came down and stood by him, her teeth brilliant in the ultraviolet light. He leaned into her, and she whis-pered to him. He took money out and gave it to her. She stood closer to him, and he felt heat in his face and along his arms. She smelled like perfume, something sharp and astringent, and beneath that sweat and cigarettes. She moved between his legs and breathed into his neck and somehow kept from touching him. Ray moved his hand along her leg, and she smiled and moved back a few inches. He held out a twenty, and she rolled a hip toward him so that he could put it beneath the band of the G-string.

“I know the rules,” he said.

“Do you?”

“I just don’t want to follow them.” He opened his fist and began counting off hundred- dollar bills. She closed her hand over his and told him she’d be done at eleven thirty.

HE WALKED OUT
, crouching to hide his insistent erection until he reached the car. He did another hit and rubbed his cramping jaw, blinking under the lights, which now looked ringed with purple motes from the dope in his blood. He drove back out to 73 and went into a package store. He walked up and down the aisles, conscious of being high. The aisles tilted away from him; the labels were too small to read. He walked up and down with a basket, eventually getting the layout. In the end he took a bottle of vodka and two bottles of tonic to the front and also bought pretzels and a handful of lottery tickets to give to Theresa, who saw tickets from another state as exotic: unfamiliar fruit from another continent.

Back out on the road, he drifted again, killing time. At the last minute he caught the sign for a used- book store and cut the wheel fast to catch the driveway. He killed the engine and took a pull from the bottle and washed it down with a long swig from the tonic water, which fizzed hot in his mouth and dribbled down his shirt. He wiped his hand over his mouth and blotted at his beard.

Inside it was quiet. A young woman with her lip and nose pierced stood at the counter talking on a red cell phone. He walked up and down the aisles, hunched over and trying to read the flaked and broken spines of westerns, mysteries with culinary themes, horror novels with titles that seemed to leak blood. He settled on Louis L’Amour, one of the Sackett books he knew but hadn’t read in a while.

Next to the counter was a stand of cheap DVDs like the one in the store where Michelle worked. While the girl rang him up, the cell phone stuck between her ear and her raised shoulder, he flipped through the movies, looking for something he knew.

“Do you have
Night of the Demon
?”

She held out his change, shook her head, turned her back to finish her call. He felt the chemical thunderbolt of the cocaine in his blood and a flash of loneliness and shame that made his shoulders cave in on themselves, and he went to the car and pawed around for the vodka.

He went back to the club and waited for the black- haired dancer, who came out with a bouncer and turned and said a few words to him before he went back inside. He waited, then got out and gave a nervous half- wave, and she pointed to her car. He pulled out, and she followed in a black Jetta.

IN HIS ROOM,
she said she didn’t have much time; her mother was watching her son and expected her home at midnight.

“He’s nine.” She held up a cigarette and raised her black eyebrows, and he nodded. She fished in her purse and brought out a Zippo and a scuffed photo of a tiny kid with a mass of black curls in an oversized football jersey and shoulder pads. He smiled at the picture, and she looked at it, and when she put it away Ray could see her hands were shaking. He watched her light the cigarette, her full lips pursed and her eyes watching his.

He sat on the edge of the bed, and she came over and sat in his lap fully clothed. He put one arm around her but thought of a small, black- haired kid in a messy living room watching TV, the grandmother asleep in the blue wash of light, mouth open, dentures loose. A smell of unwashed laundry and old cigarette smoke.

He could feel a tremor in her arm across his chest. At the club he had wanted her with an ache that seemed to run through him, carried in his blood. Under the yellow light from the cheap bed-table lamp, it all fell out of him and he could see she was afraid that he might be a cop, that he might beat her. She wanted him to know about her son. She wanted the money for her rent, or maybe to get high. He had always known this about the massage parlor women, the strippers he had briefly dated or just fucked for money. Something about killing a man with his hands, or almost getting killed himself, or turning thirty, or talking to his father had changed the way he saw things. The way he saw himself, moving through the world. Maybe it had just been the house on Jefferson Avenue, the picture of the girl in her cap and gown looking so much like Marletta, and her voice in his head again. The way she had looked at him and the things he had let himself want when he held her.