Clockers (34 page)

“You could charge money for this.” Rocco straightened up. “You wanna take a ride with me?” A huge but odorless human shit lay in the far corner of the room, most likely the grand finale of a week’s worth of some junkie’s constipation.

“You locking me up?” Almighty had swollen almond-shaped eyes that perpetually quivered with a promise of tears.

“Hell no.” Rocco waved the question away. “If I was locking you up, I’d be putting cuffs on you.” He extended his arm for Almighty to rise. “C’mon.”

Shuffling out of the room, Almighty stopped next to a parked shopping cart in the hallway. He had scored two faucets, a stainless steel tray, a bundle of traverse rods and a metal drawer from a filing cabinet. He looked to Rocco. Rocco looked to Harris and Dolan, the uniforms shrugging in assent.

Almighty led the way, pushing the cart, walking on his toes with a slightly forward lurch. In his unhurried gait, in the slow bob of his head, Rocco saw that the guy probably loved working this place, thirteen floors to stroll with his cart, nice view of the lady of the harbor, run into friends, always something to score, some wiring to rip out of a dropped ceiling, a radiator everybody missed, a shower head. It was like a garden, or a dream, the smashed toilets and gutted ceilings an outside to match Almighty’s inside—shattered, sick, still, peaceful.

Rocco shook himself out of his ruminations, shouted “Ho!” just to hear the echo. On the way down the corridor to the stairs, he stopped at a twenty-foot-long rectangular window that looked in on a barren and lightless room. A glass-walled cubicle stood off to one corner, and a red-on-yellow sign was still taped to the back wall: “Please Do Not Tap on Glass.”

“What the hell was this?” Rocco peered through the filthy window.

“The baby room,” Dolan said. “You know, the observation room, where guys made horses’ asses out of themselves waving to their new sons?”

“No…” Rocco took in the chalky desolation through the long window. He couldn’t imagine the room looking any way other than it did right now, and it made him think of unloved, unclaimed infants. “That’s a shame,” he said, clucking his tongue.

“What is?” Harris helped Almighty maneuver the cart over a pothole.

Dolan and Harris stood over the balcony and helped Almighty toss his booty down to the lobby. Elbows on the railing, observing the swoop and glide of the falling objects, Rocco couldn’t shake the image of the ghostly observation room. He began to imagine that the entire atrium was some kind of celestial flue or baby aviary and that the air was filled with the nightgowned spirits of long-gone infants.

“Do you know something?” Rocco squinted into the hollow gloom. “If you shoot a pregnant woman and they deliver the baby before she dies? If that baby is delivered dead, even if it was killed by the bullet, it’s still a single homicide. In order for it to be a homicide, a baby’s lungs have got to be fully aerated before it’s killed. Does that suck or what?”

Almighty seemed to be the only one listening.

Dolan stepped up beside him. “Double or nothing I get it right in a shopping cart.” Dolan dropped a faucet, which hit the handle of a cart and shot out of the lobby like a rocket.

”
Kill
my ass!” someone yelled from below. “Walk it
down,
motherfucker! Walk it
down!
Jesus!”

They threw Almighty’s scrap into the trunk of the Chevy Nova. Dolan rode in back with Almighty to make it two against one, and Harris brought up the rear in the cruiser.

“So, Gary, still living with Suky?” Rocco sought out his eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, uh-huh … kind of.” Almighty slouched down, hand over his mouth, watching the world slip past.

“You ever meet your father-in-law?”

“The cop? Unh-uh.” He laughed as if he knew what would have happened.

“I bet not,” Rocco said. “So what are you doing with yourself? You working?”

“Yeah, I was helping on the trucks? But I’m sick now.”

“How much is that shit in the trunk worth? Kelso still giving good prices?”

“He OK.”

They drove past the precinct house. Almighty was probably used to being booked here, and he sat up straight, frowning. “Where we going?”

”
My
office,” Rocco said.

“What’s that?”

“Homicide.” Rocco watched the rearview for his reaction.

“Homicide?” Almighty slouched back down, barely interested. “Huh, you think I did somebody?” he asked, sounding almost amused.

“I dunno.” Rocco laughed. “Did you?”

“There are those who would,” Almighty drawled. “I can tell you that.”

Rocco was silent for the rest of the ride. Almighty remained indifferent, dreamy, and only when he first sat down at the desk in the interrogation room did he become momentarily alert, frowning, jerking his chin into his neck as if he could smell his wife’s scent from three hours before. But then he seemed to let it go. He slid down into his chair and popped open a bag of potato chips from the vending machine in the hallway.

Rocco settled in across the desk, absently smoothing out the top page of his legal pad and clearing his throat. “Almighty, can I call you Gary? I just can’t get my mouth around the other.”

“You can call me what you want. We in
your
house now.” He rubbed a tattoo on the meat below his left thumb; Rocco saw “King of Kings” in blue and a crude three-cornered crown like a child’s drawing.

“Gary, what do you know about Ahab’s? What happened there?”

“What happened there?” He dipped his long fingers into the bag. “You mean the guy that got killed? I don’t know nothin’. Guy got killed.” His eyes were unfocused, drifting. “That’s what I know.”

The room smelled of grease and salt. Rocco rubbed his face. “C’mon, you’re a sharp guy, you’re always in the street, nothing gets past you. What do you hear?”

Almighty hunched his shoulders, staring silently at a spot on the wall behind Rocco’s right ear.

Rocco sighed. “How many warrants you got out on you now?”

Almighty snapped to attention, sitting up and trying to find Rocco’s eyes. “Only but one. But that time I was supposed to be in court? I was in jail on some other thing. I was in
jail,
so how could I be in court too. That’s not right.”

“So Gary, come on, what do you hear?”

“Yeah, I hear it was something … something with drugs.” Almighty leaned forward now, anxious to please.

“Who’s saying that?”

“You know, people.”

“What people?”

“People. You know, people talk. It just words.”

“What, he had drugs, he was selling drugs, buying drugs?”

“It just words, I don’t know.”

“You own a gun?”

“Me? Hell no.”

“You ever find a gun?”

“Me? No, but if I did? I’d sell it.” He nodded. “I’d sell the
shit
out of that bad boy. A gun cost money.”

Rocco tapped his pencil on the desk. “When was the last time you were in Ahab’s?”

“Ahab’s?” Almighty went blank again. “Week, two weeks. I don’t like that food they got in there. It hurts my stomach.”

“Anything happen that last time?”

“Bought some food, I guess.”

“You have any problems?”

Almighty touched his stomach. “With the food?”

“Anything.”

“Nope.”

“You sure? You have the right change on you?”

“The right change? I guess.”

Rocco stared at the ceiling, took a deep breath. “You weren’t short a couple of cents?”

Almighty jerked upright in confusion.

“You didn’t have any problems with anyone?”

“Unh-uh.”

“And the last time you were there was a week or two ago.”

“Somethin’ like that. I’m mostly day-to-day in my lifestyle right now.”

“Where were you last night?”

Almighty shrugged. “I was where I always am. All over.”

“Who were you with?”

“Shakwan, Dave and them all.”

“They’ll back you up on that?”

“I guess.”

Rocco wasn’t even bothering to take notes anymore. The guy was innocent.

“Well, then let me ask you this. What would you say if I told you I got someone who says you showed them a gun, you told them you were gonna cap that guy and”—Rocco threw this in for the hell of it—“saw you do it.”

“Who say
wha?
“ Almighty’s voice went faint and high, his damp eyes staring. He leaned closer to Rocco. ”
Who…
”

Rocco smelled true confusion, almost hurt, coming off him, but he simply stared back for a few seconds, letting Almighty sit on his own question.

“Who said that?” The words came out gently, more wounded than outraged.

“Well, let me put it another way. Why would somebody, out of the blue, come to us, seek us out, tell us all this stuff about you, try to get you—”

“Oh my Lord. That motherfuckin’ woman. That … Jesus Lord.” He put a hand out to touch Rocco’s arm. “Look at me. Look at me.”

Rocco tilted back slightly.

“I got the Virus, man. I’m a
ghost.
Who’m I gonna mess with now? That woman, it’s like … she says I
killed
her, you know? But I love her, man, I
love
her. I didn’t, I wouldn’t touch a hair on her head. I didn’t know, I didn’t…‘You killed me,’ she says, ‘you killed me.’” Almighty was shaking his head, crying now. “Goddamn, how’s I supposed to know.”

Rocco ducked his head in mock astonishment. “How are you supposed to
know?
Are you not of this
planet?
You show me one fucking junkie out there who don’t know how you catch the Virus, I’ll buy you a whole deck of heroin, how’s that.”

“Yeah, but see, she had some problems when the baby was born? They tied up her tubes for her so she can’t have no more babies? And she says to me, I can’t get nothing now, you know, no sexual diseases, because my tubes is tied.’ She tells me some doctor told her she was immune now.”

”
What
fucking doctor.”

“Well, maybe she misheard. Alls I know is, she tells me she’s immune ‘cause her tubes are tied.” His eyes went inward. “She says to me, ‘You made the baby a
or
phan. You took me from my baby.’ But it’s my baby too, you know? She got my hair. And she’s got this skin, it’s like, it ain’t a black person’s skin like mine and it ain’t a white person’s skin like her mother. It’s like, it’s like, when you stripping cable? It’s like copper, it’s like that soft red gold? And she’s gonna be tall, like me. She’s got them long legs for a kid, like a runner. She’s gonna be like a eight-eighty runner when she gets big. That was
my
event, the eight-eighty. Yeah, she’s gonna be something else.”

Rocco looked at the tattoo again, thinking, What a fucking goose chase this turned out to be. He mulled over pressing charges against Suky Phelan for hindering the prosecution.

“So you’re a proud daddy, hah?” Rocco asked, the frustration of his day seeping into the question.

“Yeah,” he said, slow, nodding. “You could say that. But, you know this last year I’m sick? Shit, I don’t
want
to be around her. ‘Cause when I see her, you know like in the park? All I can think on is I ain’t gonna see her for too much longer now. You know, like maybe a year from now she’s gonna be playin’ an’ fall down hurt herself, start cryin’ an’ needin’ help or whatnot? Where am I gonna be? I’m gonna be in the
ground,
so I don’t wanna see her because it makes me think on that, an’ I can’t take it, man. I just can’t take it.”

Wanting Almighty out of his office, Rocco went for the standard closer. “Would you be willing to take a polygraph?”

“A what?” Almighty squinted. “For what? About the Ahab’s thing? Fuck yeah, I take that and I tell you what else you can do. You can give one to
her,
man. Ask
her
what’s up, ‘cause she just tryin’ to get me booked for murder, one way or the other. But I swear I’m murdered every day I got left out here. Alls I got to do is lay down, close my eyes, think on shit? It’s like a execution. A goddamn execution. ‘You killed me,’ she says. Well goddamn, I’m killed too, you know? I’m killed too.” He looked to Rocco for understanding, but Rocco retreated to his notes, avoiding Almighty’s moist gaze.

“Yeah,” Almighty said to his swollen hands. “I never wanted to hurt nobody my whole damn life, but look at this shit now.”

Rocco stared deep into the yellow pad, recalling his half-cocked comments about the Virus being a crime fighter, thinking about the haunted baby hospital, about Erin.

“Look. I got enough reason to lock you up right now, but I’m gonna give you a play.”

“You do that.”

Rocco ignored the sarcasm and put his card on the desk between them. “But do me a favor. You get out there, you let me know what’s up. And you start taking care of yourself.”

“For what?” Almighty said.

Rocco walked him out of the office. It was raining, and the pot-holed strip that ran from the skyway to I-9 was almost purple with gloom. He was supposed to offer Almighty a ride home but all he said was, “You hear anything, you give me a call, OK?”

Almighty pulled down his Orlando Magic cap and loped off into the evening without saying anything. Rocco watched him blend into the wrecked landscape, and suddenly he remembered the guy’s scavenge in the back of the Nova. He opened his mouth to call out Almighty’s name, but then let it go, thinking, The hell with it.

Rocco wandered back into the interrogation room, began to clean it up and noticed that Almighty had left the calling card on the table. Rocco swept a little pile of potato chip crumbs into his cupped palm. The hell with it.

13

STRIKE
stood in the center of the small overstuffed living room looking down at Rodney, who was sitting on the couch in his underwear, a low-voltage pain-reducing kit attached to his trick knee. Ten years before, Rodney had injured himself falling off the roof of a federal prison while doing a storm gutter repair job, dropping kneecap first onto an acetylene tank, and since then, whenever it rained Rodney had to put his knee on a wire so that the throbbing didn’t drive him insane.