Clockers (21 page)

Touhey shook his head vigorously, his eyes glittering with heldback tears. “This is what it’s all about, no?”

“You should see the autopsy,” Rocco said.

Mazilli was hunkered down near the restaurant’s service door, his flashlight playing on the graffiti scrawled on the side of a full-up dumpster. Rocco scanned the messages:
DO RON KORVETTE SUMO TAKWAN ONE LOVE PIGIN SHAKIRA.

“One Love,” Mazilli said.

“What about it?”

“Touch it.”

Rocco pressed a fingertip into the silvery spray paint. His hand came away with shiny patches on his skin. The paint was not exactly wet, more like tacky, about two hours old.

“What’s One Love, a name?” Rocco asked.

“Are you kidding me? That’s nothing,” Mazilli said. “There’s some kid in O’Brien named Buddha Hat.”

“So what are you thinking? The shooter did the guy, stopped, sprayed his name and ran off?”

“Maybe he sprayed his name before—you know, like to kill time waiting for his guy to come out. We’re not talking masterminds here.”

“One Love,” Rocco said. “How do you know it’s not a soul group?”

“There’s this other kid, from Booker T.? His name’s Say the Truth.”

“So what do you want to do? Go down, check the moniker file?”

“It wouldn’t hurt,” said Mazilli. “Hey, maybe it’s a witness.”

Rocco took the picture of Erin out of his pocket, wrote “One Love” on the back. “Lemme get Rockets back here, do a scraping, take a picture.” Rising, Rocco surveyed the grounds: coffee cups, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, a coke vial. “We should bag all this shit up, right?”

They exchanged reluctant looks.

“What else? Canvass…” Rocco twirled his finger to signify all places within sight and hearing. “Get the fucking employees back down here, the family, I got that fucking blotto witness. What else, what else?” Rocco sighed, assessed the turf. “We’re talking breakfast here—who’s coming in on the midnight tour?”

“Brown and Honey.”

“Better than nothing.”

“Hey, Roc.” Mazilli was still down on one knee, his elbow resting on his thigh.

“What?” Rocco waited, not liking the tone of Mazilli’s voice. Mazilli’s eyes went from
ONE LOVE
to the ground and back to Rocco. “Get that asshole out of here.”

“Which one?”

Mazilli blew out a stream of air, his humorless eyes now fixed on Rocco’s face.

Rocco cracked a smile. “Hey, Maz. You’re fucking with my meal ticket there.” Rocco flushed the minute he said it. It came out too fast, and he didn’t even know what he meant by it.

Mazilli stared at him, spitting out a shred of dinner between his thin lips. “Your fucking
meal
ticket? You want a meal ticket, you come in with me. I told you that.”

“What, the liquor store? Are you kidding me? I just spent twenty years of my life up to my tits in this shit, you think I want to spend the next twenty swapping welfare checks for half pints of Knotty Head?” Rocco laughed. “Give me a break.” Then, worrying he had stepped over the line, he put a little pleading into it. “C’mon, Maz.”

Mazilli continued staring, giving him the eye. Rocco forced himself to keep his mouth shut, wait out Mazilli’s silence.

“Just get him out of here.”

Coming around the corner, Rocco saw Touhey leaning against the wall, hugging himself. The body had gone into the back of the ambulance; only a few small squiggles of blood and Rocco’s scuffed suitcase were left to mark its ever having been there.

As Rocco walked Touhey back across the parking lot, there seemed to be a whole parade coming the other way: an Emergency Services truck with a bank of searchlights, the two homicide investigators coming in on the midnight tour and Vince Kelso escorting the restaurant manager, who was carrying an attaché case and looking extremely pissed off to Rocco’s eyes, the cuffs of his pajamas peeking out from beneath his pant legs.

As Rocco approached the sidewalk tape again, he spied the kid with the high orange fade still hanging in with his two buddies. “I was gonna bring you guys out some Golden Mobies but they shut down the fryers in there.”

The kid with the fade waved Rocco off. “I don’t eat none of that fried shit. My body is the
temple.
”

Rocco had a fleeting pang of envy for the kid’s youth, his lightness. He wondered what it would feel like to give one of his Rubbermaid scalp massages through all that strange hair.

An older pipehead wearing a Runnin’ Rebels T-shirt loped over, almost barging into the three kids, taking in Rocco with bugged-out eyes.

“What kind gun you got?” His voice was a head-over-heels gobble, his tongue flicking across his lips, his head jerking like a turkey, right, left, right. Rocco tried to estimate how long the guy had been on the street. He still had some good prison muscles on him, so he must’ve just got out; the pipe melted weightlifters down to nothing but a cobblestone gut in only a few weeks.

“Two-inch snub-nosed thirty-eight,” Rocco said amiably.

The guy spun around in disdain, guffawing. ”
Thirty-eight!
Ho,
shit!
Ho,
shit!
”

“Yeah? How ‘bout you?” Rocco was distracted by the restaurant’s lights, which had just blinked on. He saw Mazilli inside, talking with the manager.

“I got me a
Uzi,
bawh.” The guy thrust out his hips on the brand name.

All the kids danced away, laughing. “Nigger got a Uzi.”

Insulted, the pipehead got a look in his eye that Rocco knew could lead to some show-and-tell retribution. Shit happened that easy all the time these days.

“You guys know anybody with a nine millimeter?”

Three of them were half gone in laughter, one in rage, everybody losing interest in him.

Rocco repeated himself: “You know anybody packs a nine millimeter?”

“Nine millimeter?” The original kid, the orange fade, came back to him.

Rocco reached for a card, thinking: Not a bad kid, half a brain at least. But how do I say it now? Do I say, Where’s One Love at?

“Yeah, they be
lots
of people I know with that.”

Or: Hey, are you One Love? Real casual, then hope the kid would say something like, Me? Naw, man, One Love’s over
there.

Clearing his throat, putting on his mildly curious face, Rocco gave it a shot. “Hey, you’re not One Love, are you?”

Before the kid could answer, a young, wild-eyed black woman burst through the tape and ran right into Touhey. He staggered back with an explosive “God!” The woman bounced off his chest, shifted to the left and hobbled forward. A uniform flew up to meet her, grabbed her by the arms and said, “Whoa, whoa” and danced her back to the sidewalk, her hobble becoming more pronounced the slower she moved.

The woman was cocaine skinny but stylishly dressed in a bolero jacket with padded shoulders and a brocade pillbox hat. As she tried to sidestep the cop’s momentum and work her way up to the blood puddles, she seemed oblivious to the fact that she had lost a high-heeled sandal.

“I want to see my brother. I just want to see my brother.”

“You can’t.” The uniform was young, and Rocco could see that he was anxious, not sure how to handle this.

“I just want to see him for a second.” She sounded both reasonable and crazed.

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do.” She tried to break free, and the cop shifted his grip up to her biceps.

“No you don’t.”

“He’s my brother. Why can’t I see my brother?”

“Lady, please.”

“I’m OK, I’m OK, I just—” Suddenly she erupted vomit, showering the cop, who tried to hop away but too late. Then he went up on tiptoes and stared down at himself. “Cock
sucker!
”

The woman dropped to her knees, crossed her arms over her gut and, dry-eyed, bellowed, “Dar-
ryl!”
as if the kid was still in earshot. Mildly surprised at the grief, Rocco moved to where she was crouched and put a hand on her shoulder. He scanned the uniforms, then called over a black female officer. “Take this lady wherever she wants to go. Wash her up, stay with her. She’s sister to the body.” He gave the officer his card. “And call me at my office in about ninety minutes.”

“Yeah, well, I get off in forty-five.”

Rocco didn’t answer, just glared. Unintimidated, the woman officer called over another uniform, gave him Rocco’s card, Rocco’s instructions, and walked off.

“Fucking bitch!” The vomit-sprayed cop lurched across the parking lot, shouting, “Hoo-wah fucking
bitch!
“ He stopped and hunched over, trying to delicately shake out his shirt with his fingertips. Someone drawled, “Lookin’ good there, Home!” and the entire herd broke up in laughter.

Rocco looked around for the kid with the orange fade: gone. Then he turned to Touhey. “Had enough?”

7

AS TWO
of the Homicides, one chunky and gray-haired, the other blond and handsome, began to carve their way back out through the crowd to the sidewalk, Strike, clutching a Yoo-Hoo, found himself unable to resist sliding right into their path, so that the gray-haired one had to gently backhand him to the side, saying “Beep-beep” as he did it. Strike horrified himself with his impulse to go right in their faces, as if begging to have his eyes read. As they plowed past him, Strike picked up a scent coming off the blond one—a piney soap smell, the smell of cleanliness, cut with a more curdled odor, one of exhaustion or desperation, like the stink of a pipehead with no money and too many hours left to his night. The cop worried him: he was like no other Strike had ever seen before, maybe some kind of expert or commissioner, somebody they brought out only for heavy investigations.

Strike had watched the cops and detectives mill around Darryl’s body and decided that most of them were just taking up space. They seemed to be playing with themselves, making wisecracks, one guy in uniform even saying to one of the sport jackets, “Mud person down,” as if a dead black man was some kind of joke. And when that pipehead woman from JFK, the one who hocked her ring to Rodney, had burst out of the crowd and knocked right into that blond Homicide before puking all over the cop in uniform, a lot of the other cops were laughing along with everybody else. The fact that no one seemed to care that much about the murder made Strike feel safe, but what did safe mean now?

Strike hung near the perimeter of the crime scene. With the body gone, along with most of the police, Strike noticed that a good part of the crowd around him had wandered off too, the only show left being Darryl’s sobbing sister. Strike was riveted by the skinny woman’s grief, but as a cop tried to bring her back to her feet, she locked eyes with Strike across the tape, recognition in her face, and a thrill of horror flashed up from his groin to his chest, sending him out of the parking lot. He walked blindly up the De Groot Street hill above Ahab’s, keeping to the shadows.

Strike tried to think about how things would be better now, but he couldn’t even remember why Darryl was supposed to get shot, couldn’t get a grip on what had gone down. He listened to his body tell him about trouble coming, felt his stomach act up even against the sweet white coolness of the Yoo-Hoo, the bottle heavy in his hand now, his kneecaps flaming from the exertion of the climb, his scattered mind periodically returning to the one truth he felt capable of comprehending: everything had changed.

Strike rested in the doorway of an abandoned tenement building high above the Ahab’s lot. He climbed the stoop and looked down on some Emergency Services cops strolling the grounds with heavy-duty flashlights, searching for bullets or something. As he watched, a little kid worked his way up the stoop. He climbed like a cub, using hands and feet, then grabbed the half-empty Yoo-Hoo at Strike’s side and took a drink.

Glancing down at the kid, Strike felt a rush of inspiration coming on, a high in his chest: buy a car seat, one of those baby seats, strap it up in the back of the Accord, make it look like a family car, maybe even throw some toys in, mess things up like kids were back there all the time. Nobody looks twice at a car with a baby seat—knockos, pipeheads, nobody. Strike clapped his hands once, laughing. Some people walking by turned to look at him, then quickly turned away.

Strike watched the kid drink. There was a snotty crust on the boy’s nose, and Strike’s stomach rippled in disgust. He looked down at the parking lot again and imagined that Darryl was still there in the doorway under that sheet, the blood blooming through the whiteness. He imagined that he heard Darryl’s sister’s shell-shocked cawing again. He shut his eyes against the vision of her puking up her misery, but the image stuck and just wouldn’t leave him. Her splattered vomit hadn’t had any chunks in it because she was on the pipe, and wasn’t putting anything in her stomach except for maybe orange juice and soda, maybe some potato chips for the salt. Strike feverishly fixated on all this, and then he felt his own stomach rise. Wheeling around toward the hallway of the abandoned building, he roared vomit, a wave of Yoo-Hoo splashing on the broken tiles.

There was a full moon out, so even without lights in the hallway Strike could see that what came up was shot through with streaks of red. He crouched over the mess, stunned, hearing again the heartbroken callings of Darryl’s sister, for real this time, coming from somewhere down the hill.

Strike’s trembling hand hovered over the thin, snaky swirls of his own blood. He tried to concentrate on exactly what he had said to Victor in that bar earlier tonight. “I’ll get back to you.” It wasn’t anything more than that. Just some empty words to ease out of the whole crazy conversation about Darryl beating up some girl, about Victor knowing some killer named My Man, both of their stories equally full of shit, or so Strike had thought. But now Darryl was dead, and Strike had no idea who did it.

Strike palmed the wetness from his mouth, thinking, Who the fuck is My Man? Where did Victor get to know anybody like that? What the fuck did Victor do?

Thinking:
Everything
changed.