Clockers (6 page)

Cruising up JFK Boulevard, Rocco spotted some unscheduled activity alongside the Eisenhower Houses: three plainclothes Housing cops stood on the street side of a primer-splotched Plymouth Fury, nervously stepping in place and trying to ignore a growing crowd of hotted-up tenants. As Rocco rolled up, one of the cops, Big Chief Scanlon, stepped up to the driver’s window, his face melting a little in relief.

“Rocco, Rocco, how you doin’ there,” Big Chief said. “The fuckin’ war wagon died.” He had one hand around the neck of a Latino kid in cuffs, and when Big Chief stooped to speak with Rocco, the kid was forced to bow too. “The herd’s getting restless there. Give us a lift?”

The other two cops, Thumper and Crunch, both wearing high-top sneakers and cut-off sweatshirts, started walking backwards to the Aries, the crowd getting louder, bold now that Housing was making its getaway.

The three of them slid into the back, big, quick, the suddenness of their bulk making the car buck and tilt. The last cop in, Thumper, grabbed the kid in cuffs and passed him over thighs until he came to rest on Big Chief’s lap like a wild girlfriend. Despite the warm weather, the prisoner wore a varsity-style Troop jacket, wool with leather sleeves,
DOG AROUND BOYS CLUB
in chenille lettering across the back, the jacket dropped down around his shoulders like a shawl.

“Yo Big Chief, we watch the Fury for you,” some kid yelled out, making everybody around him laugh. Rocco, feeling the car lurch again, turned to see Thumper fly out onto the street, reach into the crowd, pluck the kid loose and hold him up by his T-shirt.

“Yeah? Let me tell you something, you E.T.-looking motherfucker.” Thumper was talking close enough for a kiss. “You
best
watch that fucking car. We come back to get it? It better be in mint condition or I’m takin’ you for a ride, you understand?”

The crowd pulsed around the new confrontation, opening and closing in little waves, Big Chief bellowing, “Yo Thumper; c’mon there,” the kid squealing, “Yo Thumper, man, I was goofin’, I was goofin’.”

Thumper flicked the kid free and backpedaled to the Aries again. “That’s
your
fucking car, E.T. Remember that.” Slamming his door, Thumper hung out the window for a last stare.

“Take us to the office there, fellas?” Big Chief cleared his throat, the noise sounding like a thunderclap, making the kid in cuffs flinch.

Rocco had known Big Chief since high school, had known him when he played semipro football, when he had spent six months in the hospital with a broken back, when he was a stockbroker and when at thirty-six he had become the oldest rookie in the history of the Dempsy P.D., and in all that time his name had been Artie. He had become Big Chief only in the last two years, since he had organized the Fury. All the cops in Big Chief’s squad were given their street names by the kids they policed, and by now they had heard the names so often, they had started using them among themselves. Even their wives and children used them after a while.

Rocco finally rolled off, his rear view completely blocked by the kid on Big Chiefs lap. “You guys radio for repair?”

“We get back there tonight?” Thumper said, pausing to light a cigarette. “We’ll be lucky if the thing’s only on fire.”

“Yeahp, yeahp,” Rocco said, thinking about how many cops, lawyers, social workers and politicians in this town he had known since high school—easily more than a hundred.

“What’s your name?” Big Chief asked the kid on his lap.

“Stan.” The compressed space forced the kid’s chin into his chest and his voice came out somewhat strangled.

“What’s your name, Stan?”

“The Man. They call me the Man.”

“Oh yeah? You weren’t acting like no man out there on the street. What you cry for?”

“‘Cause I knew you were gonna grab me and I was clean, so…”

“What you think, you’re gonna get everybody all worked up, get a little riot going, get us all distracted so you could like, sneak out the back door? We’ll arrest all your friends too. You want that?”

“No, you know I was
clean
so like, I got up
set,
you know?”

“You clean? OK, fine, we’ll take you to the office, give you a strip search. If you’re clean, we’ll only charge you with the clips in the bag, OK?”

“That bag ain’t mine.”

“Yeah OK.” Big Chief sighed.

“Stan the Man,” Thumper snorted.

“Who these guys?” The kid tilted his chin to Rocco and Mazilli. “They knocko too?”

Rocco held his prosecutor’s ID behind his head. “Vatican Secret Service.”

“What? What’s that?”

Rocco saw Mazilli smile out the window.

“They be Homicide, Stan.” Thumper delicately removed a shred of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. “You kill anybody?”

“Homicide?” The kid caught Rocco’s eyes in the rearview mirror and Rocco saw something working in his face.

“They’re probably jacking off on the steering wheel right now,” Big Chief muttered.

“I got the tapes out at least.” Crunch held up two Rolling Stones cassettes, a Megadeth, Willie Nelson.

“Hey Big Chief, can Stan the Man sit on
my
lap for a while?” Thumper goosed the kid, made him bump his head.

“Awright, awright.” The kid sighed theatrically. “I’m gonna save you a strip search. I got a clip in my drawers.”

“There you go.” Big Chief patted his head.

“I never did that before,” the kid said, his tone mournful.

“What?” Thumper and Crunch said simultaneously.

“I never did that before.” Rocco thought the kid sounded a little shaky this time.

“Never did
what
before?” Thumper scowled in concentration.

“Sell. I never—”

“Ex
cuse
me?” Thumper hunched up, mouth hanging open. “You never—I’m sorry, say that again?”

“I only been doing it a month.” The kid’s voice was down to a small mutter.

“A month.” Thumper bobbed his head in mock enlightenment.

“I quit, I tell you that.”

“Fuckin’ A skippy you did,” Thumper sputtered with delight. “Five clips? I’d say you just quit for at least ninety days, wouldn’t you?”

The kid gave Rocco another look in the rearview, and Rocco saw that Stan the Man was thinking hard about a trade, maybe something for the gray-hairs in the front seat.

In the heart of the Sullivan projects, across town from the Eisenhower development, where he had been arrested, Stan sat handcuffed to his chair at the far end of the converted storage room that served as the city wide office for the Housing police. Protocol required that Rocco and Mazilli be in isolation with the kid, but the room was so long—seven unused desks between them and the Housing cops, all of whom were now clustered around the TV, sofa and refrigerator—that for all intents and purposes they were alone, except for a parrot that Big Chief kept in a cage right over their heads, the thing squawking periodically like a smoke detector, making Rocco feel as if he was conducting the interview in a pet shop.

Rocco watched the kid try desperately to come off like he was in control. Sitting back in his wooden swivel chair, his legs crossed, the Troop jacket still down around his biceps, the kid affected a hiked-eyebrow smirk, as if this whole situation was nothing more than an amusing inconvenience, the handcuffs an annoying but obligatory part of his wardrobe.

“So OK. Nelson Maldonado—where’s he at?” Rocco absently swung side to side in his swivel chair, picked at a stain on his tie. Mazilli remained standing, sucking his teeth and squinting longdistance at the TV.

“Well, what kind of
deal
I got here?” The kid said, then flinched as the parrot squawked.

“Well, what do you want?” As usual, Rocco did all the talking. Mazilli was better at other things.

“I want to walk.” The kid smiled as if he’d been asked a stupid question.

“Well, I tell you what. You give me Nelson Maldonado right now, you can walk. I’ll pick up this phone”—Rocco placed his hand on the receiver—“call the prosecutor and work it out right in front of your face.”

“Sounds good.” The kid shrugged, but there was a pearl-size tic pulsing in the corner of his eye.

“What kind of history you got?”

“This my first arrest.”

“What?”

“As a adult.”

“Good.” Rocco nodded approvingly. “Beautiful.”

Rocco walked to the other end of the office, sat next to Big Chief on the sofa, cracked a beer.

“Kid giving you anything good?” Big Chief spoke directly to the television.

“Yeah, well, he
says
he can serve up one of the do-ers on the Henderson job.”

A month earlier, a local landlord named Frank Henderson was speeding through a Puerto Rican block when he struck a child. He was pulled from his car by enraged neighbors and within five minutes of the accident, he was dead with a bullet in his brain.

Big Chief yawned. “I thought you had the do-ers on that. The Gonzalez brothers, no?”

“Yeah, but this kid here says he knows the guy who gave them the gun and hid it afterwards—some fuck we’ve been looking for named Nelson Maldonado.” Rocco bent over to retie his shoe; when he straightened up, his face was red and his temples were throbbing. “I want that gun, so … How many vials you catch him with?”

“Ten on his person, forty in a bag by his feet.” Big Chief got up from the sofa, adjusted the color on the TV; the two other cops, sneakers up, sipped beers and made wisecracks about the characters in “Cheers.” Rocco felt a twinge of envy for the clubhouse atmosphere here. The Fury was a tight unit, all handpicked from the Dempsy P.D.—city cops working for the city. The Homicide squad in the prosecutor’s office, on the other hand, was composed of a dozen investigators, and most of them—including Rocco and Ma-zilli—Were detectives on loan from the City of Dempsy or the three other police departments in Dempsy County. There was also a handful of county appointees, test takers who had never even gone to the police academy, and the result was a cold and paranoid squad, everybody mainly out for themselves and those who came with them from whatever township, city or political tit that had been their point of origin.

“The kid wants to walk.”

“Hey, if he gives you Maldonado? We’ll eat the forty, how’s that?”

“Good.” Rocco stood up, took a long last pull on his beer and walked back to the gloomy end of the room. Mazilli had already paged the nighttime assistant prosecutor on call.

“So Stan, you and Maldonado, you guys good friends?”

The phone rang before the kid could answer.

“Rocco!” Down by the sofa, Big Chief held the receiver high and Rocco picked up his extension to hear “Cheers” playing on the prosecutor’s TV too.

“Hey, who’s this? Hey Gene, how you doin’? I got a kid here says he can serve up Nelson Maldonado on the Henderson job. Housing snatched him with ten bottles on his person, forty in a bag. He’s looking for a noncustodial; can I offer him a deal to walk if he pleas out on the ten? If he doesn’t give me Maldonado, the deal’s off.”

The assistant prosecutor was chewing something, the sound of which drove Rocco nuts. Rocco waited for the guy to swallow, take another bite of whatever it was he was eating and say, “Sure, no problem.”

Rocco hung up and slid close to Stan the Man, talking soft and to his eyes.

“Stan, what I want from you is to know exactly where Nelson Maldonado is, right now.” The kid opened his mouth but Rocco put up his hand. “Before you answer, let me tell you what I
don’t
want to hear. I don’t want to hear, ‘He’s in town.’ I don’t want to hear, ‘He’s on the boulevard.’ I don’t want to hear, ‘He’s on the hill.’ Right now,
exactly.
Where is Nelson Maldonado?”

“Where? Well, right now I’d have to say he’s at this club.”

”
What
club.”

“In like Paterson.”

“What’s its name.”

“I don’t know the name. I would, like, have to take you.”

“Fuck you.” Rocco stood up, faked a yawn.

“Yo
wait,
wait. You said right this second. That’s all I know for right this second. I mean I’ll tell you where’s he’s living.”

“Where?” Rocco stayed on his feet for the heat of it.

“With his father, but he don’t like come home until like two, three in the morning ‘cause of the police looking for him.”

Rocco turned toward Mazilli, who had been sniffing around the father’s bodega on and off since the kid had vanished.

“Where’s the father live?” It was the first thing Mazilli said since they got out of the car.

“On Ramsey, like Twelve Hundred Ramsey.”

Mazilli and Rocco exchanged a glance: the address was right. The kid could be telling the truth, and Rocco felt a surge of old-time adrenaline, although he’d be goddamned if he’d hang around until three-thirty, four in the morning to grab some piece-of-shit number-three man on a homicide—the little prick didn’t even pull the trigger. After all, Rocco had a wife and child now; it wasn’t like the old days when he had nothing better to do.

“So what do you want to do?” Rocco asked Mazilli, not hiding his unhappiness.

Mazilli put on his coat and uncuffed the kid from his chair, taking his time.

“Why don’t you go home,” he finally said. “I’m gonna be up all night anyhow on shit. I’ll grab some guys off the midnight tour, stake out the house. We’ll take care of it.”

“No hey, I’ll do it.” But Rocco was just saying it now that he was off the hook.

“No big thing.” Mazilli gave Rocco his back as he returned Stan the Man to Big Chief’s crew.

“I owe you one,” Rocco called after him, tossing off a small salute as Mazilli disappeared out the door. Thumper and Crunch followed him, escorting Stan the Man to the car. The kid wouldn’t be eligible for his noncustodial until Maldonado was arrested, so he had to be taken over to County.

Rocco intended to go straight home, but then he remembered his half-drunk beer down by the recreation end of the room and thought: First a word from our sponsor. And two hours later, well past midnight, Rocco sat spread-legged and shiny-eyed on the Housing police sofa, watching David Letterman with Big Chief. All the lights were out and both of them were bathed in the shifting silvery cast of the TV screen. At eleven o’clock, the unofficial end of the tour, the beers had turned to vodkas, and for the last thirty minutes Rocco had been eyeing the Mr. Coffee machine. But the coffee didn’t pour itself, so nothing had come of it.