The Dope Thief

Ray ran over and kicked the guy hard in the ribs. The guy put one arm around his stomach and puked into the grass. Ray dropped onto his hands and knees and smacked the guy in the head with the butt of the pistol again and again. He saw the dead woman in the bathroom and Da

He flipped over onto his stomach and put the pistol down. He could hear Ma

“Hold out your hands.”

He did as he was told and he felt tepid water being poured over his bloody fingers. He splashed the water into his eyes and blinked, and gradually his vision cleared and he sat back on his haunches. He took the bottle from Ma

He was wearing colors, a black vest with the name of a club Ray didn’t know and FRANCONIA, NH embroidered on it in red, and blood in, blood out. There were skulls and lightning bolts tattooed on his neck and the exposed parts of his arms. On the back of one hand was a spidery jail house tat of the words lights out.

“Look in his pockets.” Ma

When he came back around the SUV, Ray saw now that Ma

The Toyota started, and Ma

He drove as far as he could away from the rutted track and into the woods, maneuvering around trees and over stumps and rocks that crunched against the undercarriage, occasionally stopping to wipe sweat and blood out of his eyes. Finally he got out and went around wiping down surfaces in the car with the gray blanket from the trunk. He took the flask out of his pocket and stuffed one end of the blanket into the gas tank and dumped some of the schnapps onto it. He dumped the rest over the bodies, stinking of shit and meat already starting to turn in the heat.

Christ, when things happened they moved fast. Both events, the farm house and now in the woods with the bikers’it was like they were over before they began. Before he could make rational decisions or some kind of plan. Standing there looking at two dead men in a wrecked car, he tried to think how long it had all taken. Three minutes, five? He played things over and over in his head, but all he got was a kind of faulty instant replay that came out different every time.

In the movies they showed gunplay in slow motion, but that wasn’t it, really. It was more like everything was speeded up except you. Everyone was moving fast, coming at you with deliberation and purpose, and you couldn’t finish a thought or get ready for the next thing. He thought maybe it was like being in a hurricane or a tornado, something fast and out of control.

He flicked the lighter he had taken from the biker and lit up the blanket and walked away through the trees. When he reached the drive again, Ma

“Did it catch?”

“I don’t know. It did or it didn’t and either way we got to go.”

“You have keys?”

Ray held up the set of keys he took off the biker and jangled them. Somewhere nearby was another car. There was a distant smell of smoke, and somewhere the dog started up again, a remote, impotent sound of rage. Ray thought that if there was a God, that was his voice, just a distant complaint that didn’t make anything come out any different.

Flies buzzed, and a fat black bee made a machinelike rumble as it passed by his head. He stumbled down the drive toward the road and thought about the flies in the bathroom and the man he had just killed, his head open in the dirt. He realized this was what he had been waiting for his whole life. All of the beatings he took, every night his father had lunged at his mother or stood at the bottom of the stairs smacking a leather belt into his hand. All the times in Juvie when some hulking lump of shit smacked him down or some guard in a county jail popped him across the knuckles with a stick because he could, because Ray was inside a cage and the guard was outside and he just fucking could. Ray had taken it and stored it up like a battery, all of it, every fucking thing. All for this day, when it would come pouring out of his heart and into his hands. It was something electric, something that gave off an ozone smell and made him dizzy and blind, like being electrocuted by crossed wires in his own brain.

THEY HEADED NORTH again in a black van they found parked in the woods near the end of the drive.

When they got in, Ma

Ray thumbed through the memory, looking at calls that had come in and gone out and stored numbers. One of these, Ray thought, was probably the guy in the Charger.

They stopped at a pharmacy in Malvern, and Ray stayed in the car while Ma