Clockers (69 page)

“Yeah, here he comes,” Rodney said to Strike, gesturing to the street and laughing affectionately as Bernard, sad-faced and slump-shouldered, walked down the block toward the store. “He up to a ounce now, but we’ll see what happens
next
week.”

Bernard came in as Strike left to get the ounce.

“Oh Rodney, man, that bitch is fucked up, man. I’m gonna leave her for
good,
man.”

Rodney haw-hawed, bawling, “Yeah? She told me she was leavin’
you.
”

Hearing the same conversation as last time, Strike felt comforted by the predictability of some people.

He walked three blocks to Herman’s building, pondering the notion of a hole in his stomach. He tried to envision what it might look like. A slit, a tiny circle? As he unlocked the outside door, he heard someone tapping “Shave and a Haircut” on a car horn. He spun around and saw Jo-Jo and his crew in their beat-up Delta 88. Jo-Jo urged him over with a toothy grin.

“This where you live, Strike?”

“No, not really.” Strike forced himself to maintain eye contact. “So then what’s with the keys?”

“I was just helping a friend.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“You know, he faw-forgot his car keys, so I was getting them for him ‘cause he’s at work.”

“No shit. Took the bus, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, were you goin’ in or comin’ out?”

Strike hesitated. “Comin’ out.”

“Good.” Jo-Jo reached outside the window to open the rear door. “We’ll drive you back to Roosevelt.”

“That’s OK.”

“C’mon, it’s free.”

Strike slid in back. There were three other cops from the flying squad in the car. All ignored him except Jo-Jo, who leaned over the seat back.

“Yeah, we come down on Roosevelt last night? We grabbed some shitheads on the Dumont side but we came up empty by the benches.” Jo-Jo nodded. “But I think we’re gonna take another crack, like next Monday.”

Strike paused before answering, wondering how best to say it. “Yeah, well, you know, I’m not working there anymore, so…”

“No? That’s good, I guess, but you know what? We should probably stay friends anyhow.”

“Well, you know, that might not be necessary and all.”

The Delta 88 pulled up a block from the benches, as if out of respect for the delicacy of Strike’s situation.

“Hey Strike.” Jo-Jo reached over the seat and put a hand on his kneecap. “You could get popped just as easy coming out of your friend’s
house
back there as anywhere else, you know what I mean?”

Strike felt the faint vibrations of another ulcer attack coming on.

Jo-Jo eyeballed him for a long minute, then extended a hand. “Friends?”

Strike surveyed the lunchtime bench scene: the mothers, the babies, Peanut absently spitting between his sneakers, Tyrone sitting on his chain perch, still wearing his batting glove. At least six other kids, including Horace, were wearing batting gloves now; Strike decided that Tyrone had started something, and that by next week every kid in Dempsy would be wearing one.

Strike saw Andre two buildings away, slowly making for the benches. He turned back to the street. Jo-Jo was still idling there, seemingly ignoring him, Strike thinking, Cops in front of me, cops behind me. He thought of Bernard waiting on his ounce, wondered how safe Herman’s place was right now, whether he should go back to the store empty-handed or take a chance. He looked at Tyrone looking at him. Shit. Rodney had said it himself: Get that boy to run for you today.

Strike moved closer to the benches as Andre put his wristwatch in Horace’s face.

“You got like ninety minutes left, my man,” Andre said. “I said Friday two o’clock and I meant it. So you get your ass walking now over to the Western. I’ll tell your mother where you going, but don’t make
me find
you ‘cause I will, and then it’s gonna be a long weekend in that Youth House for you.”

Horace writhed under Andre’s hovering gaze, his eyes scouring the ground until Andre turned and spotted Strike.

“How you feeling today?”

“Yeah, I’m OK.” Strike made a conscious effort to keep his eyes from straying toward Tyrone.

“You see how nothin’s for free out here? You always looking over your shoulder, eating yourself up, then something goes
bang
on the inside.”

Strike nodded, scowling at the clouds. “Yeah, well, I ain’t even doing nothing
ah-out
here no more.”

“No?”

“Unh-uh. I’m not gaw-gonna be around here no more.”

Andre chewed his lower lip. “How come I don’t hear that as anything positive?”

“I don’t know,” Strike said. “‘Cause you don’t. That’s the way you are.”

Andre stared at him as if lost in thought, then let out a heavy hiss of surrender. He headed off in the general direction of his surveillance apartment.

Strike stood still for another minute or so, eyes skyward, playing it safe. He turned to check the street: Jo-Jo was gone. With a quick nod to Tyrone, Strike walked toward the Accord.

A few minutes later, Tyrone walked up the old lady’s driveway, and Strike noticed that he was wearing his new sneakers. When the kid climbed into the car without a word, Strike swallowed an impulse to compliment him on his footwear.

He drove by Roosevelt on the way over to Herman’s. The benches were empty now except for Horace, who was pacing, waving a sharp stick and talking to himself. As they flew past, Tyrone ducked out of sight, cracking a small smile as he did it. Strike barked out a dry laugh, feeling a twinge of affection.

Outside Herman’s house, Strike made a show of handing all his keys to Tyrone, gesturing for the kid to lead the way and then following him up the six flights to the apartment. At the sixth-floor landing Tyrone balked, standing motionless outside the door until Strike had to say, “C’mon, man, open up.” Tyrone cracked the lock as if the wrong twist would blow up the building.

Herman sat in his easy chair by the sunlit window at the far end of the apartment. His head was tipped back, his mouth gaping open like a baby bird waiting on its mother.

Tyrone stood frozen in the vestibule, staring until Strike gave him another nudge to proceed. He tiptoed down the hall, opened the padlock and slipped inside Strike’s room. At Strike’s urging, Tyrone pulled open the deep bottom drawer and came upon the nest of packed bags, the brown bottle of cut and the triple-beam scale. He looked up at Strike, his eyes dizzy with adventure.

“Don’t lose them keys now,” Strike said. “Them are the keys to the kingdom.”

Speaking in a whisper in deference to the kid’s fear of Herman, Strike laid out the plan—how Tyrone would be his official runner, shuttling between this room and the Accord, which would serve as their secret checkpoint. Nervous about Tyrone’s mother finding out about all this, Strike asked him what he would say to explain the afternoon when he got home tonight. But Tyrone shrugged the question off, saying that his mother would be in Newark all day and into the evening doing braid extension work for somebody, and that he was staying with his half-blind grandmother.

Satisfied, Strike hustled back to Rodney’s store and at last dropped off Bernard’s ounce. Over the course of the afternoon and into the early evening, Strike went to the car eight times to dispatch Tyrone on runs, even trusting him to put varying cuts on some ounces. Strike would always find Tyrone sitting in the passenger seat of the car, stiff as a mannequin, all the windows up despite the heat. Tyrone never let the key ring out of his hand, and Strike imagined him making a solemn ceremony of locking and unlocking everything in sight—the car, the building, the apartment, the room. He could see that the kid was having himself a ball despite his impassive demeanor; Tyrone would bust out of the Accord each time and race toward Herman’s as if he had a little girlfriend waiting on him. Strike tried telling him to slow down, but the boy, trembling with freshness, simply could not be made to walk.

At seven o’clock, Strike came out of Rodney’s Place for the last time. He was holding a two-thousand-dollar roll, less than a third of what was cleared on the package he’d picked up the day before. That was bad enough, but what really frustrated him was the news that it would be a while before they re-upped. As Strike was counting his cut, Rodney had mentioned that the Colombians he had decided to go with had disappeared, and his Egyptian or Israeli landlord was having supply problems of his own. So now it looked as if they were back to hunting down a good connection again, which meant Strike was back on the benches after all.

He strode up to the Accord and rapped on the driver’s window. Tyrone jerked with surprise, his eyes a little wild. Recovering, he slid over to the passenger side, but Strike had to rap on the window again to get him to unlock the door.

On his way back to the old lady’s driveway, Strike was in such a funk that at first he didn’t notice how scared and straight-ahead silent Tyrone was. The kid looked as jumpy as he had on their first day together; he even held a hand over his gut as if he’d caught Strike’s ulcer. Strike reminded himself that Tyrone was only a little kid, and wondered whether he was suffering a fear and remorse attack after the high of the day’s work.

Strike tried to rally past Tyrone’s silence. “How
was
that?”

“What?”

“What you did.”

“OK.”

“It wasn’t too much?”

“No.”

“Because you did good.”

Tyrone didn’t answer, and Strike pulled into the driveway. He shut the engine and waited for a minute, watching Tyrone sit rigidly and hold his stomach. Strike reached into the glove compartment for the Mylanta, took a pull and screwed the cap back on slowly.

“What’s wrong with your stomach?”

The kid gave a minute jerk of his shoulders.

“Then how come you’re holding it?”

Another shrug.

Strike thought about offering him some Mylanta. “You did
good,
you know that?” Tyrone nodded.

“You were like real responsible.”

Feeling strangely guilty, Strike reached into his pocket for his roll and peeled off five twenties. “This for you.”

Tyrone took the money blind, holding it in his hand, still silent.

Strike could tell that Tyrone was dying to get out of the car, but he didn’t want to let him go just yet. Why was the kid so frozen?

“Ain’t you gonna put that in your pocket? Somebody’s gonna take you off if you walking with it out in your
hand
like that.”

Strike was suddenly seized by a dark thought. “You dint put none of that shit in your
nose,
did you?”

Tyrone didn’t turn, but his lips twisted in disdain.

“Good,” Strike muttered.

After another minute of staring at the kid’s profile he gave up. “Awright,” he said, hearing the pissy tone in his voice. “Go on out.”

Strike watched Tyrone walk off stiffly and carefully toward the projects, his hand still pressed to his belt buckle. What the fuck was his problem? Strike didn’t know, but he’d seen a sneaky flash of elation cross Tyrone’s face as he got out of the car, and he could swear that the kid had fought down a quivering fit of nervous giggles when he got far enough away to think that Strike was no longer watching him.

As Strike walked from the driveway to the benches, he came up behind the big girl who’d been punched and robbed by Stitch the day before. Beside her was a tall guy wearing a fatigue jacket, both of them also headed toward the benches, tense and firm-faced. The guy held his coat together in a way that made Strike walk slower, put more distance between him and them, and finally Strike stopped, stood in the middle of the street and watched them steam ahead like warships.

There was nothing he could do. He didn’t want to see what would happen, didn’t want to get dragged into this as any kind of witness. But then he thought of Tyrone, pictured him sitting on his perch, and suddenly Strike found himself walking again, out in the street, hugging a line of parked cars, moving parallel to the couple but out of sight, hoping that Tyrone was on his way up to his grandmother’s house. But as the benches came into view, Strike saw the kid rocking on his chain, still holding his gut, a stupid and strange grin on his face as he watched the clockers and their absentminded horseplay.

Horace still had the stick that Strike had seen him waving around earlier. Andre’s deadline was gone by almost half a day now. Horace looked knotted and crazy: he was pacing, laughing shrilly, poking people with the stick.

The fat girl and the guy in the fatigue jacket turned in off the street and walked slowly toward the benches, both of them frowning, their heads swiveling as they scanned the clockers, looking for Stitch. Strike saw the frightened awareness come into Tyrone’s face and body, nobody else sensing the danger, and he prayed that Tyrone wouldn’t panic, wouldn’t bolt or do anything to catch their eye.

The couple came to a dead stop ten feet in front of the benches, the guy putting a hand deep in his jacket. Now the crew took notice, some of them recognizing the girl, everybody getting quiet and nervous, not sure what to do. The girl looked from face to face, then zeroed in on Horace, hesitating as if she knew this one from the other day, but wasn’t sure just how. The guy said, “That him?” Horace had a trapped, guilty scowl on his face, and the guy took one step forward and said, “You remember her?” Then he pulled out a handgun and fired, the puff and crack jerking Horace back on one side like a punch in the shoulder, making him retreat two steps and drop onto the bench in a perfectly normal position, his face still showing that perplexed scowl, just sitting there as if deep in thought. Everybody but Tyrone screamed and ran, the shooter standing quietly for a second, the girl touching his gun hand almost tenderly, and then both of them turned around and stalked off, the shooter looking back over his shoulder only once.

Strike was so entranced by the shooting that when the couple walked past him he didn’t even have the presence of mind to duck behind a car. He saw that Tyrone still hadn’t moved. The kid seemed calm, interested, as he looked across from his perch to Horace on the bench, the two of them the only souls in sight.