The Dope Thief (27 page)

Ray got awkwardly to his feet, Michelle running across the lawn to help him. Together they helped Stan Hicks get up, and they went with him inside. The house was bright and empty, and there were pictures of Marletta and her mother. Michelle stood in the entryway and looked at them, and then at Stan Hicks and Ray standing in the kitchen. Ray got a glass from a cabinet and ran the water, filled it, and handed it to the older man.

Ray leaned back against the counter. “My mother always did that.”

“Mine, too.” Stan Hicks wiped at his eyes with his sleeve.

“It always helped.”

They both looked at Michelle. For the first time, the older man smiled. “Just like my girl.”

HE WAS IN
the store late on a Wednesday night, unpacking boxes and thinking about locking the door, when one of the detectives from the hospital came in. The tall one, good cop, the one named Nelson. The detective looked around and rocked on his heels. Ray waved from where he was kneeling in the space between the register and a display table, motioning him further in.

“Nice place, Raymond.”

“Ray. Everyone calls me Ray, Detective.” He stuck out his hand.

“Right. Ray.”

Ray pointed down the stacks. “Take a look around. Help yourself to anything catches your eye.”

Nelson scratched his ear, smiled.

Ray said, “If that’s not a problem. Graft or something.”

Nelson pulled out his note pad and gestured at a table and two chairs up against the far wall. “You got a second?”

Ray hesitated half a beat, then pointed to the chair nearest the door. “Sure. You want some coffee?”

Nelson said yes, and Ray went back to the storeroom, returning with two cups. Nelson had wedged his tall frame into the seat, and his notebook was open on the table. But Ray’s eye was drawn by the paper- wrapped bottle that sat next to it. Green glass and a red cap that Nelson unscrewed. He poured a small dollop of the brown liquid into his coffee and held it out to Ray, who wagged his head for a second indecisively before saying sure, what the hell. Nelson sipped at his coffee, and they sat for a minute.

“You’re seeing someone.”

“You been keeping tabs.”

Nelson laughed, holding up his hands to make peace. “No, really. Just saw you in the coffee shop with a woman.”

“Michelle. She’s usually here, but she’s taking a writing class at Bucks.”

Nelson nodded. “Nice. She seems like a nice lady, Ray.” He looked sheepish. “Not doing so hot in that area myself.”

Ray sipped at the coffee, made a face. “Forgot how bitter it is.”

“Only at first.” They sat in silence, Nelson tapping his pen on his cup.

“I gotta ask.”

“Why am I here?”

“Well, yeah. Is it about the kid in the house in Falls Township?”

Nelson shook his head. “No, but thanks for that. They got the kid out.”

“Good. I saw the news.”

“They took two bodies out of the yard. Young girls who disappeared. At least we can tell the families something.”

“That’s good, I guess. And you got the kid out?”

“Yeah, into family services. I didn’t think you’d want your name in it.”

“No.”

“But that’s not why I came.”

Ray raised his eyebrows. “Okay.”

“I’ve been asking around. About what happened the year you went upstate.” Ray stopped smiling, and waited. “I talked to Perry March’s mother.”

“His mother?”

“He’s dead.” Ray shook his head. Nelson tapped the notebook. “Overdose, two years ago. She told me some interesting things.”

“Yeah?”

“She said Perry would get high and talk about Stan Hicks and you and the car. She said her son was afraid of Stan and that Perry told her he lied about you taking the car because he was jammed up on a possession thing.” Ray put his coffee cup down and looked at his hands. “I looked at the records from the accident. And I looked at the medical records from the County Youth Authority the night you got your arms broken.”

Ray rubbed his arms then, an old reflex. Feeling the thickened bones that ached when it was cold.

Nelson said, “I talked to Stan Hicks.”

Ray looked up now. “How did that go?”

“He told me you’d been there. He told me everything.”

“I guess he’s ready to tell it.”

“He laid it all out. How he pressured Perry March with the possession beef and got him to say you stole his car. The guy who hit you and Marletta? The guy who was killed? He was a drunk. Blood alcohol well over the line. Your blood screen was clean. Stan pressured the DA, made her life hell until she made you a priority. Then he took you out of County in the middle of the night and broke your arms with something, I can’t figure out what. You went to prison with busted arms at seventeen. Stayed for two years for something you didn’t do.”

Ray was quiet. “The jack from his car. He said. It was dark. He told the Youth Authority I ran away from him in the dark and fell off a loading dock. I said, sure, what ever. I didn’t care.”

“So, what do you want to do?”

“Do?”

“About Stan Hicks. What do you want to do?”

Ray shook his head, surprised. “Nothing.” He picked up the coffee again. “I really forgot. It does kind of grow on you.”

“You might be able to press charges, I don’t know. Maybe sue, collect some money.”

“No, I’m not doing that.” Ray looked into the cup.

Nelson looked at him and rocked a little in his chair. “Okay, so . . .”

“You never knew her?”

“Marletta? No.”

Ray looked at his pale hand. “She was, I don’t know the words. There was a light inside her. Ever know anyone like that? She glowed.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “She was one of those people. You just liked her. And she was the only one who cared about me.”

“You feel guilty?”

“I was driving. I can’t remember now, but I know what I was like then. Looking at her and not the road? I can’t remember, and I don’t want to anymore. Anyway, I can imagine what it was like for him. If she was my family? And then to lose her like that? I was Stan Hicks I would have done the same.” His eyes clouded over. “Worse.”

“You got hit by a drunk driver, Ray. You can’t think she’d have wanted you to go to jail.”

“No, she’d have hated that.”

“How did you make it? With broken arms?”

“Harlan Maximuck.” Nelson shook his head, not getting it. Ray said, “Harlan had a younger brother died in prison in Maine.” He conjured Harlan then, tall and lopsided, walking with a hitched step, a staccato lope from where a statie had tagged him with shotgun pellets in the thighs when he and an even crazier friend had robbed a pawnshop and killed two people. Broad across the chest and wild brown hair that he’d stab at with oddly delicate hands, trying to keep it out of his eyes.

“So he, what? Adopted you?”

Ray pursed his lips. “Guys like you? Like anyone I guess hasn’t been sent up. You see Harlan as a scumbag. As, I don’t know. Evil, I guess.”

“And you think, what? He was misunderstood?”

“No. No.” Ray looked at the books on the shelves and tried to stretch for the words. “He kept me alive. He didn’t have to. He didn’t take anything off me. Except what he took off everybody.” Ray smiled at a memory. “He’d be talking to you and, like, going through your pockets. Looking for cigarettes, what ever. I even saw him start to do it to a CO once.” Nelson picked up the bottle again and offered it to Ray, who waved him off. “But he was crazy. I mean he was
crazy
. I saw him, well . . . One time this guy flicked cigarette ash in his oatmeal? Harlan shanked him with a fucking pork chop bone.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. So it’s not like I don’t know who he is. Would he rat me

out if that was in his best interest? Yes. Would he fuck me over in

a deal? Yes, if by some tragic fucking wheel of fortune miscalcu

lation he ever gets out again.” Ray leaned in. “But he
also
did this.

He’s also this.” Made a circle in the air to include himself, the

body saved. “Guys like Harlan? And Manny? Me, too? We’re more and we’re less than you think. Worse and better. And the thing is, all you people are, too.”

“So what does a cop do about that?”

Ray smiled wide. “Lock us up. What the hell else can you do? But maybe know, too. You lock up the good and the bad and sometimes both in the same person.”

Nelson squinted, not entirely convinced. “Maybe.”

“You think a person is defined by the worst thing he ever did? The most desperate, the most terrible day in his life?” He got a glimpse of himself in the farm house in Ottsville, the smoke hanging in the air, the milk and blood pooled on the floor and his head on fire.

“That’s how the law sees it.”

“What about Stan Hicks? He probably locked up a lot of guys who broke the law, bad guys who hurt people. You’re willing to send him away, too?”

“It’s the law, Ray. Without the law, what do we have?”

Ray lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know. Just a lot of fucked- up people trying to get through a day.”

ADRIENNE GRAY STAGGEREd
home at two o’clock on a Saturday morning, and Ray was sitting on her steps in a bright cone of light. She started when she saw him and stepped back, holding her keys out. Her eyes were wide but red and bleary.

“Adrienne.”

“Is that you, Ray?”

“Yes, it’s me.” She put a hand on her heart.

“Jesus Christ. You scared the crap out of me.”

“Sorry.” He thumped the cold stair next to him. “Come sit and talk to me.”

She lifted her shoulders, patted her arms. “It’s cold out, hon. Can’t we talk tomorrow? I’ll come by the store.”

“No. Come here.” She made a gesture of giving up with her spread arms and slowly navigated the step and parked herself on the step below him, holding her arms in her thin coat. Ray took off his parka and put it over her shoulders, and she smiled at him and pulled the sleeves together.

They had started talking, Ray finding her coming out of Kelly’s or Chambers and walking her home. Trying to pull her into the store instead of letting her go back up the hill to the bars. Bringing her books she didn’t read.

“Adrienne.”

“What can I do for you, hon? You lonely?”

“No. Adrienne, you need help.”

She stood up slowly and turned to look down at him. “And you’re going to help me?”

“I’ll do what I can.” He lifted a shoulder, not sure how this should go.

In the cold light he saw her face close up, a subtle shift in her muscles, the way a closed hand becomes a fist. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Nobody. But you need a friend.”

“I got all the fucking friends I need. The bars are full of them.” She shucked the coat and threw it down at his feet.

“I don’t think those are your friends, Adrienne.”

“What the hell do you know about it? What the hell do you want from me anyway?”

He jammed up, not ready for her to be so amped up, ready to fight. “Don’t you want to get right? Get clean?”

“So I can be what, like you? Your life’s a picnic and I’m invited?”

“No, man. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know is right.” She stalked up the steps, her small, hard shins banging his bad leg. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You don’t know me.”

“Adrienne.”

She took a couple of steps back down toward him, and he retreated, almost losing the rail.

“I lost my father. One day he’s a lawyer and he’s got money and respect and he takes care of me and the next day he’s dead, and his name gets dragged through the mud, and now he’s a shit-bag who stole money, and how do I even know what’s true? Everyone knows but me. Everyone knows he’s a shitbag. And me? I’m the shitbag’s daughter. You going to make that go away? Are you?”

“No.”

“And how do you even know my name? Where did you come from?”

“I’m nobody. I just thought. . .”

“Yeah, you just thought.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Go home, Ray.”

“Adrienne. Goddammit.” “Go home.”

TWO O’CLOCK IN
the morning and Ray’s cell rang at the apartment on Mary Street. He looked at the number and didn’t recognize it.

He whispered, “Hello?” Michelle sat up, widening her eyes to clear the sleep, her hair rucked to one side from sleeping on it. He kissed her and winked while he listened. Then his face changed and he started nodding.

HE HADN’T BEEN
inside Manny’s in almost a year. It was a narrow apartment fronting 611, quiet now at three in the morning. He looked right and left moving through the dark parking lot, the careful habits of his old life slow to desert him.

Sherry met him at the door, small and pale under unwashed black hair, speed- rapping about how she couldn’t get him up and he was just so lazy and she thought about an ambulance but who was paying for that? He put her in a chair in front of the tele vi -sion, noticing the scattered potato chip wrappers, the empty beer cans on the table, the smell. The same smell he’d got off the bag Manny’d left at Theresa’s. Sherry chewed her nail and watched an infomercial with couples in Hawaii wearing flower print shirts and looking painted into the scenery, tapped her feet on the table, blinking.

He made his way back to the bedroom where Manny was stretched out, blue and still. The orange sodium lamps on the street half lit the room, a salvage diver’s light illuminating a tiny wedge of a wreck in black water. He was facing up, naked to the waist, and Ray sat down next to him and touched an arm like cold putty. He got out his cell, called an ambulance, and waited. Heard Sherry muttering to herself about getting a dog, about money she was owed by her sister in Kutztown.

Manny’s mom had died when they were in Juvie. Abducted from some bar in Bristol, left in plastic bags by the side of the road. When he heard the CO say it, Manny slugged him in the face and ran for the fence. Three guards brought him down, got him in a choke hold and threw him into Isolation, and Ray went that night, one of the female guards taking him back to the door to try to calm Manny down. Ray banged on the door, called out, and looked through the tiny, smudged window, seeing nothing. Finally he slid open the chute and stuck his arm through and grabbed Manny around his skinny bicep and just held on, feeling the muscle vibrate and hearing his friend’s ragged breath.