Clockers (47 page)

Strike took the beaker and headed for a stall, but the supervisor touched his elbow again and extended a hand to the open urinals. “Got to do it in front of me.”

“What?” Strike was outraged, but the clipboard and the glasses took away all recognizable contact points, cut off all hope of arguing for some privacy.

Strike turned slightly toward the wall, took himself out of his fly. The supervisor shifted his stance, tilted his head to get an unobstructed view, then waited in the silence of the four-stall, three-urinal, two-sink municipal bathroom for Strike to pee.

“Guys go into the stalls, they like to fill the bottle with water from the toilet.”

Strike closed his eyes to concentrate.

“I get the bottle back, first thing I do is feel if it’s cold or hot. Cold means toilet water.”

The silence stretched out. Strike was furious at Lynch: a piss test after all this time. Six goddamn months and Lynch still didn’t trust him, didn’t
know
him.

“You want me to turn on the water faucet? That helps some guys.”

Strike tuned this little four-eyed rat out of his head, trying to will a trickle down from his belly.

The bathroom door opened in a burst and six lawyers came in, moving to the urinals, the stalls, the sinks, talking basketball, all of them taking in Strike with his bottle and the supervisor pushing his glasses up his nose, all milling around him in a busy, distracted swirl. They were tall, white, wearing wash-and-wear suits and taking jump shots with their paper towels into the wastebaskets, announcing “Dr. J!,” “Bird!,” squinting into the mirrors, combing their hair. Strike stood frozen, his dick dead in his hand, not feeling, not thinking, everything coming at him in colors right now.

Goddamn, they do make you pay.

When Strike returned to the projects an hour later, a crowd was circling something or someone by the benches. A crowd usually meant a spectacle of misery—an arrest, a fight, someone having a seizure. But when he waded through the shoulders, he was surprised to see a source of joy: Wayne Dobie, The Word’s big brother, home on leave from Wiesbaden in a crisp, clean Green Beret uniform, looking tight and right, girls reaching out to touch his epaulet braids, guys giving him the “godd
amn”
treatment, backing up to get a better look at the double chevrons, the insignias and sharpshooter bars.

Strike, who was about the same age as Wayne, had never really known him, but he remembered that two years ago Wayne was bad news, a street fighter and a docker who ran with a crew under a guy named Shavawn Deeds, who was now in Rahway for murder. Wayne himself had stabbed someone from another project, put him in intensive care. He would have gone straight to jail too except that his lawyer was able to argue self-defense. Then Andre the Giant interceded, and Wayne was given the choice of prison time or enlistment.

Reluctantly joining the crowd, Strike studied Wayne, who was nervously pulling on his jacket, stepping in place with those high black paratrooper boots like a show horse, then standing still, chesty, glowing and heroic, happy to be home. Strike was entranced, but he resented Wayne too, for breaking free of the game and coming up winners. As if picking up on his thoughts, Wayne jerked his head in Strike’s direction, bellowed “Hey!” and plowed through the crowd. Strike was about to duck but Wayne bulled right past him and into Andre the Giant’s arms. Andre smiled and hugged him, whooping like a siren, then stepped back and checked out the new Wayne, wringing his wrist as if trying to bring down a thermometer.

”
Gah-damn!
You see your grandmother yet?”

“I just got here!” Wayne yelled.

“Well, what you doin’ hangin’ out down
here
for, man? Git up there!”

Wayne yanked his duffel bag to his shoulder and headed for his building, with half the crowd following him.

Strike took his seat on the top slat and watched Andre, who stood hands on hips, gazing after Wayne, his pride obvious. Andre made a high noise of pleasure, as if to sign off on the subject, and then turned his attention to the bench just as Horace came out of his building. Horace froze in his tracks, ready to run.

“I told you I ain’t gonna chase you,” Andre said. “You surrender yourself yet?”

Horace gave him a bewildered look.

“You got till two o’clock on Friday.” Andre turned to Strike. “You tell him what I told you to?”

Strike shrugged in a way that could have meant “of course” or “I don’t remember.”

“You a boy with a outstanding warrant on your ass, Horace,” Andre said. “You best get your mother and go over to Juvie Hall
today,
you hear me?”

Horace hunched his shoulders and backed into the building.

Andre waved him off and beamed at Strike. “You ready?”

Strike froze, then tried to calm himself. “I didn’t do nothin’.”

“I
told
you we were goin’ shoppin’. I said it and I meant it.”

“What?” Strike felt a little tremble of relief.

“You got money on you?” Andre leaned over him, throwing shadow.

“Unh-uh.”

“Well, you best get some because we goin’ right now.”

“I got to get it.”

Andre shrugged. “Well get it, then — I give you fifteen minutes. Bring about this much.” Andre held his fingers apart a half inch, then pointed at Strike. “Fifteen minutes.”

Strike made a slow trip to one of his safe houses and got back to the benches in half an hour. He had hoped that Andre would be gone, counseling the broken of spirit or off on some just-say-no mission, but there he was, sprawled out on the bench with some of the crew, shooting the breeze and shutting down the action.

Strike held his arms high as Andre patted him down.

“How about I give you the money,” Strike said. “You can do whatever you want—you know, judge ha-how best to spend it.”

“Naw, I ain’t taking no money from you. That don’t look too
ko
sher, me taking cash from you. You gonna do it all. I ain’t gonna touch it.”

“What you think, I got drugs on me?” Strike put some scorn into it. At least Andre didn’t humiliate you with Johnson checks or look in your mouth like a slave trader.

“Just makin’ sure.” Andre ran a fast hand around Strike’s waist and palmed the arc of his crotch. “Let’s go.”

Andre used his own car, a Jeep Cherokee, bright red, the kind of ride a player would drive. They cruised JFK, Strike sitting in the shotgun seat.

“Check it out.” Andre nodded to a row of shut-down storefronts, their riot gates framed by chipped wood. Slowing down, he pointed out a forest-green storefront flanked by the Mount Pisgah Church and the Slo Cooked Gizzards Restaurant. “The one in the middle? I just took a lease on that. I’m gonna open a gym for cops in there, get it cleaned up, get some mirrors, lights. I’m gonna charge ten dollars a month for membership, put like a police hangout right in the middle of all this. What you think of that?”

“Where you get the money to open a gym?”

“Hey, I got houses. I got six houses, I got two jobs.” Andre raised an eye. “What you think, you the only hustler around here? You ever see me
not
working?”

Strike shrugged.

“Look here.” Andre pointed out the faded white hand-painted sign over his gym-to-be. “Mr. and Mrs. Little Grocery Store. What you think of that?”

“What about it?”

“This place used to be Rodney’s. This was his first store. I’m gonna put a cop club right in your boss’s old place. You think he’d appreciate that?”

Strike didn’t answer, although he thought Rodney wouldn’t have any problem with it at all, since he got along with the police pretty well.

A block farther down the boulevard, Andre parked in front of a store called Operation Takeback, which sold books and T-shirts.

“You got your money with you?” Andre leaned against the driver’s window.

Strike frowned. “We going in there?”

“Let me see what you got.” Andre tilted his chin to Strike’s front pocket.

Strike produced a two-inch-thick roll of twenties wrapped in a rubber band, pulling it half out of his pocket, then jamming it back in. Andre motioned for Strike to get out.

The store had been around for years, but Strike had never been inside, never been curious about it. The owners were big on the Jamaican-African connection—every surface was painted red, black and green, and reggae music blasted continuously—but there were as many posters of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as there were of Bob Marley and Nelson Mandela.

Andre steered Strike by the shoulder and planted him in front of a rotating rack. All the books on display were biographies of black Americans.

“Pick me out about ten,” Andre said.

“You said mattresses, man.”

“Yeah, we get there too. Just do it, awright? Ten.”

The books belonged to a series, each volume costing eight dollars and forty-five cents, Strike thinking, Times ten equals a lot of money for books.

He scanned the titles and started plucking: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali. Those names he knew, but most of the rest were unfamiliar. He pulled out a book about Sojourner Truth, liking the sound of that name. He took a Jack Johnson book after he saw the face on the cover. The boxer looked to Strike like a guy Rodney used to run with, Soupy Davis, such a hard-core psycho that not even Erroll Barnes could look him in the eye.

Strike regarded the books in his hands, liking their clean smell, the slick smoothness of their spines. He looked across the store to the cash register, where Andre was waiting for him. The self-satisfied smirk on his face sent Strike back to the shelf, and he picked out an extra biography—Chester Himes—for spite.

Walking outside, Strike’s first impulse was to dump the books in Andre’s hands, divorce himself from this bullied purchase. But he couldn’t get over the heftiness of his own acquisition, the way all the books matched each other in their glistening black covers, and when they got in the car he put them in his lap instead.

As they headed down the boulevard, Strike could tell who was hanging out working and who was hanging out for nothing—it was in the eyes and the posture. Some of the clockers he knew recognized him but quickly looked away.

“Shit, they aw-all think I’m turning
state’s
or something.”

Andre laughed. “Yeah.”

“You gonna get me killed driving around like this. Any a them get locked up tonight? They gonna say, ‘Yeah, Strike was with that cop today. The nigger put the fuh-finger on me.’”

“Yeah.” Andre laughed again.

Every time Andre saw a police car he slowed down and leaned out the window, waving and tossing banter. He even joked with some off-duty sheriffs who were drinking beer in front of a grocery. Strike felt a strange dizziness come over him: this was just like driving around with Rodney, but Rodney for the other side.

The Furniture Shack was a big concrete hangar off I-9 and Horton Avenue, right across from a combination driving range and batting cage park, and just up the road from the prosecutor’s office, where the Homicides hung their hats.

Pulling up alongside the store, Andre pointed to the batting cages across the road, which were empty in the gray afternoon. “I used to take Wallace Mooney there when he was a kid. He had them quick wrists even then. Twelve years old and he got around on a fastball like a major leaguer.”

Mooney, now a minor leaguer in the San Diego Padres farm system, was a Roosevelt success story, another trophy on Andre’s wall. Strike had been in a few classes with him in high school; he was a nice guy who always dressed clean and sensible, and never gave Strike a funny look when he had trouble talking.

“Wallace Mooney,” Andre announced, “now there was a boy with destiny in his genes. His grandfather played on the Birmingham Barons with Willie Mays. You know that?”

“Huh,” Strike said. He was looking down the road at the prosecutor’s office, hulking under the skyway.

“Quick wrists, good family.” Andre stared at the empty cages. “So how you feeling about your brother?”

The question caught Strike off guard and he fought down his stammer to answer. “I don’t know nothin’ about that.”

“I didn’t ask you what you
know,
I asked you how you
feel.
”

“It’s beat, what can I say? I don’t know, you know, it’s … He must’ve had his reasons.” Strike exhaled, running options through his head, wondering if there was anything he could say that would help Victor out. But he couldn’t, not without implicating himself. Andre was smart, and even if Strike had said something about “word on the street,” Andre would be on him in a heartbeat.

“How’s your mother holding up?”

Strike shrugged. “She don’t taw-talk to me, so I couldn’t tell you.”

Andre gave Strike a weary smirk. “Can you blame her?”

“Naw, Andre, I guess not. You know, it’s not like I had quick wrists or nothin’.” Strike got out of the car, thinking, Get this bullshit over with.

The Furniture Shack was a vast and gloomy space, a hot airless sea of cheap goods in plastic sheathing. Both side walls were covered with propped-up rolls of carpeting, and the far rear wall was a filmy nimbus of wrapped and stacked mattresses. The entire floor area was an imploded living room hosting dozens of couches and recliners jammed shin to shin. Gooseneck lamps arced over the velour and naugahyde like lone reeds in a pond.

Strike made a face at the choking smell of plastic, but his eye feasted on the rolling walls of color, the endless styles and finishes of the couches, the newness of things. He walked through a lane of carpet sample displays, his hand running from one rainbow hump to another, then down a staggered waterfall of shaggy squares. His eye was drawn to an imitation-leather recliner with a bronze finish, a rust-colored velour love seat and couch in the middle of the room and a Chinese-red Formica bedroom set with brass trim. He returned his attention to the bronze recliner, experienced a chewy desire even though he couldn’t imagine owning it, coming into his house and just sitting in it. Sit and do what?

“Yes, fellas?” A wiry salesclerk with a mustache and a flickering eye tic sidled up to Strike, his movements quick and ratlike.