Clockers (41 page)

Andre sat down on the bench next to Strike’s sneakers, put the book bag in his lap and sighed. “Now where you think he’s running to?”

Strike shrugged.

Andre palmed his face as if he hadn’t slept for days, which was possible, since he worked city Narcotics five nights a week in addition to his full-time one-man Roosevelt tour.

A guy in a fatigue jacket and red sneakers walked up to the bench, looked from Andre to Peanut to Andre to Futon, sensing something was wrong but not getting it yet. “Where the bottles at?”

Andre blinked at him, amazed. “You stupid or something?”

The guy nodded as if in agreement and then trotted off.

“Gah-
damn
.” Andre shook his head, then opened the book bag on his lap. “What we got here?” He took out an English book, a math book, a steak knife and a loose-leaf binder. Andre flipped open the binder and Strike saw Horace’s childish writing from the just-finished school term: homework assignments, spelling tests, compositions. Nothing looked completed.

And then from the bottom of the bag came two clips—two ten-bottle rounds of powder coke wrapped with rubber bands.

Strike blew air, more angry that Horace was holding than that he got caught. Futon and Peanut started to walk.

Andre looked around, bouncing the clips in his hand. Strike saw Horace standing on the street corner a block away, trying to see what was happening.

“OK.” Andre faced forward but Strike knew the words were meant for him. “I’m gonna write up a warrant on him tonight. You tell him I want for him to turn hisself in. If he don’t—”

“Aw, c’mon Andre.” Strike tried for a reasonable tone. “Just th’ow the shit down the sewer.”

“If he
don’t
turn hisself in come two o’clock next Friday, I’m coming to lock him up. You know why two o’clock Friday? ‘Cause that’s when the Juvenile Court shuts down for the weekend. That means the boy goes to the Youth House until Monday morning. And he’s gonna be a young first-time boy in that place with a weekend’s worth of some bad kids. Can you remember all that?”

Strike snorted dryly. “Everybody likes Andre ‘cause Andre for the
people.
”

Strike knew immediately that he had stepped over the line. Andre rose. He seemed to be resisting an impulse to backhand Strike off the bench. When he spoke there was no play in his voice.

“Get up.”

Strike sighed, stood away from the bench and raised his arms elbows high, like bat wings.

But Andre wasn’t interested in a frisk. “How’s about I lock
you
up instead? And
you
ain’t going to no Youth House. You old enough for County.”

“It ain’t
my
book bag.” Strike wasn’t too alarmed. Andre had never really come down on him before.

“Yeah? Alls I know is, when I got to this bench you sittin’ here with this bag by your feet. I got enough here for possession with intent. That’s three sixty-four mandatory, and even if they make it simple possession, you
still
gettin’ ninety days in, and I’m gonna make some calls to the inside, make sure that’s gonna be ninety days the
hard
way. Are you ready for that?”

Strike looked away. “I ain’t doin’ no ninety days. That ain’t my dope.”

“It is if I say it is.”

“It ain’t mine.”

Looking off at a brick wall, Strike could feel Andre’s hot stare. After a long thirty seconds Strike broke the silence. “It ain’t mine,” he said again with mournful insistence.

Andre muttered “Shit,” and suddenly Strike’s wrists were behind him, steel cuffs biting into his skin. Futon and Peanut strolled out of sight, but several people on the sidewalk meandered over. A lady said “Good!” real loud, and a man said “About time.” Another lady let loose with a singsong “Oooo.”

Andre grabbed a fistful of shirt between Strike’s shoulder blades and marched him through the projects, hissing in his ear, “How’s that taste? That taste good?”

Strike walked with a light tripping tread, shocked and embarrassed, his face filling with blood as if the cuffs were on his neck instead of his wrists.

“That ain’t my dope,” he repeated, but he said it numbly now.

Andre walked him back to the building that housed the surveillance apartment, a small crowd following. Strike heard his name over and over, heard laughter, and again that hateful “Oooo.” Andre pushed him into the lobby, then into the stairwell, but instead of heading up to the apartment, Andre took him down to the basement.

Strike tried to concentrate over the pain of the cuffs. “Where you goin’?”

Andre didn’t speak, pushing Strike ahead into the dank window-less underground, just the two of them now, walking right past Andre’s old office. He steered Strike over to a steel door, then looked for a key on the ring hanging off his hip.

“What you doin’, Andre?”

Andre opened the door and shoved Strike into a long, narrow, low-ceilinged space, a cement corridor lined with storage cubicles and littered with broken bikes, discarded stoves, fifty-pound bags of rock salt. The hot stench of urine made Strike’s eyelids flutter.

“Hey, what you
doin,
Andre?” He wasn’t really scared yet—people had seen them go down here together, there were witnesses. But Strike flashed on that lady who said “Good,” and a wave of self-pity washed over him. He didn’t deserve that kind of disrespect. He had never pushed dope on anybody in his life, had never gone door-to-door with it. They all came to him.

“You see this room?” An overhead pipe grazed Andre’s head as he circled Strike. “What you think of this room?”

Strike didn’t believe Andre would hit him, but just in case he tried to back up against a storage fence. Andre put a hand on his shoulder to keep him planted.

“What you think of this room?” Andre said again, his taunting voice echoing off the cement walls.

“I don’t like it.”

“Yeah,
I
do, though.”

“Can you loosen the cuffs?” Strike bared his teeth, unable to mask his discomfort.

“Yeah, I like this room fine.” Andre walked behind him. “You know what I want to do? I want to clear all this out, all this garbage, then I’m gonna line this corridor with mattresses. What do you think of that?”

“These cuffs are
tight,
Andre. They the wrong size.”

“You know why? ‘Cause I see the kids outside, they always jumping on throwed-out mattresses, or they always rolling down the hill—you know, doing flips an’ leaps an’ shit? And there’s all that
glass
out there, rusty shit, but they just, they don’t care. Because you know when you a kid that age, you don’t have no
fear
in you.” Andre put a big hand on the back of Strike’s neck. “But what I wanna do is line this with mattresses in here where it’s safe, and like maybe get free weights set up in one of these storage bins, start like a
gym
club down here. Teach some tumbling, maybe get somebody who knows his shit come in here, you know, get ‘em really
young
and do something
pos
itive with them.” Andre started squeezing Strike’s shoulder muscles as if loosening him up before a prize-tight. “Don’t that sound good?”

“Yeah, it does.” Strike coughed, not listening to any of it, brooding again on the way people treated him like a criminal. Shit, at least he
earned
his money.

“You know, ‘cause like I say, kids, when they’re young? They don’t know enough to be afraid, and that could be like a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you’re doing with them. You agree with that?” Andre moved in front of him, his breath smelling like mint, Strike reflexively jackknifing a little to guard against a punch.

“Uh-huh.”

“But I got me a problem.” Andre smoothed the top of Strike’s head, Strike staring at the two black police officers on Andre’s T-shirt. “Housing don’t have no money for my gym club.”

“Uh-huh.” Strike’s face felt like it was starting to swell, as if from an allergic reaction to the piss stink.

“So I got to raise the money on my own, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I need me a sponsor.”

“Uh-huh.” Strike kept his voice low, Andre beginning to scare him a little more now.

“I need me a
bene
factor.”

“I hear you.”

“You hear me?” Andre strolled behind Strike again. “That’s good, ‘cause I could lock you up. Shit, I could even mess you up first, say you tried to fight me, you know what I’m sayin’? But I know Rodney’d just put someone in your place out there and the goddamn beat would just go on and on.”

“Uh-huh.”

“‘Cause you ain’t nothin’. You just holding down a spot out there. You know that, right?”

“Right.”

“You just one in a long line of parasites out there, right?”

“Right.”

“So maybe instead I should just try to get some of that money recirculating—you know, like coming back into the community. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“I hear that.”

“So maybe instead of me and you going off to County, we could maybe go off shopping. How’s that sound?”

“Good.”

“‘Cause the kids’ll be real grateful.”

“Yeah, OK.”

For a long and close minute Andre stood silently, his chest in Strike’s face, Strike tense and alert, looking at the ground, realizing that he’d heard little of what Andre had been saying—something about “community” and “positive.”

“Yeah, an’ one thing.” Andre reached behind Strike as if to unlock the cuffs, but instead jerked Strike’s arms straight up behind him, the pain so sharp and unyielding that Strike made a bleating noise, saw zips of light behind his eyelids.

“One last thing.” Andre embraced Strike in a loose bear hug, his big cracked lips right in Strike’s ear. “I ever see you so much as make
eye
contact with that boy Tyrone? I’m gonna personally fuck you up so bad you gonna
wish
I just throwed you in jail.”

Strike trembled from his legs to his lips, barely able to whisper, “Please…”

16

ROCCO
sat in the windowless Homicide office, staring at the picture of Papi on the front page of the
Dempsy Advocate
.

“Do you realize what this guy had to do to die in the tunnel?” he said to Mazilli. “He went
in
there all shot up, right? That means he had to pay his toll. He had to wait on line, hand over three dollars, get the green light. Unbelievable.”

“Maybe he went through the exact-change lane.” Mazilli was watching an old Richard Widmark movie on television.

“No, I mean there he is covered with blood, handing a five-dollar bill to some fucking boingo in a booth, waiting for his two dollars change, right?”

“The guy was in shock.” Mazilli yawned and tilted his chair back at a 45-degree angle.

“Yeah? Another thing, they found two kilos of coke in the car. Who the fuck brings coke
from
New Jersey
to
New York, right? It’s like bringing clap to Saigon.” Rocco watched as Richard Widmark put on a bulletproof vest.

“How do you know the guy was starting out from New Jersey?” Mazilli said. “Maybe he was making a run from down south. Flew right up the corridor from Georgia or Florida, right onto the turnpike and into the tunnel.”

“Well, he stopped somewheres.” Rocco flopped the paper on his desk. “It’s like a math problem. Juan got whacked at point X, he drove away losing blood at the rate of a pint every ninety seconds. He was driving forty-five miles an hour and he bought the farm two miles inside the tunnel.” Rocco’s phone rang and he scooped up the receiver. “So for ten points, what shit-skin in what New Jersey town did Juan? Piece of cake … Hello, Homicide.”

“It’s not
my
problem.” Mazilli strolled out of the room. “Not my table, not my problem.”

“Yeah, hi there, my name’s Bill Walker.” The voice sounded black to Rocco’s ear. “I’m a retired detective out of Newark P.D.? And ah, I got a bit of a situation here.”

“Shoot.” Rocco yawned into the side of his fist.

“I’m at the First Baptist Church on Lexington and Royce? And ah, I got a young man here, he says he shot somebody last week.”

Rocco turned down the volume on the TV. “Oh yeah? Where at?” Rocco figured the shooter was listening, because the detective was picking his words carefully.

“At that restaurant.” The detective put his hand over the receiver for a second and asked, on his end, “Ahab’s?” Then, to Rocco: “Ahab’s. On Friday night.”

“Does he know the name of the victim?”

He heard the detective say to the shooter, “You know the boy’s name?” There was a silence, then back on line: “No, he don’t know.”

Rocco pulled over a pad. “OK. You know where we are?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, the boy is here with the reverend. He gave up the gun to the reverend, and the reverend would prefer you come by here.”

“Hey, no problem. I’ll be there in a half hour.”

“Half hour?” The detective sounded unhappy. “No later, I promise.”

Rocco hung up. Lexington and Royce: he was surprised, because that section of town, known as Bellevue, was overwhelmingly white, and he didn’t think there was enough of a black presence to support its own church, unless it drew its congregation from other neighborhoods or even other towns, some of the well-to-do blacks from Newark, Jersey City and the Oranges going to church in Bellevue for the change of scenery. Which probably explained the retired detective who made the call: Rocco assumed that the cop was a member of the congregation, and the reverend must have asked him in to handle the situation. And now, Rocco thought, the poor guy’s Sunday afternoon was blown to hell.

“You want to pick up the Ahab’s shooter?” Rocco called across the desks to Mazilli. As he got to his feet he was overwhelmed by a full-blown flashback of his conversation with Touhey and Jackie the night before. Experiencing a momentary fatigue—half hangover, half shame—he plopped back down at his desk and didn’t get up again until he had found the actor’s business card and tossed it in the trash.

The church was an enormous peaked chalet with white stucco walls, blond wood pews and a whitewashed wooden cross thrust out above the congregation like a figurehead on a ship’s prow. High over the pulpit, twenty feet up on the pristine front wall, “Christ Is the Answer” was scripted with such delicate luminosity that the words seemed to hover there, weightless and free.