Chapter 3: Ryan

“There’s only one person working,” Joseph hissed as he came around the corner where Ryan was poking a spongy white package of diapers.

“I bet you anything there’s someone else in the back.” Ryan craned his neck to get a look at the end of the drugstore, pulling his hoodie over his head to cover his face. Pack members always told him his face was too recognizable and his eyes, a bright crystal blue, would be too easy to identify. “Or the pharmacy. There’s always someone in the pharmacy.”

“Not in this jenky-ass place,” Joseph promised, yanking two packages off the shelf. “Where’s Rodrigo? He’s gotta be our distraction.”

A well-worn routine: Rodrigo smiling and joking at the counter, asking for out of the way items that had to be retrieved with a turned back while the other two slipped out the front door. Ryan was built enough that a package of diapers wasn’t quite as obvious pressed into his abdomen, but Joseph was a jangle of bones and sinew. A single diaper against his stomach looked like a distended bowel.

“He’s over by the toothpaste. Probably grabbing a few,” Ryan whispered.

Some of the pack took a wolf’s perspective to dental hygiene but not Rodrigo and Ryan. Ryan wondered if there was a streak of human pride in the two of them that made them care just a bit more than the rest of the pack. Whatever made it happen, he was glad it did. He peeked over the top of the bland, beige shelves to see Rodrigo pacing the dental aisle with a tube of toothpaste already in his fist.

“Get him and tell him to head to the counter,” Joseph hissed again. Ryan noticed his dull, yellowed teeth as he spoke. Bones and sinew and rotting fangs hanging from his jaws. “Let’s get a move on before we find ourselves dealing with more than one damn employee.”

He started forcing the package of diapers under his shirt as Ryan whistled to Rodrigo. Their eyes met and Ryan tilted his head in an instructive nod. As Rodrigo made his way to the counter, Ryan and Joseph, both pregnant with diapers, headed casually towards the exit.

“I know, I know. It’s so crazy that they keep the condoms behind the counter.”

Ryan could hear the lilting laughter of the teenaged girl at the register while Rodrigo worked his magic. She was crouched down and opening the plastic divider kept secure with the oblong silver lock when Ryan and Joseph crept past the counter. They were outside and out of sight by the time she stood up, a black box of Magnum condoms in her hand.

It took Rodrigo a little longer than usual to emerge from the drugstore after them. Joseph smoked a cigarette while they waited; Ryan listened to the sound of the smoke being sucked against his yellow teeth.

“We shouldn’t rip this place off anymore,” Ryan said, staring up at the brightly lit sign. It was a chain store, and he had no qualms with the stealing, but it was a quiet neighborhood populated with kids and families. He couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes landing on his back.

“It only gets hit once in a while. Relax, Ryan. I thought you were tougher than that,” Joseph said between drags, drawing out his name like an older brother might.

“This has nothing to do with toughness, Joseph,” Ryan snapped back, enunciating the name in the same cadence as Joseph said his. “It’s about brains.”

“Like you got any of those.”

Rodrigo exited the store, a plastic bag swinging by its handles in the palm of his hand. He headed towards where the truck was parked against the curb, and Ryan unlatched the door of the cab from the inside.

“Got what you needed?” Ryan asked.

“Could ask you guys the same thing.” Rodrigo tossed the plastic bag into the backseat of the cab. Its contents rolled out just enough for Ryan to see what he had gotten, toothpaste included. “I think we should keep away from this place for a while.”

Joseph slapped his hand down on the steering wheel. “You too? Jesus, you and Ryan sound like a bunch of high school kids. Like this is your first time ripping shit off.”

“It’s too small, and it’s not busy enough,” Rodrigo argued.

“So what? That means there was only one person behind the counter. This place didn’t even have a pharmacist working, for God sakes.”

Ryan stared at the collection of loot scattered across the half-folded back seat of the truck cab. He had seen how much the diapers cost, and it occurred to him that the pack should be in a better position than it was. He didn’t understand why they were always scraping along instead of being able to stand upright. There was plenty of superstition among the pack members, and more than one of them thought that the living were constantly watched by the dead yet none of them were concerned with making the dead proud. Maybe because, he thought, the dead all lived the same way they do anyway.

“It’s pathetic,” he said after a long pause that neither of the other two noticed because they were still bickering between themselves.

“What is?” Rodrigo asked.

Ryan faced forward and leaned his head as far back as he could against the seat. “How we live. Sheila’s kid needs diapers, and among the group of us, we couldn’t come up with a few bucks for them? That’s pathetic.”

“The kid’s gonna keep needing diapers,” Joseph replied, missing Ryan’s point entirely. “Even if we could scrape up enough for this run, there’d always be another.”

Ryan wanted to tell him that that was exactly what he considered to be pathetic, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. He stared past Rodrigo out the window of the cab as the lit-up sign from the drugstore receded from view.

Rodrigo knew Ryan’s point even better than Ryan did. Most of his life had been spent trying to convince the rest of the pack to become a different sort of people. All that came from his efforts, or proselytizing as Joe referred to it, were snipes about him being weak, soft, a fucking pussy. He told Ryan that their kind was in a sad state of giving some thought to the future and to the quality of life made someone a pussy.

The ride home was mercifully short, which only gave Ryan another reason they should stay away from that particular drug store. There had been a time when the pack had a stronger code, and a big part of that code was not shitting where they ate. If they needed to rip a place off or steal supplies, they drove a bit further than down the block.

Ryan had heard it explained as two separate schools of thought: they were less likely to get snagged if people had never seen them before, and it showed a level of respect to their neighborhood.

As the truck made its shaky landing outside the main house, Ryan rolled the whole conversation over in his mind. His dad had been dead about five years at that point, but he was remembered as a man who upheld some form of moral code. When Ryan was a kid, his dad never passed up a chance to explain the difference between real criminals, ‘to the bone low-lifes’ as he used to say, and themselves.

“The system is rigged against us,” he told a younger Ryan on one of their many trips out to Ocean Beach. “It’s rigged against most people, but most people just assume that’s the way it’s supposed to be and go about their day. We know we deserve better, but the system won’t give it to us.”

His dad told him never to steal from people you know, never commit a crime merely for the sake of doing it, avoid doing harm as much as possible. To Ryan’s dad, crime was a necessary evil that should only happen in order to get the basics for survival. Swiping food from a big chain grocery store so they could have something to eat was perfectly acceptable; stealing liquor from a locally-owned corner store warranted a punishment.

The only time Ryan could remember his dad hitting him was when he caught him and Rodrigo drunk in an alleyway behind the dim sum place that sold their treats for pennies at the end of the day. Ryan was pretty sure it had been Rodrigo’s idea to lift a bottle from the corner store run by the old Asian couple. Ryan’s dad loved to stop and chat with them, buy a pack of cigarettes and a candy bar even when he didn’t need one, just to give money to a business that kept a storefront filled. When Ryan and Rodrigo were spotted by Ryan’s old man, they didn’t even have the time to think up a lie. An open palm caught Ryan across the jaw, and the numbing effect of the booze did nothing to dull the spike of pain driven up the side of his face.

“It was my idea!” he could hear Rodrigo shout, whether it was true or not. Ryan’s vision blurred, and he was yanked to his feet. Rodrigo’s protests faded into the alleyway as Ryan was dragged into the sun.

“How much did the bottle cost?” Ryan’s dad asked as he pulled him into the store. “How much should you have given these people?”

Ryan insisted they stole because they knew the old couple would never sell liquor to kids, but the reasoning didn’t matter. For the next month, Ryan’s dad made him stock shelves and clean for the couple, and when they offered payment, he was instructed to turn it down.

At the time, as is common in pre-adolescence until adulthood, Ryan thought his dad was being overly harsh and ludicrously tied to his weird rules. To him, it seemed odd that a man who once held a member of a rival pack at gunpoint would care about something as innocuous, in Ryan’s mind at least, as shoplifting and underaged drinking.

In the years between his dad’s death and that very moment sitting in the cab of Joseph’s pick-up truck, Ryan had watched the decline within the pack. Only a few of them were trying to hold it all together. Most of them were fine to descend into full blown criminality and depravity. To the bone lowlifes shedding any pretense of civility that they had cobbled together. The main house was starting to look as if squatters lived there, and no one was paying attention to the state of things in general. Aside from Ryan, Rodrigo, and Sheila, who came to her senses once her kid was born, it really seemed that nobody cared.

Joseph climbed out of the truck without saying anything. He didn’t bother to bring in the diapers, and he lit a cigarette on the way into the house. In the purple glow of early night, Ryan watched the flame of the lighter illuminate Joseph’s face, casting shadows upward across his narrowed eyes. When Ryan’s dad was alive, no one was allowed to smoke in the house.

“Thank God we don’t live here anymore, huh?” Rodrigo said as he gathered up their items. He tossed a package of diapers onto Ryan’s lap. “For a bunch of reasons but mainly because I couldn’t live with smokers.”

“This place is going to hell,” Ryan agreed, clutching the diapers to his chest.

They slid out along the bench seat and slammed the door to the cab. It rattled in a hollow echo, its metal bones clanking against its aluminum skin. A light flicked on in the house, and they could see Sheila framed in the lighted window, a toddler propped on her hip. She was wearing her nurse’s scrubs the way she always did, and from the movement of her mouth, they could both tell she was yelling at Joseph about smoking inside.

“Maybe we should ask Sheila to move in with us,” Rodrido suggested but Ryan just shrugged in response. Right now, the only thing he wanted was to have less involvement with the pack until some semblance of order was in place.

Ryan waited until Rodrigo was inside before he started in behind him. When the door swung open, he heard voices snapping at each other, and it took everything he had to continue in instead of turning away and walking home.