Clockers (88 page)

Behind him he heard Strike hang up the phone.

I can live with that.
The prosecutor had offered Aggravated Manslaughter and was maybe even willing to downgrade it to Reckless. But given what he had just heard, Rocco’s guess was that Victor had no interest in either of those deals, that the only thing he would permit himself to call it was self-defense.

I can’t take it no more. Me or him.
Self-defense meant different things to different people, and on this one, Rocco decided, he would accept the kid’s definition. And if Victor wanted to take that to court, that was all right too. Rocco would let him roll the dice with a jury.

He turned back to his desk and saw Strike hunched over, the heels of his palms pressed into his eye sockets. Rocco leaned across him, said “Excuse me” and popped the tape free of the machine.

Strike came up out of his curl, his eyes sticky-looking, the lashes matted by the pressure of his hands. “You gonna lock me up?”

Rocco gave the question a moment, but answered before he had fully worked out his justification. “No.”

Strike nodded into the distance. “Yeah, OK. So you say you ain’t locking me up, buh-but what do I do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I can’t go out there, man.” Strike tilted his head toward the parking lot and Rodney.

“I’ll walk you.” Rocco shrugged, still surprised at his decision to let this kid go free.

“What do you mean, you’re gonna
walk
me. Where you gonna walk me
to?
Ha-how come you not arresting Rodney?”

“Well, that’s gonna take some time,” Rocco said, knowing he would never even try to touch Rodney on this. Not Rodney, not Strike—nobody.

“Andre says he ever sees me again he’s gonna shoot me.”

“Oh yeah?” Rocco ditched the cassette in a garbage can; it was illegally secured anyhow. “Well then, maybe you should leave town.”

Strike looked up at him as if trying to read the setup behind the reprieve, but Rocco ignored him, still working out how he would make sure Victor was never connected to any of this. Rocco would lose some of the players for him—co-conspirators—and discreetly clear the boards as much as he could. If it went to trial, he’d keep his mouth shut, let Jimmy Newton throw up a parade of character witnesses, take whatever beating he had coming to him. It was the least_and the most—he could do.

Rocco walked Strike out of the office toward his car, one hand on the kid’s neck, riding the bob and dip of his gimpy walk. Rodney was nowhere in sight.

“Listen, just because—”

“Jesus Christ,” Strike hissed.

Every window of the Accord was smashed, the ground littered with tiny cubes of glass, the crystal-fringed hole of the windshield gaping inward as if it had caught a meteorite.

“Gahd…” Strike said, his face twitching.

“Let me ask you.” Rocco massaged Strike’s knotted shoulders. “Do you think Rodney’s thinking, ‘Now we’re even’? Or do you think he’s thinking, ‘This is just a taste’?”

Strike scowled at the glass on the ground.

“Where you heading, Ronnie? I’ll drive you.”

Strike looked off, scanning all points of the compass. “New York. No … yeah, New York.”

“Follow me.” Rocco walked towaid a sky-blue county-owned Aries, but Strike, still gazing at his car, didn’t move.

“Let’s go,” Rocco said.

“I got my medicine in there.” Strike stepped closer to the car, moving cautiously, as if he expected to find Rodney hiding behind the seat.

“Where’s it at? The glove compartment?”

“Yeah.” Strike took a step back, raised a limp finger toward the car. “The glove compartment.”

Rocco reached in the window and was instantly enveloped in the hothouse reek of urine coming off the upholstery. “C’mere, get it yourself,” he said, wanting the kid to know what kind of animal he’d be dealing with if he ever decided to come back to town.

Strike disappeared into the car, then quickly backed out, his face twisted in disgust. A bottle of Mylanta dangled from his fingertips.

“So Strike,” Rocco said, squinting at the skyway, “where do you want to live?”

The Homicide’s car entered the Holland Tunnel and Strike blinked in the fluorescent glare. The long interrogation, the shock of his mother’s words, the violence that Rodney had done to his car—all combined in Strike to make him feel so stunned and passive that he couldn’t begin to understand what had happened to him. He wasn’t even sure how he’d ended up sitting here, why this cop was speeding him away from the projects, away from home. But he was so used to cops just
doing
things to him that the idea of challenging this one right now was entirely beyond him. All he could grasp at the moment was the fact that although he was carrying seven thousand dollars in his pocket, he was leaving behind fifteen thousand in two safes.

He imagined asking the Homicide to turn around once they got out on the New York side, to head back to New Jersey so he could scoop up the rest of his drug earnings. He’d have to sneak back in town on his own, steal his own money. But Rodney would probably be counting on him to do something like that. Rodney and that bat…

Strike began to play back the phone conversation with his mother and realized that not once had she accused him of getting Victor into this mess. Maybe she didn’t know about his participation, maybe Victor had kept him out of it, for his sake and his mother’s. His mother hadn’t even been angry on the phone; if anything, she had sounded glad for the chance to unburden herself at last.

Victor. Strike couldn’t shake the image of his brother sitting on their mother’s bed, pressing the gun to his chest, asking her what to do. Every time Strike closed his eyes he envisioned the unnatural curl of Victor’s wrist as he turned the gun on himself.

Strike remembered feeling stupid after telling the Homicide that My Man story. Well, Buddha Hat or not, on some things he didn’t want to be any smarter than he was. Maybe he didn’t
want
to know Victor that well, what his brother might be carrying around inside him.

Pressing that muzzle against his own skin, looking up to their mother…

Strike involuntarily winced, feeling that he had finally glimpsed a little of his brother’s grinding rage and pain. He spoke without thinking: “You know what he said to me once? Victor? We was in that bar that night? Rudy’s? I’m just standing there, ready to leave, he says, T miss my kids,’ juh-just like that.” Strike shook his head. “I just thought, Gah-damn, then go
home,
man. What you doing here for, then? Go home.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the cop give him a quick frown, open his mouth as if to respond, then sink back, his focus returning to the driving.

Strike thought again of the fifteen thousand dollars. Maybe he should call his mother, give her the addresses, the combinations, tell her to get Victor a good pay lawyer like Champ or Rodney would have, or at least pay his bail. “Mommy,” he’d said to her, “I’m gonna help him.” What else could he do?

Strike imagined calling his mother again, the words he would use, telling her where the money was. But she would probably refuse to go get it because it was dope money, so maybe it would be better to tell Victor’s wife. She probably wouldn’t care where the money came from, but somehow, telling her about the money wouldn’t be the same—there was no real audience for him in that call. Or how about Tyrone? Maybe he should call Tyrone’s mother. The boy’s face flashed at him, then Erroll Barnes’s upturned palm sticking out from under the sheet. With
my
gun … But Strike pushed the thought away, focused on calling Tyrone’s mother, telling her to get a good lawyer for Tyrone or save the money for his education. But she was like his mother; she probably wouldn’t take it either.

Strike thought about how he had always told his mother that he was only in the business until he could get out of it. Well, he was out of it now. But then he started thinking about the future, what to do to get over, and the first thing that came to him was taking that seven thousand dollars in his pocket and buying a package, a quarter ki or something, put his money to work for him. Strike quickly changed tracks, got back to noble notions about making money to cover his obligations—getting Victor sprung, putting Victor’s kids through college, Tyrone through college, getting his mother and the rest of them the hell out of Roosevelt and into private housing.

But what was he supposed to do, get a job? Well, why not? It’s not against the law. He could do anything. He could work in a store again, maybe
buy
himself a store, a little store like Rodney’s. Go down south, live in New York, go out west, anything. Strike started working on himself, trying to feel that the world was in his hands now—as if the urge to hustle, to make it the Rodney way, wasn’t lying like a shadow on his mind. And despite all of his terrors about the past, the future, there was also a lightness rising in him, an airy disbelief: he had seven thousand dollars in his pocket and he was cutting out on
all
of it. He was shooting through a tunnel, out into a new life, and he had no idea what he had done to deserve it.

All he knew for sure was that someone—Victor, Tyrone, this cop, his mother, maybe God—someone was giving him a second chance, right now.

Strike had never really liked music. He had never cared about sports, even girls that much if he thought about it. But now he reached forward without thinking, reached for the car radio under the police receiver and turned it on, spun the dial until he found some music. The tunnel broke most of the tune into choppy static, but enough of the beat came through to make Strike bounce a little in his seat, make him think about all that music out there. All that
life.

I miss my kids.

Rocco was still mulling over Strike’s story about Victor’s announcement in the bar that night. Rocco thought he knew that feeling, that anguished yet voluntary exile from your own child. Driving under the river, he thought about Erin, how just this morning he had thought she was gone forever; he thought about retirement, about everything and anything other than the fact that he was in the process of helping this kid to escape.

And then Strike had the balls to reach over and turn on the radio. Rocco was stunned by the self-centeredness, the arrogance of the move, and now the kid was sitting there bobbing to the beat, getting light in the face, shuckin’ and jivin’, just taking a ride…

Rocco stared at Strike in disbelief. Here he was, setting himself up, risking his career to give Strike the break of his life, and then the fucking kid reaches for the dial in a county car, plays music in
my
house … Rocco was too astonished to do anything but glare at him. He saw the bliss in Strike’s eye as he tried to sing along with the tune without really knowing the words. The kid had an atrocious singing voice, but that didn’t make it any less of an outrage. On the other hand, Rocco thought, he’d probably be singing along too if he was dancing out of some serious jail time.

Rocco’s beeper went off and the office number came up on his hip. He hoped it was bullshit, but his instinct told him it was another job. It had been a while, after all. With the tunnel-dampened music crackling through the car, Rocco debated whether to return to Dempsy tonight. The hell with it; Mazilli could cover. Rather than hit the tunnel two more times in the next four hours, he would just go home and be with his family. Rocco thought of Erin again, savoring the terror he had felt this morning, the preciousness too.

But Erin wasn’t eating at him right now. He was more concerned about the long-term fallout from the Darryl Adams murder. Maybe it would never go to trial. Maybe Victor would make his bail, get another taste of freedom, get to walk his kids through Liberty State Park again and wind up rethinking his self-defense defense. The kid should find some way to live with Reckless Manslaughter and take a deal—he’d be crazy if he didn’t. Rocco drove almost blindly now, thinking, This
can’t
go to trial; thinking, What about me?

He had always assumed that he would soon take his twenty, but what if he didn’t
want
to retire? He was only forty-three. And the Victor Dunham job had recharged his life, had set that wheel of gifts in motion. Rocco began sweating it. Even as he realized how much he wanted to hang on to his job, he understood that he was at the mercy of whatever calibration set the final balance of pain in Victor’s heart. Victor could plea out for minimal jail time or he could insist on calling it self-defense, and his decision between the two could come anytime from his first few days on the street to a year from now, when his trial would probably begin. Rocco imagined the kid waiting to plea out until a week, a day, an hour before his first appearance in court. A fucking year…

As the car shot up from under the Hudson River and broke into twilit Manhattan, the radio suddenly drew clarity and volume, making both of them jump. Rocco reached over and shut off the music.

“I ever see you in town, I ever even
hear
about you coming back to town or even crossing the river into New Jersey? I’ll book you for criminal solicitation and conspiracy to commit murder. I’ll pick up Rodney on the same charges, and I’ll make sure you two go in together, draw the same tier, the same fucking
bed,
you understand me?”

Strike nodded mutely, and Rocco drove up the West Side until they reached the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He crashed a line of taxis at the main entrance, ignoring the pissed-off gestures of the dispatcher.

“You got enough on you for a bus somewheres?” Rocco asked, although up to this point nobody had said anything about further travel. He just wanted this kid gone as far as he could go right now.

Strike nodded noncommittally and cleared his throat. “Can I ask you a question? One time I saw you with this other cop, he was like
buh-blond,
really handsome like a television announcer or something. You know who I’m talking about?”

Rocco said nothing.

“That cop, was he like a special cop? Like a expert or, you know a, a
high-up
cop?”