Marletta had died, and they’d sent him up for it, and he’d let them. He’d picked her up from graduation and they’d driven around, went to a park, gone to his house and made love, and when he was driving her home a drunk had crossed the center line and she’d been killed. Thrown from the car into a field full of tiny white flowers whose name he couldn’t remember. Her old man was a state trooper, and he’d hated Ray even before that day. They’d taken Ray to St. Mary’s with a concussion, and her old man would sit in the parking lot in his car. Every time Ray had gone to the window, her old man would be there. At night, he’d see his cigarette going in the dark, a slow red pulse as her father breathed.

Her old man had pushed the case about the stolen car, and they’d locked him up. He sat in Juvie for months, waiting, and one night her old man came for him and took him out and beat him with a tire iron and took him back with a thin story about Ray falling in the dark. So when they finally convicted him, sent him upstate as an adult, he’d had two busted arms. Ray had let it happen, let it all come, and none of it, no matter how bad it got, was as bad as he thought he deserved for losing Marletta.

After a few minutes he gave up the idea of going back for his shit. Instead he drove west to Montgomeryville to get more clothes, toiletries, and a couple of CDs to calm him down and help him think. It was late when he finally pulled into a motel on 611 near the turnpike. Standing in the bright lobby by the highway brought his paranoia on hard again, and he drummed his fingers and hunched his shoulders waiting for the sleepy clerk to appear from the back. He checked in, then drove around the back of the place, twitching with fear. He ran upstairs, his insides turning to water, and then sat in the dark with the pistol in his lap.

What would Marletta think of him now? What would she say? He was so far from the things he had let himself want when they were together, but he felt like he wanted something like a normal life now more than ever. Was it just that things were so fucked up? That he was afraid and looking for a way out?

He rummaged in his bag and pulled out some CDs and threw them on the bed, then chose one and put in the CD player on the bed table. Henryk Górecki. Classical music. What he called it, anyway. It had been playing when he walked into a Tower Rec ords in King of Prussia, and he asked the girl behind the counter what it was, and she pointed to a stack of CDs near the counter.

He had looked up the music online and knew that the words were from a prayer, and they sounded that way. Someone pleading or crying, he guessed in Polish. He thought all pleading was the same in what ever language. Help me. Forgive me. Don’t leave me. Don’t kill me. He thought about the white- haired man and the terrible red arc streaming out of him, and Rick Staley slipping around in his own blood on the floor of the dope lab in Ottsville. He wanted to let himself go, start screaming and breaking things. He wanted to get high. After a while, he fell asleep.

HE GOT UP at eight and had coffee in front of the window, watching the street. A woman jogged by; a man in one of those spandex outfits he didn’t get rode by on an expensive- looking bike. He got awkwardly to the floor of the room and did a few sit-ups and wanted to puke. He thought about being in Juvie, where he met Manny, and work details hauling trash and clearing brush.

They had been tough little fuckers then, tanned and fit, ready for anything. They got out six days apart and started boosting cars and stereos together. They shaved their heads, and Manny gave Ray his first tattoo, SS lightning bolts on his right arm done with a homemade gun with the motor from an electric razor and a guitar string. They’d split the money from stealing and get high and go to the movies. They watched Predator, he remembered, over and over, doing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura to each other, capping bad guys in the jungle. “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” How different was his life now, when you broke it down? He had stopped spending money on candy and soda but still bought movies and CDs and books compulsively. Didn’t understand savings plans or IRAs, hadn’t worked forty hours in years. The year before, he had gotten his last tattoo, dope thief in heavy black Germanic letters high on his left arm. At the time maybe committing himself, or maybe just letting go of every wish he ever had for a normal life.

Ho Dinh called Ray around ten, told him to come by. He took a shower, got dressed, and put on a sweatshirt and a sport coat to help hide the automatic. He spent a last ten minutes watching the street, his face tight, before he finally jogged to Sherry’s Honda and took off.

WHEN RAY PULLED up, Ho came out of the house and jumped in alongside him.

“Keep going, down to Green Street.”

“Where we headed?”

“West. We’re going to see a guy I know about your problem.”

“What’s he know?”

“So far, nothing. And we should talk about what you’re going to tell him. He doesn’t have to know your business, just the part about the guys from New Hampshire.” Ho took a piece of paper from his pocket and called the turns. They made their way along Kelly Drive, slaloming along the edge of Fairmount Park toward the Schuylkill River. Ho wore a light jacket even though it was in the eighties and expensive- looking sunglasses that he pushed up on his head whenever he consulted the paper.

Ray asked him if the guy they were going to see was with one of the clubs that controlled the meth business in the Delaware Valley.

Ho waggled his head back and forth. “I don’t know that he’s with any of the biker clubs, exactly, but he knows them and does business with them. They have some kind of deal together. I think he cooks for them and they distribute his product.” Ho took his glasses and cleaned them, which made him look momentarily even younger. “So if we’ve got guys from up north pushing into his area, he might care enough about that to make your fight his fight.”

“You think?”

Ho looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “You got a gun with you?”

“Under the seat. And in the glove compartment. I got more in the trunk, it comes to that. We going to need them?”

“I hope not. This guy’s a little nuts, is all I know. You can’t hang around that shit as much as he does and not be a little cooked yourself.” Ho opened the glove compartment and pulled out the Colt. He worked the slide to see that it was loaded and put it at his feet.

THEY CROSSED THE river and made their way down Route 1 for a while, finally turning off and heading north. Ray stopped recognizing things as soon as they were out of Philly. The houses got more spread out, the yards big and green. He saw a sign for Blue Hill, and they made some more turns and came to a dirt road. When they pulled in, Ho told Ray to stop and handed him the pistol. He wedged it in his belt and pulled his sweatshirt over it.

He put the car in gear again and rolled down the rutted track that led to what looked like an abandoned shack. There was a new- looking red pickup truck pulled in next to the house and a big guy with a shaved head sitting in the bed. He had wraparound shades, and his hands were under a blanket that covered his lap. He worked a toothpick in his mouth and stared at them as they turned the car off and sat, listening to the engine tick.

Ray raised his eyebrows at Ho. “Should I have worn the vest?”

“Think bulletproof thoughts.”

Ray shook his head.

Ho looked at the big guy in the pickup. “Tell me, what’s with the shaved heads? Too much to look tough and comb your hair, too?”

“I did it once. Me and Manny, when we were young.”

“Remember why?”

“No. If I had a nickel for every stupid thing we did when we were kids.” He considered this for a minute. “Wait, I probably do.”