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.

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.”