Clockers (35 page)

“Lookit.” Rodney extended an American Express gift catalogue to Strike. “What you think of that?”

Strike looked at the picture of a male model wearing a three-hundred-dollar pair of suede pants.

“The way
you
eat sometimes? Shit, I’d get me suh-some oilcloth pants.” Strike scanned the other offerings: hooded cashmere bathrobes, terra-cotta planters, diamond rings. Who the hell would order a diamond ring from a catalogue?

“Naw, I like them.” Rodney adjusted the voltage on his leg.

Two of the three stacked TVs were on, one showing “The Jefferson,” the other playing a videocassette of
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

“So what’s up?” Strike said. He took a seat across from Rodney on the other couch. Rodney started to fall asleep. The electrical vibrations always put him out.

Strike leaned over and raised the volume on the TV, blasting Rodney upright into a blinky alertness.

“What’s up, Rodney?” Strike lowered the TV again.

“Yeah … ol’ Erroll got locked up.” Rodney’s head started lolling back again.

“What for?”

“He shot this guy in the leg. You know that nigger Chickadee? Yeah … Erroll asked him for some money and Chickadee wouldn’t give it up, so he shot him. But he’ll be out tomorrow on bail, and then Chickadee best withdraw the complaint.”

“I thought you said Erroll ain’t shooting people?”

“It was only in the leg. But like Erroll was supposed to pick up a package tonight from Papi? So now I need you to do it. I would go but…” He pointed down to his knee with the index fingers of both hands.

”
I’m
gonna pick it up?” Strike felt himself getting sucked into Rodney’s game again: half-truths, quarter-truths, out-and-out lies.

“Yeah, uh-huh. Unless you got other plans.”

“Where at?”

“You know the methadone trailer some blocks off Cooper? Near the scrap-metal yard? He gonna meet you at—” Rodney hit the time button on his remote control; 6:15 showed up on some actor’s forehead. “In a hour.”

Rodney pulled a taped-down grocery bag filled with money from under the couch. “Just drive up, leave this under your seat. Get on out, make talk with the man, watch for police. When Papi say goodbye, just get back in the car. The package gonna be in there. Go take it over to your cutting house, whack it in fours, spread the three out to some other safes, come on back here. Tomorrow we’ll start workin’ it out of the store. Get to meet some faces, like we talked about.” Rodney said all this to the TVs, fighting off drooping eyelids, sliding both palms under his knee and slowly kneading it, looking as if he was on a heroin nod.

“I’m going myself?” Strike tried to make it sound like a question instead of a whine.

Rodney started to snore. Strike hit the volume knob and Rodney boomed upright again, looking around the room.

“What if they take me off?”

“They ain’t gonna take you off,” Rodney said, closing his eyes. “Yeah, but I ain’t no Erroll Barnes.”

Rodney perked up at that. “See? Hear what you said? You ain’t no Erroll Barnes. And you ain’t
me
either. But you
from
me, you understand?” Rodney leaned forward, going almost nose-to-nose, smirking. “Still think you doin’ all the work?”

Strike massaged his neck. He hated it when Rodney crowed like this.

“Yeah, heads you win, tails I lose,” Strike muttered to himself. Rodney cocked his head and spoke with a dangerous lightness in his tone: “What you say?”

As Strike drove along I-9, the road rain-slick and empty, he continued to talk back to Rodney. “I said, ‘Heads you win. tails I lose.’ You fuckin’ deaf? You want me to do it in
sign
language? Watch my lips, motherfucker.”

But there was no getting around it: after all the bullshit “my son Strike” declarations, he was nothing more than Rodney’s A-1 coolie boy and would never be more. Whether Rodney was asking him to run out for a sandwich or for a kilo, he was not to be denied.

Strike turned off I-9 at the Cooper Street exit and stopped for a traffic light. Lost in a sulk, he idled there through several changes, watching the colors bleed into the wet asphalt stretching before him.

Rolling forward again, he drove down three lifeless blocks, then turned into a narrow and desolate lane bordered by tattered warehouses and weedy lots, at last coming to a stop alongside the fence surrounding Kelso’s scrap-metal yard.

Across the street was the methadone trailer, and behind that was a junkie encampment in a debris-strewn field. But with his engine shut down and the rain obliterating his view, Strike could barely make out the bright orange siding of the trailer, and the junkie camp was lost in a boiling mist. Nervous about being taken by surprise, his imagination calling up a vision of half-dead noddies trudging in the direction of his car, Strike turned on his wipers and saw that in fact the street was virtually deserted. The rain had washed away the usual shopping cart traffic between the field and the scrap-metal yard, and now there was only one staggering drunk about fifty feet away on the trailer side of the street, the guy reeling and lurching in aimless circles alongside a car with New York plates.

Both tense and bored, Strike decided to wait for Papi under an overhang. He put up the hood of his sweatshirt, kicked the money deep under his seat and opened the door, but as soon as he stepped out of the car he heard tinny Latino music, the same kind of music that Papi’s crew had been playing that first time they met, by the cemetery wall. Strike took a step toward the New York car and saw a boom box sitting by its front tire. He squinted through the rain at the stumblebum: it was Papi.

Maybe he isn’t drunk, Strike thought. Maybe he’s dancing, dancing in the rain by himself. Strike felt his stomach go light as he took a few tentative steps forward.

“Papi,” Strike croaked. He cleared his throat. “Papi!”

The guy didn’t answer, just continued to stutter-step in a distracted circle, Strike thinking, The motherfucker
is
drunk. And where were his gun boys, the black-eyed skinny kid in the watch cap and the other vulture?

“Papi!”

Papi finally heard him and stood his ground, legs planted wide, shoulders jerking back and forth to keep his balance, belly peeking out of the same orange Milwaukee Brewers T-shirt he’d worn three days before.

“What’s happenin’?” Strike stepped closer, feeling the rain on his face, ready to bolt at a second’s notice.

Papi’s hair was a mess, the nap standing up in forky clumps here and there. And now Strike saw that he was covered with something. It looked as if someone had winged a half-dozen fistfuls of food at him, peppering his shirt and pants.

Papi stared at him stupidly, silently, and Strike was about to go back to the car when he realized that it wasn’t food—it was blood.

“Papi,” Strike whispered, hands out, floating, not knowing what to do, wondering how the radio could play in the rain without shorting out. Papi turned in a dazed circle as if looking for something. The song ended on the boom box and the disc jockey began talking in rapid Spanish, indecipherable to Strike save for the words “Tidy Bowl.”

Strike’s eye was drawn to what appeared to be a red pulsing light just to the left of Papi’s crotch, on the inside of his beefy thigh, a glistening beat in the rain. Strike, unable to run away now, in shock himself, was taking the time to stare at the blinking light, as if it had nothing to do with the man, the pulsations making Strike think of Rodney’s electroshock machine, of stoplights on deserted streets. Papi grunted with annoyance and kicked off a cracked tan woven loafer. Strike saw that it was filled with blood and abruptly recognized the bright red pulse for what it really was: a gunshot wound, the life blood pumping in a weak fountain from Papi’s inner thigh with the slow and steady throbbings of his heart.

Hunching his shoulders, shivering, Strike looked into Papi’s eyes. “Yo, suh-sorry, man.”

Papi came alert, as if seeing Strike for the first time, glaring at him with those yellow cat’s eyes, Strike numbly thinking that Papi was reacting to the stammer, watching Papi reach around, go for something stuck in the small of his back. “I’ll kill
your
nigger ass too,” Papi said hoarsely.

Kneecaps locked, Strike stood stock-still, wanting to apologize for something—but what?—hearing high-pitched notes inside his head.

Papi pulled out his beeper, muttering, ”
Kill
your nigger ass.” He picked up his radio from the street, tossed it into the car, then drove away in a drunken swerve, sailing right past Strike.

His knees starting to vibrate a little, Strike chanted the words “Ho shit, ho shit, ho shit” ten, twenty, thirty times, like a prayer.

“I didn’t
do
nothin’!” Stunned, talking out loud to himself, Strike drove blindly along JFK.

“I swear to
God!
“ He was talking to Champ, really, because Champ had to be behind what he’d just seen, shooting up Papi for selling weight in Champ country. Which meant that the next one going down would be Rodney, and after that Strike himself.

“But I didn’t
do
nothin’!” Strike shouted as he sideswiped a double-parked car, drawing some startled frowns from a clot of people standing under an awning. Strike’s vision went blurry, his world suddenly a killing floor, Strike hoping to keep his chin above the bloodline, seeing Darryl again, Papi, both of them sprouting deadly blooms.

Unable to drive, Strike pulled over to a bus stop and tried to collect himself, palming his temples and breathing through his mouth. Darryl, he thought, how long ago was Darryl shot? Then: Maybe it wasn’t Champ tonight. Maybe it was Victor again—not Victor, but Victor’s man. Maybe the guy is some kind of wind-up monster that can’t turn off once he’s set in motion. No, it had to be Champ.

Strike’s stomach came at him then, announcing itself with a raw stabbing sensation. He blindly opened the glove compartment and grabbed a half-full Yoo-Hoo. As he twisted off the cap, the bottle slipped from his fingers, splashing the drink on his chest and leaving a chalky stain on his sweatshirt.

Strike sat there gasping for air, his shoulders heaving, this last small disaster leaving him trembling: Everything happening to
me,
just look at this shit. There was no way he could go out in public now, not with the stain on him.
Look at this shit,
and then he was butting the steering wheel with his forehead, punching the horn and making noises behind his teeth that sounded like the high whine of grinding gears. As the fit receded, he noticed that several people were circling the car, peering in at him. Strike peeled away from the bus stop, almost mowing a man down in his rage and shame.

He had to find Rodney. Forcing himself to drive slowly, to regain some semblance of self-control, Strike slipped into the nighttime car parade along JFK. At the intersection of JFK and Krumm, right in front of a candy store with at least six clockers working the sidewalk, Strike saw a uniformed cop writing a parking ticket. Eight o’clock Saturday night on JFK, the street knee-deep in bottles, and some bugged-out uniform is spending his evening writing up violations. Strike was so riveted by this absurdity that he almost didn’t see Rodney’s car coming toward him through the traffic. He pulled over to make a U-turn and go after Rodney, then saw the battered Cadillac screech to a halt, jamming the flow of traffic.

Rodney stuck his head out the window and yelled to the cop writing up the ticket. “Yo Bones! What the fuck you doing!” The guy looked up, grinned at Rodney, and Strike recognized him as that crazy cop who remembered everything and everybody: Bobby Bones. Strike had heard that the guy was so into his job that on his days off he volunteered to fill in for anyone, no matter what the shift or detail was.

“Go
home,
motherfucker,” Rodney shouted. “Watch some television, memorize the damn
phone
book or something. Jesus Christ, it’s Saturday night, man.”

“The city never sleeps,” Bones shouted back.

“Well, catch some criminals then,
gah-damn.
”

Strike honked his horn and waved to catch Rodney’s eye, but Rodney rolled off, oblivious, and only Bobby Bones looked at Strike, squinting and then smiling in recognition.

Strike eventually caught up to Rodney in a small Italian neighborhood at the tail end of the boulevard. Rodney was standing in front of a glass-bricked corner bar, talking to an old bony white man whose cheeks and temples were covered with quarter-size liver spots.

Anxious about walking around in this neighborhood, Strike double-parked across the street and waited for Rodney to finish his business. The two men were out of earshot but Strike saw that whatever they were talking about was making them both choke-faced crazy: Rodney was standing coiled and knotted, his lips clamped tight; the white guy’s eyes glittered, giving off a watery shine of anger.

Strike’s stomach was on fire again. He looked down at his hands, lying palms up in his lap, and thought about New York, about haircuts and hot dogs, about how long ago that all seemed. He thought about Tyrone, his vague plans for the kid—or was that going to be a bad move too? Absorbed in his own misery, Strike didn’t notice the bronze Reliant creeping up behind him until the car came to a stop abreast of his window, startling him, the adrenaline squealing in his gut. The driver and the passenger, two plainclothes knockos, eyed him impassively, then made a lazy U-turn so that they were alongside Rodney’s Cadillac.

Belching away the jolt of terror, Strike watched the driver get out and stand on tiptoes, then stretch like a yawning cat right in the middle of the street. Ignored by Rodney and the old guy standing just a few feet away, the knocko leaned into the open window of Rodney’s car and came out with an envelope, which he jammed sloppily into the back pocket of his dungarees. A moment later the two cops were gone, their car receding into the combat zone at the heart of JFK.

The bony white man finally waved Rodney off, as if to make him vanish. When the man walked back inside the bar, Rodney seemed to contemplate going in after him, then limped across the street to Strike.