Clockers (77 page)

Rocco resisted smacking him, hoping for one last chance to get something. “So
tell
me.”

Strike’s eyes lit up again. He seemed to be teetering, but then held firm. “I don’t know, you fa-fat muh-motherfuckin’ piece of shit! I
don’t know.
”

“Welp,” Rocco said, his voice fluttery with rage, “I might be a fat motherfucking piece of shit, I might be nobody to nothing, but I tell you, when I wake up in the morning? And
you
wake up? I see what I see and you see what you see. I don’t
have
no brother in jail for something / did. How about you?”

Strike pressed his palms into his eyes, and for a wrenching second Rocco thought the kid was going to give it up after all, give it up and save them both, save all of them.

But then Strike spoke from behind his hands. “You want to talk to me, you get me a lawyer.”

“Get your
own
damn lawyer.”

Looking battered, Strike rose. “That’s what I meant.”

Rocco pulled out a Homicide card and spun it across the table, hitting the kid’s thigh. “I’ll be talking to you, Ronnie. Now take a fucking hike.”

***

Rocco stood on the steps in front of the prosecutor’s office, watching Strike walk off in the direction of the batting cages and the Furniture Shack.

Thinking about how badly he’d blown it, Rocco was filled with a belated energy, a dizzy astonishment. He had handled the interview as if he’d never gotten a confession in that room before and had no idea how to go about it. And calling the kid a nigger: Jesus. Rocco wondered if he should have just arrested him, borrowed a little package from Narcotics across the hall and then busted the kid. But then he
really
couldn’t talk to him, so what would that accomplish? Besides, he’d never done anything like that in his life, and he was potentially in enough trouble already.

Strike walked past a parked Cadillac, and Rocco saw Rodney Little pop out on the driver’s side and call something across the roof. The kid almost jumped out of his skin, but after a few moments of conversation, Rodney and Strike got in the car and drove off.

Rodney. Rocco watched the car make its way to I-9 and vanish. Fuck Mazilli: Rodney was the guy behind the death of Darryl Adams. Rocco just knew it. But he also knew that Rodney would get away with it, because you can’t convict on hearsay. Maybe if Strike testified about how things had really come about, they could nail Rodney on conspiracy, but…

“Shit,” Rocco said aloud, smacking his head. The Rodney angle—why hadn’t he pushed that? He should’ve told Strike that he knew he’d had no choice, that Rodney must have threatened him,
made
him do it, and was he gonna let that lowlife scumbag ruin his life, his brother’s life? He should’ve given the kid the old tag about how if you were coerced into the commission of a crime, you were really a victim yourself; should’ve convinced him that his real target was Rodney, that he had no interest in locking up Strike as long as Strike helped him land the bigger fish. But of course that wasn’t true. Knowing he’d never get anything solid on Rodney, Rocco just wanted the bad brother. He had wanted him ever since that night in Rudy’s—maybe even before that, when something made him ask for the photograph in the mother’s house. There was a Tightness to the exchange, a symmetry in brother for brother that was irresistible, and Rocco saw no reason to mess with the clarity of that vision.

Rocco trudged back into the prosecutor’s office. Brother for brother: now that he’d blown his chance at tripping up Strike, his last hope was getting a jailhouse confession out of Victor. But Jimmy Newton was right. If he interviewed Victor in jail and couldn’t get him to change his story, it would be pure humiliation for Rocco up on the stand. Jimmy would get him to admit that he didn’t think the kid he arrested was guilty, force him to completely sabotage the prosecutor’s case, condemn him to the seedy grind of midnight shifts in a squad car.

Rocco recalled his bullshit bluster to Jimmy that day in the restaurant, how he’d shrugged off the prospect of getting kicked out of Homicide. He tried to envision himself as a middle-aged uniform like Harris or Dolan, grunting with the effort every time he had to get out of the cruiser to hassle some two-bit docker, who would then take off on him like a gazelle. The picture was humiliating, unacceptable—he could never retire from the Job at the bottom after eight years at the top.

Rocco stood by his desk trolling his nails across the blotter. It was time to admit that the idea of getting Victor to tell the truth about the night of the Ahab’s murder was pure fantasy. Rocco flipped through his Rolodex, stopping on Jimmy Newton’s office number. He decided to blow off the whole scheme.

After the sixth ring Rocco remembered it was Saturday. He pulled up the card to get Jimmy’s home number off the bottom—do it now rather than Monday—but instead he found himself ringing up the County Jail and asking for Frank Lopez, Victor Dunham’s designated babysitter.

“So how’s he hangin’ there, Frank?” Rocco asked halfheartedly when Lopez came on the line.

“Not so good, my man. He was in Gen Pop for like two days? They stole his sneakers, his food, his cigarettes. He got beat up both days. He just couldn’t stand up so I shipped him to Protective, but that turned out not so good either.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Well, like at first it was OK. You know, usually there’s nothing up there but snitches, baby bumpers, but then there was this other guy? Orel Carmichael? This guy Orel’s like a real antisocial. He knows karate an’ shit, he beat up like six guys already, gashed ‘em all up, every ten minutes with him it was a war. So they had to put this motherfucker up in Protective too, but now he’s like a shark in a goldfish bowl, plus, he’s got a crush on your boy. So I know you’re looking out for him so I had him shipped back down to Gen Pop.”

“Who, Carmichael?”

“No, Dunham.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you ship Carmichael instead?”

“To where?”

As Rocco hung up, all his hunger for breaking the brothers came clawing back. Now would be the time to hit on Victor, now when he’s all trembly and exhausted, terrorized, willing to say anything to get out. In a few days he’d probably get a bail reduction hearing, get the ten percent option and be out on the street, where he wouldn’t be as vulnerable. Now was the time to help a kid who had been fucked all his life—by his brother, by Thumper, by alcohol, by the water torture of seeing the world through Hambone’s service windows. Victor Dunham was guilty of nothing more than sitting on the truth, and by breaking him down, Rocco could help this kid help himself. It was Rocco’s oldest line, but this time it wouldn’t be bullshit.

Rocco looked at the Rolodex card in his hand and picked up the phone. “Jimmy, it’s Rocco … Listen man, you got to let me in there with him. I swear this poor fucking kid is as pure as the driven snow. You got to let me in.”

31

STRIKE
sat in the car next to Rodney, his hands fluttering on his thighs, a noise like a tuning fork or a dog whistle in his head. He was thinking that he had just decided to quit this work, this town, maybe as soon as he got out of Rodney’s sight.

“You was supposed to be by my store like an hour ago.”

“Yeah, wuh-well, what was I supposed to do, tell this cop I had to go cut some ounces?”

“Did he arrest you?” Rodney stopped for a light by the batting cages, empty now in the late afternoon smog.

“Unh-uh.”

“Then why the fuck did you go down there? You shoulda told him to go fuck himself. He can’t take you down there unless you let him. Don’t you know nothing? Gah-damn, you a infant or something?”

Strike opened his eyes wide, as if to get air around the sockets. “I had a situation on me with Andre.”

“Fuck Andre. He ain’t nothing. What did that fat cop want?”

“Nothin’.”

Strike held his head, remembering the interview, recalling how Buddha Hat had floated above that table, daring him to speak his name.

“Nothin’, huh? Don’t give me that nothin’ shit.” Rodney was sailing down I-9 now, looking at Strike as he drove. “Did he ask you about me?”

“He didn’t say nothing about you.”

“‘Cause I never said nothing to you about shootin’ nobody. Alls I said to you is, if you want that slot you got to go get it for yourself, and shit, I didn’t even say
that.
”

Strike let the challenge go, too beat up to protest, wondering if Victor could really be doing worse in jail than he was out here.

Rodney drove in silence for a few minutes, turning off the highway onto JFK. “So what did he want? What was he asking about?”

“He say he thinks / did it. Caw-called me a nigger too.”

“Well,
did
you do it?”

”
Fuck
you.”

Strike said it fast and hot, the words liberated by his bleeding nerves. At first he thought Rodney was reaching out to pat his shoulder, but then Rodney’s hand grabbed the top of his hair and yanked him down under the steering wheel. His head in Rodney’s lap now, Strike looked up into Rodney’s nostrils as he drove one-handed, Rodney’s lips bunching mean and tight as he pulled over and threw it into park, Strike suddenly finding that big .38 in his face, the muzzle flattening his nose to one side, Rodney’s elbow cocked high, his bug-eyed face shimmering behind the grip.

“Who you talkin’ to like that?
Who?
“ Rodney dug the muzzle into cartilage, Strike lying limp, one sneaker pressed against the passenger window.

“I ain’t one of your little
crew
boys, motherfucker. You watch your fuckin’
mouth
or I’ll blow your face off, you understand?” Rodney gripped Strike’s hair as if he was holding a shrunken head, but Strike was off into static and colors, not resisting, not even there.

“And I’m gonna tell you something else. If I ever hear about you talking to that Homicide one more time, if I ever hear my name come up on this at
all,
I’m gonna know you said it an’ I’ll kill you before you can
blink.
I swear before God, any police come up on me on this? I’m gonna know it was you, and you are
killed,
you understand?”

Rodney waited, his stomach pressing into the side of Strike’s face. Strike nodded, closing his eyes and pretending to go to sleep.

“Word is
word
on this, you got that?”

Strike nodded dreamily as someone came up alongside the car and rapped on Rodney’s window, making Rodney drop the gun down under his seat.

“Hey, what’s up?” Rodney said, his tone instantly casual.

“Nothing from nothin’,” a voice said.

His head still down, Strike watched Rodney rummage in the glove compartment and peel off three white cards from a stack four inches thick, then leave the car without another word.

Strike sat up and saw Rodney stroll across the street with his arm around a white guy’s shoulder. The Cadillac was parked alongside a children’s clothing store; Strike glanced at the window and saw a cloud of pink and blue polyester hanging on a field of plaster balloons.

Strike took the stack of cards out of the glove compartment—they were New Jersey state auto insurance cards. He recalled Rodney saying that he had a friend who worked at the printing plant, that the friend had sold him a hundred blanks for ten dollars each. With Rodney probably selling them off for about seventy-five dollars apiece, anybody who could type could save a grand a year in premium payments.

Strike opened his door to get out, then remembered that Rodney needed him to cut and run some ounces. He sat back, exhausted, thinking, The last package, I swear to
God.
He stared dopily at the pastel playsuits in the store window: maybe after this he’d work with kids. The notion made him think of the Homicide asking him if he was going to take care of his brother’s kids. Looking for distraction, Strike started to count the plaster balloons, and they triggered a memory from when he was eight years old, of a night when his father had come home from the dress factory in Secaucus with at least fifty balloons, all blown up. How, where and why he got them no one knew, but he had put Strike and Victor in the bathroom with all those balloons—the bathroom because it was the smallest room in the house and because it would make fifty balloons seem like a thousand, like a world of balloons. His father had let them go wild he and his brother jumping and screaming and punching balloons rolling on them popping them Strike remembered feeling hysterical with happiness’ until Victor slipped and cracked his chin on the edge of the bathtub, the game over then, his brother spilling a stream of blood over his lower lip, his father barging in and grabbing up the balloons, squeezing them out the small bathroom window one by one, yelling, “You kids got to learn to play
right!
“ And Strike remembered that despite his own sense of unfairness, despite Victor’s bloody mouth, he had felt worst for his father when he saw him watching all those balloons floating free, sailing high over the projects on their way across the Hudson River.

Strike squinted in the general direction of the Roosevelt Houses, thought again of his failed attempt to give up Buddha Hat’s name, and spoke aloud. “I tried, man.”

Rodney came back to the car and threw himself into his seat. Sighing, he counted a thin roll of twenties, then reared back to slip the cash in his front pocket.

“I ever tell you about this insurance card thing I got going? Yeah, I should let you get in on it. How’s about I sell you fifty cards for fifty dollars each? Shit, you can sell ‘em out here for like a hundred. What you think of that? You up for something like that?”

As Rodney drove Strike to his car, hammering away at him on this new scam, Strike tuned him out, savoring his secret decision to bolt, wondering where he should move to. Jersey City? Elizabeth? New York? And do what? Sell drugs, most likely—the Homicide was right about that. Or maybe he’d move to Secaucus, work UPS. Work for Thumper’s uncle. Haw.

“What’s
this
now…” Rodney slowed down about a block from Strike’s car, and Strike saw Errol Barnes hovering over Tyrone, the kid leaning backwards over the rear of the Accord, Erroll sandwiching him in. Tyrone looked terror-stricken. Strike figured the kid must’ve been hanging around waiting for him and then run into Erroll, who had come to the same place to deliver the new package.