Clockers (5 page)

The overhead fluorescents were cold and ugly, their light bouncing harshly off the chipboard walls. Rodney had this store plus a craps house, both of them lined with salami-textured composition board. The man cleared twenty to forty thousand dollars on the two-plus kilos sold every week by Strike and his two other lieutenants, but he couldn’t put up decent wood or even a coat of paint. It was like buying a ten-year-old fat-ass Cadillac instead of something that didn’t cough blood every time you put the key in. Strike understood Quiet Storm, but to him this seemed like a sickness.

Strike turned to Rodney’s diplomas, correspondence degrees for the most part, all hanging in Woolworth frames on pushpins jammed into the chipboard. Strike thought all this was some silly shit on Rodney’s part—who went to school to cut hair? Anyway, he knew that Rodney really learned barbering in jail.

But Strike felt a little tug when his eye fell on the New Jersey State high school equivalency diploma. He had never finished school himself. It took too much time away from making money, first in here and then out on the street. Anybody could get a high school diploma if they hung in, but it didn’t lead to anything except more school, or some hour-pay job.

Besides, his stammer had made each school day hell. Nobody ever made fun of him directly, but they always watched him talk, and usually the teachers wouldn’t call on him if the answer required more than one word. One time in English, after a particularly bad attack complete with head-whip and eye-flutter, the teacher had said, “Well, we have a Claudius among us.” After class Strike had gone in his face for an explanation, and the guy had danced out of it by telling Strike it was a compliment, that Claudius was an emperor of Rome, but the teacher’s jittery grin betrayed him. School had made him sick to his stomach with anger, and the speech therapy class he had taken two afternoons a week was more like a punishment than a help, the other two kids in it almost retarded. Strike remembered that the therapist smelled like a cafeteria, like a big vat of boiling hot dogs. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that his stammer had started lifting from the moment he had dropped out of school, so that now, except for the bad days, like today, his tongue rarely seized on him.

Still, he hadn’t been a bad student. He was bright and he had worried over his work the way he worried over everything. Once in tenth grade, one of his teachers called in his mother and told her about a boarding school up in Maine that was giving out scholarships to inner-city kids. A few weeks later he took a three-hour test in English and math, and then spent another three hours being interviewed by a white-haired white man and then by a black lady with an Afro and glasses on a bead chain. He didn’t get accepted: he was smart but there were other kids who were smarter, and that was that.

He felt bad about being rejected only because it meant his mother had lost a day of work for nothing. Work had always been a kind of religion with her, and Strike couldn’t remember a time growing up when his mother didn’t have two jobs, sometimes three—everything from geriatric care to waitressing to supermarket cashiering. He must have gotten his work drive from her—that and his bad stomach. He remembered their kitchen in the Roosevelt Houses: all those bottles with the chalky stuff for her to drink, and sometimes the caked residue of the medicine around her mouth. At least he didn’t inherit her asthma.

When Rodney finally walked in, waddling with the weight of three cartons of Coca-Cola, it was like an underwater surge: everybody felt pulled toward his presence. Even the baby kicked his heels and yelled, “Yahh!” The kids around the pool table and the video machine forgot about their games and began sputtering out his name as he dropped the cases by the refrigerator with a sharp whack.

“Yo yo, Rodney, this nigger say Chuckie could kill Freddy, man,” said a skinny snaggle-toothed kid holding a cue stick with no tip.

“Freddie
who?
“ Rodney bent over and began filling the shelves with cans, both hands moving from crate to shelf to crate as if working a speed bag.

“Freddy
Kru
ger, man, who you think?” They all watched Rodney work, as if his hands and body might speak to them.

“Yeah, and who’s Chuckie?” Strike noticed that Rodney always sounded slightly pissed off and threatening when talking to kids, as if he’d just about had it with them, although none of them ever seemed to care.

”
Chuckie,
man, you know, the doll from
Child Play.
”

“I don’t know none of that horror shit,” Rodney said, “But I do know y’alls wasting time on it. I know
that.
”

Strike seconded that with a nod. A movie was ninety minutes of sitting there.

“Who-alls minding the bench?” Rodney asked Strike without looking up.

“Futon’s on it.” Strike watched Rodney hunched over the soda in a spread-legged stoop, wearing high-top boxing shoes and a broad leather weightlifter’s belt. His hands were a blur and there was a constellation of sweat breaking out on his forehead and through the back of his shiny gold acetate T-shirt.

Strike grunted in amazement: the man was making almost a million a year on the street, yet here he was unloading sodas. Well, a hustler hustles; that’s what he does.

“Feels
good
to stretch your legs, don’t it?” Rodney was puffing a little, working with his head lower than his chest. “Walk around, take a ride, see the sights.”

Strike found himself going glassy staring at Rodney, struck with a hazy memory of who he looked like, someone from Strike’s past, the face and the name just out of reach. Strike only knew that part of his fascination with Rodney had always been connected to this vague memory of another man from somewhere, his childhood or something. Not Strike’s real father, dead eleven years now, but maybe a friend of his father’s. He couldn’t remember who.

“So I’m here now. So what’s up?” Strike sounded pissy even to himself, a man with a watch.

“We get there, we get there,” Rodney said, his voice going high and singsong. “Y’all gotta
relax,
learn how to
relax.
”

Strike rolled his eyes. Nothing made him more tense than relaxing.

“Yo, Rodney, Rodney, you know what?” said a kid whose sweat suit was so thin and cheap it looked as if he was wearing pajamas. “Jason the baddest, ‘cause Jason be dead already, so you can’t kill him.”

“Freddy dead too!” bellowed another kid. “Freddy dead too!”

“Gah-damn Jason fuck Freddy up, man, he’d just fuck him up.”

Rodney straightened, arching his back and pushing out his stomach. “Yeah, well, I tell you who the baddest. The baddest is
me
‘cause I’m for
real,
so why don’t you all go out to the van and get the rest a them sodas before I drop some heavy violence on your ass.” Watching three of the kids mill out the door, Rodney unbuckled the weightlifter’s belt and dropped it between the wall and the refrigerator.

Strike took his measure—the sweat-blotched, gaudy T-shirt, the dark blue polyester warm-up pants with white piping down the leg, a loud gold ID bracelet on one wrist, six rubber bands on the other—Strike thinking, Goddamn, where do all the money go?

Rodney frowned down at his son in the stroller, clucking his tongue in disgust, snatching the Pay Day sucker away from him and moving to the shelves behind the counter.

“What you let him have this shit for?” Rodney crabbed at his daughter as he pulled down a Frosted Flakes box, ripped it open and dropped it in the baby’s lap. “Where’s his ma at?” But Strike could see that Rodney wasn’t really interested in getting an answer. Rodney considered himself the only responsible adult in the world, a notion that he cherished, like his diplomas.

The Yoo-Hoo quarters were still on the glass counter. Rodney absently swept them into his pocket and nodded to Strike. “Let’s go.”

He took two steps to the door, then wheeled back, snapping his fingers and sliding past his blank-faced daughter again, squatting down behind the counter and coming up with a Toys R Us shopping bag folded over and Scotch-taped into the size and shape of a double bread loaf. From the bulk, Strike figured the bag held about twenty-odd thousand, probably in twenties and smaller bills, the money explaining the rubber bands on Rodney’s wrist.

But before Rodney could make it out to the street, his beeper went off and he stopped in the doorway, squinting down at the numbers coming up on his hip.

Strike stole a peek: just two zeros. Rodney scratched his neck, made a face and returned the Toys R Us bag under the counter. He walked Strike out of the store with a palm on the small of his back, stood out in the night with him, humming something tuneless.

Rodney started to shadowbox. “Futon’s a little immature yet, so why don’t you go back to the benches before he fucks everything up, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Inexplicably disappointed, Strike shrugged. For a moment they watched the traffic on the boulevard, Strike musing on the fact that Rodney was about the only guy in town who could leave a kilo’s worth of cash with a mopey teenage girl and not have to worry about it.

“C’mon by tomorrow night.” Rodney cocked his head, giving Strike a smile as if he could read his mind. “Give them legs another stretch-out.”

Strike drove back to the projects, thinking, Shopping for kilos. How come and why with me?

2

BORED
and bloated, Rocco Klein and Larry Mazilli drove slowly back to the Dempsy County prosecutor’s office after a long and too rich dinner in a Portuguese restaurant way out in Newark. It was nine o’clock on a hot June night of a fairly busy year by Dempsy standards: forty-one murders so far in the county, almost all of them, as usual, in the city itself, a city of three hundred thousand mostly angry blue-collar and welfare families. Still, forty-one jobs in close to six months was not exactly a tidal wave of blood, and tonight’s biggest problem was how to look like they were actually earning their pay.

Rocco was slowing down on green, stopping on yellow, thinking back on some graffiti he had seen on an apartment door earlier in the tour, when he and Mazilli were trying to locate a possible witness on some three-week-old stabbing. The witness, who wasn’t home, lived in O’Brien, a major public-housing tiger pit, and walking down the piss-reeking hallway to the apartment, Rocco had seen a bumper sticker someone had plastered on someone else’s door:
I WORK FOR A NON-UNION SCAB EMPLOYER
. And under that, presumably written by the tenant himself, was a fierce Magic Marker response:
LEEST I GOT A JOB, MOTHERFUCKER
. Now, four hours later, Rocco was still marveling at the ferocity of the gesture, somebody scrawling that profanity on their own goddamn door.

Rocco stopped for a red light and found himself profiling three black kids sitting on a tenement stoop. The kids made Rocco and Mazilli instantly but toughed it out, swallowing their startlement, their faces going heavy-lidded, deadpan and unhappy, looking everywhere but straight ahead at the sky-blue Aries ten feet in front of their noses.

Mazilli leaned forward slightly to glance across Rocco’s chest. “Guilty, guilty, guilty,” he exhaled in a trailing drawl, then dropped back in the shotgun seat and waited for the light to change, his pinkie ring rapping a spacey tune on the roof of the car.

Rocco figured the kids saw all the gray hair and made them as Homicides; otherwise they might have taken off like track stars. The light turned green but Rocco stayed put, vaguely insulted, trying to draw one of the kids into eye contact.

“Hey you.” Rocco picked out the tallest of the three, a kid sporting red acid-washed dungarees, L.A. Gear sneakers with the price tag still attached and a Chicago Bulls cap jerked sideways. “C’mere for a minute.”

The kid groaned to his feet—definitely holding, Rocco decided—and limped to the car.

“Let me ask you something.” Rocco squinted up. “Where do you get those hats with the bills over the
ear
like that? Alls I can find are the ones with the bills in front. I looked all over…”

The kid shrugged, scowled down the street. “All you got to do is turn them around sideways.” The answer was so straightforward that Rocco couldn’t tell if the kid was stupid or just throwing it right back at him.

“Yeah? Let me ask you. We’re looking for a guy, he wears two hats, one on top of each other, like this.” Rocco mimed holding a cap bill over each ear. “You know anybody who does that? It’s real important.”

“I knew a guy with two
heads
once.” The kid fought down a smile, still looking off.

“Oh yeah?”

“He was in my homeroom.”

“Did he graduate?”

“Yeah, but he only wore one hat.”

The kid looked Rocco in the eye, Rocco reading it clear: Fuck you too. Despite the challenge. Rocco let it slide, rolling off with a little wave.

The kid’s play was pretty subtle considering he was living in a city that had always valued lungs and legs over brains, and Rocco was never one for coming down on a good mind out here just because a kid refused to kiss his ass. Besides, he was tiring of the streets and no longer had much stomach for the million little attitude contests every tour, to say nothing of the occasional roll-around or footrace.

In the beginning, the Job had seemed more of a privilege than anything else—getting paid to walk through walls and witness the wildest and most riveting details of human struggle—but after a few years you could drown in it, and what had once made you step back in awe could begin to slide past your eyes, as unseen as the air you breathed.

You had to be like Mazilli to keep it up out here after a certain number of years. Mazilli was so deep into the streets that he regularly hired his own informants and their girlfriends to do the shit work around his house and his war-zone liquor store, even babysit his kids. He paid them five dollars an hour too.

Mazilli and Rocco were an odd-looking team. Rocco was heavyset and ruddy, his usual expression one of sly expectation, as if listening to a long-winded but funny joke, and Mazilli was dead white and painfully thin, all blaze and bones with a teenager’s waistline, a forward-thrusting blond-turning-gray duck’s ass haircut and a humorless, thin-lipped pucker of a mouth. And while Rocco usually got by on the street with a laid-back talk-show affability, Mazilli counted on his naturally choleric aura to survive, although in the eight years they had been partners, Rocco had never seen Mazilli ever truly lose control.