Clockers (17 page)

The white guy returned to the bathroom for another ten-second trip, in and out, snagged his french fries on the way to the parking lot, got into a LeMans with Pennsylvania plates and disappeared out onto JFK.

What to do?

“Hey, Strike.”

Strike flinched, wheeling to face that fourteen-year-old girl Shanette, Sharette, that baby-fat girl, the one who was just dying to throw it all away on the pipe. She was still trying the same play, giving him the hungry happy face, that licky-lipped gleam.

“What
you
doin’ here?” the girl said, eyeing his clothes. Her gaze traveled up and down from hood to sneakers. “You gonna get yourself all dirty.”

Strike gave her his back and practically ran to the Accord. He drove with the windows open, as if the Ahab’s air had followed him into the car like a hellish breath.

But once he was clear of that sizzling choke of grease and fear, clear of Darryl Adams, he found himself coming into some kind of resolve again. He must have been dreaming to think he could do something right in the restaurant. It would only draw attention to Darryl’s job, make the cops think, What’s here? Still, how to play it?

Darryl lived in a shabby, mostly welfare-subsidized motel over in Tunnely that always had lots of business going on because of its proximity to the Lincoln Tunnel. Day and night, cars drove around back of the Royal Motel for dope or sex. It was a place of whispers, quick reflexes, and shadow play. Anything could happen to anybody out in back of the Royal; everybody there was either guilty or just about to be. Shootings, stabbings, robberies—the Tunnely cops spent so much time at the Royal that the management had once joked about giving squad cars a designated parking section.

Strike drove up I-9 toward Tunnely, wondering why Darryl would choose to live there, then remembering that Darryl didn’t get along with his mother too well either. He probably moved out in a huff one night, and where are you going to go to live after a fight? A motel. Darryl likely checked in on impulse and wound up staying. When you were on your own, it was easier to have just one room than a whole apartment, and sometimes Strike felt like giving his own place up, get a nice furnished room somewhere.

Strike drove up the ramp to the rear of the Royal, pulling in under the long second-story catwalk. A crowd of regulars hunched over the railing and watched the New York cars entering and leaving with the jerky frequency of customers in a 7-Eleven parking lot.

Strike turned off the ignition and sat there waiting for Darryl’s night to end. But what if he went out after work? What if he came home with a girl? What if … Strike thought of Rodney waiting on the news, waiting to judge his heart: This is my son.

Then Strike remembered he had heard somewhere that Darryl’s mother had moved back down to Georgia. Somebody told him that; who would have told him? Strike started thinking about his own mother, about how ever since he moved out of the house he never ran into her, even though he was working the benches in the same projects where she lived. He never saw his brother either. Maybe they were going out of their way to avoid him, always coming and going from the other end of the projects, Strike thinking, Is that good or bad? But did he really want his mother to see him overseeing business on the bench? Maybe she was just showing him consideration. He had said to her that his dealing was short term and that he’d end it quick, coming back to her rich and on the level, but now look what he was up to, sitting here outside this sinkhole with a .25 on his lap How would
this
lead to
that?
Rodney once said about Kennedy’ the President who the boulevard was named after, that his family made its first real money smuggling booze but Strike couldn’t imagine an American President starting out on the road to respect and real money by sitting in back of the Royal Motel with a gun waiting to ambush a done dealer so he could take his place dealing ounces Rodney had gone on about the hypocrisy of whites how they were dirtier in a bigger and more subtle way than any black kid trying to hustle and survive on the street but Strike always had a hard time seeing that. White-trash pipeheads and corrupt knockos right in front of him every day, he had no trouble reading them hut anybody with a tie and a briefcase had him buffaloed. ’

Strike drifted off, thinking about making it in this life, how hard it would be to draw a picture of himself that could be entitled “Making It.” He couldn’t imagine what he would be doing in that picture, what he would be holding, wearing, even what the expression on his face would be.

But his father had almost made it, or so he was told. Strike used to believe that his father’s stories about being asked to join Kool and the Gang had been beer bragging, talking trash. But a year or so after the funeral, Strike had finally asked his mother about Kool and the Gang, and his mother had said it was the God’s own truth, your daddy was asked and he really did turn it down. But just because his mother had said it was the God’s own truth didn’t necessarily make it so. Maybe his father was bullshitting her too.

Strike reluctantly scanned the parking lot again. Ambush: Who the fuck was he kidding? There were twenty, thirty people around, people hanging right over his car on the catwalk. Ambush: right. He didn’t have the heart, he didn’t have the plan. What if he just wounded Darryl, put him in the hospital. Or maybe he could tell him that Rodney wanted him dead, that he should split and save himself.

Think it through. Think it through. Strike felt himself sinking: no heart, no plan. He thought again of his mother, his promise to come back rich and legitimate, and he began working up a little rage, hating Darryl for putting him through these changes, for making himself
see
himself right now. Strike gripped the .25, praying that Darryl would come right up in his face and—

Whomp.
It sounded as if someone had dropped a cinder block on the roof of his car from the second-story catwalk, the explosion so sudden that Strike yipped like a dog.

Whomp. A
husky white guy in dungarees and a New York Jets T-shirt pounded his fist on the roof of the Accord again, then bent down, pressed his face against the driver’s side window. “Hi there.” Wiggling his fingers in greeting, he grinned at Strike with the casual proprietariness of a cop.

Strike dropped the gun between his shoes, kicked it under the seat. The cop moved off to hoist himself up on Strike’s front fender, not even looking at him, just planting himself, hunched over and smiling at the action. He whistled and rocked, enjoying the ripple he was causing in the lot: cars pulling in, hesitating, then throwing it in reverse and pulling out quick, driving back onto I-9, people coming out of their rooms and seeing him squatting like King Toad, then retreating behind shut doors.

Strike sat stone-faced, pinned in his car. He watched a chunky middle-aged Latino emerge from one of the ground-floor rooms and heard the cop whistle him over. The guy paused for a second, as if weighing options, then walked over in a bent-knee waddle. He was dressed in a white shirt, white slacks, white shoes, white Panama hat. He was high as a kite.

The cop tilted his head and beamed at the guy as if he was proud of him. “Let me ask you,” the cop said, jingling an ID bracelet on his wrist. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The guy mumbled something with the word “student” in it.

“You want to be a student?” The cop nodded reasonably. “What do you like to eat?”

“I am working, sir.”

“Yeah? How long you working on the pipe?”

The guy hesitated. “Two days.”

“Two days? Do you know if you lie to a police officer your dick falls off?”

The guy nodded solemnly. “I don’t speak English, sir.”

“Oh yeah? Do you like spaghetti? Where’d you buy that hat?”

“I speak Spanish.”

“Spanish? Donde de yomo doo-doo.”

“Como?”

“You don’t speak Spanish. You’re full of shit.” He took the guy’s hat off his head, the guy’s hand coming up five seconds too late. The cop took out a lighter.

“You ever try to smoke a Panama hat?”

“It’s my hat.” The man in white remained flat-faced, not even daring to frown.

The cop sighed, playing with the lighter, then took the hat and screwed it down on the guy’s head all the way to his eyebrows.

“Thank you for coming to the Royal. Please don’t ever fucking come back again.” He waved the guy off.

Strike slunk down low in his seat, the cop beating a paradiddle on his fender, throwing him the same beckoning head tilt through the windshield. Strike made sure the .25 was kicked deep under the seat, then slowly emerged from the car.

“How you doing?” The cop gave him that same pleased-to-meet-you beam.

“OK.” Strike knew to keep his answers to one or two words, not give the guy a chance to goof on him. The cop wore three gold chains and a gold ID bracelet, which made Strike wonder if he was really a cop after all.

“You here for dope or pussy?” The cop looked up at the catwalk, waving, some of the people waving back.

“Neither.” Strike cleared his throat, said it stronger. “Neither.” He felt OK now, not too shaky—in fact, somehow relieved.

“So what are you here for?”

“Nothing,” Strike answered, hearing the stupidness in it.

“Nothing. You just like to drive up the rear of the Royal, sit in your car and like, what … think?”

Strike shrugged, tried not to smile.

“What do you think about? The environment? ‘Cause this is some fucking environment, let me tell you.”

“A friend…” Strike felt as if he was on TV.

“A friend. Who?”

“Donald.” He’d almost said, “I don’t know his name.”

“Donald. Donald. Yeah, well, you know what happened? Donald moved to Orlando.”

“Oh yeah?”

The cop shrugged apologetically. “Yeah, he’s down there with Mickey and Goofy so…”

“Uh-huh.” Strike started to backpedal to the car door.

The cop was momentarily distracted by another kid, who was walking briskly through the lot. “Whoa, whoa.” He flagged him down.

The new kid, clam-colored, pockmarked, came up fast, charging right into the cop’s face as if he had nothing to hide, even though his eyes were bugging out of his head.

Both Strike and the cop stared, the cop turning to Strike and saying, “Do you see what I see?”

The kid shook his head, laughing a little too heartily. “No sir, please.” He sounded foreign but not Latino. He touched a surgical scar across his throat and said, “Thyroid.”

“Thyroid,” the cop repeated.

The kid reached into his pocket and pulled out three colored disks on a key ring; “A.A.” was stamped in gold on each one. “Thirty, sixty, ninety days.” He gave a froggy smile, but Strike saw a little tremble in his fingers.

The cop extended his hand for a shake. “Congratulations. Really, really, I swear, congratulations. Now why don’t you take your fucking tags and get the fuck out of here.”

The kid nodded animatedly as if it was a great idea.

“But first, I want you to meet…” The cop looked over at Strike.

“Charles.” Strike looked away.

“Charles.” The cop brought their hands together, the other guy’s palm a swamp, the kid actually saying “Hi.”

“Charles is a dope dealer. Why he’s coming around here I don’t know, but now that both of you know each other, why don’t you both get off my fucking beat, out of my fucking domain, and do some business on the other side of the highway, OK? Hey Charles, is that reasonable of me or what?”

Back in the Ahab’s lot, Strike paced under the trembling shadow of a huge plaster statue of a whale hunter that rotated on top of the restaurant. The gun was back in the Accord where it belonged.

What to do. Darryl was killing him, kicking his ass.
Talk
to the guy.
Explain
the situation. Then if he doesn’t … Then if…

Strike continued pacing, hissing to himself, scowling up at the revolving Ahab, his hands whirling before him in pantomimed debate, the restaurant’s exhaust fan sending out a cloud of reek that came over him like an emotion—the smell of panic. Strike felt as if
he
was the victim, and he imagined Darryl in there laughing his ass off, tormenting Strike with his status as Rodney’s number-one man, Rodney’s choice-boy. Strike tried to get puffed up with anger one more time, but it was like willing himself to sprout wings and fly. The cop had seen him, that baby-fat girl had seen him; it was hopeless. He imagined explaining all this to Rodney—I
would
have gone through with it but I ain’t
stupid
—and his stomach bellowed for something cool and soothing. Scanning the street across from the Ahab’s lot, Strike looked for some kind of sanctuary, some shadow place to sit down for a minute so he could regroup.

The music coming out of the speakers in Rudy’s Lounge was so loud that it went all the way around into a kind of silence. Strike walked in under the blare, hand on his stomach, instantly regretting his choice. The room was illuminated by a few bare red-tinted light bulbs. Under the dull, hellish glare, a half-dozen customers hunched over their drinks at the bar.

Sniffing the yeasty odor of slopped beer, Strike turned to leave, but before he could complete his about-face, the bartender slapped a cardboard coaster in front of him as if staking a claim. “How’s it goin’?”

Strike squinted at the hand-drawn announcements of dinner specials and charity events wedged into the frame of the bar mirror, then turned and eyed the revolving plaster Ahab directly across the street. He turned back to the bartender.

“You don’t have, like, Yoo-Hoo here?”

The bartender struggled to keep a straight face. “Yoo-Hoo?”

“Well, you got something like … I don’t drink ah-alcohol. Muhmilk, you got milk?” The stammer caught Strike by surprise, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t control right now.

“We got dairy creamer.” The bartender hunched forward as if fascinated by Strike and his strange tastes. “You want a glass of dairy creamer?”

Strike bared his teeth, miming disgust.

“How about Coco Lopez mix?”