Dennis Tafoya - The Dope Thief

He stood on the street, looked back up at the store one last time to make sure the lights were off, and was nearly knocked off his unsteady feet by Edward Gray’s daughter coming down the sidewalk, listing to one side and paddling at the air with one stiff arm. He searched his mind for her name. She held up her hands and spoke with deliberation.

“I’m so sorry.” Adrienne, that was her name. She smelled like sour fruit and was underdressed for the weather in a sweater and scuffed jeans. She said, “A little dark out here to night,” and smiled. Drunk, he realized. Her eyes were shadowed pits in her head.

“My fault,” he said and meant it. “Standing around in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking traffic.”

She patted hair the color of foam on a lifeless pond. “Not at all. Not at all.”

She kept moving along the street, downhill to wherever she lived, he hoped. He watched her go.

HE HAD AN open house in February and invited Manny, who didn’t come, and Ho and Tina, who did. Theresa was there, and Bart, skin the color of mustard and sitting in a wheelchair, though he smiled and held a glass of white wine and snapped pictures with Theresa’s little digital camera. Ray showed Ho the Web site Michelle had put together for the store and her brochures for the children’s parties she wanted to host, letting the kids make books of their own. Ho looked from the computer to Ray and then at Michelle where she sat on the floor, her ankles tucked under her as she guided Ho’s five- year- old, Ly, through an Alexandra Day book where a black dog danced with a smiling infant. Ho shook his head and smiled, and Ray opened his hands.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.”

“Oh, you know? Don’t start.”

“Did I say a word?”

“I get this enough from Theresa.” He inclined his head and dropped his voice, a hand held out as if to signal stop. “She doesn’t know. Anything.”

“So?”

“So I don’t want to go down that road.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to get into anything.”

“You think what, she’s here for six bucks an hour?”

“Fourteen. I can’t dump my life on some kid from Ohio who works in a bookstore. That life? Where I’ve been and what I’ve done?”

“Then don’t.” Ho poured more wine into his glass, waved at his daughters. “But you got this far, man. You going to spend the next fifty years dating massage parlor girls?”

Ray dropped onto the sill of the window behind the counter, massaging his thigh and grimacing, and Ho stood with his back to the room.

“I’m just saying think about what you’re going to say. You don’t have to sign a full confession to tell someone you’ve been in trouble and aren’t anymore. If you think you got to say anything except you own a bookstore in Doylestown.”

Ray looked across at her, and she turned her head and smiled and then looked down, and he felt the floor dropping away and a thudding in his head.

Ho motioned him out to the porch and looked up and down the street, then told him Cyrus was dead.

“The guys from New En gland?”

“No. That’s over.”

“Over?”

“That guy, Scott? He was making this move on his own, took some of the guys from the Outlaws and came down here on his own. With his end of an armed robbery at an Indian casino. That’s what the cash was.”

“How do you know this?”

“A friend showed me some transcripts.”

“Transcripts?”

Ho looked around again and lowered his head. “Federal wiretaps.”

“Jesus.”

“It was everything he had, his own money.”

Ray nodded. It explained the way things played out. He shook his head. “How did it show up on wiretaps?”

“The FBI was on him up there. They scooped up everybody on the New Hampshire end of it.”

“Then who got Cyrus?”

“That wasn’t business.” Ho smiled. “He was screwing around and his old lady caught him.” Ray saw the woman at the abandoned house. Tattoos of the sun and moon on her hands and ice-blue eyes.

Ho turned to go back inside, shivering and pulling in his shoulders.

“Does this mean it’s over?”

Ho shrugged but smiled. “There’s no one left.”

“How do we know?”

Ho looked at him. “The only people you got to worry about chasing you are all up here.” He reached out and tapped Ray’s forehead.

LATER HE WAS alone with Michelle, and he moved along the table they had set out, throwing empty plastic wineglasses into a plastic bag. Michelle fiddled at the CD player she had set up, and the gentle electronic music she liked started up. Quiet voices and lush sounds that were like being wrapped in something soft. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but he was getting used to it, starting even to depend on it. Like her sweet perfume and the quotes she put up on the board near the door every day. Admonitions to be brave and alive. Rilke and Emerson and Rumi. That made him secretly siphon off books and try to parse out the meaning of the poems she loved.

He became aware of her behind him and stopped. He turned and she took the plastic bag from his hand and dropped it on the floor and moved into his arms and they were dancing. He was stiff and moved slightly to the beat, and she rested her head on his shoulder, and after a minute he lost the sense of the music and just swayed with her. He tried out different things in his head. Telling her where he had been and what he had done. Wondering what she needed to know to know him.

She finally said, “What happened?”

“What?”

“In August?” She kept her head tucked against him, her breath warm on his chest. “Was it the accident?”

He had been waiting for this question since they day she had come in about the job but still wasn’t ready for it. “Yes. No.” He shook his head. “I was in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” She picked her head up, and suddenly it was much more difficult and there was something guarded in her eyes.

His eyes flicked over her face and he looked down again. “I’ve made some mistakes in my life.”

She stopped moving, and then he did, a beat too late.

“Tell me.” But her face was different, harder, and it was an interrogation and his mind was blank.

The door chimed and they both looked up, Michelle pulling away and moving to the stacks, collecting paper plates left by Ho’s kids. He looked after her, his hands still in the air, then turned to the door to see two kids, thirteen or fourteen or fifteen. One short and blond, the other long, with black hair hanging lank over his eyes. They moved to the counter and dropped a pillowcase on it, spilling hardback books, and Ray pawed through them while the short kid fidgeted and the tall kid stared hard at him. The tall one wore a thin black jacket with duct tape on the elbow, and Ray remembered he’d seen them before, by the side of the road in Warrington. The tall kid had a runny nose, and they both had red cheeks from the cold. The short one was just getting fuzz on his chin and had spots of something purple and sticky-looking on his army coat.

There were some old books that looked like they were worth something. Jack London, The Iron Heel and Call of the Wild. Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Some others he didn’t recognize. Some of them in plastic covers. First editions or something. He took more out of the pillowcase and found two candlesticks and a bell that looked to be real silver.

The short kid flicked the bell with his finger, miming plea sure at the bright sound. “Gimme a hundred bucks. And you can keep all that shit.”

Ray looked them up and down and smiled.

“Yeah? That ain’t much for all this swag.”

“No, it’s like a deal.”