Dennis Tafoya - The Dope Thief

“I used to think that. I used to be one smart motherfucker.” He watched a bee hover in the light from under the door, jinking back and forth, looking for an angle on something it wanted. “Now I don’t know shit.” He took the keys to the padlock out of his pocket and gave one to Manny.

“Listen, I got to say this out loud. You think there’s any point in giving the money back?”

“Only if you want to be standing still when they kill you.”

“Yeah.”

“You heard that fucking guy’s voice. What do you think he’s going to do? Say thanks and no hard feelings?”

Ray shook his head. He couldn’t say he saw it any different. He shifted on the cement. “If anything happens, we… split up or you don’t know what happened to me, just leave my bag here for a month and then come back and give the rest to Theresa.”

“You don’t have to say it.”

“I know. See, I’m making the possibility that you could lose track of me but I could still be alive. Just by saying it out loud.”

“You think that’s how it works?” Manny smiled and shook his head. “So, we go into this fucking hornet’s nest and I don’t come out. And if I don’t come back and get my hundred and fifty thousand dollars, it’s not because someone stuck a gun in my mouth and punched my ticket.”

“No, not necessarily. You could’ve just gotten real busy doing something else and the money just slipped your mind.”

“I think you slipped your mind. Look, Ray, we’re just a couple of lowlifes. Guys like us, we make our run and we go out. We get locked up, we get killed.” Kilt, the way Manny said it. “We knew it going in.”

“Did we? I don’t remember going in, is the thing. It was like I was born in.”

“Yeah, well, I never got what you were doing anyway.” Manny scratched his neck. “I mean, you were smart enough not to get caught up in this shit.”

“I was? Why didn’t someone tell me before?”

Manny tipped a bottle of water over his hair and shook his head like a dog coming in out of the rain. “I don’t know. I figure it’s some kind of fuck- you to your old man. Something like that.”

“Maybe.”

“Anyway, you were always good company, and who wants to do this shit alone?”

AN HOUR AND a half later they were coming off of 202 in Malvern. The sky was full of clouds, white and dark blue moving across the sun. Things could go either way, more rain or more sun. There was a breeze, but it was just hot air moving. Ray kept trying Danny’s cell phone number but got nothing. It didn’t mean much. Danny used, and he could’ve lost the phone or had his service turned off or just been bingeing on dope and ignoring the ring. They turned onto a narrow country lane, and Ray began looking at the numbers on mailboxes. Finally they turned into a driveway that wasn’t much more than a trail into the woods.

The house where Danny lived with his mother was speckled with green’some kind of mold or fungus that made it seem as if the house were being reclaimed by the forest. There was a washing machine rusting in the yard and cracked and rotted asbestos tiles on the walls. A pickup truck sat in the carport with blue plastic covering a missing passenger side window. Manny turned off the engine, and they sat for a minute, watching the house. Somewhere far away a dog barked and birds moved in the trees. Ray began to open the door, and Manny put a hand on his arm and reached into the backseat for the vests. They struggled into them, sweat pouring down their backs, and then stretched and shrugged, trying to get used to the bulk. Manny lifted a hip and awkwardly dug a one-hitter out of his jeans, and they both did jolts of brown meth. Ray smacked his forehead while the dope burned in his sinuses like he’d fired a flare gun into his head.

They both got out and left the doors of the 4Runner open. Ray held up his hand for Manny to stay at the car. He nodded to Ray and pulled his shotgun from under the seat and stood with the open door between him and the house. Ray reached over the seat and got his Colt semiauto and worked the slide, putting a round in the chamber. Maybe it was all for nothing, maybe Danny was okay and they could give him some money and send him packing, but the house sat there closed and quiet in the woods, and Manny and Ray looked at each other, feeling wrong.

Manny wiped sweat from his face with the heel of his hand. He flexed his shoulders and whispered, “Christ, I can barely move in this thing. I feel like a fucking astronaut.”

Ray held the Colt behind his leg and walked to the front door. He looked back at Manny and then knocked on the door with his fist. “Danny!”

They stood for a minute. Ray blotted at the sweat at his temple with the back of his free hand. He knocked again, this time banging the butt of the pistol against the door. After a minute he tried the door and found it unlocked. He looked back at Manny, who put the shotgun sight on the door. Ray stood clear and pushed the door open, flattening himself against the outside wall. There was no sound except the door creaking as it opened. Manny shook his head.

Ray moved inside, pointing the gun into the hallway ahead of him. He called Danny’s name again and waited. After a minute with no sound but the birds in the trees and the faraway dog, he moved down the hallway into the kitchen. He circled through the first floor, checking the empty rooms. The place was a mess, and there was a stink of unemptied garbage and mildew. In the living room there was a big new flat- screen TV standing next to the box it came in. This was Danny spending his end of the score he had put Manny and Ray onto before he even got his hands on it. In the living room a few steps from the front door, a suitcase was open on the floor. Clothes were pulled out and heaped on the dirty carpet.

He went to the front door and shrugged at Manny, who came out from behind the car door and moved around the back of the house. Ray went up the stairs, and the garbage smell got stronger. All the doors were open except one, and Ray moved to it and stood in front of it for a moment, adjusting the pistol in his sweaty hand. Finally he pushed the door open and looked for a minute before stepping away and breathing through his mouth, gasping and spitting to keep from throwing up.

He forced himself to look again. An old woman was in the tub. There was blood and vomit on her chin and down the front of her robe. One eye stared, a milky blue. There was a hole in her chest and her throat was open. There were flies walking in the blood on her mouth and a terrible buzzing noise that filled the small room. Ray used the sleeve of his coat to grab the door handle and pulled it closed, wiping it again after it was shut. He didn’t want to see what might be in the other rooms and ran down the stairs and out the front door. He heard Manny calling his name as he wiped the doorknob and pulled the door shut.

He moved cautiously around the house, the gun out and pointing down. He came around the corner into a junk- strewn backyard. Manny passed him going the other way, back out to the car. In the back a Plymouth Fury was up on blocks, the exposed wheels rusted through. There was a woodpile with spiderwebs running down one side and an ancient deflated football stuck in the mud. There was a clothesline strung from the house to a pole stuck in cracked cement. And there was Danny, staring at the sky. Thinning red hair showing white scalp, pale blue eyes. His right arm was broken over a flat tree stump, and there was an axe separating his right hand from his fingers.

Ray heard the car starting and looked around the yard, rubbing his own right arm. He looked everywhere but at Danny. After a minute, he went back to the front of the house.