Clockers (29 page)

Rocco sat in his car, spasming with fatigue. The sky was a mustard-mauve now, giving no clear sign of the weather for the coming day. He shivered, threw the car into reverse, thinking about the actor, who was probably still asleep in the prosecutor’s office. He decided to go back and drive Touhey home.

Half an hour later Rocco stood inside the cell, feeling as if there had been a legitimate jailbreak. Sean Touhey was gone. Rocco looked around the cell for a note: nothing. He searched his desk, checked the reception area, Vy’s desk. The guy must have just staggered out. Rocco told himself he was worried that the actor might have an accident driving home, but it was more than that: he couldn’t help feeling that Touhey had simply dumped him again. Rocco tried to remember if he had said anything about coming back for the following four-to-twelve tour, then took Touhey’s business card out of his pocket, read the scrawled promise on the back: “Bank on it.”

Bank on it. What a self-approving jerk. But still…

Finally ready to go home, Rocco drove through Dempsy toward the Holland Tunnel. The sky was still undecided, a flat, washed-out white, and the JFK war zone, stripped of the night and its suggestions, looked shrunken and tamed, a street of forlorn and battered doll houses under artificial light. The few remaining people, mainly the odd skull-faced whore tromping home or the occasional docker still on his corner, stamping his feet in boredom or fatigue, seemed miniaturized too—dope dealer dolls. Rocco drove by, taking in the last dregs of his clientele, feeling up to his eyeballs in the nothingness of people’s lives, the objects and odors, the petty game plans and deceptions, underwear and tinfoil, dope and booze, all the shitty little secrets, the hiding places, everything adding up to a stain on a sidewalk, the only evidence that these people had ever existed.

Soar and plunge. Rocco thought about Duck roaming the catwalk of the Royal, just another haggard and restless wee-hour wanderer, so completely digested by the job that he had become almost indistinguishable from all the others.

Rocco shot under the river, heading into New York, thinking, But I’m more than that—I just have to be.

11

SATURDAY
was a sweet and sunny day, the kind that made people think about getting it together once and for all—health, kids, jobs, personal appearance, doing things
right
this time. Mothers stood around smoking and laughing, their kids shouting and running as if their hair was on fire. The shards of bottle glass that studded the chained-in grass island behind the benches caught the sun and turned an eyesore into a field of diamonds.

Strike sat locked in a crouch on his perch, red-eyed and stiff, feeling as if the benign weather and buoyant voices that surrounded him were some kind of setup. He had been waiting for the hammer to drop since ten o’clock the night before, waiting for the news of Darryl’s death to fan out into a plague of misery and chaos, yet here it was, the day after, a Saturday so luminous and joyful that he hadn’t sold a single bottle all morning.

Futon, The Word, Peanut and the others were hopping around, flicking make-believe jump shots, lashing out roundhouse karate kicks, celebrating the first full day of summer vacation. Tuning them out, Strike squinted across the projects, trying to see into his old bedroom, Victor’s room, but the window was a gleaming shield of light, and Strike forced himself to look away, to forget about it, deal with the bottle flow: What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

Strike could care less about the selling slump. He was just marking time now, keeping up appearances. The night before, Rodney had said no sudden moves, can’t have people saying, Hey, what happened to Strike? Rodney wanted to run ounces out of his store for a while, risk the traffic for a few days, a week, let Strike hang out a little, see customers’ faces. In another week or so, when the murder died down, crowded out by fresher jobs, Rodney would slide the whole thing over to Ahab’s again.

But Champ—he was still out there, even if they got away with the Darryl Adams end of it. Rodney had said something about Champ having his own problems soon, but he didn’t say what. And there was Victor to deal with too, and My Man … Strike hugged himself, knowing that too much hung in the air, that this could never have a happy ending, that right now, for all his talk about how important it was to think about the future, he had acted like a sneaker dealer, just another bonehead living by the two-minute clock.

A waddling baby dropped a bottle of red juice, the spillage billowing out right under Strike’s perch. The baby let out such a penetrating yowl that Strike jumped off the bench and began walking toward 41 Dumont, his old apartment house, not knowing what he would do when he got there.

Halfway to the building, he saw Victor’s wife, ShaRon, in the playground, playing a kind of handball with herself against a graffiti-covered wall, her infant son in a stroller parked on the sidelines. Overweight and mope-faced, she was flinging the ball with a girl’s cocked-elbow toss, then missing it on the bounce-back when she tried to hit it with an open palm. After every missed contact, she trudged to the fence to retrieve the pink high-bounce, then threw it up again missed it again walked after it again, her gait like a bored camel’s.

Strike leaned against the mesh, watching her, knowing she knew he was there by the way she didn’t notice him.

ShaRon had moved into his old bedroom about two years before, bumping him to the sofa, and Strike remembered the day he first learned about her. He found a letter she had composed lying on Victor’s night table, a torn-out page of a spiral notebook on which she had written a formal greeting to the child in her belly, telling it that she hoped it was handsome or beautiful, asking the child if it was scared, reassuring it that she loved it and so did its father. The letter ended in a dozen possible names, most of them champagne-toned, right out of a soap opera.

Strike didn’t think ShaRon and Victor even liked each other that much. Victor had gotten her pregnant, and he’d always had this iron-bound notion about being responsible and cleaning up his own mess, which was a lot more than Strike could say for most of the guys he knew. And his guess about ShaRon was that she had simply wanted to get out of her mother’s apartment any way she could.

Strike had met ShaRon’s mother once. She was a skinny, scooped-out, chain-smoking woman with a face like a fist and a startlingly deep and sharp voice. But moving away didn’t seem to solve anything for ShaRon, and the girl looked as unhappy playing handball with herself today as she did the first time Strike had laid eyes on her.

The ball rolled to where Strike was standing, and ShaRon had no choice but to meet his eyes.

“How you doin’?” Strike squinted at her through the mesh.

“I’m OK.” Her brow was furrowed like a prisoner’s or a child’s.

“Where my brother at?”

“Workin’.”

“At Hambone’s?”

“At the other job. I don’t know.”

“He OK?” Strike’s mouth went dry with the question.

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.”

“Everything OK?”

“Yeah.”

“When you see him last?”

“I don’t know. Last night, this mornin’.”

“Everything was OK, huh?”

“I guess so. I don’t know.”

Caught between irritation at her deadness and a sudden gust of anxiety, Strike wanted to push it, to ask her straight out if she knew who killed Darryl Adams, but he had a feeling that she wasn’t enough a part of Victor’s world to know, even by a guess.

Giving up, he stared at the tiny thing lying flat in the stroller. Ivan, his nephew—he had never seen him before. No, this was Mark—Ivan was the older one.

“My brother,” Strike said. “Tell him to come see me.”

“OK.” Her face was blank.

“If he wants to. You know, if he needs to.”

ShaRon stared at him, waiting for him to leave.

“Yeah OK.” Strike walked away, wondering why Victor was killing himself for a girl like that. He recalled all the evenings his mother had come home from one of her two jobs and had to zip through the kitchen, cleaning the dishes still in the sink from the morning. ShaRon sat goggle-eyed and mute at the kitchen table, holding her baby in her lap, Strike’s mother moving around her like water running around a rock. The minute any of them got home from work—Strike, Victor, their mother—they’d instantly start to tidy up, keeping the apartment spotless and proud—everybody except ShaRon, a sullen nineteen-year-old with no appreciation for all Victor was doing for her. Strike allowed his outrage to overwhelm him now, his righteous anger almost a relief. At least it got his mind off Darryl.

Back at the benches Peanut was still yammering, tossing off put-downs, The Word and Futon listening, eyes shining, waiting for the next cut. “Yo yo, I went up to Horace this morning? I go up there, knock on the door, this big motherfucker
rat
come to the door ‘bout six feet high.”

“Ho shit.” Futon jackknifed with pleasure.

“Yeah,” Peanut said. “He come open the door. He say, ‘What you want?’ I say, ‘Yo, is Horace home?’ He say, ‘He still sleepin’.’ Wham! Slam the door in my face.”

Everybody bent over with laughter, watching for Horace, hoping he somehow heard that and would come running, jump on Peanut’s head.

“Leave the motherfucker alone,” Strike said. “I see
your
house. Goddamn, the couch so motherfuckin’ buggy it up and walked across the goddamn room, turned on the TV.”

The kids got pop-eyed with delight, mouths perfect o’s. They pointed to Peanut and barked, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

Peanut went dark but was afraid to start trading digs with Strike. “Yeah, but we gettin’ new furniture this week,” he said in a lame mumble.

“Yeah, how?” Strike said. “The roaches chipping in?” The woof chorus went through the roof, everybody high-fiving, hopping in glee.

Strike didn’t like to crack on anybody, but he wanted to shut Peanut down because Peanut always goofed on Horace, and something bad was going on with Horace these days. His mother had a new boyfriend, and whatever was happening in his house was making Horace choke-faced crazy. He had gotten into two bad fistfights over the last two weeks, and more recently he started carrying a steak knife in his pocket. He’d already had the knife out once. The day before, a fight had broken out around the corner that was unrelated to any crew business, and when people started running from everywhere to watch, Horace ran toward the fight too. But he ran with the steak knife in his hand, and Strike had imagined him blindly plunging the knife into somebody’s chest or back, for no reason other than that violence was already in the air.

Pinch-faced and mumbling, Peanut stalked off, everybody else fanning out to the corners to see if they could draw some car business. Alone now, beginning to brood about Darryl again, Strike was hungry for a distraction and found himself locking eyes with that kid Tyrone from 8 Weehawken, who was perched on the low chain surrounding the glass-littered patch of lawn. Figuring that the kid had overheard all the banter, Strike checked first in the direction that Peanut had gone, then back to Tyrone, shaking his head with disgust. Tyrone glanced away, fighting down a smile, rocking the chain like a cradle.

One of the new clockers, Stitch, a tall gangly kid with tiny folded-down ears, appeared from the rear of 6 Weehawken, race-walking toward Strike, his face cemented with furious determination. Strike groaned, Now what?

Stitch marched up to the bench, glaring at Strike. “I just got
beat.
Nigger in a Nissan want a clip, I go get it, come down, the motherfucker put a gun in my face and drive off, so what I’m sayin’ to
you
is, I got to go home and get
my
gun, because I know who the nigger is and I got to get it straight. So like, I’ll be back.”

Strike put his hand out, holding him in place, thinking fast, knowing Stitch was full of shit. He probably smoked it himself or sold it for more in some other neighborhood. “Hang in, hang in,” Strike said. He looked into Stitch’s eyes, not seeing the dope there as he expected. But the body language was all wrong. Stitch’s ear was almost kissing his shoulder and he kept rubbing a spot on his shirt with his fingertips.

“What’s the guy’s name?” Strike said.

Stitch jerked his head back. “Who?”

“Who
stole
from you, stupid.” Strike watched him think, as if it was a physical activity. Strike had taken Stitch into the crew because he was Futon’s half-brother, but brains didn’t run in the family. He’d had 348 stitches up and down his chest and arms from when he stole money from another dealer about six months before. Proud of getting cut up like that, he had given himself his own street name—as if walking around looking like a human baseball was some kind of mannish accomplishment. Some people would hang on to anything to hold their head up.

Reebok,” Stitch finally said.

“Reebok?” Strike ducked his head and stared up and into Stitch’s face. “The motherfucker a stickup man or a sneaker?”

“Reebok, that’s all I know.”

Strike followed a kite-tail curve of suture marks that climbed out of the kid’s shirt and up to his jawline, thinking, What to do? The kid just stole ten bottles, and the bottles should come out of his commission. He’d have to sell five clips with no two-bottle cut to make it up, but if he already stole ten bottles, why give him more?

Strike had to split the bottle profits with Rodney, sixty percent for Rodney, forty percent for Strike and his crew, but any kind of shorts—theft, usage, breakage, police—came out of Strike’s end. Rodney always got his sixty percent, and Strike took his losses out on the people responsible, insisting that everyone account for what he held, one way or the other.

But right now all Strike wanted to do was ease out of this job without any undue grief; it wasn’t a time for coming down on people.

“Get your ass on out,” Strike muttered.

“I’m gonna get mah gun.”

“You ain’t
got
no gun. Just get the fuck out of my face before I give you a taste of something you ain’t gonna like.”