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 pointing 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.
She spoke quietly, with no force in her voice. It was tougher to take than if she had been screaming. “The first time you got locked up, who was there for you?”
“You.”
“Me. And the second time, when you went to Lima, and the time after that when you went to the penitentiary. I never asked nothing from you and I never will. Not for myself.”
Ray took a long pull on the beer and then played with the label, peeling a corner up and plastering it back down. The dog sighed under the table. Ray put his hand over his face, talked through his splayed fingers. “You know, for a long time I just figured he killed her, my mother. One day she was gone, and he said she ran off, but I just figured he got so juiced and crazy he split her skull and dumped her in a ditch. Then that postcard came, and at least I knew she was alive somewhere.”
“He loved your mother, and he loved you. He still does.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But what the fuck good did it ever do any of us? Even you?”
“It’s not about what people do for you or to you. This is what I think: You just never give up. That’s what family means. He’s your family and I’m your family, and you’re ours. And that’s that.” Theresa went to the cabinet and got out a glass. She took the bottle from Ray and poured the beer into it. “I’m not stupid, Ray. You got a duffel bag full of money and no job. You and that dopehead Manny are stealing or dealing drugs or something’”
“Ma’”
She held up a hand. “Don’t even start.” She sat across from him at the table and picked up her lighter. “Just grit your teeth and give it up.”
Ray blew out a long breath and held his hands against his temples. It was like every cell of his brain was firing at once. Too many wants and fears were crowding each other in his head, and he couldn’t sort them out or figure which were the important ones. He couldn’t pick anything new up without dropping something. He felt like he had run a hundred miles in the last few days and he hadn’t gotten anywhere, had no idea what direction to move. He had the feeling again that he wanted to cry but that if he did he would lose control of himself completely. His eyes burned.
“Okay, I’ll make you a deal.” He combed his fingers through his mustache and made calculations in his head. “I’ll finance the great escape if you go down the shore for a few days, on me.” Her eyes narrowed, and she chewed her lip thoughtfully. He held up his hands. “Don’t blow a head pipe trying to figure my angle. Just do what I say and we all get what we want. Though from what Bart said when I seen him inside, I don’t know that he wants what you want here.”
“Okay, okay, but I got calls in to the lawyer and the DOC. I’m at the shore they won’t be able to get me.”
Ray opened the plastic bag and pulled out a throwaway cell phone. He grabbed a pair of scissors off the counter and cut the package open. He booted up the phone and waited for a signal, pulling a pen and a pad of Post- its from a caddy near the wall phone. “I got you covered.” He watched the readout and scribbled down some numbers, then handed her the phone and the Post- it. “For the next few days this is your phone number. Call everybody back and give them this number. Keep it with you all the time, and I’ll check in with you every day or so. After you talk to the lawyer and whoever, pack a bag and I’ll take you down to the limo.”
“You’re in some kind of trouble, Raymond. Don’t think after all these years I can’t read you like a comic book, you little pissant.”
He dialed his own cell phone number, and the phone in his pocket buzzed. “Nah, I’m trying to stay out of trouble, and I’m trying to keep you out of trouble, too. So do what I say for once in your life. I’m taking you out of here in half an hour. So do what you have to do.”
“I’m an old lady, Raymond, it takes me a while to’”
He held up his hands. “Ma. Don’t talk, pack.”
“What about Shermie?”
Christ, the fucking dog. “I’ll get him to that kennel up on County Line.”
While Theresa got her things together and kept a running com plaint going about being rushed out of her own goddamn house, Ray went back into his bedroom and pulled the duffel out from un der the bed. He had to assume at some point they’d be here, and he didn’t want to leave anything for them to find. The bag was heavy, so he hefted it in two hands and lugged it out to the Toyota and set it on the open hatchback. He took out money in short stacks and put two in his pockets, handed two to Manny, and held two aside for Theresa. Down the street, two kids crept around their yard with water pistols, angling for position from behind bushes and skinny trees and then popping out to squirt each other, shrieking. He went back into his room and stood on the bed, pushing aside a ceiling tile and bringing down a tape- wrapped square of bills and throwing it on the bed and then reaching up for a short- barreled police- issue shotgun and a box of shells. He wrapped the money and the gun in his bedspread and carried it to the car.
He kept hearing a voice in his head telling him to leave it all, the money and the guns and the whole thing, and just get in the car and drive away. Was it Marletta’s voice? Maybe it was, trying to propel him away from the terrible things he had done and the terrible things he might do now. Was he really trying to get to some kind of safety or just so far down this road he couldn’t see any other place to go? He had been thinking so much he’d like to talk to her again, to ask what he should do. To explain he wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, not really. He’d just fucked up so many times that every move seemed wrong, every way he could go seemed to lead down into a hole.
Manny was dialing the cell again, and he snapped his fingers to get Ray’s attention. Ray looked up, and Manny mouthed Danny and handed the phone to Ray.
“Hello?” The voice sounded whiny, young. Something else, agitated.
“Danny?”
“Who is this?” Fear. That was the something else he heard. There was a tremor in Danny’s voice, and Ray heard him breathing hard.
“Danny, it’s Ray. Manny and Ray.”
“You fucking guys, what did you do?”
“We did what you told us to do, Danny.”
“No, no way. I never told you to kill nobody. You fucking guys.” Whining, like a kid, Ray thought. Jesus, and this junkie dipshit knew who they were.
“Danny, don’t be an idiot. We’re on a cell phone.”
“You think that fucking matters now? You fucking guys, honest to Christ.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“What’s going on? They know me, that’s what’s going on. You got to get me money and I mean right fucking now today, got me?”
“Danny, what did you get us into?”
“What did I get you into? Are you high? Manny never told me nothing about killing nobody.”
“What do you mean, they know you?”
“These guys from New Hampshire. They stayed at my fucking house, they know where I live.”
“Jesus Christ, Danny, why would you put us on to something that could get back to you?”
“I need money. I got bills and shit. I got a dependency problem and I owe people and I had no idea you two fuckups would get somebody killed.”
“Danny, they don’t care about that, which you should please stop saying on the fucking phone. They want their money back.”
“I need my money. You come here and gimme my money so I can get gone.”
“Why did they for Christ’s sake stay at your house?”
“My cousin, Ronnie, he knows these guys from being inside up there.”
“Jesus, Danny.”
“And they gave me money and I got dependency problems. I seen they were trying to get established down here. And I thought you guys weren’t going to fuck this up so bad. Ronnie called me.”
“Danny.”
“You better fucking hurry up. Those fuckers come back I am giving you two assholes up, you hear me?” There was a click and the line went dead. Ray tried calling back, kept hitting the send button, but Danny never picked up again.
Manny raised his eyebrows at him, and Ray shook his head. He couldn’t believe he had given his life to a junkie for safekeeping.
THEY WENT TO Theresa’s bank, and Ray gave her money to pay lawyers and what ever expenses she thought might come up, then dropped her at a hotel in Willow Grove where she could meet a limo to take her to Atlantic City.
He went into the lobby and got a ticket for the limo and a schedule while Manny took her little paisley suitcase out and extended the handle. When Ray handed her the tickets she held him close and kissed his cheek.
“I know you’re pissed. I know it. But I did the same for you and I have to do this for him.”
He held up his hands in surrender and shook his head, smiling, and backed up toward the car. Out of her kitchen she looked tiny, frail, but her chin was up and her eyes bright.
She said, “Family’s got to come for you when no one else will.”
He took out his cell phone and waved it at her to remind her to keep it near her and on, and Manny put the Toyota in gear and they drove up to the Wal- Mart at Jacksonville Road. Manny pulled the Toyota up to the door when Ray came out, and he piled the things he had bought in the back. Manny drove up to a U-Store- It around the corner. They rented a narrow, cinder-block storage unit for a couple of months and paid a hundred and eighty bucks.
They drove down the long, empty rows of doors and found the unit they had rented, number 181. They angled the car in and got out, and Manny mouthed the number to himself. Ray laughed, and Manny said, “What?”
“You’re going to play that number?”
Manny said fuck you and laughed and hauled the door open and went inside. Ray took some flashlights and batteries out of a plastic bag. They closed the door and turned on the flashlights and sat on the cement floor with the bags, the guns, and the money. Ray sorted out his cash from the money he’d been holding for Manny and the money they owed Danny, splitting everything between two imitation leather suitcases with the tags from the Wal-Mart still on them. Manny loaded and checked their guns and put them into the olive duffel. Ray had bought them some bottles of water, a couple of T-shirts, and candy bars, and Manny put them into a new knapsack.
When they were done they shared a bottle of water, their faces lined with sweat. Manny opened the door a crack to let some air in.
Ray put one of the flashlights up against his chin and made a moaning noise like a ghost in an old radio program. “It is later than you think.”
Manny made a face. “What’s that?”
“Something my old man used to do.”
“Christ, what, to help you sleep?”
Ray turned the light on the floor. “Yeah, he was a charmer. It was something from an old TV show. Used to scare the shit out of me.”
Manny lit a cigarette, waved the match out.
Ray said, “Guess we can’t stay here forever.”
“Nah. It’s too fucking hot, for one thing.”
“We had it sewed for a while there, huh? Set ’em up and knock ’ em down. How did things get so fucked up?”
Manny flexed his skinny biceps, his tattoos sliding and puckering on his arms. “Things are what they are. The thing I don’t get is why you think they should be any different.”
“We had it under control before. If it wasn’t for that fucking Rick, or that moron Danny…”
“Oh, will you please? If it wasn’t those two it would have been one of the tweakers. Somebody was going to go for a gun eventually. Somebody was going to dime us to the cops or just come to our houses in the middle of the night.” He stabbed the air with his cigarette. “You think, what? Shit can’t go wrong cause you’re smarter than they are? Cause you got a plan?”
“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?”