Clockers (9 page)

Strike stared at’him, waiting for more.

“I had to give him five thousand dollars and I’m supposed to get up another five for him tonight. After that, me and him’ll work something out but goddamn, that little ol’ clip cost me a thousand a bottle, ain’t that some shit?”

“So why you carrying again tonight for?” Strike’s voice dropped to a sullen mutter. He was thinking about the cop who had the message for Rodney, the cop working on getting a Caddy for himself.

Rodney just shrugged. “I’m getting outa this life.”

“Houses.” Strike said it to mock him.

“Houses. You learnin’.”

Strike knew why Rodney was carrying the bottles. He was a damn addict as sure as any other bug-eyed dope fiend out here, hooked on being the
man.
The man? Rodney was more like God because of those bottles. He couldn’t drive twenty feet without causing someone to bubble over with hope and joy. He couldn’t walk into a room without every lost child in there jerking his way like he was some kind of magnet. All that from bottles: the bottles were the beginning and the end of it. It wasn’t the money itself, because no one ever felt that way about a holdup man or some other kind of thief no matter how much they took in.

And Rodney was talking about houses. Strike could just see Rodney giving up his bad-man bottle-king glamour, giving up all that love, to be some landlord chasing down pipeheads for back rent they’d already spent on bottles, giving it to whatever new king had taken over Rodney’s throne.

All the kilo men and ounce men around town talked about real estate, about getting out, but Strike knew they were all full of shit. They were all stone junkies like Rodney, hooked on a lifetime of hustling, of making it the outlaw way, hooked on their status as street stars. It was just like Strike’s mother said when they’d had their big fight: “How much is enough? How much money do you have to make to retire? Who do you think you’re hustling with that nonsense, me or yourself?”

As Rodney trolled JFK, Strike conjured up his mother’s face when she spoke those words, saw again the set of her mouth, the unblinking conviction in her eyes. She had been so sure of her knowledge that she hadn’t even raised her voice. Well, now he knew that she was right, knew that he was probably no different from Rodney by now, hooked on the dope of recognition, of adoration. And Strike was just getting started.

They drove along a miracle mile strip of Highway I-9, one side of the road lined with carpet outlets, waterbed showrooms and Chinese restaurants, the other by a dark park bordered by a low stone wall. Strike saw the towers of the O’Brien projects about a mile ahead, but long before they got there Rodney slowed down, coming to a full stop on the park side of I-9 behind a Ford Taurus with New York rental plates. There was no one in the car, but Strike saw three Latinos sitting in the shadows on top of the stone wall and listening to a Spanish radio station on a boom box.

“Leave the money in the car.” Rodney grunted, getting out of the van. Strike did as he was told, then slipped onto the sidewalk, feeling jittery and exposed. He didn’t know what was happening but would have felt better about it if everybody was indoors.

The Latinos slid off the wall, and the biggest one clasped hands with Rodney, Rodney drawling, “Papi, my man Papi.” No one looked at Strike, not Papi or the other two, both of them wearing jackets in the warm weather to cover their guns.

“Where you been, brother? I beeped you like three times.” Papi giggled and danced nervously from foot to foot as if he had to pee. He was huge—six three, 230 pounds—wearing an orange Milwaukee Brewers T-shirt over baggy khaki pants. He had calico eyes, a mustardy cat color, the exact tone of his skin. “I figure my man Rodney’s takin’ care of some heavy business. Your beeper fucked up, man? I figure maybe you dint recognize the number ‘cause I was calling from a
pay
phone.”

“Yeah, I knew it was you.” Rodney’s voice was a high singsong. “Anytime I don’t know a number coming in, I know it be Papi.”

Papi exploded into giggles again, tossing his head like a horse. “Rodney, fuckin’ Rodney, man.”

Strike saw tombstones and granite angels in the shadows over the park wall. He looked back at the Latinos’ car, and the New York plates made him sick to his stomach: Rodney was getting into something here that might be way out of bounds.

“‘Cause we waitin’ like an
hour
here,” Papi said, pushing it. “I got fuckin’ people stacked up like airplanes, you know? So what was it, like you didn’t hear it when the number came in? You like looked down at it later?” Papi smiled, waiting for an explanation.

Strike noticed one of the Latinos studying him. He was a slender, baby-faced teenager, smaller than Strike. A black watch cap pulled down over his hair made his black eyes enormous. The boy looked away, spit a pearl of saliva over the wall into the cemetery.

Rodney gave Papi a backhanded wave. “Naw, man, I heard it. I heard it every time. It’s what you said, I was takin’ care of business.”

Papi looked dreamily at Rodney for a beat, as if wondering where to take it. He abruptly reached behind him, elbow high, and Strike’s stomach shot a red stream: gun.

But Papi only came up with a beeper that had been clipped to his belt. He pushed a button and it began to vibrate. Papi held it out in his palm to Rodney.

Rodney took it, turning it this way and that. “Gah-damn, man, what the fuck?”

Strike saw the black-eyed gun boy disappear around the street side of the van.

“Sometime you don’t want the beeper noise, that beep-beep, you know?” Papi beamed.

“Gah-damn, I stick this up some bitch’s pussy? She can take a message and get off at the same time, ain’t that something?”

The boy rejoined the group holding something between his ribs and his elbow but out of sight under his jacket. Papi was howling at Rodney’s comment, staggering as if he was gut shot. The others seemed not to understand English. Rodney handed the vibrating beeper to Strike. Strike made a fast pass at looking intrigued but then didn’t know who to give it to. The thing had a powerful, insistent pulse that made it seem alive.

Suddenly the two gun boys became casually alert, turning at the same time and leaning back to look down the dark sidewalk at a lone figure emerging from the shadows, walking toward the group, about a hundred yards off. Papi noticed him too, and his wet laughter subsided into sighs, then just a dewy smile. Rodney winked at Strike, Strike thinking: Ho shit, now what? But as the figure came closer—average height, shoulders hunched as if he was cold, taking small unhurried steps—Strike saw who it was: Erroll Barnes. Everybody made him out at the same time, became relaxed again, but Papi’s jokey hysteria was replaced by a sober calm. Strike watched Erroll draw near. He was thirty-five but looked fifty, frail with close-cropped gray hair and beard. His face was deeply furrowed, like a thumb had plowed lines though clay across his forehead and down his cheeks. His mouth was a flat line and his eyes were both furtive and blank He looked as if he had never uttered a full sentence of conversation in his life.

When Erroll was still a few yards from the group, Rodney raised both hands overhead as if someone had said “Stick ‘em up.”

“Papi,” Rodney barked, hands high, backpedaling to the van. “Vaya con Dios.”

“Mi amor.” Papi saluted, then turned to Strike. “My friend…” He smiled expectantly, an open sentence.

Strike nodded goodbye but didn’t think that was what the guy was driving at. It took a moment before he realized that Papi was asking for his beeper back.

Strike and Rodney pulled away from the curb just as Erroll reached the group. Reading faces, Strike could tell that Papi had a completely different manner with Rodney gone and Erroll there.

“What you into here?” Strike asked. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Rodney said, his mouth puckered with secret amusements.

“I didn’t
like
that.” Strike pointedly looked out his side window.

“Didn’t like what?” Rodney laughed. “You just said you dint know what that was, so how you know you dint like it?”

The gloomy towers of the O’Brien projects were coming up at the next light and Strike braced himself for the turn. “Just get the business over with and take me back to the benches.”

But Rodney flew right by the projects, then drawled out of the side of his mouth, “Business
is
over with.”

Startled, Strike sat up, automatically feeling under the seat for the money. The Toys R Us bag was gone.

“See now usually I let Erroll do it
all,
you know? Carry the cash and take the dope, but tonight I figured I do the cash half so’s I could show you the people. Let everybody get a look at everybody for future reference, just in case I got to ever ask you for some
help.
See what I’m sayin’?”

Strike was sitting in Rodney’s living room on a plastic-slipcovered turquoise couch, keeping his mouth shut, thinking that as long as he held his peace he wasn’t involved.

He had never been invited to Rodney’s house before, never had the security status of “house-comfortable,” and he felt both dizzy and alert: What the fuck was going on? He couldn’t stay quiet any longer.

“But y’alls buying from New York people. Champ is gonna
kill
you man. You can’t do that.”

Rodney, nude to the waist, stood by the refrigerator eating a chicken leg. “Champ is cool.” He licked his fingers. “Champ’s getting his money. He got no complaints.”

“You can’t
do
that,” Strike said weakly, too freaked to expend a lot of heat in argument.

Rodney’s apartment looked like every other seventy-five-year-old shotgun flat in Dempsy: a small living room going straight back to a same-size bedroom, continuing back to a kitchen behind which, in a small T, were a bathroom to one side and a tiny bedroom to the other. There were no doors to separate the front rooms, just the barest bit of indented molding to define one area from the next, so that sitting in the living room, Strike found himself staring directly at a pink satin-covered queen-size brass bed twenty feet away and at the kitchen sink fifteen feet beyond that. Rodney had moved in here twenty-two years ago, Strike thinking, Big real estate man.

“You want some?” Rodney extended a Tupperware bowl full of chicken. Strike reflexively touched his stomach as if he was full. Rodney shrugged. “You go on like this, you ain’t gonna have no ass on you at all.”

“I eat.”

“Yeah, you a real pig.” Rodney sighed, then got into it. “Look, let me tell you about Champ. Champ is on the street, but Papi’s about
weight.
It ain’t got nothing to do with Champ. What I buy from Papi goes out in ounces and it never see the light of day. I got people coming up from south Jersey, from Pennsylvania—shit, I even got me a customer from
Vermont.
I don’t even know where Vermont
is.
Alls I know is I get me a ki from Papi so good I step on it three times and I can still sell a ounce for nine hundred dollars. And the goddamn ki is cheaper up front than the stepped-on shit I buy from Champ.” Rodney belched, hunched over, squinted into the refrigerator. “Champ is bottles, so don’t you worry about Champ.”

Strike dropped his forehead to his palms. “You can’t bring in no dope to Dempsy and sell it. Champ’s gonna fuck you up.”

“Who said I sell it here?”

“Well, where you sell it then?”

“Out of town.”

“Where at?”

“I got me a partner.”

Strike gave up. Nobody told nobody nothing save for what they wanted them to know, and even then they were full of shit, just out of habit.

Rodney took a long chef’s apron off a hook on the kitchen wall, draped it over his naked chest, fished around the kitchen, reaching into the cabinets, under the sink, then came into the living room holding a big stainless steel wok, a brown jar of lactose, an eggbeater and a fold of cheesecloth.

He sat down across from Strike, placing the paraphernalia on a heavily varnished driftwood coffee table. He rubbed his face with both hands and leaned back, his arms spanning the length of the couch. The matching couches were too big for the tiny front room, but to Strike it seemed that the room itself was too big for the room. Thick blue shag rugs, heavy tan drapes, cutesy statuettes of dentists and drunks and milkmaids everywhere you turned, a fake antique white telephone, three televisions stacked one atop the other, at least two of them looking broken, figurine lamps with suedelike pleated shades sheathed in plastic, graduation pictures, wedding pictures and more diplomas mounted or propped on every flat surface, vivid sunsets painted onto sections of driftwood to match the coffee table, a laminated Jesus holding out his heart from some more driftwood over Rodney’s head, a four-foot-high stuffed pink panther like a prize from a carnival standing in a corner of the room—for some reason even that was in a clear plastic bag—and finally a small mini-bar refrigerator, which Strike guessed held dope, booze, money or guns. The whole room made Strike feel like smashing his head through a window just to get some air.

Rodney leaned forward suddenly, looking at his watch. “You hear what happened to one of my boys on the boulevard?”

Strike was silent, thinking about Newark stickup men, Erroll Barnes, Champ, retribution. Maybe Rodney’s new dealings were cool if he kept them out of town. But they seemed dangerously shortsighted, and Strike felt his stutter coming back even though he had nothing to say.

“This old boy like fourteen? He got dumped by a girl so he put some Comet in a glass of milk for hisself, they take him to the hospital and who do he call for, his mother? Hell no, he call for
me.
Ain’t that somethin’? Called me first. I got up there like to tear him a new asshole, almost killin’ hisself over a thirteen-year-old girl. I tol’ him I ain’t havin’ no business with a fool like that, he better
learn
some things if he wants to continue on with me. Called me first…” Rodney palmed his mouth to mask a satisfied smirk.

“Woo-what you got me up here for, Rodney?” Strike felt as if he was breathing through a pinched straw. “What’s up, like juh-just…” His lips fluttered, then clamped shut, and Strike just let it go. Too much trouble.