combined to have him thrown out on his ass, as that combination is wont to do to a man in any walk of life. Ray had learned his lesson: he didn’t drink so much anymore, but it was hard to shake off his history in a state like Maine where everyone knew everyone else, and bad reputations spread like a virus. It didn’t matter that Ray was a changed man, his penchant for socking people who crossed him largely excepted, or that he stuck to beer now, not liquor. Coffee had replaced whiskey as his main vice, so that he was rarely without a to-go cup in his hand, and lived off cheap refills at Starbucks. There was a Starbucks at the corner of Oak and Congress, and Ray planned to head over there and fill up once he was done with breakfast. He’d take a seat while no one was looking, stay there for a while, then go to the counter and claim that this was his second coffee, not his first. Nobody ever contradicted him. Say what you liked about Starbucks, but you couldn’t fault their staff for their manners. Still, Ray didn’t care for those little breakfast sandwiches they sold. For the same price he could get a good meal at Marcy’s, which was why he was sitting there now, flicking through his free copy of the Portland Press Herald while chewing on egg-smeared toast and wondering just what a man had to do to get a decent break in this life.
He was about to toss the paper aside when an article on the front page, below the fold, caught his eye. He had left the front page until last owing to the half-assed way the paper’s previous reader had reassembled it, and because Ray tended toward the view that whatever was in newspapers had already happened, and therefore there wasn’t much point in worrying about what they contained, or getting all het up about the order in which you flicked through the pages, except, of course, that sometimes you ended up reading the second half of articles before the first, which could be confusing if you were dumb. Ray Wray was a lot of things – undisciplined, an addictive personality, borderline autistic in his capacity to absorb and recall information – but dumb wasn’t one of them. He got into trouble because he was too clever, not because he wasn’t clever enough. He was angry at the world because he had never managed to find his place in it, so he lashed out whenever the opportunity arose, and accepted the resulting bruises with equanimity.
He carefully balanced the newspaper against a ketchup bottle and read and reread the front page article, his smile widening as he did so. It was the first piece of good news he’d received in a long time, and he felt that it might presage an upturn in his fortunes.
One Perry Reed, who was facing charges of possession of a class A drug with intent to supply, possession of child pornography, as well as being wanted for questioning in New York in connection with his possible involvement in at least two murders, had been refused bail by a county Superior Court and would remain in custody until his trial began. More to the point, someone had burned Perry’s piece-of-shit auto dealership to the ground, along with one of Perry’s titty bars. This was a cause for celebration.
Ray Wray raised his coffee cup in salute.
Sometimes, the world just upped and fucked over the right guy.
So this was how Ray Wray come to hate Perry Reed . . .
The car was a piece of shit. Ray knew it, Perry Reed knew it, even the fucking squirrels collecting nuts in the parkland behind the lot knew it. The ’02 Mitsubishi Gallant looked like it had been used to transport troops in Iraq, it had so much dust in the engine, and it smelled of dog food, but it wasn’t as if automobile salesmen were lining up to offer someone like Ray Wray a credit option. He’d been told that, if he couldn’t get Perry Reed to cut him a deal, he might as well resign himself to being the white guy on the bus for the rest of his life, so he convinced his buddy Erik to drive him up to Perry Reed’s place and see what could be negotiated. Erik had dropped him off at the entrance to the lot and headed on to Montreal,