Clockers (68 page)

“Huh,” Rocco grunted, envisioning Victor coming out of the kitchen with his game face on, his hands full of sodas, heading for a table of clockers. “But you said nine out of ten.”

“Tenth time? He gets his crazy Puerto Rican partner coming out of the back with a baseball bat.” Hector laughed hard and short. “Nah. Nah. Tenth time you call the cops, ‘cause you bend but you don’t break, you don’t retreat, you know what I’m sayin’? And we got some hard boys comin’ in, they got guns and shit, everything.” Hector stole a look at the time.

The office door puffed open a crack and Hector’s head jerked up at the clattery sounds that leaked into the room. Rocco stuck his leg out and shut the door again.

“Let me ask you something. You say guns. Did
he
have a gun?”

“Victor? Not that I know of.”

“He told me he found a gun here, cleaning up once.”

“Well, I don’t doubt it. You wouldn’t believe what we find here sometimes. I found a goddamn human pinkie in the bathroom once, a flesh-and-blood pinkie under the sink. I thought it was a piece of bacon or something. But you say guns. Man, we got guns, gold, big fat wads of cash, the people coming in here? Yeah, OK, like for example, the other night? We got two kids outside the store hangin’ on the kiddie climbers, two teenagers selling bottles. Victor goes out there to do his ‘yo, yo, brother’ routine. He comes back in all rattled and I say, ‘What’s up?’ He says he told them they got to go, but one kid pulls out his cash, looks like four rolled up socks it was so much, the kid says, ‘My boss says he’ll pay you five hundred cash every week you let us work out here. We got the cops paid off, nothing’s ever gonna come down, just say the word.’” Hector shrugged and threw Rocco an apologetic smile. “I mean, no offense to you.”

“So what’d he say?”

“Well, I wasn’t there, but my guess is he said, ‘No please, thank you.’” Hector laughed and gently touched his glistening stripes. “That’s some rough shit to pass up, hard as
we’re
working? But you got to pass it up regardless, ‘cause when the shit comes down you’re losing it
all,
salary and, so … But you know, they offer you that, it’s like a mockery on you. You know what I’m saying?”

Rocco gave him a sympathetic nod, but his mind was focused on details, implications.

“When was this again?”

“Friday? Yeah, Friday.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, most definitely Friday.”

“Do you know these kids that were out there? Who they were?”

“Just some kids.”

“He left early that night, right?”

“Yeah. Jammed me up too.”

“Why’d he leave?”

Hector shrugged. “It might’ve been because of those kids. He didn’t say as much, but sometimes that shit can
get
to you. That shit can cut your heart out.”

“Did he call here after he left?”

“Call here?” Hector squinted, then laughed again. “Yeah, yeah, he called to say he quit and for me to tell Wally.”

“Who’s Wally?”

“The owner. This a franchise.”

“Why did he quit?”

“He didn’t say. He just said, ‘Tell Wally I quit.’ He was high, you know, drunk a little, so I didn’t tell Wally. The next day, Saturday? Victor came into work like he didn’t remember quitting. He does that sometimes, leaves work early, all fed up, gets a few drinks, calls up and quits, comes in the next day like nothing happened.” Hector tilted his chin toward Victor’s desk. “Open that there by your foot.”

Rocco pulled out a drawer and a bottle of store brand scotch rolled into view.

Hector shook his head. “He shouldn’t drink, Victor.”

Rocco spied a photograph lying flat under the rolling bottle, a glossy black-and-white eight-by-ten of two black kids and a woman, their mother maybe, all three of them smiling at the camera.

“Who’s this?”

Hector shrugged. “It ain’t his family, I know that. He found it out in the restaurant one night.”

“It looks like models.”

“I don’t know. He found it and he kept it. He used to have it hanging over the desk.”

A guy with a wife and kids hangs a picture of someone else’s wife and kids over his work desk … Something about that chilled Roc-co’s bones, made him feel for Victor more than anything else he’d heard.

“Yeah, he didn’t get on with his wife too much. They were always yellin’ about money, about his kids, how she never brought the kids by the restaurant for him to see them. He liked his kids at least, I know that.”

Rocco took out a few photos of his own, starting with Darryl’s ID. “Did you ever see this guy with Victor?”

“Nope. That’s the guy that got killed, right? I never seen him in here. They got some nasty shit at that Ahab’s, though. Maybe he died of eating it.”

Rocco laughed by reflex.

“That’s terrible I said that.” Hector put the heels of his palms in his eyes, touched his stripes, checked the time again.

“How ‘bout him?” Rocco offered up Strike.

“No … Well, one time, that’s his brother, right? Yeah, he came in here to say hello one time.” Hector laughed. “He looked like he was gonna puke.”

“Victor ever say anything about him?”

“No. I know he’s dealing, but Victor never said nothing.” Hector pushed off from the side of his desk. “Yo I’d like to help you more, but I’m like scared to death to open this
door
here, see what’s been happening behind my back.”

Rocco rose to his feet, about to express his thanks, but before he could get the words out Hector was past him, out of the office, head up, hands out, plunging once again into the roiling stream of his job.

Controlled freedom. Rocco lay in bed flicking a stack of prosecutor’s office business cards, wondering if that expression was something Hector had come up with spontaneously tonight or a catch phrase that Victor had created as a tag for his managerial philosophy. Whichever, the idea tickled at him.

The bathroom door was ajar and Rocco could hear Patty undressing, the rustle of falling clothes turning him on a little, stirring up a dreamlike vision of rocking her soft and steady, her fingers playing at the back of his neck. But he didn’t know whether they’d wind up making it tonight. Patty sometimes liked a full day’s worth of compliments, unexpected hugs and kisses, random outbursts of affection, and he’d been pretty distracted since coming home a couple of hours earlier, the Strike-Victor thing still filling his head.

Rocco silently mouthed “I love you,” practicing for when she came into the bedroom, hoping that the words would allow him to make a quick end run around all that emotional foreplay.

As the shower hissed to life, Rocco drifted back into the Darryl Adams case, scanning tomorrow’s moves. He was about ready to come up on Strike again, pay another visit to the benches, and maybe this time he’d drop the hammer a little harder. He planned to visit the mother again too; the phone log told him the call to Victor’s house from Rudy’s on the night of the murder lasted thirty-five minutes, and Rocco wanted to get another read on her, what she knew. And a talk with that reverend in Bellevue might not be a bad idea either—find out exactly what Victor had said to him when he gave up the gun.

Rocco was getting dopey with sleep. Through the partially open bathroom door he could see Patty’s silhouette on the shower curtain. Rocco put the prosecutor cards on the night table to have his hands free for when she came in. He was filled with the presexual rush of affection that felt like love: he lived here, with her and the baby, and it was good to be home. Turning his head, Rocco looked out the bedroom window at their nighttime view of the bridges leading into the southern tip of Manhattan. Underlit by the city, the sky was an eerie muddy purple. He remembered his visit with Kiki in To Bind an Egg, the moment he’d startled himself by announcing he lived in Dempsy.

The bathroom door opened and then Patty stood at the foot of the bed, wrapped in a thick kelly-green towel, her skin heat-mottled and vibrant from the shower.

Rocco felt his eyes brimming with fatigue, and he heard himself speaking in a druggy garble. “I love you, you know that?”

Patty’s voice floated back at him. “Good. I love you too.”

Rocco closed his eyes and smiled. “Good … good.”

He rolled on his side and crashed.

A few hours later, Rocco opened his eyes and saw a living, fully animated bust of Darryl Adams. In the gray-green stillness of the bedroom, the kid’s head and shoulders sat on his night table. One of Darryl’s eyelids was the shiny purple-black of a mussel shell, and a curl of bright pink flesh dangled like an inverted question mark from the entry wound on his chin.

Rocco couldn’t move but he wasn’t panicked. Darryl looked at him, shook his head and said, “Controlled freedom.”

27

EARLY
Friday morning, Strike opened his eyes and saw a black man in a white coat standing over him. The cops and the Latino with the bloody face were gone.

“You know how much blood we took out of your stomach?” The doctor sounded pissed at him.

Strike looked around for Rodney, remembered the tube in his dick and touched himself.

“It’s out,” the doctor said. “I asked you, do you know how much blood we took out of your stomach?”

Strike felt his face: no tubes in his nose either, although his throat still hurt. And he still had one tube in his arm.

“Two liters,” the doctor snapped, answering his own question.

“What’s a liter?”

“How long has your stomach been hurting you?”

“Did they arrest him?”

“Arrest who?”

The doctor looked confused, and Strike shut up about it: this knifing situation was between him and Stitch.

The doctor leaned down. “What the hell are you talking about? Do you know what a perforated ulcer is? Do you have the
slightest
idea what’s been going on inside you?”

“Ulcer.” Strike looked blankly at the doctor, saw him glaring down with obvious disgust, and finally understood. He felt swallowed up in shame.

The doctor told Strike that he had almost died and should stay in the hospital for a few more days, for observation. But when Strike heard that his blood pressure was back to normal, he said he wanted to leave right away, so the doctor settled for giving him a brisk lecture on the consequences of not getting some follow-up treatment.

An hour later, carrying a referral slip to a gastrointestinal clinic and a bag full of assorted medicines, Strike walked into the sunlight. He felt rubber-legged, but at least the stabbing pain in his stomach was gone.

As he approached a line of gypsy cabs, he saw Rodney’s Cadillac swing out from the curb. Rodney flung the passenger door open before he came to a full stop.

“What you do, wait out here aw-all night?” Strike wasn’t comforted by the thought.

“Hey, you my man.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Dint I tell you to see my doctor? You see what happened?”

Rodney rummaged through Strike’s bag as he drove, dumping out antacid tablets, a small bottle of Mylanta, some Tagamet, a stapled packet of Valiums.

“You get yourself all boiled up on that bench top, all crabbed over, sucking on that Yoo-Hoo shit, worried about this, worried about that.” Rodney threw the Valiums into his glove compartment. “You smart, but you stupid too.”

Strike tuned him out, then tensed when Rodney pulled up in front of his apartment building. Strike had never told Rodney exactly where he lived.

“Why don’t you just, like, lay out for a few hours, watch some TV, get your strength up. Come down to the store this afternoon, we can run a few ounces. Maybe get that boy Tyrone to do the legwork for you today.”

Rodney gave Strike a small shrug, as if to say that knowing about Tyrone was no big deal. But his message was clear: I am everywhere and into all things.

“From now on, I want you to
relax,
you hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“Nobody lives forever, so you got to learn not to
give
a fuck. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.”

“So get on up and relax.”

“OK.” Strike reached for the door but Rodney put a hand on his arm.

“Yeah, I heard that Homicide came back on you again yesterday.”

Strike didn’t answer.

“What’s he, like your boyfriend now?”

Strike sat curled up on Rodney’s stool behind the counter, haunted by the previous night’s hammering and braced for its full-blown return. But he had been out of the hospital for several hours now, and so far he seemed to be holding up pretty well. He had chugged down about half of the Mylanta. It had given him the shits but it didn’t taste bad, and he thought maybe he would start drinking it instead of the Yoo-Hoo.

Rodney’s beeper went off, and Strike tried to read Rodney’s lips as he decoded the numbers.

Rodney looked over to the twelve-year-old mule playing pool by himself. “Get ten for the benches,” he said, and the kid skipped on out to a safe house somewhere, disappearing through the doorway like a glint of light.

In his watery state, Strike imagined himself having to fly down the street on a bicycle like Rodney’s go-boy. Just the thought of it made Strike sick again, made him feel like an old man.

Over the past two hours, Strike had met three more sets of customers: two white boys from a high school in Short Hills, who got-an ounce that was cut to almost nothing; a black gym teacher from his own high school, who copped a half ounce while pretending he didn’t recognize Strike; and a white corrections officer from County, who got an uncut ounce for half price—Rodney’s way of getting a little insurance for when he had to go in next time. Strike took it nice and easy, walking over to Herman’s apartment for every order, cataloguing all the faces and cuts for future reference, thinking that this was definitely better than the benches. But he missed the benches too; it made him feel off balance and unprotected to work or even hang out anywhere else. Besides, he couldn’t let himself get too comfortable here. Next week he would be moving over to Ahab’s, he and his perforated ulcer in all that sizzle and clamor, and that might be another story altogether.