Clockers (46 page)

But Rodney wasn’t done. He lit up again, tried one last approach. “I mean, look at Strike here.” The kids did as they were told, Strike looking away as if he had seen something out at the bar. “Look how my man dress. No flash, color coordinated, nice pair of dark Reeboks—none of them paratrooper sneakers you all like to wear. Jump out a window, you bounce right back.”

No one laughed.

“I mean, check this out. The knockos roll up on my man at a red light. What do they see, ‘cause you
know
they gonna be profiling. They see a nigger in a two-year-old Accord, no gold on, nice hair, not no high-rise billboard up top his head, nice dark sweater. Nigger probably driving like my grandma. You think the knockos gonna be thinkin’ docker? Hell no, they thinkin’ a nine-to-five nigger working at First Jersey or some damn thing. Strike’s doing it
right,
Strike’s getting
over,
‘cause Strike’s Quiet Storm.”

Strike fumed, thinking, Lose the Accord, a table of strangers now knowing it’s a dope car.

“And Strike got hisself a
safe
house.”

Abruptly Strike rose from his chair. Now they all knew he saves it, which means he’s got it—Rodney getting him killed.

Strike stood over Rodney, trying to hold in his anger, keep himself stone-faced. “I got to book. I got to see muh-my PO.”

As Strike walked from the table he heard Rodney say, “Strike’s got like four safe houses, so come knock night? They can’t confiscate his money. See what I’m sayin’? I mean, Strike’s here to
stay.
”

Strike palmed his gut. Lose the safe houses, lose the Accord. Lose Rodney too.

***

Strike parked in the lot behind the Municipal Building, where the probation offices were housed. For a minute or two he sat in the car, taking in the sight of the tall, soot-streaked County Jail, which was joined to the courtroom-and-office complex by means of an underground tunnel.

He had spent one night in that building, coiled in the bullpen waiting for a morning arraignment. In the two hours it had taken for Rodney to get the word in to lay off him, he’d had his sneakers stolen and his elbow burned with a lighter. Since then, he had often told people that he’d blow his own head off before he’d ever go back in here. But instead of going straight, he’d become super-cautious—as if the point of jail was to teach him the importance of not getting caught.

And now Victor was somewhere inside that seven-story sinkhole, and he didn’t have Rodney’s name to protect him, and there was nothing Strike could do to help.

But Victor could be a tough little motherfucker sometimes, stubborn and one way—he had used that steel-eyed dignity of his to control an entire roiling fast-food kitchen without ever having to raise his voice, as far as Strike knew, for three years now. Strike had seen his brother on the job at Hambone’s, seen him striding from griddle to ice chest to deep fryer to dishwasher, barking out orders with a crisp Please and Thank You in every command. And it wasn’t just Victor who talked that way. He had made it a commandment in the Hambone’s kitchen that nobody could ask anybody for anything, no matter how frantic it got, without putting Please and Thank You on each end of the sentence. So maybe he was doing OK in jail after all. And maybe, Strike thought, I should go visit him, see him face-to-face and try to find out what happened with Buddha Hat and Darryl.

But not today, he decided, getting out of his car. The hamburger started to repeat on him as he walked up the hill and then around to the front of the Municipal Building. He pushed through the revolving doors, getting hit with the toxic smell of brass polish, the aroma of authority in his life. He worked his way through the security check, dropping his keys in a plastic bowl and standing for a metal detector frisk. He walked through the marble lobby and headed for the stairwell, recalling Victor that night in the bar, thinking about how all that dignity had turned goofy after a few drinks. When Strike had last lived at home, sleeping on the sofa, Victor was starting to become a private nipper—his cocktail lounge usually a midnight kitchen or a parked car. But Strike had never held it against him: self-control was important, but a man’s got to have
some
kind of release valve. It was just that he’d never considered his brother a bar drinker before.

Strike trotted down the two flights of stairs to the sub-basement of the building, then walked along an echoey hallway filled with cops, victims, caseworkers, secretaries, defendants out on bail. He was moving fast now, imagining Victor in the bullpen last night, all those hard-time motherfuckers in there smacking him around, taking his food, his clothes, his pallet, his dignity, but saying Please and Thank You each and every time. Strike felt something gritty rise in his craw, then realized that it couldn’t be the hamburger coming back on him: in all that time at the Red Rooster he hadn’t taken a single bite of food.

Strike sat in the tiny waiting area of the probation office, choosing one of the two molded plastic chairs over the cotton plaid couch because the fabric could take in stink and crawling things off people’s hair and clothes. Besides, the couch was occupied by a light-skinned man with dried blood on his T-shirt and a face so swollen Strike couldn’t tell if he was black or Puerto Rican or white. He wasn’t wearing shoes, just bedroom slippers that didn’t hide his scabby and swollen ankles. Strike believed in going to see your PO looking a little bummy, so no one would think you were still clocking, but this was going the whole other way around. It was best to dress down—down, but clean. A nice fresh sweatshirt, pressed stone-washed jeans, shoes instead of sneakers in order to suggest that he wasn’t the type who ever needed to
run
anywhere—everything in Strike’s PO wardrobe was clean, cheap, respectful.

The waiting area was cut off from the huge room of interview cubicles by frosted glass partitions and a bulletproof reception window. Half a dozen fruity-smelling deodorizing strips were glued to the walls, and Strike didn’t know whether to be insulted or grateful. He was required to visit his PO for just fifteen minutes a month, but it felt like going to the dentist or the Roosevelt rental office, the visits filling him with an unfocused dread that he hadn’t felt since childhood.

Strike sat holding his passport-size probation book out in front of him. He wished he had a Yoo-Hoo to calm his empty stomach, but he was afraid that sitting with a bottle of anything, even Yoo-Hoo, would be enough to trigger his PO, make him think “attitude,” and that’s when shit could happen. Even if they didn’t throw you in County, they still found some way to make you pay.

The door to the outside hallway opened and a guy whose face Strike recalled but couldn’t place entered the waiting area and took the other plastic chair.

“Wha’s up?” the guy said to Strike, not knowing exactly who Strike was either. Strike thought the guy looked like an advertisement for clocking: snow-white high-top BKs, a royal-blue Fila warm-up suit that must have set him back two hundred dollars, a gold nameplate hanging off his neck, two gold rings and an ID bracelet. Strike imagined the guy telling his PO, “Yeah, I’m still making deliveries for Shop-Rite, just like last month.” Maybe he had the blind PO, the lady whose bruised-looking eyelids opened only a tiny bit, who had no lamp on her desk, no posters on her walls, the one whose cubicle looked as if a shitstorm hit it. Strike’s stomach jumped just thinking about her. God
damn,
they make you pay.

Finally Strike’s name was called, and as he walked up the center aisle to his PO’s desk, he passed ten probation meets on either side of him. He nodded in recognition to three of the guys and one of the girls.

He took a chair across the desk from Mr. Lynch. A heavy-jowled Irishman with wavy white hair that was starting to yellow, Lynch had his head down over some paperwork. Strike scanned the walls. His eyes stopped at a poster of a skeleton on a pitcher’s mound winding up to fire off a hypodermic, with “AIDS” on his baseball cap and “Don’t Let Him Strike You Out” in red along the bottom. The only other poster was a poem called “Invictus” written over a picture of a sunrise. Strike had been coming into this cubicle for six months now, had always stared at that poem but had never read it through. He just liked the name. Invictus.

Lynch cleared his throat, opened a huge green ledger with males written on the front and started right in, not even looking at Strike.

“You still live with your mother?”

“Yeah, uh-huh.” He had moved out of his mother’s house after his first PO meet, the next day in fact, but he didn’t want Lynch to know he had enough money for his own place.

“Same address?” Lynch’s voice was preoccupied and automatic.

“Uh-huh.”

“Same employment?”

“Rah-Rodney’s Place.” Although he could have controlled it, he tended to let his stammer ride inhere, wanting to come across as slightly pitiful.

“Still”—Lynch squinted at his book—“night manager?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah.”

“So how’s it going?” Lynch didn’t look up.

“O-OK.”

“No other arrests, pending charges, drug use, problems?”

“Ah-I’m good.” Strike never used dope in his life, just said he did when he got busted so he could hook up with Second Wind, the drug treatment sentencing alternative, and avoid spending ninety days in County, the mandatory time on a 364 for selling drugs in Dempsy. In retrospect he wondered if that was so smart, because he had to do three months as an outpatient in a drug treatment program—all those “tough love” sessions, two hours of everybody screaming at each other—and he still had to see Ron, his Second Wind counselor, every month for a year. But anything was better than County. They had two to three Virus deaths a week in there. In there: Victor. Shit.

“You got some money for me?” Lynch hawked into his fist, a phlegmy cough that made Strike turn away.

Strike dug in his pocket for some crumbly bills, pulled out a twenty, two tens, a five and a single, flattening them out on the desk as if they were all he had in the world.

“I got like forty-six. I’m ha-having trouble this month. Can I, you know, like bring in fifty-four next month, to even up? It a ha-hard month right now.”

Strike always felt it was a good policy to be shy a few bucks, maybe even show up flat broke every now and then—a working man with bills. He had a $1,080 mandatory fine to pay off in $50-a-month installments from the drug charge, including the $30 Victim Compensation Board tab and a $50 lab fee for spot urine testing. He could have paid it off in one lump sum, but it was smarter to drag it out, play it straight.

Strike opened his probation book for a receipt stamp, laid the bills on top and slid it a few inches toward the PO. “Suh-so, Mr. Lynch, it OK if I slide the four dollar till next month?”

Lynch looked at him for the first time since he’d come into the cubicle, his face all eye slits, boils and wattles. Strike felt a horrible sliding sensation, a sweaty panic, as if he was a little kid whose mother had taken him in for a routine checkup only to have the doctor pull out a harpoon-size hypodermic.

“What do you mean, a
hard
month? How was it hard?” Lynch’s eyelids were so red they looked skinned.

Strike’s throat constricted, the stammer uncontrollable now, the truth coming to him in one big picture: Victor had given him up, and this whole visit to the PO was a trap. They knew all about him, about his slick caution, about how he’d never miss a PO appointment. A trap, and he had walked right into it.

Lynch kept staring. “How was it hard?”

“You know, wuh-with bills and all.”

“What bills?”

“House bills, whatnot. My muh-mother’s not working this month.”

”
House
bills … What other kind of bills?”

“Hey.” Strike felt lubricated, his T-shirt swimming across his ribs. “It only four dollars. You want me to get it now? I probably ga-got it at home, you know.”

The more Lynch stared, the more Strike wanted to talk, tell him he didn’t have anything to do with the Darryl Adams murder, that Buddha Hat was the hit man. Strike’s fear of County was greater than his fear of any one psycho out there.

“What else you spending money on?”

“F-f-f-fuh-h…” He couldn’t get the word “food” out of his mouth. Goddamn POs, they were just like cops—kill you with a look, tear out your heart with a mumble.

Lynch watched Strike sputter for a minute, then stared down at the open probation book and crumpled money. He reached for his phone.

“Larry, Dan Lynch.”

Strike was almost in tears now, all his carefully planned lies in shambles, sitting there nerveless and floppy, saying in a small voice, “It was Buddha Hat…” But Lynch didn’t hear him, and before Strike could repeat himself, another county worker came by, a soft hairy man in glasses with curvature of the spine and a low-slung potbelly under his belt like his ass was on backwards.

Lynch slid back from his desk and pulled out a glass beaker about twice the size of a ten-dollar bottle of coke.

Strike went cold with comprehension: The motherfucker wants a urine sample. Relieved, insulted, disgusted with himself for panicking, Strike stood up, leaving the money and the book on the desk. “It best not come back dim.” Lynch was already heads down in his big green males book, looking up something else, somebody else.

The Dempsy probation office was across the hall from the Municipal Building’s cafeteria, and as Strike and the urine-test supervisor walked to the John, Thumper, Crunch and Smurf appeared with coffee and candy bars, Strike guessing that they were on their way upstairs for some overtime-paying court testimony. The three of them saw Strike and the supervisor walking toward the John, the supervisor holding a clipboard in one hand and the beaker in the other. The cops started howling like dogs.

“You got a piss test, Strike?” Thumper said.

“Don’t you worry ‘bout Strike,” Crunch bellowed. “Strike be
clean.
He be clean as a
Strike!
”

Crunch squeezed his crotch and all three started hissing, ”
Pss pss pss.
“ Strike tried to ignore them. The supervisor was oblivious behind his glasses as he led Strike into the men’s room. Even with the bathroom door shut, Strike heard Thumper bawling, “Dicky check! Dicky check!” somewhere down the hall.