The Dope Thief

by Dennis Tafoya

  “I’m not a member, just an attender.” She said it like it had capital letters. “I’m not really religious, that’s not my thing. It’s just, I don’t know. It’s just nice. There’s no priest or minister or anything. You just sit in silence, and if someone wants to say something, they do. Sometimes the whole hour goes by and nobody says anything, but usually someone’ll say something about, you know, the war or how they’re trying to work something out for themselves. It’s like antichurch, you know? Church without all the bullshit.”

  He laughed a little. “That would be something to see. I grew up Catholic. All my friends are Catholic. I stopped going when I was eight. I had an argument with the nuns about pagan babies going to hell.”

  “Me, too! I love it.” He picked up that this was something she

  said, that she loved things. Of all the ways you could go through

  life, was looking for things to love all that bad?

  She shook her head. “They’d make these ridiculous sweeping statements about who was going to hell, which was pretty much everybody, and I’d sit there thinking about special circumstances where it didn’t make any sense to me to send somebody to hell just because they were gay or had an abortion or were mad at God or had just never gotten the word about Catholicism before they, you know. Shuffled off this mortal coil.” She moved her arms when she talked, making arcs and swoops in the air with her hands.

  Ray said, “I never got the religion thing at all, to be honest. I’ve been, you know, around some pretty bad guys, and everyone always talks about God, or has to have some special diet or something because of their religion and meanwhile they’re fucking everyone over for’” He almost said for a pack of cigarettes. Why not just roll up his sleeves and start showing her the tats? “For a nickel.”

  He had to be careful, but he didn’t want to be. “Being in a church seems like, I don’t know. Like just painting everything a certain color. You’re still a, you know, a jerk, you do what ever the hell you want, because everyone does. But if you’re a Catholic you paint everything red, if you’re a Jew everything gets a coat of yellow, if you’re Muslim it’s something else. Does that make sense?”

  “I think so. Like the fact of being in a religion means something more than it really does. Like you don’t have to do the right thing or help anyone or think about your actions. As long as you say the right prayer.”

  He nodded but then shook his head. “Like I know shit from Shinola. Like I’m in the deep thinking business.”

  “I have to ask.” He braced himself, waiting for the just- what-is- your- business question, and his mind raced for the right thing to say. “I’ve heard that expression a million times, but what the hell is Shinola, anyway?”

  He breathed out. “Shoe polish.”

  She looked up at the sky, waggled her head. “Okay, I can buy that. But I think you do.”

  “I do?”

  “Know shit from Shinola.” She got up. “And with that, she headed off to church.”

  “Have dinner with me.” He didn’t know where that had come from. He felt like he was in some twilight zone, off from his real life, and he could go back and forth between the world where girls wore peasant dresses and he sat on the street drinking coffee and the world where he was being hunted for money and dope. Was he out of his fucking mind?

  “I can’t do dinner, but how about coffee? Tomorrow night, like seven?”

  “Okay.” He smiled. “At Starbucks?” He pointed back up the street.

  She lowered her voice. “Fuck no. I hate their coffee. There’s a little place around the corner, Coffee and Cream. They have great homemade ice cream, too.”

  “Tomorrow night.” He stuck out his hand, and she took it. Her fingers were long and cool to the touch.

  “Seven.” And she moved away, waving over her shoulder.

  He thought, if I still have my head.

  AT TWO HE woke himself up trying to scream. A man with a misshapen head had been standing over him, staring down at him, eyes dark and hard. He opened his mouth and couldn’t force anything out. No sound, no breath. When he opened his eyes he forced out a croak and started coughing. He got up and moved around the apartment with the Colt in his hand checking locks. Put the TV on and fell asleep to muted infomercials about no-money- down real estate.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  MANNY PICKED HIM up the next morning in a black Toyota 4Runner he had picked up in Trenton, and they headed down 309 toward Chestnut Hill and Ho Dinh’s. Ray had met Ho upstate when Ho was doing six months on a stolen merchandise beef and Ray was in for boosting cars, taking them down to a guy in Aston who moved them overseas in a complex deal that seemed like more work than work. Ho told him he could do better, and when Ray’d gotten out he began to move the cars through him and got a couple more points. Plus, Ho was easy to deal with, and Ray just liked the guy. Manny would always make jokes about eating cats and shit, and Ho just grinned and shook his head, as he had when the Rockview yardbirds began calling him Hoe Down about ten minutes after he got there.

  When he had first told Ho what he and Manny were onto, taking down small- time dealers, Ho told him he’d help them when he could. Keep them from stumbling into something bigger than they could handle. Warn them off dealers and labs run by guys who were connected to the local clubs or gangs Ho did business with. Nothing was guaranteed, but up till now nothing had gone wrong and no one had come after them. Of course, they hadn’t stolen a hundred thousand bucks off anyone before, either.

  The meth business around Philly was run mostly by biker gangs, and they fought and jostled each other for territory. They’d rent farm houses in rural counties and cook up for a few weeks, then shut them down and move on. Once in a while a club from some other part of the country would come into the area and get beaten back, or some small- timer would appear and begin to get noticed, and he’d get smacked down or warned off, or they’d let Ray put him out of business, at least for a while.

  Manny had a baseball cap jammed on his head and sunglasses on. They pulled to the curb in front of Ho’s gray stone house in a quiet residential neighborhood off of Germantown Avenue. Ray got out with a gym bag, and Manny took a pistol from beneath the seat and stuck it under his thigh.

  Ray moved up the walk. In a second- floor window he saw a man with binoculars around his neck and wraparound sunglasses that made his face unreadable. It was Ho’s cousin, Bao, a wordless, stone- faced killer as broad and muscular as Ho was thin and frail. Bao had done serious time for killing two Chinese guys in some kind of scrape over the massage parlor business. Ray had seen him working out in Ho’s yard, massive shoulders painted with stalking tigers and smiling demons. Now he nodded to Bao, and Bao nodded back and pointed to the door.

  Ray knocked, and Ho’s wife, Tina, let him in. There were three kids sitting at the breakfast table and an old woman stand ing at the kitchen counter and some kind of wild exchange going on. The smallest girl had a cereal bowl on her head and was banging it with a spoon. The old woman was making angry faces and talking a mile a minute in Vietnamese. Ray guessed it had some-thing to do with how kids should act at the table. Tina led him out into an enclosed porch looking out at a neatly trimmed lawn. She pointed outside to where Ho stood over an older man Ray took to be Ho’s father, kneeling in a patch of garden.

  “There he is, arguing with his father about bitter melon.” Ray shrugged and smiled. Tina threw her hands up. “Don’t ask.” She gestured to a recliner. “Want some coffee, Ray?”

  “No, I’m good, Tina, thanks.” She went back inside.

  Ho was short and rail thin, with glasses that gave him a studious look. He nodded his head toward Ray and smiled. He exchanged some more words with the man in the garden and came around to the outside door of the porch. He waved to Ray to follow him, and they walked back to the kitchen, where there was now a high- pitched argument about breakfast foods going on. Ray figured Grandma was pushing for something healthy, holding a heavy frying pan and pointi
ng it at the kids, who were pouring cereal with a wild abandon. Two dogs scrambled to get the cereal that hit the floor. Ray thought it was funny how much you could get without knowing the words at all.

  Ho let Ray go ahead of him down the stairs and locked the door behind them. He clicked on the light, and Ray settled on a leather couch. The room was furnished tastefully, with a slate bar and dark furniture, muted prints of Chester County on the walls. There was a massive safe on one side of the room and a locked metal gun cabinet next to it. Ray figured this was the safest room in Philly and felt some tension go out of the muscles in his shoulder. He put the bag on the table and waited for Ho, who grabbed a bottled water from a minibar and offered Ray one.

  Ho pointed to the bag with his bottle. “How’s business?”

  Ray raised his eyebrows. “That’s an interesting question. I’m hoping you can help there.”

  Ho sat down and opened the bag. His eyes got wide. “Christ.” Ho had been in the country since he was two and had only the ghost of an accent that surfaced in clipped consonants when he was agitated.

  “Yeah, wow is right. Plus a nice haul of cash.”

  “But?”

  “But, there was a mess, and someone put their eyes on me and Manny.”

  “This was that thing in Upper Bucks, right? It was on the news.”

  “Somebody with an interest in the place shows up just as we’re leaving. We see him, he sees us. Plus, he finds a walkie- talkie we left on the ground, starts talking to us. Telling us how easy it’s going to be to find us. Two guys ripping off dealers.”

  “He got a good look?”

  Ray shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was dark, it was raining. But man . . .”

  Ho took the bag off the table and knelt by the safe.

  “He said something?”

  “He was just so fucking sure of himself. Like it was a matter of time.”

  “That’s our game, though, isn’t it?” Ho turned the dial on the safe with small, precise movements, then pulled the steel handle and opened it. He took a canvas sack out of the safe and began transferring the dope from the bag Ray had brought to the sack. “What we do, how we make money. In what I do, in what you do. It’s the image you project. You play a role, right? It’s what keeps people from doing something stupid, at least most of the time.” He put the canvas sack in the safe next to some neat stacks of currency from different countries. “But it’s all an illusion. The illusion of reputation, the illusion of control.” He pulled a colorful bill from the stack and put it on the table between them. “Even this, when you think about it.”

  Ray bent over and looked at the bill closely. It was beautiful in the way foreign money was often beautiful next to the monochromatic green of U.S. bills. He picked it up and turned it over. One side was a subtle pink and showed some kind of government building and had “1000” printed on it, the only thing Ray understood. The other side, a soft blue, showed men riding elephants.

  “Where’s it from? Looks like Asia?”

  Ho smiled ruefully. “Vietnam. Actually South Vietnam, about 1975.” Ray held it out to Ho, who waved it away. “Keep it.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “About five bucks, to a collector. Which is my point. Even money is just a note from the government saying, ‘We promise this piece of paper is worth something.’ It’s just a bet, right? On that illusion, or projection or what ever it is.” Ray folded the note and put it carefully in his shirt pocket. Ho pointed back up the stairs. “My old man left South Vietnam with a couple million dong. That’s what the note is, it’s a thousand South Viet nam ese dong. By the time he got to the States the money wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. He talked to a guy from the State Department and the guy told him to wipe his ass with it.”

  “But he kept it.”

  “I guess it’s a reminder. At the end of the day you can’t depend on anything. Everything changes, everything ends. All you got is what you got up here.” He pointed to his head. The sound of high voices in argument bled through the ceiling. Ho smiled. “And family.”

  Ray knew how Ho felt about family. He remembered Ho telling him about his parents taking him out of Vietnam right after the war, when he was barely a year old, his mother and father carrying him in their arms in a leaky boat across the China Sea. His father had been a colonel in the army, and they were on a boat with about fifty people who wanted him dead. The army and navy dissolved, and deserters were cruising around in stolen patrol boats and one of them attacked the boat and machine- gunned everyone. Ho’s parents hid with him among the dead. They drifted around the ocean for days with no water until a Taiwanese trawler picked them up.

  Ray tried to picture the ferocity of that kind of love, and he thought about his father and mother and about how maybe family could be one of those things that just ends. Maybe it was all six kinds of bullshit, and you just made a choice about what illusion to believe.

  RAY ASKED IF Ho had any idea who the guys were, running a dope lab in a farm house in Bucks County. Ho shook his head.

  “I have two guys I ask about that shit. It’s not an exact science, I just ask them what you ask me, if you go to a certain cor-ner on a certain street, does anyone have a problem with that? They tell me no, or yes, and if it happens I down some of the money I take off you to them. Usually, they’re happy to have less competition.” Ray described what he had seen of the guy and the car, the New En gland accent. Ho nodded and said he’d quietly ask around.

  Ray put his hand up. “For Christ’s sake don’t let this get back to you. Maybe it was all talk, but this guy sounded crazy. All I need is enough information to get to this guy before he can get to me and Manny.”

  “You need anything? Guns, ammunition?”

  “Guns I got. My old man used to say you didn’t need more guns than you got hands, and I got more than that.”

  Ho looked thoughtful for a minute, then held a finger in the air. He went to a closet with a steel door and pulled a ring of keys out of his pockets. After a second he found the right one and snapped open the door, stepped inside, and was gone for a minute. When he came out he had what looked like two dark blue sleeveless sweaters, each wrapped in plastic. He handed them to Ray, and he felt how heavy they were. Bulletproof vests.

  “Yikes. I don’t know, man. If it comes to this . . .”

  “If you’re not going to run, then you’re going to find him or he’s going to find you. What else could it come to?”

  RAY WENT OUT to the 4Runner and put the vests in the back and covered them with a gray blanket. Manny was smoking and keeping his eyes on the street.

  “Ho will pull the money together in a few days. If he moves it first there’s more for us than if he has to front it.”

  “Is that Kevlar vests?” Ray nodded, and Manny sighed. “Great. Well, at least we know Ho’s on our side. That’s something.”

  “He’s going to ask around, see if he can find anything out about these guys.”

  “Where to now?”

  “Let’s swing by and see Theresa and keep trying to get ahold of Danny, or someone who knows him.”

  Manny started up the car, and they moved down the street. Manny looked at Ray and then back at the street.

  Ray watched him. “What?”

  “He had a black eye.”

  “Who?”

  “Danny. He had a black eye when I saw him. It just came into my head. I didn’t think of it before.”

  Ray looked away, thinking. “So maybe . . .”

  “Maybe he had a beef with the guys he put us onto. Maybe he thought why not make a few bucks putting me onto them ’cause he was in some kind of scrape with them. They ripped him off and threw him a beating or something. Or they just pushed him around ’cause he’s kind of a punk, Danny.”

  Ray put his hands over his eyes, suddenly tired. “Maybe. Or maybe he just fell down ’cause he’s a stone junkie and a thoroughgoing dipshit.”

  “Maybe.” Manny laughed and shook his head. �
��You know, I’m

  starting to have more respect for the police. This is some Sherlock Holmes shit.”

  THERESA WAS SITTING in the living room talking on the phone when Ray came in carrying a plastic bag under his arm. Manny was sitting in the backseat of the 4Runner, trying on the vest and watching the street.

  “How long will that take?” she was saying, making notes on a yellow pad. She had a cigarette going and had the phone book open and papers spread out on the coffee table. When she noticed him come in, she waved and made a motion with her hand, opening and closing like a mouth flapping. “And how much will that cost?” She made more notes and shook her head. After another minute of listening she hung up the phone.

  “What gives, Ma? Looks like big business.”

  “The fucking government and fucking lawyers.” She picked up her cigarette and squinted at him through the smoke. “I’m about ready to unscrew somebody’s head.”

  “What is it? You got tax problems?” She made a small motion with her head, like she didn’t want to talk about it. “You need more money, Ma? You just gotta ask.”

  “Well, yeah, I’m going to need more money, but it’s not for me.”

  His face darkened. “I can see where this is going, and I won’t fucking have it.” He stood up.

  “Raymond, hon.” He stood at the stairs with his back to her.

  “Theresa, there’s nothing I don’t owe you. For you, what ever you need, you know you got it. For that prick, I got nothing. He can die right where he is.”

  She said, “He told me you went to see him.” Ray nodded and went into the kitchen, rummaged around in the fridge. “Then you know,” she called from the living room. “You know he’s got just a couple good months left.” She got up and moved into the kitchen and stood over him. He took out a beer and sat down at the table, and she sat across from him. He looked at the bottle, taking a dollop of foam off the mouth of the bottle with his tongue.