Clockers (82 page)

When the Fury rolled up an hour after the Homicide had left, all the boys on the bench chanted, “Five-oh! Five-oh! Five-oh!” Completely clean of both money and drugs, they began laughing and stomping like fans at a basketball game.

Strike was the only one who walked off. He had never bolted in his life, but he was completely unstrung from standing in the same spot for so long, from trying to find something, anything, to say to the bench that would convince them that the handshake conversation with the Homicide was a setup and that he had nothing to do with Rodney going in. He didn’t even realize he’d turned his back on Big Chief and Thumper until he was three steps gone. But by then it was too late: Thumper was instantly beside him, right in his face with that squawky voice—“Whath up, Yo?”—his hand already in Strike’s pocket, plucking out the fat roll like a bloody heart, holding it high and screeching to Big Chief in triumph, “Mother’s Day on Strike!
Ow!

“Hey…” Rocco stared blindly at the office TV, the phone alongside his jaw. “I can’t make it home tonight. I got a thing I got to do at the jail. I can’t do it until like five in the morning.”

Patty sighed. “Shit.”

“Shit?” Rocco jerked his chin into his chest. “What do you mean, ‘shit’?”

“No, I just … I got something on for tomorrow. I need you to stay with Erin.”

“What’s wrong with the babysitter?”

“I gave her the day off. Her sister’s coming in from Ecuador.”

“Ecuador, huh?” Rocco envisioned playing with Erin tomorrow morning without ever having gone to sleep.

“It’s only the morning. I’ll be back by one in the afternoon at the latest.”

“Good. I can sleep from one to three, then go right back to work.” The thought made Rocco feel as if his eyelids were caked with sand. “Where you got to go?”

Patty hesitated. “I got a job interview.”

“A what?
What
job? I thought you said you weren’t going to work until she was older.”

“I know. I’m … I’m not gonna take it. I’m just going to see what it feels like.”

“You mean like a practice run?”

“Never mind,” she muttered. “I just got a little bored this week. Forget it. I won’t go.”

Feeling bad about being snide, Rocco tried to sound hearty. “What kind of job?”

“Forget it,” Patty said, her voice sullen.

Rocco sat up straighter, a little angry. “Let me ask you, though, you get some job now, OK?”

“I said I’m not going.”

“No, no. But what I’m saying is, if you
do
take some job, who’s gonna be with Erin all day, Adis? The babysitter?”

“Well, you’re home until midafternoon, you’re free—”

”
Free?
“ he snapped, starting to lose control, his mind roiling with images of Strike, Rodney, Patty.

“Well, then that’s where Adis comes in. But don’t you worry about it. You get your sleep.”

“You know, you say ‘free’ like, I’m
free
all day like, sittin’ on the dock of the bay, like, alls I do when I’m not here is fuck off or something.”

“Well, she’s your daughter
too,
Rocco, and I would think that if I ever
did
go and get a goddamned job, you’d be hard pressed to find something you’d rather do than spend your days with her.”

Surrendering to the fight, Rocco suddenly became outraged. “Well, she’s your daughter too …
Mommy.
”

Rocco shocked himself with the ugliness of that line, but in the moment he took to collect himself to apologize, she said “Fuck you” and hung up.

Strike was released from the Southern District station house at midnight, Thumper letting him go after keeping him caged up for a few hours while he ran some bullshit warrant checks. He returned Strike’s money and walked him back to the street, saying, “This the way it’s gonna be, brother. You best
talk
to that man.”

Strike slipped into an alley to recount his roll—all there. Thumper might be a hothead but he wasn’t a thief. A lot of knockos who caught you with a roll would back you up in a stairwell somewhere, the money already in their hand, and ask, “How much you got here?” And you were supposed to answer half of what it was, the knocko giving you that much back and pocketing the rest. But Strike didn’t even care about the money. He was just glad not to be sent over to County and wind up in the bullpen with Rodney.

Rodney. Heading home, Strike decided the best thing to do was be at the arraignment court in the morning, then go right in Rodney’s face when he bailed himself out, tell him the situation before anybody else.

Rocco had a nightmare: Erin had vanished. He was running in some woods looking for her, came to a stream and there she was, on the opposite bank in the arms of her great-grandfather, Rocco’s grandfather, who had been dead a good five years but was standing there, draped in a decay-splotched winding sheet holding Erin, the both of them smiling back across the stream at him, his grandfather saying, “It’s OK, Davey, she’s with me now.” And Erin, with one arm around her great-grandfather’s flaking and corrupted neck, waved goodbye to him forever and for all time.

The alarm went off at five
A.M.
, the nightmare retreating into a trapped half-sob in his chest as he sat up on the holding-cell cot, tasting the hour behind his teeth. Rising, he pushed past the bars and staggered across the deserted squad room to the John.

A half hour later under a grubby white sky, Rocco drove down the ramp into the receiving bay of the County Jail. He gave up his gun at the door and walked past the two darkened bullpens to the processing desk. Behind a smoldering menorah of staked upright stogies, the sergeant was reading a fat paperback biography and didn’t look up until Rocco said, “Hey, how you doing? You got a Rodney Little here?”

Standing in front of the crowded bullpen, Rocco realized that he had hung in until this shitty hour for nothing. He had hoped to come upon Rodney dead asleep, but guys like Rodney tended to go for thirty-six hours before crashing, and now here he was, leaning against the back wall, his head right under the graffiti rainbow, holding court before three other prisoners, young men nearly half his age. Almost everyone else was asleep.

“See, the problem with you boys right from the gitty-up is you sell a clip, make your twenty dollars,
bam,
you go out buy a twenty-dollar ring. You hear what I’m sayin’? You
be
like that, no matter how much you make, you always wind up with nothin’. No matter how much you earn the night before, every day you start out with nothin’, day after day. Don’t
have
nothin’, never
will
have nothin’, gonna
die
with nothin’.”

Rocco leaned against the bars listening in, half interested.

“Now, you come to work for me, I don’t want somebody who got that kind of mentality. ‘Cause I ain’t like no boss who says to you, What can you do for me? What / want to know is, what can you do for
yourself,
‘cause a man who can’t do nothin’ for himself, shit, he can’t do nothin’ for anybody else either, see what I’m sayin’?”

The three prisoners nodded, two of them slapping palms.

Rocco looked around the bullpen, about forty deep tonight, half the prisoners sleeping on the bare floor while Rodney sat nice and comfy on two pallets. Between his sneakers were three half pints of milk and a pear, Rocco thinking, King of the jungle.

“Hey Rodney!” Rocco barked.

Rodney squinted through the gloom, then rose and stepped over people to see who it was.

“Rodney, how you doing?”

“Aw man, what the fuck
you
want?” Rodney clucked his tongue and turned his back, but he hung in by the bars.

“Nah, you know, it’s just, I was thinking you got yourself in some fucked-up situation here. Maybe I could help you out on it. You know, if you help
me
on something.”

“I ain’t in no fucked-up situation. This a bullshit CDS rap. I ain’t never going in on this. This just a headache situation.”

“Gee, I don’t know, I heard someone got you locked in real good on this. Someone that got themselves in a jam on something else served
you
up to get out from under the rock.”

Rodney turned back to Rocco, wanting a name. Rocco was a little surprised that he didn’t get it right off the bat.

“I think you’re looking at some years here—that is, you know, unless maybe you want to talk to me about something.”

“Like what?” Rodney’s eyes were steady, faintly curious.

“You remember that Ahab’s thing? I hear you know what happened.”

“Hey,
fuck
you man, this just a CDS. I ain’t talking to you about no homicide. What you think, I’m stupid? How the fuck I talk about a homicide from on the inside without incriminating myself. Gah-damn, you a insult to my intelligence. I don’t know a damn thing about that. Get the fuck on out of here.” Rodney started to walk away.

“I can get you immunity from prosecution.”

“Prosecution on what? Fuck you. I don’t know nothin’.”

Someone on the floor woke up, grunted, “Yo, shut up,” and Rodney kicked him in the back, the guy half rising to fight, seeing who it was, then going back down.

“The thing is, Rodney,” Rocco said, yawning, “somebody deep on your inside got you in here tonight trying to save their own ass on the Ahab’s thing, so alls
I’m
saying now is that this is a perfect opportunity to get back at them—but like in spades.”

Towering over all the bodies, Rodney stood in the middle of the bullpen. Slowly he turned his face back to Rocco, the name finally coming into his eyes, Rocco nodding, thinking, It’s about time, asshole.

“So what do you say?” Rocco gave Rodney a hopeful smile.

“Fuck you.” Rodney walked back to sit under the rainbow, but silent now, big-eyed. And as Rocco left the jail, his back bowed with exhausted tension, he wondered which way Rodney would play it: make bail later this morning and go after Strike himself or hang in here, watch some TV, play some cards, make a phone call from up on the tiers and then stay out of the line of fire.

The waiting room of the Central Judicial Processing Court smelled of sweat and potato chips, and Strike, his belly full of Mylanta, still thought he would vomit blood any second. At least fifty sad-sack-looking people, grown-ups and children, sat on the benches or leaned against the walls. Most of them had been in the room for a while now, since on Tuesday court always started at eleven instead of nine, but unless you’d been here before, to bail out a friend or relative on some other Tuesday morning, how the hell were you supposed to know?

After a sleepless night, Strike had arrived by eight-thirty, and like everybody else he did nothing for his boredom and misery but stare at the walls. There wasn’t a newspaper or magazine in the room. Strike’s gaze went back and forth from a hand-drawn sign over the courtroom doors—this waiting room is a courtesy, you are not in the street, act civil — to a patch on the ankle of a little boy’s sneaker, a red silhouette of a basketball player soaring spread-eagled to the hoop. Four years old and the kid is sitting around the waiting room of the arraignment court to bail out a father, a mother’s boyfriend, a brother. Strike studied the boy’s composed face, wondering how many years he had left before someone would be here to bail
him
out.

Still only nine-thirty: the clock was moving backward. Strike sat hand to forehead, immobile with exhaustion, thinking about Victor on the inside. What was he doing right now? Probably he felt a lot like Strike this morning, or maybe worse. Thirty in—what would that be like? Day in, day out, thirty goddamn years of feeling this way, nailed to the face of time.

At a quarter to ten, seventy-five minutes before the court was due to be in session, people began to drift toward the locked double doors, trying to peek through the center seam, squinting into the empty courtroom and making vague comments of frustration, until a court officer came out and yelled for everybody to sit down and behave or he would clear the house. And at a quarter to eleven, a woman came in with three kids, all eating burgers and fries. The smell of grease and fried meat, combined with the reek of his own exhausted body, had Strike running outside for air, had him standing on a strip of grass between the jail and the court building, amazed that he had ever seriously imagined himself selling dope inside a dump like Ahab’s.

Driving down Broadway at ten in the morning, Rocco fought off tremulous yawns as he rehearsed apologies for his behavior on the phone.

Who cared if Patty got a job? If that’s what she wanted to do, so be it. Nobody had to explain to him how precious work could be. Besides, she was right—what could be better than being with Erin?

As he pulled up in front of his building, Patty came flying out the front door looking distracted, a little wild. Upon seeing him, she jumped with relief, both feet actually leaving the ground.

Rocco was mystified, but he smiled anyway, eager to make peace.

Patty thrust her head in the car. “Is she with you?”

Thinking she was asking him about some girlfriend, he beamed stupidly, happy to be accused of something that he could honestly deny. “I left her in the motel.”

“What?”

Patty’s face was raw with confusion, and Rocco finally read the panic. ”
Who
with me?”

“Erin.”

“I just got here. What do you mean?”

“She’s gone.” Patty ran a claw of fingers through her hair. “She’s gone.”

“What?” Rocco’s hands started trembling on the steering wheel. “Slow down.”

“You didn’t see her run out of the building?”

“What are you talking about?”

But Patty turned and ran, first up Broadway half a block, then around the corner toward Lafayette. Rocco jumped out of the car. He caught up with Patty and grabbed her arms. “What are you talking about?”

“I was out in the hallway waiting for the elevator upstairs and I forgot something in the house, so I turned to unlock the door and the elevator must’ve come and she just stepped inside, and when I ran to catch the elevator I pushed the button to keep it from closing but it closed anyway with her in it. So I waited for it to come back up, I figured she’d stay put but it came back up empty, so I just took it down now, thinking she was in the lobby, but she’s not there, so…” Patty’s head twisted past Rocco, scanning the clamor of Broadway—the traffic, the people, the heart often
A.M.
New York. “So she’s
gone
somewhere.”