The Dope Thief by Dennis Tafoya Page B

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