The Dope Thief

“Yeah, I guess.” Ray liked Ho, didn’t like to think of the moment they couldn’t trust him anymore.

“Then? At that minute? He’s not thinking long term.”

AFTER A FEW minutes they came to a bridge and crossed into Frenchtown on the Jersey side of the river. The houses were dark and nothing was open. When the road dead- ended again they turned south on 29, following the black coil of the river and passing through crossroad towns, most of them too small to have names. When they hit Lambertville, Ray told Ma

CHAPTER FIVE

THEY WERE TOO freaked to go home, so they rented a room at a no- name motel in Bordentown. Ray paid for the room, and Ma

They developed a system, Ma

“I can’t fucking count any more. I’m fried.”

“Where are we?”

“Right now, I’m at’” He added a column of figures on the pad. “One hundred and twenty seven thousand, six hundred, give or take. Not counting the dope. And there’s still all this shit over here.” He picked up a pile of loose bills and let it drop.

“Jesus Christ.” Ma

“Unless it’s not theirs.”

“The guys in the Charger?”

Ray shrugged. The most they had taken off anyone had been twenty- two thousand, from a Salvadoran crack dealer in a hous ing project in Bensalem, and that had been dumb luck. The Salvadoran’s crew of jugglers’underage kids who stood on the street and serviced the rockheads walking or driving by’had been sitting at the kitchen table emptying their pockets at the end of the day. One of them, who looked about nine, had actually started to cry when Ray and Ma

RAY WALKED OVER to the sink and ran the water, dumping it over his head with his hands. Ma

“Seriously, man, what the fuck do we do next?” Ma

“We could run. Between this and the shit we got stashed, we could stay gone awhile.”

“But?”

“But I don’t know. You and me can run, but what about Sherry, or her mom, or Theresa? It seems like all they have to do is get ahold of someone we know and go to work. So unless we’re taking everyone we know and moving away, we have to figure out a way to deal with this.”

Ma

Ray adjusted the curtains to cut down on the light coming through and snapped off the light. He walked over and threw himself on one of the beds and put his hands over his eyes. “I gotta sleep for an hour. Get my head straight, so I can think. The guy wasn’t from around here. Did you hear his voice?”

“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 Ma

Ma

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

Ma

“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 Ma

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 ski