Clockers (25 page)

Strike moved closer; the man on the ladder was Erroll Barnes. It must have been 70 degrees outside, but Rodney once told him that Erroll always felt cold, the way old men do. And if Erroll Barnes decided to build himself a raging fire in the middle of June, who would tell him to put it out?

Strike nodded, catching Erroll’s eye, but he got no acknowledgment. Erroll would know where Rodney was, he might even know who killed Darryl Adams, but Strike couldn’t even imagine asking him for the correct time, so he said nothing. Passing Erroll, he picked his way through car parts and open buckets of motor oil and moved to a rear corner of the garage. Four older men were playing poker on a netless Ping-Pong table under a suspended worklight.

It was still early, and Strike knew that by one-thirty or two in the morning, when the Dempsy weight men and their lieutenants started knocking off for the night, the game would shift to craps, and by sunrise a lot of the players would have blown off all of the night’s street profits, some even losing their re-up kitty too. In fact, some guys lost so bad in this garage that they went out of business. And when that happened, people sometimes got a little desperate, which was why Rodney paid Erroll Barnes to sit and feed the furnace, keeping the garage nice and warm and peaceful.

The garage belonged to Rodney, in partnership with someone Strike knew only as Curtis, who also owned the clapboard house out front. At the house cut of a dollar a throw on the craps table alone, Rodney and Curtis made at least fifteen hundred a night hustling the hustlers. In the last three months, Curtis had made so much money off the Ping-Pong table that he was negotiating to buy two more houses on either side of his first house, which was a joke, given that he bought the house and garage for a hundred dollars at a government auction. They even gave him a no-interest home improvement loan as part of the deal.

Strike watched the poker game for a few minutes while standing back in the shadows. Curtis wasn’t around, and the four men were playing just to keep the table warm, stud games for a nickel and a dime. Behind them, a tall skinny girl with blazing pipe-head eyes danced in a corner as if she had to pee. Her hooded sweatshirt was filthy, and Strike saw her size him up with a sidelong glance. He knew that the minute she could get him alone she would hit on him for five dollars or two dollars or one dollar. Strike furtively watched her dance in and out of the cone of light, thinking, This is no place to be right now. He wheeled and headed out, hands in pockets, head sunk into his collarbone as if expecting a punch.

“Hey.”

Strike wasn’t sure he heard it; if he did, it came from Erroll, but Erroll was still looking at the shadows on the far wall.

“Give me fifty dollar.”

It was like a voice in his head. Strike turned back. Erroll sat as still as death, composed, distant, not even giving Strike the courtesy of eye contact. He didn’t repeat himself.

Strike stared at Erroll, weighing responses, concluding there was nothing to weigh. Erroll was like New York City: he broke all the rules of do and don’t.

Strike walked back to the furnace, digging in his pocket. He held out two bills. “Alls I got is forty.”

Still without looking at him, Erroll forked the two twenties with his fingertips and refolded his arms.

Strike walked out of the garage, thinking, I just got held up, I just got fucking held up, I’m a goddamn victim my
damn
self.

Standing by his car in the moonlit back yard with his keys in his hand, Strike jumped when the girl from the garage came up fast alongside him.

“You looking for Rodney, right?”

Strike stepped back from her: she smelled bad. “I ain’t looking for Rodney.”

“Rodney’s in his new store.” Her eyes were on his car keys.

“What new store?”

“It’s on like Jury and Krumm.”

He stood in confused silence for a second, then said, “I ain’t looking for Rodney.”

She moved closer, inches away now. “Give me some money.” She said it low and fast, thrusting her upturned palm at Strike’s belly.

Strike gripped her by the shoulders and pushed her back a couple of feet so he could open his car door, get inside and away.

“I’ll tell Erroll on you,” she said with childish menace as he floored it in reverse out onto the street.

Jury Street was two blocks over from Blossom, but there was little difference between the two: both gave off the same ash-gray air of decrepitude, the same haunted stillness. After parking his car, Strike stood on JFK and looked down the length of Jury. He saw a single ray of yellow falling on the sidewalk, maybe a hundred yards into the gloom, like a flashlight at the bottom of a pond.

Rodney’s new hole in the wall had no name out front. Standing in the doorway, Strike saw that the new store was three quarters the size of the old one. But in every other way it was identical—the same pool table, video game, refrigerator, cracked vinyl bar stool, diplomas, glass counters; the same linty crew of teenagers and relatives strung out through the tiny room as if they’d been there for years.

Rodney stood in front of the counter, his back to Strike, wearing a neon-yellow tank top and a skin-tight pair of bicycle shorts. He was yelling at his daughter for stacking the Goody Cakes under the pork rinds in the display rack, asking her if she thought the cakes were some kind of goddamn secret, tearing into her in a climbing sarcastic drawl.

When Rodney was in this kind of mood, Strike usually kept walking, but he was so eager to talk that he charged across the store as if to leap on Rodney’s back. One of the teenagers playing pool saw Strike and yelled, “Yo Rodney! Rodney!”

Rodney turned just as Strike stopped short and said, “Hey.”

The kid relaxed, hand on chest. “I see him coming in all crazy, I thought he a hit man. I was gonna
hook
him. I was knotted, bawh.”

“He ain’t no
hit
man.” Rodney gave Strike a fast, knowing wink that made Strike feel almost sleepy with relief. Sometimes just seeing Rodney, hearing his voice, worked on him like hypnosis. Rodney had that power.

“What the hell you do, what’s this, what you move for?” Strike’s voice came out high and squeaky.

“What for? This morning the motherfucker tried to up the goddamn rent on me from like four hundred to
six.
He figured like I did all that
work
in there, the wallboards, the bathroom, the light fixtures—like I’m stuck, you know? The hell with him, man. I got me some of the kids, we took everything out this mornin’. Everything that
could
go, went.” Rodney leaned over the counter and rearranged the popcorn and Fritos bags. “The man a opportunist.”

“Y’all should give out a warning, you know?” The words came out faster than Strike intended.

“A warning for what?” Rodney looked at him flat and hard.

Strike looked away.

“You ain’t gotta know all my business.” Rodney’s voice went high with righteousness. “I don’t ask after all
y’all
business, do I?”

Strike turned back to him and spoke with exaggerated courtesy. “Can I talk to you?”

“Shit, you be tellin’ people all your moves before you make ‘em, next thing you know they got their hand in your pocket more’n
you
do.”

“Can I talk to you, Rodney?”

“Shit, that’s just common sense, that’s just business.”

Strike turned for the door—he just couldn’t take it—but before he made it past the pool table, Rodney let loose with a dramatic sigh and said wearily, “Hang on.” Then he reached over the candy counter and brought up a sledgehammer, and its sudden appearance, its oversize power and bulk, was so startling to Strike that he thought of a clown prop at a circus.

“Take us a
walk.
“ Rodney jerked the sledgehammer up to his shoulder and brushed past Strike. On his way to the door, Rodney pushed the
Penthouse
his father was reading into the old man’s chest, almost knocking him off his bar stool. On the street, he strolled with the sledgehammer on his shoulder as if coming home from work at the rock pile.

“What’s that?” Strike nodded to the sledgehammer, but Rodney didn’t seem to hear the question.

“You want to hear some shit?” Rodney sucked on his teeth. “That old fool wants to get married. You believe that? My father been going into the O’Brien Houses for this little thing about six months now? He-all wants to
marry
her, I’m fit to block his hat for him. Saying to me, ‘I loves her, you don’t understand.’” Rodney shook his head. “Jesus Christ, the stupidness.”

They walked in silence for a moment, Strike having no idea where they were headed. He licked at the imagined blood on his mouth again, hungry for both absolution and praise. And when he finally spoke his voice came out both high and low.

“So you hear about it, right?”

“Hear about what?” Rodney asked. They got to the corner of JFK and passed a knot of people marking time in front of the boarded-up storefronts.

“What you think?”

Rodney’s eyes went bright with recognition, then flat again. “I ain’t heard nothin’.”

“Wait—” Strike began to sputter.

“I ain’t heard nothin’, I don’t
wanna
hear nothin’. I told you, I don’t ask about all y’all business, do I?”

Off balance, feeling helpless, Strike ignored Rodney’s message. “I don’t know who did it.”

“Did what?” Rodney stopped in front of his old store. “I don’t even know what you’re talkin’ about.” Rodney went face-to-face with Strike, eyebrows high—a last warning. “Don’t
care
neither.”

Strike took a step back, searching for some way to deal with this.

Rodney turned away from him, put the sledgehammer on the sidewalk and addressed the sheets of plywood, working them loose with violent two-handed tugs, throwing his crouched weight into it, growling with the effort, looking more like an animal trying to get out than a man trying to get in.

When the plywood came free, he climbed inside, unlocked the front door and waved Strike in.

Rodney stood in the center of the empty room, the sledgehammer back on his shoulder, a hand on his hip. He looked down at Strike. “You don’t know nothin’, or you don’t know all?”

Strike was suddenly afraid that he had walked into a trap. Being close to one death made it seem easy to die, as if it was a flu going around.

“I don’t know all. I know like half. Or like
maybe
I know half.”

“Front half or back half?”

“Front half. Alls I did was hold conversation, you know, like, I was in this bar, and—”

“Six hundred dollars.” Rodney cut him off, walking in a slow distracted circle with the sledgehammer. “Unh, unh, unh.”

Strike backed away to the door, reached behind him for the knob, but Rodney, ignoring him, disappeared behind a half wall, and in a moment Strike heard a steady bubbling splash.

Rodney came back out to Strike while zipping his fly with his free hand. “Y’all got to take a leak?”

Strike shook his head no.

Rodney adjusted the sledgehammer on his shoulder, spread and set his feet. “Last chance.”

“What you gonna do?” Strike wanted to run, but he was torn between not wanting to look foolish and not wanting to die. Then Rodney turned his back on him again and went to the half-wall bathroom. Strike heard the toilet flush. Rodney said, “I took out everything 1 put in ‘cept one thing, and now
it
got to go too.”

It sounded like a series of explosions, and water raced through the store even before Rodney was finished smashing the porcelain. He sloshed back out into the main room, clucking his tongue at the damage. “It a damn shame, ain’t it?” He looked around, spied a framed diploma on one of the walls and tucked it under his arm before wading out to the sidewalk.

“How much did it cost you?” Rodney drove in circles around Dempsy Heights, a presence on the streets, keeping up the morale of his troops.

“Did
what
cost me?” Strike sat in the shotgun seat, knowing they could circle like this for hours.

“Tonight.”

Strike needed a second for the question to sink in, remembering Victor saying his man would do it “for nothin’…for me.” Avoiding Rodney’s eyes, Strike said, “That’s my business, just like you said.”

“Uh-huh. Did you bring up my name?”

”
Hell
no.”

“Do I know this guy?”

“He’s like from New York.” Instinctively, Strike wanted to protect Victor from that tone in Rodney’s voice.

“So then he don’t know me.”

“Unh-uh. Shit, I just met him my damn self, and it got passed on from
there
so…” Strike looked out the side window, feeling heavy with disappointment. Rodney had said, “Don’t tell me,” but obviously what he really meant was, “Tell me I’m in the clear.” His self-interest was so naked that Strike wondered why he had ever imagined that he could come to Rodney for help. Probably, he thought, because at the moment Rodney was the closest thing he had to day-by-day family.

Strike shifted gears, still looking for a little sympathy. “Yeah, so, I just got myself
robbed
by Erroll Barnes. About two hours ago. Ain’t that some shit?”

Rodney seemed amused. “How much he get from you?”

“Forty, right in the damn garage.”

“Big bad Erroll.” Rodney laughed. “What he do, just ask for it, right? Dint even look you in the face, right?”

Strike didn’t answer.

“You know why he do it that way? He
shy.
“ Rodney waved lazily to a crew in front of a bar called Shut Up. “Yeah, when we were growin’ up he was the shyest boy. He never had no dealin’ with girls. I got him every girl he ever had until he was like eighteen.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, you could say Erroll always had a problem dealing with the public, you know, at parties, on the street an’ shit.”

As they rolled past the Dumont side of the Roosevelt projects, Strike sneaked a peek up at Victor’s bedroom window. The lights were off and he couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. He felt a surge of remorse for having cast his lot with Rodney over his own true blood.