Free The Dope Thief by Dennis Tafoya Page B

cutting the rubber bands off the bundles of money and dumping more cash out of plastic bags. Manny found the remote and put the TV on, something to make noise and cover their conversation. The bag stank of dogshit, so when it was empty Ray took it outside and stuffed it in a trash can near the ice machine.
    They developed a system, Manny making stacks of ones, five, and tens, and Ray organizing the twenties, fifties, and hundreds. Ray fished in a drawer and came out with a pad and a green pen. After a while Manny went out and got them Cokes from the machine. Around two Manny stripped off his clothes and took a shower. When he came back Ray leaned back against the bed and shook his head.
    “I can’t fucking count any more. I’m fried.”
    “Where are we?”
    “Right now, I’m at’” He added a column of figures on the pad. “One hundred and twenty seven thousand, six hundred, give or take. Not counting the dope. And there’s still all this shit over here.” He picked up a pile of loose bills and let it drop.
    “Jesus Christ.” Manny sat on the bed wrapped in a towel. “How do you figure Ma and Pa Kettle put together that much money? That’s a shitload of eightballs.”
    “Unless it’s not theirs.”
    “The guys in the Charger?”
    Ray shrugged. The most they had taken off anyone had been twenty- two thousand, from a Salvadoran crack dealer in a hous ing project in Bensalem, and that had been dumb luck. The Salvadoran’s crew of jugglers’underage kids who stood on the street and serviced the rockheads walking or driving by’had been sitting at the kitchen table emptying their pockets at the end of the day. One of them, who looked about nine, had actually started to cry when Ray and Manny came in with guns up, shout ing. The kid had put his head on the table and started sobbing, yelling, “
No me mate
,” with his eyes clamped shut. Don’t kill me. Which was a pretty useless thing to say, but Ray guessed you had to say something when the guns came out, and that was as good as anything.
    RAY WALKED OVER to the sink and ran the water, dumping it over his head with his hands. Manny put his dirty clothes back on and sat on the edge of the bed, paralyzed by the pile of cash and drugs.
    “Seriously, man, what the fuck do we do next?” Manny asked. “Do we just clean the fuck out and run? This is too much fucking money for these guys to be the kind of assholes Ho lets us take off. These guys are going to come after us to get this back.”
    “We could run. Between this and the shit we got stashed, we could stay gone awhile.”
    “But?”
    “But I don’t know. You and me can run, but what about Sherry, or her mom, or Theresa? It seems like all they have to do is get ahold of someone we know and go to work. So unless we’re taking everyone we know and moving away, we have to figure out a way to deal with this.”
    Manny kept his voice low. “Deal with what? Are you fucking nuts? That was the most fucked- up situation I ever been in, and I don’t want to get in another one like it. We’re not shooters, Ray. What we mostly do is take candy from babies, like that kiddy crew last week.”
    Ray adjusted the curtains to cut down on the light coming through and snapped off the light. He walked over and threw himself on one of the beds and put his hands over his eyes. “I gotta sleep for an hour. Get my head straight, so I can think. The guy wasn’t from around here. Did you hear his voice?”

    “Where was he from?”
    “New En gland somewhere. He had that ‘pahk the cah’ voice.”
    “So?”
    “So I don’t know, maybe it means something. If he’s in a club from up north and he’s going up against one of the local clubs or something?”
    Ray heard Manny light a cigarette, blow the smoke out. He turned to see Manny pointing at him with it, the end glowing red.
    Manny said, “Or working with them, so he’s that much more plugged in. Or he moved here twenty years ago and the accent don’t make a