Clockers (67 page)

Something was tickling Strike’s thigh, something lying along his leg. Opening his eyes again, he saw Rodney walking down the hall, curling his lips in disgust at the moans and odors. Rodney spotted him and bellowed his name, laughing, as if he was glad to see him. But Strike wasn’t fooled. The frozen vision of Victor said it all: every man for himself.

Strike weakly pulled off the thin blanket covering his legs to see what was tickling him. He saw a tube trailing off between his feet, followed it to its source, then gasped in disbelief, the world flying up into his eyelids and out.

26

ROCCO
kept the engine running in the Hambone’s parking lot, watching three kids down the block standing under a bus shelter, quietly clocking. He had been sitting here for twenty minutes, collecting his thoughts, and had seen four or five sales—not much, but still, fifty bucks in twenty minutes came to a hundred and fifty dollars an hour.

Rocco had intended to stay in New York and go home after the interview at To Bind an Egg, but he had left the store craving another bite of Strike. And the second go-round with the kid had him straining at the leash. He could’ve sworn Strike was about to give it up, saying, “Maybe somebody else did it,” and then going down on one knee like that. This kid would definitely break. All Rocco had to do was keep coming back at him, keep up the “Gee, I thought you said, so then how come” bullshit. He didn’t for one minute think that Strike wasn’t wise to his routine. Even so, he could tell that this bad brother was in hell over this—- a shithead with a conscience.

After working over Strike, Rocco, forgetting that he had called in sick, dropped by his office, anxious to keep it going, praying that no other jobs had come in. Fortunately there was nothing new on the blackboard, and lying on his desk was the call log from the pay phone at Rudy’s that he had subpoenaed. Noting that eight calls had been made from that phone between seven-thirty and eleven on the night of the murder, Rocco guessed that Victor probably made at least two of them, one to his home and one to Hambone’s. Somebody else could have made either call—his brother, for instance—but Rocco didn’t think so. The other six calls were made to numbers in Newark, Dempsy and Beaufort, South Carolina, and Rocco eager to keen moving had decided to track down those parties’later.

Out of his car now, striding across the lot, Rocco opened the door to the restaurant. He surveyed the brown and orange room, and felt like a fireman coming back the day after a six-alarmer. The exhaust fans over the grills must have died, and a grease mist hung so heavy in the air he could lick it. Hambone’s was in chaos: the tables full up and rowdy, long lines at the cash registers, ketchup slopped over the stainless steel rim of the condiment bar, a puddle of orange soda on the floor in the bathroom alcove, a garbage can with decal eyes on the side of its mouth gagging on cups and wrappers. Rocco’s first response was to wonder, Where the hell’s the manager? But then he remembered.

He waded through the clatter and bubble of the steel-on-steel kitchen area and reached the manager’s office. He opened the door and heard Hector Morales, Victor’s partner, chanting at someone on the phone.

“No fuckin’ way, no fuckin’ way, no fuckin’
way!
“ He screamed on the last beat, punching wood.

Rocco rapped lightly on the open door and stepped inside the tiny room, his badge flapped out. The office was two beat-up desks, two chairs, a phone and a hand-drawn work schedule.

“She’s my kid too, bitch!”

“Hector.” Rocco waited, holding his ID before him like a cross.

Hector turned and Rocco took a step back. Hector’s face was striped with long bloody scratches from eyebrow to chin, and another jagged gouge ran the length of his forearm. Half the wounds were covered with yellow ointment. Hector held a jar in one hand and was applying salve with the other, the phone in the crook of his neck.

He held up a finger for Rocco to hang on. “You’re fucking dead. That’s right … that’s right … that’s right.” He hung up.

“Bad fucking day, bro.” Hector was brisk, manic, fingerpainting his face with salve, going into a grotesque imitation of a Latino woman: “‘You na’ fokin’ seein’ huh today, she got
a flu,
she see you
nes
week.’”

Rocco sucked his teeth in sympathy. “Women—can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em.”

Hector gave the one-liner a quick straight face as if to say, “Oh yeah?”

“I’m Rocco Klein.”

“You got to give me like
ten
minutes.” Hector held up both hands, then moved past Rocco to the door. Rocco decided not to push it, just walk in Hector’s shadow and look out at the world through Victor’s eyes.

Back in the kitchen, a young kid was nibbling french fries off the fry scoop as if he was at home. Hector scowled at the cockeyed heat lamps over the frying racks: one was trained on the floor, the other focused on the boiling shortening. The grease smell was even thicker back here, the air just getting whipped around by big stand-up fans not connected to any exterior exhaust vent.

Hector refocused the overhead lamps on the fries and grabbed the kid by the upper arm.

“Eric. Why don’t you please go out and empty up the Garbage Monster, my man. Thank you.”

“That’s Derrick’s job.”

“That’s your job for right now, please.
Thank
you.”

The kid stood still and sullen, not wanting to go. “Where the garbage bags at?”

Hector didn’t answer. He grabbed a stumpy girl working the tomato sheer and stuck a mop in her hand, pushing her through the door into the dining room with a please and thank you. He snatched a spatula out of the hands of a kid trying to clean the surface of the meat patty grill and gave him a little lesson, putting some steel wool under the edge of the spatula, getting up on his toes and scouring the surface with two hands on the handle, then giving the spatula back. Moving on, he dropped six rectangular blocks of frozen pollock into a fryer basket, dropped the basket in the shortening and picked up a handful of burger patties, dealing them out on the grill like playing cards. Right next to the french fry baskets, Hector spotted an unmarked cup filled with liquid. He sniffed it, looked up to Rocco with alarm, then shrugged it off and dumped the contents into the sink, the air suddenly clogged with the pungent reek of bleach.

Then Hector was on the move again, Rocco dogging behind, trying to appear casual about this burning ship, but the frying smells were making him nauseous. He imagined his insides all crusted up, the grease lying in his veins, circling his heart. Watching Hector from behind, assessing the spare tire around his middle, Rocco remembered Victor’s mother saying, “Tagamet, he’s got to have his Tagamet,” and then he tried to imagine Victor working in here, with an ulcer on top of everything else.

“Clarence!” Hector yelled while scooping a pile of fries. “Where’s Clarence at, please?”

“He ain’t come in today,” the girl at the drive-through window answered as she turned to him with a ten-dollar bill. “This man say he gave me a
twenty.
”

Rocco looked out the window and saw three crew-cut Latinos in an Audi, the bass of their sound system cutting through the noise of the kitchen, thumping like a big heart.

Hector and the cashier stared at each other, the girl deadpan, holding out the ten, elbow cocked into her hip. Hector stared at her until she shook her head. “Unh-uh. They give me this
ten.
”

“Tell ‘em to come back at midnight. If we over ten dollars, it’s theirs.”

Hector moved off, obviously not wanting to deal with the problem now, Rocco thinking about that three-thousand-dollar thump, thinking, Making money hand over fist, but still trying to hustle an extra ten dollars off Hambone’s.

Hector scanned the hissing kitchen, probably looking for someone to shanghai for bussing tables, but everyone seemed to be locked into their own locomotion. Rocco followed him out front, stepping back as Hector pulled the head off the Garbage Monster and, using the flat of his hand, swept fries, wrappers and soggy napkins off the orange trays.

“Hey, yo, please, thank you.”

Both Rocco and Hector turned to face a kid of about fifteen in a red, white and blue Nike running suit and a gold chain with a six-inch gold anchor pendant. His name was shaved into the hair over his left ear:
SHAY
.

“My man Hector,” Shay said, warily taking in the stripes on Hector’s face.

After slapping his palms free of ketchup and salt grains, Hector shook hands. “What’s up?”

“Please, thank you. Please, thank you.” Shay smirked, checking out the room from the corner of his eye to see if he was being noticed, admired, envied, anything. “I just came back, you know, to see how you doin’.”

“Hangin’ in.”

Rocco could see that Hector was fuming, antsy to get back to work, but the kid was still shaking his hand.

“You still sayin’ please and thank you all the time?”

“I try.” Hector started to move away.

“Yeah, I’m doin’ OK now, myself.”

Hector took his hand back. “That’s good. I’ll see you around.”

“Yo whoa. Wait up, wait up,” Shay said, stopping him. “This my man De Wayne.” He nodded down to a hulking baby-faced teenager wearing orange sweats, top and bottom, “Syracuse” in white letters running down the thigh, as if being muscle for a fifteen-year-old dope dealer was some kind of collegiate sport.

De Wayne sat hunched over a giant orange soda. He twisted his head sideways to look up at Hector and shook hands without straightening up or taking the straw from his mouth.

“This my boss Hector, from when I worked here,” Shay said.

Hector gestured to Rocco. “Yeah, and this is my friend Chuck Norris from Dempsy County Narcotics.”

Shay and De Wayne got a little woody in the face but toughed it out. Rocco had a flash of premonition: De Wayne would be dead within a month, maybe Shay too. Dead boys—he was fairly sure of it.

“I’ll see you around. You all have a good meal now.” Hector moved off and Rocco followed.

Hector shook his head as they stepped behind the counter again. “Fucking kid works for me three weeks, comes back here wanting to reminisce like we was in Vietnam together or something. I fired his ass too, he was stealing buns, can you believe that?” Hector thrust his hand into the ice chest and popped a cube in his mouth to crunch. “I mean, if you’re gonna steal,
steal,
don’t boost no buns … Well, now he’s king of the world, right?” Winking at Rocco, Hector returned to his office, made a sweeping gesture of welcome. “King of the world.”

Rocco took a seat while Hector leaned a thigh against the edge of the desk, his wrists curled over each other. He kept one eye on his watch.

“It’s bughouse now because I got no partner up here, as you well know.”

“Yup.” Rocco felt the sweat begin to cool inside his shirt.

“So how can I help you?”

“I don’t know, but let me ask you. What did
you
think when you heard about it?”

“What I think?” Hector shook his head, blew out some air. “I feel for the guy because … let me ask
you.
You hear me out there—Please Thank You Please Thank You—that little shithead out there dissin’ me on that? You know where I got that from? Victor, man. Victor said everybody got to say Please and Thank You, because courtesy brings down the temperature, courtesy breeds teamwork. And he’s right. Like I said, things is shit right now because you can’t do this with one guy, but when Victor was here, like last week? This place … I mean, the owner’s bringing in somebody to help me from over in Jersey City ‘cause no one can deal like this, but you see them antique
car
prints on the walls out there? And the nice overhead fans? The old-time fans and the plants? Real plants? That was all Victor’s idea.”

Rocco didn’t recall seeing any of it, but he hadn’t lingered on the decor.

“Victor said you got to make it like a home, make it like people are coming into a person’s house, like they’re guests. So you ask me what I
make
of it? I don’t know, and I wish I had the time to sit down and figure this shit out, but I don’t. Alls I can say is that it beats the hell out of me. You sure it was him?”

“So he was into the job, hah?” Rocco said reflectively, trying to get Hector to slow down.

“Let me tell you, Victor treated everybody with decency, and on both sides of the counter, you know? Like the kids we get workin’ here? This is a shitty kind of job if you’re a kid, but Victor gave them some
air
in here, like he told them what the job was, told them how to relate to the people and to each other, and as long as they doin’ what they supposed to be doin’ he let them alone, because the kids? Alls they want is respect, freedom and some cash to buy some clothes, go take a girl out, an’ he had that thing here like, You got a job to do, just do it and everything’s gonna be OK—like controlled freedom. See, he taught
me
that, because me, I’m like a throwback. When I started here, it was like don’t even look me in the
eye,
I’m the boss, you know? Like I’m going down with the
ship.
But Victor, man, he’s like—”

“How was he with the customers?”

“The customers?” Hector made a face and waved off any suggestion of a problem. “I’ll tell you
one
thing, man. Victor, he knew how to weigh a dollar. Somebody come in here all bummy, they say, ‘Yo, I’m hungry, man,’ Victor give ‘em a hamburger just like that, no money. He said to me, ‘Hey look, you give ‘em one so they don’t steal two, protect yourself, protect your investment.’ And the first time he told me that, I’m thinking, Somebody ask for something free, hey, I’m a Puerto Rican, you stealing
my
sweat, I’m coming
out
with something. But he was right, he was right … And even with the drug dealers. You know they come in here, start selling shit? Victor’s going over to their table with a Coca-Cola in each hand sits down ‘Yo brother You ain’t
clockin
‘ in here are You? ‘Cause this like a family place.’ Then he passes out sodas, says, ‘I would appreciate if you would do that stuff off the property.’ And nine out of ten they leave, you know, because basically no matter who You are_done dealer welfare working man_people respond to
respect
getting respect” He leaned back on the edge of his desk folded his arms across his chest and nodded in agreement with himself.