Then she was past, and he stepped out. He watched her move up the street and turn a corner, the light catching in her hair, her face in silhouette for a moment. Then she was gone.

RAY SLIPPED OUT from the darkness and moved back down to the busy street where he had parked. There were cops out on the sidewalks, an ambulance at the head of the alley where the bikers had shot the man with white hair. He could hear voices from police radios, and he struggled to stay calm and look like he belonged. He got his keys out and held them in his fist, tried to keep them from rattling. He passed the ambulance crew, young kids in blue jumpsuits carrying metal clipboards and leaning against a parked car, and a cop carrying a shotgun at port arms who looked at Ray hard when he passed.

Back in the Camaro, he cranked the ignition with shaking hands and felt around on the seat for his cell phone, grabbed it, and started to dial before realizing it was the one they had taken off the dead biker out in Delaware County. He tossed it away and snapped open the glove compartment, pulled the black automatic, and sat for a minute, looking compulsively up and down the street and breathing fast. Finally he decided it was better to be in motion, and he put his car in gear and pulled down the street, turned south, and picked up speed.

He dialed Manny and told him what had happened. The telling was out of order, distorted by his fear and adrenaline. He kept touching his chest and feeling his heart beat, touching his temple reflexively at the place where the hole had been in the man’s head. That man, someone’s father or grandfather was dead, and wasn’t it his fault? He hadn’t wanted any of it to happen, but if it wasn’t his doing, whose fault was it? Was everything that had happened just his fucked- up life spilling out over everyone he came across?

“How the fuck?” Manny wanted to know. “Did they follow you, or what?”

“They picked me up at my house. One of them said. Those guys at Danny’s must have called them.” He kept checking the rearview, looking for the van or anyone trying to get to close to his bumper. So taking the piece of paper with their names on it hadn’t stopped anything. How stupid, how fucking stupid could he be? The guys had called Scott, and everyone knew who they were. And who was everyone? Were there ten guys, twenty, a hundred? He was sweating but felt cold. “Fucking motherfuckers.”

It came to him that it could have been Michelle standing with him when they pulled the guns, and that put more terrible pictures in his head that crowded his thinking and made his heart race. He pulled over to the side of the road, and it dawned on him they knew his car, had in fact followed him to Doylestown. The kid had said it. Jesus. He wasn’t thinking, wasn’t planning. He needed to slow down, get right in his head. He was on 611, near a big shop ping center at Street Road, and he pulled in and told Manny to get away from his own car, find another one, and come for him.

He cruised through the lot, pulling behind a Genuardi’s and nosing toward a Dumpster. He switched off the car and looked around him, grabbing his small duffel and checking the Colt. He pulled the slide back to put a round in the chamber, then slowly let the hammer down and stuck it into his belt, an awkward move sitting down.

On the dark floor, something flashed green. He stopped and watched. After maybe thirty seconds, he saw it flash again. He leaned toward the pool of darkness in front of the passenger seat and put his hand on the dead biker’s cell. He flipped it open and looked at it. The display had bars for battery life, a little graph for signal strength. There was a symbol, a 1 and an X, which meant nothing to him, but then he noticed a flashing letter G in the lower left hand corner. Was that for GPS? Did that matter? Did these guys have some kind of software that could track the cell phone or something? Were they right now boxing him in again?

He jumped out of the car and looked around. Two kids in green aprons sat smoking on overturned milk crates. One of them, a big kid with red hair, waved with his cigarette. Behind the car, Ray saw a slight grassy rise, a driveway leading away toward an exit; across the driveway the ground sloped down to what looked like a creek, a black line in the dark sketched through a stand of trees. He took two steps and fired the cell phone hard over the road and down toward the creek.

The kid with red hair pumped his cigarette hand in the air. “Fuck, yah.”

The other kid laughed, nodding his head. “Toss that bitch.”

Ray jumped back into the car and sat with his head in his hand for a minute, thinking.

The red- haired kid took a few steps closer, eyeing the Camaro and Ray. “Nice ride,” the boy said, and the silent one sitting on the crate shook his head in agreement. “Want to get wasted?”

“Yes,” said Ray and put the car in gear.

HE LEFT HIS car in another shopping center farther east down County Line, by a dark and empty Dunkin’ Donuts. He got out and locked the car under feeble lights that left the parking lot the dull green of a lake bottom. He called Ho and told him what had happened while he walked across the dark lot to stand in the shadow of a Sunoco station. It had all happened fast, he told Ho, and chances were the guys they killed hadn’t told Scott about Ho, but he should take what ever steps he thought were right. Ho thanked him and hung up, and Ray watched the street and kept his hand in his pocket, on his pistol, clicking the safety off and on, off and on.

He thought about Ho’s kids, and Tina, and that made it tougher to think straight, but Jesus, was everything bad that could happen his fault? Ho was in the life, ran massage parlors and dope houses, and had a cousin who sat at an upstairs window with an AK, so there was already the possibility hanging out there for Ho, and Ho knew it. But Ray knew even as he had those thoughts that it didn’t get him off the hook. This shit had gotten away from him, and he had to make it right somehow.

Manny took him by his own place, and Ray took Sherry’s old Honda and drove it slowly home, taking a long route around Warminster and through Horsham. Later he sat in the dark car by his building and watched the traffic go by, the headlights throwing twisted silhouettes of trees onto the fronts of the houses, tangles of shadow that moved and broke apart into nothing.

He tried to see into the cars going past, caught glimpses of dark figures going home, going out. He thought about regular life, tried to think of people he knew who just went to work and came home, went to sleep, got up, and did it again. Just about everybody he knew was in the life except Theresa and her retired friends from the neighborhood who got together at the Ukrainian church to play Bingo on Wednesdays. Tough old broads who had raised kids and buried husbands, worked at Acme or the post office or Warminster General.

He had worked straight jobs, but never for very long. He had worked in pizza joints when he was a kid, liked the smell of the dough and flirting with the waitresses and the girls who came in for a slice and a Coke. But then he’d just blow it off; he’d go get high with his friends, and the next thing he knew, he’d be driving someone else’s car to the Oxford Mall, or sneaking around a dark house, high, drunk, banging into things and trying not to laugh, or running through black yards at night with a pillowcase full of cheap costume jewelry he took off someone’s bureau while Manny took cold cuts from the fridge.

Could he stop being who he was? He thought about Marletta, about the last time he saw her. What had they said? She wanted a normal life for him. If things had gone different with her, would that have been his way out? She was in his thoughts more and more now, working on his head. The way she loved him and thought he could be more. Gone all this time until that picture brought her back, the picture in the house on Jefferson Avenue of the young girl in the cap and gown.