Authors: Richard Price
Buddha Hat stared distantly at Strike, expressionless save for a pulsing tautness along the line of his jaw.
“Ha-how much time you think he’s gonna
get
in there?”
Buddha Hat was silent, a last bite of hot dog still in his hand, giving Strike that lifeless gaze. Strike found it impossible to read—it could be anything from boredom to dreamy distraction to mounting fury—and he was on the verge of begging him to speak his mind, just get it over with, when Buddha Hat dropped his hot dog and grabbed Strike by the elbow, a rush of tense resolve breaking through the stony wall of his expression, as if he’d just made a momentous decision.
“I want you to see something,” Buddha Hat said, the words far off and flat. He pulled Strike into the fluorescent glare of the peep show next door.
Strike had never been inside one of these places, and he hated it instantly. It stank of that disinfectant, and the long corridors of private booths with men slipping in and out, heads down, sneaky and silent, made him both disgusted and nervous.
Buddha Hat gave a dollar to an Arab behind a raised platform. The guy pumped once on the bottom of what Strike thought was a microscope and dropped four tokens into Buddha Hat’s palm.
Still holding Strike by the elbow, Buddha Hat dragged him down a red-lit lane of doors until he came to a stretch of three unoccupied booths. He dropped the four tokens into Strike’s hand, looked both ways down the aisle, then shoved Strike inside the middle booth. “Channel eight,” he said, “push channel eight.”
As the door shut behind him, Strike stood in the sickly light with his back flush to the side wall. The booth smelled of spunk and he knew now that in a second or two Buddha Hat was going to shoot him through the door and go back to Dempsy alone. A girl wailed in ecstasy on somebody else’s video. He put his hand to his mouth, wanting to block out the smell. Suddenly the door jerked open. Strike slid to his knees in fear.
“What the fuck you
do
in’, man?” Buddha Hat leaned in, snatched back the four tokens from Strike’s limp paw, pumped them into a slot and stabbed a red channel selector above what looked like a digital clock. Strike, ashamed of being seen on his knees, scrambled to his feet as the booth abruptly went dark. A rapid series of sexual tangles popped on the screen, the personnel changing every time the channel selector beeped.
“Yeah, here.” Buddha Hat’s voice shook as the selector stopped on eight. “Watch that.” He slipped out of the booth and shut the door.
Strike remained glued to the wall, ignoring the video, ignoring the moaning under the wah-wah-pedal sound track, bracing for the bang, making himself as thin as possible, thinking Buddha Hat wanted the ecstasy and the music to smother the noise, trying to remember if he’d checked Buddha Hat for a gun since they left O’Brien, straining up on tiptoe, eyes shut, sucking in his belly, silently chanting, “Do it, do it, do it.”
The lights came up, the moaning cut out and the screen went blank, a red zero beaming at him from the electronic counter. At first the booth seemed utterly silent, and then Strike heard canned grunts and wails coming at him through both side walls. Woozy, Strike looked down and saw a token rolling to a stop by his foot, followed by a white hand groping blindly under the raised partition.
“So what you think?”
They strolled down Eighth Avenue, Strike still feeling giddy and light. “About what?”
“About channel eight. What you think?”
“It’s good.” Strike nodded vigorously. “It ga-got me
hot.
”
“Yeah? I tell you what happened. I was over my cousin’s house when I was fifteen? He says he knows this guy, he’ll pay us a hundred dollars to fuck this lady while he shoots the whole thing. So we went over to this motel in Queens. Man, I was scared. That lady had to like play with me for an
hour
before I got my dick hard. But when I did, man, we had us a
time.
“ Buddha Hat stopped dead in the street, hunched over and lit a cigarette, his first of the night. Strike saw that his hands were shaking.
“I never showed that movie to
no
body, but you know you can’t do that shit and not show it to nobody. I don’t know why I showed it to you, but I guess the other night? With Champ and Rodney? You so quiet-style, I figure you ain’t the type that’s gonna say nothin’. But I’m tellin’ you, man, you best keep it to yourself, you know, like take it to your
grave,
‘cause if I start hearin’ about it, I’m gonna know from who it started, you understand?”
Strike held up his hand as if being sworn in.
“Yeah, that was fun when we did that.” Buddha Hat glanced furtively at Strike. “So like that got you all turned on?”
“Yeah well, you know.” Strike passed his hand over his mouth, dropped his ear to his shoulder. “That lady was aw-all right, you know?”
“Yeah,” Buddha Hat said, smiling a little. “She took my damn virginity too.” They walked a few blocks before he added in a self-conscious murmur, “What you think of
me
in there?”
As they headed for the car, Buddha Hat telling and retelling the story of the porno movie, Strike floated in a buoyant bubble of relief, certain that for at least tonight he was out of danger. Did Victor get Buddha Hat to kill Darryl Adams? Strike just didn’t know, because every time he said anything about Victor, the Hat went all blank. Did he kill Papi? That seemed like a good bet, given the way he’d said, “You should read the papers more” with that dreamy look in his eye.
But Strike wasn’t worried about that now, his mind focusing instead on a simpler thought. Once again Rodney had it right: The only real life out here was your own.
For the moment it seemed like a liberating lesson, something worth celebrating, but Strike’s elation didn’t last. As they drove out of the city, taking the sharp bend that led from Eleventh Avenue into the Lincoln Tunnel, Buddha Hat flew right past a Port Authority blue-and-white, parked in the nook of the curve. The cops had chosen a perfect spot for profiling the Jersey-bound traffic, and although neither Buddha Hat nor Strike so much as blinked, the cruiser rolled out as soon as the Volvo had passed.
“Now they gonna fuck with us,” Buddha Hat said. The police car hung back half a car length in the parallel lane. “You got anything on you? Throw it out now.”
“I’m clean.” Strike reflexively patted himself down, then sunk back against the headrest.
When they broke clear of the tunnel, Buddha Hat was careful to use his turn signal to shift lanes, careful to avoid driving over the painted boundaries of the breakdown zones. But the blue-and-white still trailed them by half a car length, and Buddha Hat said, “Fuck this,” and took the first turnoff, the Hoboken ramp. “Let’s get this over with.”
The cruiser followed suit, hitting its misery lights as soon as both cars were clear of the mainstream traffic. “Park it there, brother,” a voice blared hollowly over the police loudspeaker. Buddha Hat pulled alongside a car wash and the cruiser stopped twenty feet behind them, turning on its take-down brights and training a spotlight on the Volvo’s rearview mirror, leaving them so cocooned in whiteness that it hurt to look up.
Buddha Hat spoke in a calm murmur. “One’s coming up your side, so don’t get jumpy.”
“Hands on the dash, fellas?” The voice in Strike’s window seemed disembodied.
“Where’s the papers at, Home?” Another voice floated in through the driver’s window.
Buddha Hat nodded to the glove compartment, both his and Strike’s hands splayed on the dash.
“Look at me.”
Strike turned to the voice in his window, and the cop drilled the beam of his flashlight into his eyes, lights on top of lights on top of lights, Strike instinctively curling his chin into his shoulder.
“C’mon, don’t be shy, look at me, look at me. Whoa, this one’s fucked up there, Fred. C’mon out, son.” The cop held the door for him, palming Strike’s chest to gauge the pound, a heart test.
The other cop trained his light on Buddha Hat’s outraged sockets. “This one too, Bobby. Whoo!”
“Where you been, brother?” Strike’s cop sported a flaring wax-tipped handlebar mustache and longish blond hair, and he loosely held a cigarette in his free hand, as if this roust was on his own time. “Where you been?”
“New York.” Strike tried not to look at the cars coming off the Hoboken ramp, their drivers rubbernecking.
“I
know
New York.
Where
in New York—and don’t look at him, look at me.”
“Times Square, around.” Strike tried to sound neutral, as if this whole thing was reasonable.
“Score some good shit?”
“N-nuh-no.” Shit, Strike thought. Here we go. “You nervous? I’d be nervous too. Lying always makes me nervous. What you do, pick up a package?”
“Cuc-clothes.”
“Oh yeah? No package? No smack? No blow?”
Strike reared back in disdain. The cop hit his eyes with the light again and began going through his pockets, patting him down. “No smack, huh? Step back a few feet please? But stay out of the car wash, it’ll shrink your clothes.”
The cop ducked into the car, feeling around and under Strike’s seat, then fingering the change caddy, the visor and the glove compartment. Finally he turned on the air conditioner, palming the air streams for blocked vents.
The side of the car wash was quivering with purple and gold Mylar disks in the shape of a whale, and Strike stood framed in the light-dappled glitter, furtively watching Buddha Hat and his cop, a muscular Hispanic with a small ponytail under his cap, probably a plainclothes working the odd night in uniform. Strike saw the cop’s frisk come up empty. No gun.
“Who’s Yvonne Carter?” Buddha Hat’s cop frowned down at the registration.
“M’grandmother.” Buddha Hat was tight-lipped, distant.
“She know you got her car?”
“Yeah, uh-huh.”
“Let me ask you. Your grandmother, she’s a working woman?”
“She’s retired.”
“Yeah? You help her on the car payments?”
“Some.”
“You good to your grandmother?”
Buddha Hat didn’t answer.
“When was the last time you were arrested? Don’t look at him, look at me.”
“I never…” Buddha Hat stared intently at the Hispanic cop’s throat.
“No?”
“Nope.”
“Good. Let me ask you. Why do you think I stopped you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? I’ll tell you. You were driving too cautious. Isn’t that a pisser? You were driving like you wouldn’t fart without putting out your hand to make a fart signal. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, ain’t that a bitch? So what did you score on the Deuce?”
“Two hats.”
“Two hats, huh?”
“They in the car.” Buddha Hat pointed with his chin.
“Two hats,” the Hispanic cop said. “Is that what they’re calling it now?”
“Two hats of
smack.
“ Strike’s cop straightened up from his search grunting and wincing, then threw a thumb at Strike. “This one’s
all
fucked up, Fred.”
“No I ain’t,” Strike said, fighting to keep his voice mild.
“Hey, you can’t hide your lying eyes, Home. They’re like fucking pin dots, and your heart’s pumping Kool-Aid.
You
know that,
I
know that, so why don’t we cut the shit, just tell me where it is.”
“They
ain’t
none.”
“Look, you two bozos are under arrest anyway for driving under the influence, for
being
under the influence. You know what that means?”
They both stood silent, letting the game run its course.
“That means this fine car is mine, right Fred?”
The other cop nodded. “Mine too.”
“You say you don’t got no drugs, so now I got to impound this bitch and tear it apart. But let me tell you something. You make me do that, go to all that work, and we find some? Against your lying?
Ho
ly shit, what happens to you.”
For a moment no one spoke, all four of them standing there as if waiting for a bus. Strike’s cop lit another cigarette, took a languorous drag, stretching his throat for maximum inhale. “Are you a gambling man?”
“No.” Strike shook his head.
“What are we gonna find in your urine right now?”
Strike shrugged. “Piss, mostly.”
Buddha Hat turned away quickly, hiding a smile, and Strike felt a sudden glow of friendship.
The cop belly-bumped him slightly, his voice going quiet. “You giving me shit?”
“No sir.”
“You want to fucking dance with me?” He tilted his head to one side to peer up into Strike’s eyes.
“No sir.”
“‘Cause I
like
to fucking dance, Home.”
“No sir.”
“You don’t have
no
drugs in here?”
“No sir.”
“You don’t have no drugs in
you?
”
“No sir.”
The cop retreated, then walked in a slow circle around Strike, all three of them watching him, waiting. “Are you queer?” he asked with theatrical sincerity.
“No.” Strike stepped back a foot.
“‘Cause you yanking my chain.” The cop shrugged as if the evidence was obvious to everyone.
“No I ain’t.”
“Sure you are.” The cop walked back to his cruiser, retrieved a nightstick and ambled back. He reached behind himself and slipped the nightstick between his legs so that it stood out like an eighteen-inch hard-on from under his gut.
“You know what this is? This is called a visual aid.”
Strike stared at the car wash wall. The cop was standing with his back to the exit ramp so none of the drivers could see what he was doing.
“Grab it. G’head, it’s OK, grab it.”
Strike stared off, sighing.
“I said
grab
it.”
Strike delicately fingered the tip as the cop started sliding the stick back and forth. Staring off at the glittering disks of whale, Strike blew air through his cheeks and tried to hold it together.
“That’s it, yeah, OK, just keep it up, ‘cause that’s what you were doing to me before anyhow, jerking me off. So just keep it up, and while you’re doing it? Think about where the dope is. Take your time, though, take your time.”