Clockers (33 page)

Rocco leaned back. Shit, now he’d have to go hunt down a goddamn scavenge rat junkie. He knew something else was going on here but he just couldn’t crack it, and he hated feeling that he was being used to settle a private score.

Vy stood outside the interrogation room wiggling her long nails, catching Rocco’s eye and then slipping a manila folder under the door.

Rocco scanned Almighty’s rap sheet, sent over from BCI. He could see the Virus come on him: armed robbery six years ago, car theft and burglary three years ago, then down to selling drugs, then to the crimes that didn’t take much energy or carry much risk of jail time—shoplifting and criminal trespass.

“Is this him?” Rocco put the mug shot on the table, next to the ashtray. Suky looked away as if not on speaking terms with the photo. “Yeah, that’s him.”

The field was a full acre of wasteland bordered by a low-slung housing project, an orange-shingled trailer that housed a methadone clinic, the salvage yard owned by Vince Kelso, the cop, and curving around at the farthest end, a soaring, abandoned hospital complex.

Following a local squad car, Rocco drove a Chevy Nova down a paved but cratered cul-de-sac that was littered with mangled shopping carts and fire-blackened oil drums. At least a dozen men were toiling quietly, burning the rubber off stolen phone cables, piling up battered hubcaps or filling shopping carts with soda cans, refrigerator ribbing, liberated plumbing fixtures and other, less identifiable metal salvage. A hundred feet into the field stood the clubhouse, a rickety lean-to under a tree accompanied by two legless couches which faced the hospital. None of the junkies looked up at the cop caravan, everybody focused on the task at hand, preparing scrap for sale to Kelso’s yard across the way, all moving in an unhurried yet purposeful glide like insects programmed for a life task and knowing of nothing else.

Rocco got out of the Chevy and stretched. The air stank of burning insulation. The oily smoke, the charred metal carcasses, the ashy mounds of old rubber-stripping fires and the zombie lope of the scavengers made him feel as if he was visiting a major battle site three days after the troops had buried their dead and moved on.

He didn’t know too much about the life out here anymore, but he did know that these people were at the bottom of the junkie chain, too weak to support themselves with violence or fast reflexes and too sick to survive prison. Most had the Virus, although Rocco guessed that not a one had been tested. Nobody wanted to know for a fact, but they all walked around as if they had already died, as if there was nothing left to fear, as if the news in their bones had finally liberated them, allowing them to embrace without excuse or pretense the only thing that had ever given them comfort, even though it was the same thing that had killed them: intravenous drugs.

Rocco leaned against the door of the Nova and watched the two uniforms emerge from their squad car, both of them older guys with ballooning guts, humped necks, cigarettes and shades. They walked back to Rocco with a casual lumbering roll. He knew them pretty well; they had been cruising this section for years, and one, Eddie Dolan, had once spent six months in Homicide. Bored to death, he had begged to be returned to the street.

Rocco wrinkled his nose. “It’s like fuckin’ Bhopal.”

“Dempsy burnin’,” the two cops chimed in chorus.

They all stood together by the Nova and watched a tall, string-muscled black man tie the end of a roll of phone cable around a tree stump, cut an incision down to the copper strands with a bowie knife, drape the cable around his waist and yank back violently, each jerk stripping back the thick rubber and exposing more of the precious metal.

Eddie Dolan stepped up to the guy. “What’s up, my man.”

The junkie stopped wrestling with the cable, straightened and gave Dolan a look of patient annoyance.

“How you be?” Dolan eyeballed the bowie knife.

The guy said nothing, waiting for a real question.

“Where’s Almighty at?”

“For what?”

“For telling me.” Dolan took the cable from the guy’s hands, coiled it around his own hammy fists and gave it a yank. It wouldn’t budge and Dolan offered it to Rocco.

Rocco took off his sport jacket, exchanged it for the cable and dug in his heels, throwing everything he had into a long jerk and wrenching his back. The junkie stared at him, unamused.

Rocco winced and handed him back the cable. “Thank God for guns, right?”

“You just don’t have the
need
to strip that bad boy,” the other cop, Willy Harris, drawled. “You gots to have the
need.
”

“So where’s he at?” Dolan gave Rocco back his sport jacket.

“Ask the desk.” The junkie gestured to the lean-to under the tree. “He’s around, I know that.”

Under the tree but hidden from the road by the lean-to sat an old-fashioned teacher’s desk and chair that someone had boosted from a high school basement. The furniture was never meant to be used outdoors but the heavy oak was indestructible, its surface marred only by bird droppings. The desk drawers, once filled with school supplies and attendance records, were now used to store community-shared sets of works, and the chair and desk sat tilted at opposing angles on the rocky ground.

The thin, bare-chested guy at the desk was otherwise engaged, and Rocco and the uniforms stood two polite steps back, Rocco wincing as the guy shot some dope between the knuckles of his left fist and then carefully placed the needle in a water-filled jelly jar on top of the desk. Running a hand over his mouth and staring toward the hospital, he looked passively amazed, as if he had been teaching a class and the school, the classroom, all the students, had suddenly been atomized leaving him shirtless but intact at his desk in the middle of nowhere.

He tilted back in the chair, twisting his head up to the cops standing behind him. “You ever hear of privacy?”

“I can’t help it. I watch that needle going in, it gets my dick hard.” Dolan pulled on his crotch.

“Well, then you a pervert, Dolan,” the junkie said.

“Hey.” Rocco squinted at him. “Hey, I know you.”

The guy sat motionless, heavy-lidded.

“Robert Johnson, right?”

The guy batted his eyes, sniffed.

Rocco smiled. “Didn’t you die?”

“Somebody’s here,” the junkie said, smirking.

“Yeah, Robert Johnson. I arrested you in 1978 coming out of Dinardo Liquors. You had that shotgun down your leg. Don’t you remember me?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, so how you been?” Rocco asked without sarcasm.

Johnson stared out into the field. “Working on my tan.”

“Yeah, I could’ve sworn you died two, three years ago, no?”

“Where’s Almighty at?” asked Dolan.

Johnson jerked his chin to the gigantic hospital complex across the field, its Gothic arches so expansive in the twilight that the building seemed to be floating.

Rocco and the two uniforms made their way through the field toward the hospital. “You ever see
War of the Worlds?
“ Rocco asked Dolan. “No one can stop the Martians and they’re blasting the shit out of everybody? You remember what finally killed them?”

“The Virus?” Dolan asked.

“Sort of, yeah, some microbe they couldn’t handle. And that’s what this is like. Robert Johnson? You remember him, Willie? All the badass motherfuckers from like ten years ago? They’re all dead, dying. They killed themselves. You think of all the old names—Robert Joy, Johnson there, Chuckie Grover, the Carter brothers, all of them.” Rocco shot an imaginary needle.

“I hear Erroll Barnes got it.” Willie Harris pulled up the waist of his pants.

“Good. Fuck him.” Rocco said.

“So what are you saying there, Rocco?” Dolan skipped over an unidentifiable object covered with flies.

“Hey, I’m not saying the Virus is a good thing, but…” Rocco faltered, suddenly feeling defensive. “Don’t put fuckin’ words in my mouth.”

The hospital loomed before them. Built in the 1930s, the Anne Donovan Pediatric Center, known to everybody in Dempsy as the baby hospital, was a spectacular ruin, a thirteen-story Depression-era monolith abandoned in the 1970s for a variety of reasons—too expensive to heat, structural fissures, not enough babies. From a distance the gray granite building appeared to be functional; it was only by standing in the necklace of knee-high weeds and debris that ringed the grounds that you could see the blackened and shattered windows and the graffiti-tattooed plywood boarding up the entrances.

The cops picked their way through the booby-trapped vegetation and came to a boarded-up side door. Dolan threw his shoulder into a loosened corner, allowing them to squeeze inside, into the clammy darkness of a stairwell. Following flashlights, they entered the circular main lobby, the heart-stopping base of a thirteen-story atrium that was ringed with interior balconies connected by skeletal staircases, all spiraling up to the skylight like the icing on a multitiered wedding cake.

Surrounded by a herd of shopping carts, they stood on marble tiles that had been scattered and smashed over the years by scavenged booty tossed from above. Once their eyes adjusted to the anemic light filtering through the opaque ceiling, they could pick out three or four junkies at various heights on the stairs, shadow-men mining the carcass, the sounds of their hammering and dragging ricocheting up and down the hollow heart of the hospital.

Rocco was seized by a combination of nostalgia and anxiety. He had come to this place many times as a kid—for vaccinations, stitches, a broken arm, a tonsillectomy—and the visits were always accompanied by pain and panic. Even now, amid the choking must and filth, he could swear he still smelled the fear-inducing pungency of antiseptic alcohol.

Wary of getting winged by flying brass, they all backed up under an overhang.

“I was
born
here,” Dolan grunted, as if the thought made him angry.

“You and every other fucking cop.” Harris caught a junkie three flights up in the watery beam of his flashlight.

“About six years ago?” Rocco stooped to pick up a loose tile, put it in his pocket as a keepsake. “Me and Frank Delgado, we’d hit a dry spell? You know, it’s cold, no one’s killing anybody, we’d park out back here and wait for them to throw shit out the windows. You know, you smash up a toilet on the twelfth floor, who the fuck wants to lug the pipes down all those stairs, right? Shit would come down,
ka-boom,
we’d run out there, grab up the brass, the copper, the whatever, throw it in the trunk and take it over to the yard ourself. Sometimes there’d be six other cops out there waiting for the same thing. We’d
race
for the shit, bend down at the same time, bang heads.” He shrugged. “Paid for a few beers … Guys still doing that?”

Neither of them answered, although Rocco caught Dolan throwing Harris an amused look.

Seeing no sign of Almighty, Rocco motioned for Dolan to lead the way to the stairs. As they climbed, Rocco thought about stealing the salvage from the junkies, imagining telling that story to Patty, the look she’d give him, telling her his half-serious theory of the Virus as a weapon against crime, the look
that
would get, and suddenly Rocco was overwhelmed with a ferocious sense of pride at being born in this ruin just like Dolan, pride at being a local boy, a son of Dempsy, a street kid, a regular guy. He thought of Erin: she had never been in Dempsy in her life. That had to be rectified; she had to know.

As they reached the fourth floor all three of them began breathing through their mouths, and at the fifth, Dolan called for a cigarette break. At every landing Rocco noticed that the fire hoses, racked like compressed intestines on the wall alongside the exit doors, had had their brass nozzles neatly razored off. Compact, heavy, valuable, they must have been the first things to go.

On the sixth floor they ran into a guy sitting on the stairs drinking an Olde English and smoking cocaine.

“Randy, my man.” Dolan put a hand on his own sweating chest. “Where’s Almighty at?”

“He up there.” On the wall alongside Randy’s head was a star-burst of rust-brown dots where someone had booted the blood from their hypo.

“How many floors?” Dolan sounded as if he was begging.

“Just one.” Randy pinched his nose, turned his glass pipe around and took a hit from the other end. “You can make it if you try.”

Rocco picked his way down a chalky, rubble-strewn hospital corridor illuminated by the dying sun descending over New York harbor, the slanting rays coming through the windows of a lane of doorless recovery rooms, the Statue of Liberty tracking his progress so closely that he could count the spokes on her crown.

“Dr. Almighty, paging Dr. Almighty,” Rocco droned through cupped palms. “Paging Dr. Good God Almighty.”

Harris and Dolan laughed, high-stepping over chunks of fallen ceiling. The three came to the corner room, the one with the best view, ducked in and saw a man who had to be Almighty, sitting slightly hunched over on the wrecked rusty springs of a hospital bed. The man started and clutched his chest, the arm of the Statue of Liberty sticking straight up out of his head like a prosthetic device.

“Dr. Almighty, you’re wanted in surgery.” Rocco leaned in past the doorframe, pointed his finger like a gun, then pulled the trigger. “Gotcha.” He tried not to laugh; the poor guy looked so seized up that maybe he thought the hospital had come back to life for real.

“Almighty. How you doing?” Rocco walked into the room, hand out like a salesman. Almighty tentatively extended a junkie’s swollen mitt, and Rocco forced himself to keep smiling as he shook his hand. Almighty was wearing a dirty plaid shirt open over a dark blue T-shirt from a place called the Good Girl Lounge, red gym pants and an Orlando Magic cap. Something about his lanky frame, his sleepy yet precise movements, suggested a former athleticism.

“I’m Detective Klein from the prosecutor’s office. How you been?”

“I’m OK,” he said in a frail drawl. “I ain’t bothering nobody.”

Rocco ducked down, took in the Statue of Liberty. “Jesus, nice view.”

Harris and Dolan joined Rocco at the window.