The short kid flicked the bell with his finger, miming plea sure at the bright sound. “Gimme a hundred bucks. And you can keep all that shit.”

Ray looked them up and down and smiled.

“Yeah? That ain’t much for all this swag.”

“No, it’s like a deal.”

Ray put sunglasses on the tall kid in his head and laughed. Manny and Ray, a month out of Lima, scoring from empty houses near the Willow Grove mall and trying to dump the stuff in the pawnshops along 611.

The blond kid snapped his fingers under Ray’s nose and pointed. “Fitzgerald, you know him?” He looked into the corner of the room as if something were painted there. “ ‘All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.’ “ He pantomimed laughing, like a dog panting, and looked over his shoulder at his friend, who smiled and nodded as if the blond kid had done a card trick he’d seen before.

The tall one looked at Michelle, who had stopped what she was doing and stood listening. His face changed and he looked hard at Ray. “Don’t fuck with us, man. Just pay us or let us be on our way.”

Ray nodded slowly. “Where did you get this stuff?”

The blond kid snorted, but the tall one reached over and started snapping the books back into the case. “We’re out of here, Lynch.”

Ray held up a hand. “Wait a minute, okay?”

The tall kid moved toward the door, wiping at his nose with his free hand, and Ray snapped the register open and he stopped. The shorter kid stood up and angled his head to see. Ray came out with two twenties and held them out to the kids. Michelle sighed and disappeared into the back of the store. The blond kid, Lynch, pointed at his friend and the pillowcase. For the first time, Ray noticed a bruise on the tall kid’s face, the shape of a hand etched in faint and fading blue.

The blond kid said, “What? This shit is worth like ten times that.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Then what?”

“Take the money.”

The kids looked at each other, then reached for the money. Ray held out another two twenties, but when the kids reached for them, he jerked the bills back and held them high.

“This is to buy books with.”

The kids looked at each other again, the blond one, Lynch, shrugging.

“Buy,” Ray said again. He picked up the day’s paper and dropped it where they could see he had circled half a dozen ads in red. “These are garage sales. Go by these places and buy what-ever books you find. Don’t pay more than a buck a book, and don’t bring me CDs or DVDs or games or any other shit. Just books.”

The tall kid shrugged and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand.

Ray said, “Get receipts.”

He let the blond one take the money and watched it disappear into his coat and handed the tall one the newspaper. “Take that shit back where you found it and go buy me some books. Every book you bring me I’ll pay you another buck. So drive hard bargains.”

Ray watched them walk to the dark street through the front windows, heads together, talking and laughing. He saw a young blond girl come out from behind a column on the porch as if she’d been hiding there. She fell in beside the boys, and Lynch took her arm. When she turned one last time to look at the store, he saw a ring of livid purple around her right eye.

He turned to see Michelle in her coat. Her head was down.

“Okay, see you,” she said.

“Wait.”

“What?”

She looked at him and then away, and he had that feeling again of recognition he had had before on the street in August.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you, you know. Coming back?”

“Why is Theresa’s name on the store?”

“I told you I was… in trouble.”

“Are you in trouble now?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Why do you pay me under the table?”

“What’s going on? Isn’t that better for you?” He looked around as if there were someone else he could bring into the conversation.

“Is it? Those kids stole that stuff.”

“Yeah, but’”

“You thought it was funny or cute or something.”

He smiled, saw at once that was the wrong thing. “They’re kids, Michelle.”

“Kids like you?”

“Once, yeah.”

She was shaking her head and moving to the door. “So you’re what? The cool guy who buys stolen stuff and maybe sells you some weed?”

“Where is this coming from?”

“I see you when there are policemen on the street.”

“You see me?” He wanted to say, I see you, too, but wasn’t sure what it was he saw.

“You get this look. And you move away from the window. One time that cop went next door and you hid in the stockroom.”

“I didn’t hide. I had shit to do.” But he didn’t believe himself, either. He was getting angry, felt something twisting out of his hands, the desire to restrain it somehow propelling it away.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll see you, Ray.”

He grabbed his cane and started after her, but she was through the door and down the street faster than he could cross the room. He stumped out to the top of the stairs, the cold gripping at him. Watched her moving under the lights away up the street toward Main. It began to snow, white flakes sticking to his hair and his shirt like nature trying to erase him from the scene.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SHE DIDN’T COME back the next day, or the next. He called her over the next three days, stammering vague messages to her voice mail and hanging up. He sat in the store and stared, reading the last quote she had put up over and over. “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” Rilke, one of her favorites. He got out Letters to a Young Poet when he was alone in the store and scoured it for traces of her, all the time willing himself to be smarter and more patient. When the store closed he sat in the light from the street and touched the pages and held it up to his face, hoping her scent would have lingered on the book.

STRANGE WEATHER MOVED in. Hot, damp days in which the sun furiously melted the last of the snow and kids built slick gray snowmen in their shirtsleeves. Bart moved into the hospital, and Ray would go there at the end the day, so Theresa could take a break. He’d bring his father crime novels. Elmore Leonard and Donald E. Westlake and John D. MacDonald. Bart loved anything with guys fighting over a briefcase full of money. Faithless women and smoking pistols. At first Ray would drop them on the nightstand and take the old ones, but after a week he noticed they were untouched and started reading them aloud. Bart would close his eyes and fall asleep, and Ray would stick a tongue depressor in the book and leave it on the nightstand.

One night, in the middle of The Hunted, during a long chase across the Negev, Bart put his hand on Ray’s arm and held it there. Ray closed the book and waited, feeling the papery skin and the rocklike bones beneath.

“I always wanted to see the desert.” Bart’s voice was like something rimed with salt, gritty and brittle.

“Me, too.”

“You should go.”

“Maybe.”

“Nah, just go. Take that girl from the store.”

Ray thought about that, and about what to say. “That would be good.”

“I never did nothing in my whole life.”

Ray looked at him, but Bart was dry- eyed, just staring as if struck by the wonder of it.

“Nothing that was worth a damn to another living soul.” Bart patted Ray’s hand. “I can’t tell you what to do. I ain’t got that right anymore.” Then his father smiled, that alien arrangement of muscles that made him unrecognizable. “But, maybe, take a lesson.”

THE NEXT SATURDAY the kids came back, Lynch and the tall kid, who Ray found out was named Stevie. They were excited, dumping the books they’d found out on the counter, pushing them forward, Lynch talking about the ones he’d read, thumbing them open to show Ray passages he liked and that, eerily, he’d obvi-ously memorized just by glancing at them. They shifted the books into piles, claiming finds and smacking the table and saying, pay me, bitch.