Dennis Tafoya - The Dope Thief

He got takeout from the Golden Palace on 611 and sat in the dark listening to music. He ran through his Stan Ridgway CDs, grabbed by the strange mood of songs about loners drifting on western highways and people on the run from big trouble or fucked over by the ones they loved. He wanted to get into the last of the heroin, but he had things to do, so he loaded up the one-hitter with some coke Ho had given him the last time he had been at the big stone house in Chestnut Hill where he lived with his wife, Tina, and three kids. Ray had brought coconut rum and pineapple juice, something they were drinking that summer, and Ho and Tina kept bringing dishes out of the kitchen that smelled of tamarind and lotus and laughing gently at Ray’s attempt to pronounce them.

Manny pulled up in front of the house at about midnight. Ray was already in his car and blinked the headlights when Manny pulled up. He followed Manny up 611 and then north on 202 into Jersey. The night out here was black except for the lights of farm-houses and little developments far away. There was lightning in the clouds but no rain, and Ray put the window down and smelled wet grass and asphalt, the smell of country roads.

It reminded Ray of riding the back roads with Manny when they were kids. Alternating long sips of vodka from the bottle with swigs of orange soda. A girl with a black eye they had picked up in Bristol. White- blond hair and Kmart perfume. They had pulled into a turf farm somewhere off Swamp Road and run around, drunk and high, screaming and rolling in the grass. Manny turned the radio up, and they lay on the cooling hood of the car and passed a beer- can bong back and forth and talked about running away to California. He remembered that he couldn’t stop looking at the girl’s small hands, fixed on them moving white in the dark, in that way that you sometimes did when you were high.

Now they pulled off the road into a soybean field. Ray stopped just off the road, and Manny pulled the van about fifty yards in and got out. Ray killed the lights and waited, and after a couple of minutes he could see Manny’s silhouette against the orange haze in the sky from the cities to the north. There was a yellow glow visible through the rear window of the Ford that grew until it filled the back of the van. As they backed onto the road, Ray saw the windows blow out. They headed back down 202. Halfway across the bridge, Manny cranked down the window and sailed the plates out over the Delaware.

They stopped at a diner in New Hope and had a cup of coffee. They sat in silence, and Ray watched the young waitress come and go. She had a big ring on her left hand.

“Tell me about the guy who put you onto the house.”

“Yeah, I been thinking about that. Danny Mullen, from down in Charlestown, over near Valley Forge. I saw him about three weeks ago down at the Neshaminy. He put us on the place in Marcus Hook, remember?”

“I remember. What did he say this time?”

Manny lifted his shoulders, spread his hands. “I don’t know. He said he knew this place up north, a meth lab where some buddies of his had copped, and did I want it.”

“Nothing weird?”

“He did say the guy was crazy, but I figured what the fuck did that mean? Who’s in that business, you know? Sane people?” They watched the waitresses carrying plates of pie to a table of giggling teenagers at the front of the diner.

Ray tapped the table twice with his index finger, tried to look decisive. “Okay, we see Ho and we see Danny. Try to figure out if there’s a way to know who we’re dealing with. Did you talk to Sherry?”

“Yeah, I told her stay with her ma a few days. She was pissed, but she’ll get over it.”

“I figure I’ll try to get Theresa out of town for a while.”

“Yeah, good luck with that. When was the last time she was out of town?”

“She likes Atlantic City. She goes down on the bus with her girlfriends. I could stick her in a hotel down there for a couple days, I guess.”

“How long do we do this? When is this, you know, over?” Ray shrugged and looked out the window, trying to keep the feeling like he had a plan and it was going to lead somewhere. He kept dancing around the end of it in his mind. Could they talk to the guy? Scare the shit out of him? Get something on him that made it more of a pain in the ass to come after them than it was worth? It was like a chess game where all the other guy’s pieces were invisible while his own sat out in plain sight, waiting to get taken off the board.

The deal with Ho was supposed to keep this kind of shit from happening. Some crazy fucker might blow up at them, but mostly they were closing down people who would slink away and never be heard from again, or pull up stakes for some place where any tweaker with some ambition and a few charcoal briquettes could go into business.

THE NEXT MORNING was Sunday, and Ray got up early, restless and fidgety. He took a shower and went out to his car and pulled out, not knowing where he was heading until he found himself on 611 going north toward Doylestown. He cranked the window down, and the warm air felt good after all the rain of the days before. When he reached the town he parked and sat for a minute. As soon as he stopped the car, the air inside began to heat up and he began to sweat. He thought about putting on his jacket anyway, the better to carry the little.32 he had with him, but in the end he just left the pistol in the jacket and the jacket in the car. He walked by the bookstore again, but the dark- haired girl wasn’t there. He prowled around the aisles for a while and bought himself a book on classic horror films, the kind of movie he hadn’t been able to stay away from when he was a kid, even though thoughts of the monsters kept him awake at night.

He took his book and walked up the street, stopping at a Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee and then walking aimlessly past craft shops and jewelry stores. He liked the town. There were gaslights on the street and nice old buildings with a little character in the details. He walked and sipped at the coffee and sweated till he came to a bench in the shade of a tree and sat down and paged through the book. He was trying to find a reference to the movie the girl had recommended when he looked up and there she was. She was walking along with a paper cup of coffee and stopped to sip out of it, wearing a blue oxford shirt with long sleeves and what he thought of as a peasant skirt that hung almost to her ankles, some kind of reddish- brown print from India or someplace. He smiled and watched her walk toward him and almost didn’t say anything as she got closer, until she was right beside him, looking distracted.

“Hey,” he said, and held a hand up. She looked at him for a minute with a frown, and he began to feel nervous and maybe a little disreputable, and then her faced changed and she cocked her head and gave him that crooked smile again.

“Hey, Night of the Demon.” She laughed and shook her head. “I’m sorry! I don’t remember your name.”

“No, I’ve been called worse. Anyway, I don’t think I ever said it.”

“No, but still. I could have said the cute guy who was looking for a movie, or something.” Her teeth were white and even, and he felt the levers moving in him again, wheels spinning and metal balls dropping and rolling through the hollow pipes inside him.

“I’m Ray.”

“Michelle.” She shook her head. “This is wild. Do you live nearby?” She looked away, and then back at him.

“No, actually down near Willow Grove. This is the second time I’ve been here, and I’ve seen you both times. Are you like the mayor or something?”

“The official greeter. How are you enjoying your stay in our little town?”

“Swell. You should have a sash and a top hat for a job like that.” He should have been nervous and distracted, with his head on a swivel for trouble and unfamiliar faces, but he was relaxed and warm inside, and he let himself focus on the girl. On Michelle. She laughed and sat down next to him, and he moved over to make room. She reached over and put her hand in the book, took glimpses of him out of the corner of her eye. He could smell that sweet, fruity smell again.