Clockers (3 page)

The bounty run over for now, two of the knockos walked back through the projects toward the second hidden car.

Thumper came back in his face. “Strike, why you always look depressed? Are you depressed? Are you angry at me?” Thumper looked concerned, waiting for an answer.

“You gotta do what you gotta do.” Strike controlled himself, the words coming out low and lazy.

“Yeah? Let me ask you something else. Do you think I’m an effective deterrent in the war on drugs?” He stared Strike in the eye, mouth open, innocent and earnest. Strike turned his head away, but Thumper moved his own head to keep up the eye contact. “Or do you think I’m just a big asshole?”

Strike caught Peanut looking at him again: Peanut definitely out of work. The Word out too.

“Oh shit.” Thumper snapped his fingers. “Did we do socks and shoes?”

Strike breathed through his nose and hunched over to unlace. Thumper said, “Allow me,” then dropped to one knee as if they were in a shoe store, undoing Strike’s sneakers and then slipping off his socks.

“Let’s go, there, Thumper,” Big Chief yelled from the car. Thumper sighed, rising, shaking out the socks for hidden dope.

“OK. I gotta go, hon.” Thumper swiveled on his hips like a discus thrower. Strike tensed, bracing himself for the goodbye. Thumper uncorked it, slapping Strike between the shoulder blades, a heavy, bone-rattling
pock,
sending a shock wave of pain through Strike’s 125-pound frame. “Catch you later.”

Thumper walked over to a group of little kids who were watching the show, dropped his hand on a six-year-old shoulder: “Walk me, Big Time.” He strolled to the car with the kid as security against a toaster thrown out a window, Strike’s socks dangling from his back pocket.

Strike pulled on his sneakers over bare feet, clenching his teeth so the porcelain squeak was a hundred times magnified in his head, thinking: Lose
all
the idiots around me. Clowns, thieves, juveniles…

Strike walked to the curb and looked into the Fury: The Word sat in the back. Strike tried to catch his eye, throw some fear, but The Word was sitting on the street side and wouldn’t look his way. Crunch sat on the curb side, elbow out the window, waiting to roll. Little kids hung all over the car, wide-eyed; Big Chief nodded to one kid and growled, “What’s up, yo? Dempsy burnin’?”

Strike turned and noticed a boy of eleven or twelve standing there staring at Crunch, stick legs in wide-cut shorts, arms crossed high on his chest like an old-time comic-book weightlifter. The kid was giving Crunch the thousand-yard stare, testing himself, putting on his I-ain’t-afraid-a-no-knocko face. Crunch, feeling the eyes, the attitude, stared right back. “What’s
your
problem?”

The skinny boy didn’t answer, just kept staring, and Crunch went with it, playing, staring back.

But Crunch couldn’t hold it. He started laughing, and what happened next threw Strike completely. Strike expected the kid to go on staring or walk away triumphant, but when Crunch started laughing, the kid laughed too. The kid had play in him. The kid
had flex,
and flex was rare. Flex was intelligent, special, a good sign, like big paws on a puppy. For a minute Strike lost his anger, entranced by this kid, by possibilities.

As the Fury rolled off, Big Chief said goodbye to Strike by making a gun with his fingers and winking. As soon as they were gone, the baby-fat girl came up to him again.

“Can I ask you something?” she said. Her smile was tense, jittery, begging.

Strike ignored her, then asked a question of his own. “Who’s that kid there?”

“Where?”

“Him.”

“That Tyrone Jeeter.”

“He live here?”

“He just moved into Eight Weehawken from over on the other side. You know his mother? That woman Iris? Strike, can I borrow a bottle?”

Strike started to walk away, thinking about flex, when the rust-colored Caddy came rolling up again, Rodney at the wheel with his arm flung out along the back of the shotgun seat. Rodney ducked his head down to see over the gold frames of his sunglasses, then curled a finger for Strike.

Strike looked right and left, frowning, not liking to be seen talking to Rodney out in the open, even though any kid in the street could draw a diagram: Champ on top, then down to Rodney, then down to Strike and finally down to whomever Strike was trusting this week.

Strike walked to the car, stuck his head in the passenger-side window and got hit with a heavy cherry smell coming from the deodorizers Rodney had in front and back. Six Garfield cats were suction-cupped and spread-eagled on all the rear and side windows, staring bug-eyed out at the traffic.

Rodney sat with a hand on his crotch. Zodiac and
Apollo XII
patches sprouted from the thighs of his dry-cleaned jeans, and a button was missing from the belly of his white ruffle-paneled shirt. But he was handsome, smooth-skinned and in pretty good shape from all the prison time and from being an ex-boxer.

“Who’d they take?” Rodney thumbed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“The Woo-Word.” Strike was annoyed to hear the stutter come back on him. “He ain’t holding or nothing.”

“You gonna go tell his aunt to get him?” Rodney spoke in singsong, like a schoolteacher.

“I’ll take care of it.” Maybe Rodney should take care of some things too, Strike thought, like losing the Garfields. And lose the Caddy while he was at it—the only monied nigger left in creation to drive a big-body Cadillac.

“What you want?” Strike sniffed, picking up a vague fried-food smell underneath the cherry scent.

“You go to that
doc
tor yet?” Another singsong nag.

“I ain’t had time.”

“That shit’ll kill you quicker than anything out here.” Rodney tilted his chin at the Yoo-Hoo.

“What you want, Rodney?” Strike tried to come off patient, but barely, wanting to get back to the bench and reorganize the post-attack situation.

“Come by the store.”

Rodney’s long fingernails were shiny and gray with food grease. Strike’s gut rippled reflexively. “When?”

“Later.”

“It gonna be busy.”

Rodney shrugged. “Let Futon run it.”

“Futon’s a idiot.” Strike looked away, scowling, not wanting to see those fingernails anymore.

Rodney sighed, shook his head. “You got to get off that bench every now and then, my man. You gonna get all crabbed up.”

Strike couldn’t respond, the stammer hitting strong, right up from his feet. And he didn’t even know the words yet.

“Just come by, OK?”

“I-i-if I can.”

The baby-fat girl worked her way up to Rodney’s window in a shy slide. She peeked in, smiling. “I like them
Gar
fields.”

Rodney gave her a slow eye, fanning his knees. “What
you
want?”

Strike pushed away from the car, headed back to the bench. Turn my stomach.

“Yo yo, check it out.” Horace shoved a Childcraft catalogue under Strike’s nose and pointed to a brightly colored set of 250 blocks standing at twice the height of a blank-faced, five-year-old redhead. “That’s some bad shit for a kid, them blocks.”

They were sitting on the top bench slat, thigh to thigh.

“What the hell you want with blocks for? You a
in
fant?” Strike had a Hold Everything catalogue open on his knees.

“Not for
me,
motherfucker. I’m just
say
in’…” Horace got all red and choke-faced.

“Yo yo, Horace want
play
blocks.” Peanut haw-hawed, spinning out in a tight circle, his own catalogue rolled up into a baton.

“Hey,
fuck
you, nigger!” Horace flew off the bench and Peanut danced away, his laugh exaggerated, pushing it.

Strike thought Horace did want the blocks. He wanted the blocks, the deluxe colored pencil sets, the construct-a-castle, the miniature rescue vehicles and maybe even the plastic microbots. Strike knew Horace had been taking his money and buying toys on the sly since the beginning, but he never said anything about it because Horace never had anything before in his life, and he was only thirteen.

Ever since Peanut fished a dozen catalogues out of a garbage can, everybody was in a state of mild disorder, passing around the thin glossies as if they were sex books. Strike would have cracked a whip if it was anything else, but he was the worst. He’d meant to go over to Rodney’s store an hour before, during the dinner lull, but had remained glued to the bench, a half-dozen catalogues on his lap, running his fingers down page after page of camisoles, hand-carved Christmas-tree angels, computerized jogging machines, golf putting sets for den and office, personalized stationery, lawn furniture—anything and everything for man, woman or child. The catalogues made him weak in the knees, fascinated him to the point of helplessness, the idea of all these
things
to be had, organized in a book that he could hold in one hand. Not that he would ever order anything—possessions drew attention, made you a target. None of the boys would order out of a catalogue either, not necessarily because they were paranoid like Strike, but because the ordering process—telephones, mailings, deliveries—required too much contact with the world outside the street. It was easier to go to a store on JFK Boulevard, flash your roll and say “Gimme that.”

Strike didn’t have a watch, but he knew it was seven o’clock because Popeye came out of 4 Weehawken. Popeye was forty-five but looked sixty, a hobbled-up twist-backed pipehead with a bulging left eye. He shuffled over to the bench licking his lips, probably broke but liking to be near the bottles anyhow, hoping he’d find one in the grass or something. Strike had given Popeye a bottle out of pity a few weeks back, but that had turned out to be a bad mistake, because the only thing worse than a pipehead with no bottle to smoke was a pipehead with one bottle, and Popeye had spent the rest of that night in a frantic scuttle, hassling the crew for hours until Strike had to slap his face. Strike still remembered the slick bristles of Popeye’s cheek and something wet—spit, blood—left on his own hand. Strike had rubbed it off against his pant leg in disgust, and all that night he dreamed about that wetness on his palm and fingers.

Popeye came hobbling past the bench now, not looking at Strike but pacing back and forth like a sentry, mumbling, “Strike the
man…
Strike the
man.
”

Seven o’clock: the Fury last rolled on them at four-thirty, and processing The Word at Juvie, if it went that far, would take them out of action for about ninety minutes. Then they’d probably hit O’Brien, then Sullivan, which meant they’d probably roll on Strike again about eight, eight-fifteen—unless they scored at those other two projects, in which case they wouldn’t come back tonight, because a second booking would bring them to about ten o’clock and the Fury always knocked off at ten to drink away the last two hours of the four-to-midnight shift. They didn’t like to snatch clockers later than ten and risk getting stuck until two
A.M.
with paperwork and all the requisite stops along the way to the county bullpen. So they were either coming in an hour or not at all. Strike couldn’t take another dicky check tonight, decided to be out of there before eight, come back at ten when all was clear one way or the other.

He went back to the pictures on his lap, flipping past a gold-plated razor, bocce balls, thick merino wool undersheets and a child-size police cruiser, four feet high like a bright blue cartoon car, a blond three-year-old grinning behind the wheel like he’d just shit his pants.

Strike had no real love of things for themselves, but he loved the idea of things, the concept of possession. Sometimes he was crazed with wanting, blind with visions of things he was too cagey to buy, and at moments like this he felt tortured, tantalized, sensing in some joyless way that he was outsmarting someone, but he wasn’t sure who.

Finally revolted with the catalogues, with himself, he slid off the bench top, walked over to Futon and took away Futon’s catalogue, a sexy Victoria’s Secret, Futon going, “Hey hey,” his fingers snapping like fish after the pages. Strike had to hold the catalogue behind his back to get Futon’s attention.

“I’m going out. Watch the bench.”

“Where you goin’?”

“If I wanted you to know, I would’ve said to you.”

“You goin’ to Rodney’s store?”

Strike stared at him.

“Gimme back the book, OK?”

Strike continued to stare, as if his silence carried some kind of lesson he wanted Futon to learn.

“I got it covered. Gimme back the motherfuckin’ book.” Futon faked left around Strike, then snatched the catalogue from the right side, laughing. Strike guessed he liked Futon as much as he liked anyone: not much.

On his way out of the projects, Strike spotted the boy who had stared down Crunch—Tyrone. He was standing by the fence, watching Horace and Peanut huff and puff, looking disgusted. Strike noticed that Tyrone had a half-assed Mercedes symbol shaved into his hair, mostly grown in now, looking more like some kind of indentation than a design. Strike walked up closer to the boy, checked him out a little, got the smell of him, the boy so aware of Strike coming near that he locked his head at an angle to be looking away, Strike taking that as a sign that the kid was alert. Tyrone … the kid needed a street name. Strike would think about it.

Walking the three blocks to his car, Strike performed casual 360-degree turns every minute or two to see if anybody was walking behind him. He had no money on him, no dope, but he was known.

He kept his car in an old lady’s driveway, paid her a hundred a month to keep it off the street. The lady was seventy-five, half blind, liked to listen to gospel radio and sit in her window, watching the two-year-old Accord as if it might drive away by itself. Strike liked old people. They were more sensible, less likely to be greedy, had no taste or inclination for getting high. He had six of them on his payroll: this one for the car; three others to keep Sears-bought safes in their houses, for his money; another to keep a safe for his surplus bottles; and another to do his laundry. Old people were his biggest expense, $2,000 a month. But he was making between $1,500 and $2,000 a week now, his cut for selling anywhere from fifteen hundred to two thousand bottles, depending on what kind of shorts he encountered—thefts, breakage, police. He was afraid to do anything with the money, didn’t want to flaunt it or acquire anything that could be taken away from him, so all he had to show for his hard work was cash, more cash than he could count. His car was used and leased; the cops couldn’t confiscate a leased car, and a used car didn’t draw that much attention anyway. His apartment was rented in someone else’s name, in a bad but quiet neighborhood, a whore strip, but there weren’t any clockers and a bank of pay phones stood right across the street.