“Maybe Ronald.”
“Maybe Ronald.” Ray sighed theatrically. “Jerome, when you are standing tall before the judge I am going to be your only friend, do you understand that? What am I going to tell the judge, Jerome? That you lied to the police and made them go looking for Maybe Ronald, or that you helped resolve this situation?”
“I don’t know.” The kid’s voice was muffled by the carpet.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can be a hero, Jerome. You can be the one makes sure no one gets hurt, that the police get the money and the drugs off the street. Believe me, Jerome, you want me to tell the judge you were a hero and not an uncooperative dirtbag. You know the difference?”
There was a long silence.
“I don’t know.”
The kid with the Iverson shirt said, “Heroes get a beatdown.”
Ray looked at him. “Shut up. Heroes get to finish high school, and dirtbags go to jail.” He finished cuffing the kids on the floor and straightened up.
Manny took a hand off the gun and yanked Jerome awkwardly to his feet. “Talk to Ronald, tell him to come down here with nothing in his hands.” He walked Jerome to the foot of the stairs.
Jerome leaned against the wall, unbalanced with his hands cuffed behind him. He called up the stairs. “Ronald!”
Ray waggled his eyebrows at Manny, who put a cupped hand to the side of his mouth.
“Ronald! Come on down here with your hands up.” Manny kept Jerome between himself and the stairs, lowering his body to use the tall kid as a shield. “Ronald!”
“What?” The voice was high- pitched, quavering.
Manny slapped the wall. “Don’t ‘what’ me, you pain in the ass. You get down here on the ground right now. You want to get shot?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then come on down.” There was another silence. Ray trained his pistol on the stairs and waited.
“How I know you won’t shoot me?”
Manny said, “We’re the police, Ronald. The police don’t just shoot people.”
The kid with the Iverson shirt said, “Bullshit, they don’t.”
After a long minute, brilliant white Jordans appeared at the top of the stairs; then Ronald slowly walked down, looking all of about twelve in an oversized red jeans jacket and gold chains. When he reached the bottom step, Manny stepped from behind Jerome and laid Ronald down next to his friends, and Ray took another pair of flex cuffs out of his jacket.
Iverson said, “Punk,” under his breath.
Ray flicked the back of his head with the plastic cuffs. “Shut your mouth.” He ratcheted the cuffs around the smaller kid’s skinny arms. “Maybe Ronald is my hero.”
Manny stayed in the living room, his long, thin frame bent over the shotgun like a pool hall sharper draped over a cue. Ray went back into the kitchen. He opened a few cabinets until he found a roll of big plastic trash bags, jammed his pistol into his belt, and pulled a bag off the end of the roll. He dropped to his knees and began scooping the dropped Baggies off the floor into the green trash bag. He held up one and inspected it’tiny vials, each one with a few rocks of blue- white crystal’and then shoved it into the trash bag. He opened the freezer, the oven, the dishwasher. In a drawer near the back door he found a pistol, an Italian.32 with rust on the handle, and he pocketed it and went out to the front room.
Manny was going through their pockets, turning out rolls of bills and tossing them over by the stairs. Ray grabbed them up and shoved them in the bag. He went to the front door and retrieved the metal cash box, open and showing stacks of fives and tens. Ray upended it, spilling the money in with the vials. He picked up the old shotgun and broke it open, throwing the shells into a corner, and tucking the gun awkwardly under one arm.
His eyes kept going to the picture on the wall. A light- skinned black woman in a yellow cap and gown, cheeks wide with her smile. Even white teeth and almond- shaped eyes with a kind of fierce intelligence that made Ray feel uneasy. Guilty. For standing in her house, maybe, for waving a gun. Probably at one of her children or grandchildren.
Ray leaned over the kids. “Jerome, where’s the rest of the money and the stash?” The big kid was silent. The kid with the Iverson jersey shifted, glaring at Jerome. Ray snapped his fingers. “Don’t look at Iverson, look at me. Where’s the rest?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know. Don’t look at him. Is he going to do your time?
Is he going to take care of your mom while you do ten years up state? Is he going to talk to the judge for you and get you home to night in time to watch The Gilmore Girls?”
“No.”
“No is right.” Manny pulled Jerome to his feet by his cuffed hands and propelled him into the kitchen. Ray followed, keeping the pistol where the others could see it. Ray stood in the doorway and saw Manny put his head close to Jerome’s and whisper. Jerome looked over his shoulder toward the room where his friends were laid out, then whispered something back. Manny grinned, then stood back and banged his hand on the kitchen table hard. “Goddammit, tell me something.” He smiled wider and Jerome shyly smiled back at Manny’s game.
Manny ducked into a bathroom off the kitchen while Ray made a show of marching Jerome over to his friends and laying him down on the floor. “Looks like Jerome don’t want to help the police. I guess he’s going away upstate for a while. See his uncles out at Camp Hill.” Ray picked up the trash bag from the floor and threw it over his shoulder like a pistol- toting Santa. “Nobody move, now.”
He backed into the kitchen. Manny was holding up two wet plastic bags, one filled with vials, the other with cash. Ray pulled the bag from his shoulder and handed it to Manny, who moved silently down the stairs. Ray stuck his head into the doorway to the front room and looked over the prone bodies. He heard the girl ask Jerome how Ray knew his uncle was at Camp Hill and Jerome telling her to please shut the fuck up.
“Keep your heads down and be still. Since Jerome isn’t telling us what we need to know, we’re searching the rest of the house. I’m leaving Maybe Ronald in charge.” He ducked back into the kitchen and followed Manny down the stairs, through the basement and out to the street. Manny was starting the engine on the van, the side door open. Ray threw the double- barreled gun under the seat, jumped in, and slammed the door.
They drove in silence for a minute, Manny keeping it at the speed limit and making quick turns, Ray spinning in his seat to look behind them. After a couple of blocks, Ray opened a gym bag and dropped the pistol in; he reached over and took the badge from around Manny’s neck. He leaned forward awkwardly in the seat and took off his windbreaker and stuffed it into the bag with the guns and badges and a couple of leftover pairs of flex cuffs. They turned out onto Route 13, and he reached over and grabbed the wheel and held it straight while Manny took off his jacket.
Ray thought about the kids lying in the front room, whispering to each other. He wondered how long it would take them to begin to move around, get up, tiptoe into the kitchen, their heads cocked for the slightest sound. He imagined Jerome peering down the cellar steps, his hands still cuffed, and realizing they weren’t coming back. He rifled in the green trash bag for a minute, then held his hand out to Manny.
“Jolly Rancher?”
RAY WATCHED THE cars around them as they drove west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “That was a nice house. Whose house do you think that was?”
“Someone’s grandma, I’d bet.” Manny clicked the radio on, low. “Maybe Ronald’s.”
“Didn’t stink, it was all kept up. It was like Crack House Lite.” Ray picked up the trash bag and set it on his lap, running his fingers through the loose cash and vials. He stuck a finger through the plastic bag of cash from the toilet tank and made a hole, thumb-ing the bills, looking at denominations.
Manny looked over. “How did we do?”
“We? Who did all the work?”
“Get the fuck out of here. Who got Jerome to spill?”
Ray waved his hand. “Oh, like I wouldn’t have lifted the lid on the toilet. Doper kids like that only know two places to hide shit, and I already looked in the fridge.”
“I have to admit I got a kick out of that ‘help the police’ stuff. How many times the cops tried to play me and my friends like that.”
Ray shrugged. “They call it the command voice. It’s a gift some people have. Your problem is you don’t watch enough TV. One or two episodes of Cops’ll tell you anything you want to know about managing the criminal element.”
“Please, the criminal element. They were all like fifteen. An episode of Sesame Street could have told you anything you needed to know about managing that bunch.” Manny rummaged in his pockets and brought out a cigarette. He pointed with his chin. “Seriously, what did we get?”
Ray didn’t answer. He kept thinking about the house, and the picture of the girl in the cap and gown. Someone’s mother, or grandmother. One of the doper kids her son or grandson. The kids now stumbling around the house, their wrists still cinched by the flex cuffs. It made him unaccountably tense, wondering how they’d get out. They had cell phones, he knew; he had seen them when Manny turned out their pockets. Ray thought about whoever was supplying them. Conjured a hulking gangbanger with big shoulders from the joint, a shaved head. Would there be trouble when they came up short? He saw a big man stalking around the house with a baseball bat, Jerome and Maybe Ronald talking fast, trying to make him see how they got took by two guys said they were cops. Had guns and badges, looked like cops, sounded like cops.
Ray noticed one of those little roadside shrines that families build where someone has been killed in a wreck. Saw the shattered plastic flowers and rotted wooden cross, a tiny, faded photograph flashing by too fast to register. He began to feel a tightness in his chest, a hitch in his breath that felt like panic.
The girl in the picture reminded him of someone. The girl in the cap and gown. The name came back to him, and the accident, and a terrible pulse in his head that made him sick. Marletta. A girl he’d loved, who’d loved him. The brilliant girl with the open smile.
He got her back for an instant sitting in the front seat of a car on the day she graduated high school. The day he would have graduated but for Juvie and the time lost. Marletta sitting beside him in her cap and gown, looking like the girl in the picture in the house on Jefferson Avenue.
He stretched, turned on the radio. KYW came on, the an nouncer talking about Allen Iverson and his bad attitude. Ray snapped off the radio, opened the window, let the rain spatter his eyes, his cheeks, his open mouth. Manny watched the road, the traffic, occasionally looked his way. When they reached the exit, Ray cranked the window back up and ran his hands over his face. He caught sight of himself in the mirror on the visor, and it looked like he’d been crying.
“Ray, man?”
But Ray was staring, now. His hands empty in his lap, his brain twisting in his head. “All good things,” he said.