STRIKE spotted her: baby fat, baby face, Shanelle or Shanette, fourteen years old maybe, standing there with that queasy smile, trying to work up the nerve. He looked away, seeing her two months from now, no more baby fat, stinky, just another pipehead. Her undisguised hunger turned his stomach, but it was a bad day on his stomach all around, starting with the dream about his mother last night, with her standing in the window looking at him, pulling the shades up and down, trying to signal him about something, then on to this morning, being made to wait for an hour in the municipal building before anyone bothered to tell him his probation officer was out sick, then Peanut this afternoon not respecting two-for-one hour, and now, right here, some skinny white motherfucker coming on to The Word, trying to buy bottles, The Word looking to Strike like, “What do I do?” Strike turned away, thinking, “You on you own, I told you that,” his stomach glowing like a coal, making him want to go into a crouch to ease the burn.
Strike was seated on the top slat of his bench, his customary perch, looming over a cluster of screaming kids, pregnant women and too many girls, drinking vanilla Yoo-Hoo to calm his gut, watching The Word try to think on his feet. The white guy, a scrawny redhead wearing plaster-caked dungarees and a black Anthrax T-shirt, looked too twitchy and scared to be a knocko, but you never knew. Knockos making street buys usually came in colors, or at least Italian trying to be Puerto Rican, but not piney-woods white, and they usually acted cool or sneaky, not jumpy. The guy was probably a customer for real, but it was The Word’s call—on-the-job training.
The guy took out a twenty for two bottles. Strike watched The Word thinking, thinking, finally saying, “Go change it for singles.” Strike shook his head: Marked bills, Jesus, they ain’t gonna go to the trouble of using marked bills to make a case on a two-bottle buy from a fifteen-year-old boy. A kid getting busted for that would probably get revolved at Juvenile and be back at the benches before the dinner-hour lull was over, right on time for the heavy night traffic when he was really needed.
The white guy nodded and loped away, looking for a mini-mart, the twenty-dollar bill sticking up out of his fist like a flower. Nobody would take him off with Strike here on the bench rolling the Yoo-Hoo bottle between his palms, but Strike knew that if he was to go take a leak, the guy would be lying in the grass with a crease in his hat. Rodney had said it: most niggers out here want all the money now. They kill the golden goose, the return customer, because they never see past the next two minutes. A bunch of sneaker dealers: get ten dollars, run out and buy a ten-dollar ring.
Like Peanut earlier in the day, trying to make a little extra selling bottles one for ten instead of two for ten during Happy Hour. On each clip he had been pulling in a hundred instead of fifty, then turning over forty and pocketing sixty, until some pipehead came up to Strike and said, “I thought it be Happy Hour.” Strike looked at Peanut now, sulking on the corner, demoted to raising up—looking out for the Fury—a flat twenty-dollar gig, no bottles, no commission. Watching Peanut probe the raw bump on his cheekbone, Strike swung into his usual recitation: Sneaker dealers, pipe-heads, juveniles. Stickup artists, girls, the Fury. You can’t trust nobody, so keep your back to the wall and your eyes open—24, 7, 365.
Strike scanned the canyon walls of the Roosevelt Houses. There were thirteen high rises, twelve hundred families over two square blocks, and the housing office gave the Fury access to any vacant apartment for surveillance, so Strike never knew when or where they might be scoping him out. The best he could do was to get somebody to spot them sneaking into a building from the rear, yell out “Five-oh” so nobody did anything stupid and then just wait for them to get bored and leave.
The Fury consisted of only a handful of cops, and they had half a dozen housing projects to cover so they couldn’t hole up for more than an hour. But it was no secret that Andre the Giant had a surveillance apartment too: 3A in 14 Dumont, the apartment Housing couldn’t rent out because six children and their grandmother had died in a fire there a year before. Andre was obsessed with the dope crew that worked the Dumont side of the projects, unlike the Fury, who liked hitting the Weehawken side, Strike’s side. But Andre was a free-range knocko; he could show up anywhere, anytime, and he could see the benches just fine from Dumont.
Strike’s clockers got jumpy if they thought they were being watched. They’d start singing too loud, get into idiotic arguments, let go of the pent-up tension in a hundred dumb ways, becoming a danger both to themselves and to Strike. And then there were the girlfriends to worry about. They were the worst—flirting with other guys in front of their boyfriends, gassing up their heads, starting fights. To Strike, the girls were good for one thing only. The Fury were all male, so if a girl kept her mouth shut, acted like a lady, she could carry two clips down in her panties, another two up top, and the Fury couldn’t do anything unless they pulled her into the precinct for a strip search. And it was a lot quicker to serve up bottles out of a bra than to have everybody running in and out of the stash apartment for every ten-dollar sale.
But girls could steal too, just disappear around a corner with the product. They could have a lovers’ quarrel, give the dope to a new boyfriend not in the crew, sell it themselves, smoke it themselves. So Strike wasn’t up on using girlfriends; he’d rather go slow and steady, get the boys to make the trip up to the apartment, at least for the Fury hours, four to ten. He moved the apartment around every day: knockos can’t go through a door without having paper, and by the time they got the paper signed by a judge, the apartment wasn’t there anymore.
Girls. Strike always told his crew: “Don’t let the girls wrap you around their little fingers. It’s just pussy, and if you play your cards right, pussy always be there, and you play your cards right by making the money, then saving it.” Strike would say it word for word, just like Rodney said it to him almost a year ago.
Strike watched the baby-fat girl—Sharelle, Sharette, something like that—finally get up for it, walk over to him, a smile pasted on her face like she was happy or something.
“Hi, Strike.”
“No.”
“I didn’t—”
“No. Go on outa here.”
Futon came out of 6 Weehawken scanning the street, eating Cheetos and holding a big jar of Gummi Bears, bobbing his head in time to whatever was coming in over his aqua-blue headphones. He nodded to Strike and walked back to the benches.
“Re-up, re-up,” he announced, blaring out the words over the music in his head.
Strike pursed his lips to respond and was startled to feel the sudden seizing up that hit somewhere between his mind and his mouth. “Woo-what you got?”
He hadn’t had a stammer attack in weeks: What a goddamn day.
“‘Bout forty, forty-five.” Futon seemed to ignore Strike’s flustered speech.
Strike thought about the night to come, calculating the traffic. It was the twelfth of the month. People still had some money from the mailbox. On the other hand it was Wednesday, five days from the last payday. Strike thought about the weather too: Rain coming, maybe. Two hundred bottles should do it.
Getting up off the bench, legs stiff, Strike limped to the pay phone and rang up Rodney’s pager, punching in the code for the day and then a two-zero on the end. The bottles would be coming by bicycle in about fifteen or twenty minutes, the delivery boy just another twelve-year-old zooming by, a kid going into 6 Weehawken with his schoolbooks under his arm and a lunch box. Strike hated beepers, kept his in his pocket, out of sight. It was too obvious, like wearing gold. Besides, everybody had a beeper these days. Strike preferred talking on the phone, mouth to ear—one thing about dope corners, nobody ever vandalized the phones. But Rodney said, Wear your beeper.
Back at the bench, Futon offered him the Gummi Bear jar. Strike waved it away, Futon saying “Lookit,” unscrewing the false bottom and revealing a nest of four bottles, his voice a slick murmur: “They sell it on JFK at that smoke shop.”
Strike scowled at him. “That’s stupid. I-I-If they sell it, the knockos be knowing about it. Soon they see anybody with that, they go right for the bottom, buh-bust your ass.” The stammer was coming on strong now, Strike’s consternation only making it worse.
Futon got sulky.
“Besides, what you got the Cheetos for too? Tha-that don’t look right, two kinds of junk you holdin’.”
Futon shrugged. “I don’t like Gummi Bears. And they ain’t coming back for a month anyhow, right?”
The day before, Futon had raced one of the Fury, a knocko named Thumper, and beat him by twenty feet. The Fury had said that if Futon won the race they’d lay off for thirty days—just a joke, but now Futon was acting like it was bonded and true. And Futon was Strike’s second in command.
The baby-fat girl started talking to The Word, saying something Strike couldn’t hear but knew was flirty because The Word started to dance around and grin like a fool. The girl was trying to mooch, a bottle, and The Word would have given it up in a minute if Strike wasn’t here. Always had to be here, always. He thought of telling Futon to go over and tell that girl he was going to tell her mother, but then decided he wasn’t Jesus on a stick. Girl wants to pipe up, it’s a free country. As long as she got ten dollars. And if The Word gives up the bottle, then The Word better have ten dollars.
Strike drank some more Yoo-Hoo and massaged his gut. Sweetness coated the pain, lukewarm sweetness now that he’d been holding the bottle between his palms for an hour.
The red-headed white boy came loping back into the semicircle and Strike had a bad feeling. He looked to Peanut, who was watching the street to see if the Fury was playing peekaboo around a corner. Peanut looked to Strike and touched his cheek again. Strike had whacked him good with a full bottle of Yoo-Hoo, and Peanut had fallen down so fast his hat stayed in place right over where his head had been, like in a cartoon. People stealing from him turned Strike’s brain red: If somebody pulled something like Peanut did, you had to kick their ass, then put them back on the street. And if they did it again, then you had to really fuck them up bad. And you never, never let that shit slide, because if you did they’d be all over you, them and everybody else, and then the game would be over.
Strike knew he’d done the right thing; Peanut knew it too. But then Strike began to wonder if Peanut would try a little payback now, let the Fury come by without raising up. Can’t trust nobody: everybody was dense one minute, devious the next, always talking about being brothers, watching each other’s back, but when it came down to it Strike preferred enemies to friends. At least with enemies, you knew what they were right up front. Either way, this business could chew you up, and Strike would do anything to get off the street and just deal weight like Rodney.
The white guy fanned out the singles to The Word as if he wanted The Word to pick a card, any card. The Word swept the bills into his hand, said “Two-oh” to Horace, and Horace vanished into 6 Weehawken.
The Word walked away and the white guy said, “Hey . . .” For a minute he stood there alone, blinking and confused, but then Horace came back out of the building holding a crumpled-up paper bag. He dropped it in a garbage can, hissed “Yo” to get the customer’s attention, then walked away too. It took a few seconds for the guy to figure it out, but then he snatched up the bag and hustled off toward the street.
It was Strike’s idea to move the store to the benches at the edge of the projects. Whites were too scared of walking all the way in and copping their bottles while being surrounded by the towers, too scared that they wouldn’t make it back out. Working from the benches also made it a lot easier to spot the Fury when it rolled, especially when the knockos pulled a pincers move, trying to sneak attack from both sides at once.
Strike had suggested it to Rodney, Rodney saying, “Hey, you’re the man,” letting him run his own show as long as he moved half a kilo a week. And in six months on top out here, Strike had never failed to hit that figure, partly through his vigilant fretfulness, partly through marketing novelties like two-for-one Happy Hours, Jumbos, Redi Rocks and Starter Kits, but mainly because he understood that good product rules. People always knew who had it; all Strike had to do was not get greedy and step on Rodney’s bottles when they came in. That way he’d always have the best, because all the other lieutenants stretched out their re-ups by diluting the product. Strike counted on the greed, knowing it would drive all the pipe-heads right to him.
“Five-oh!” Peanut hissed, whirling, spinning on one foot.
Shit. Strike looked past Peanut to the street, saw the knockos still in the car and heard one of them, Crunch, calling to the white guy, “Hey, you!”
Strike looked to Horace and The Word, both of them flying back into the building. Strike sat tight, just watched as Crunch stepped out and escorted his grab to the rear of the Fury.
Blasting from the open door was some Rolling Stones garbage, one of the tapes the knockos played in order to get pumped up when they were hunting bounty.
Strike saw Spook and Ahmed walk away as if they had something to hide—wannabes, the only idiots who walked. He heard Big Chief still in the shotgun seat whisper into the hand radio: “Batman Hat guilty, Red Hat guilty.” Then Strike saw Smurf and Thumper sneaking up on foot from the Dumont side, closing the pincers, grabbing Spook and Ahmed and throwing them up against the chain fence.
The white guy was pleading with Crunch, yammering, “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, look listen I’m, look listen,” then babbling on about how he was a caulker, how he just got the job this week.
Crunch began cutting a deal right on the street, and Strike heard him say something about “just a desk appearance if you ID the kid who served you.” The white guy was barely able to talk, wanting to say so much so fast. He called The Word “stocky” instead of fat: “Stocky kid in a St. Louis Cardinals cap, Officer.” Officer, like he was in the army.
Strike, hunched over on his perch, watched Thumper press a splayed palm on Ahmed’s chest, saying, “What’s up, Yo? Where you going?,” saying it with that honking street lisp he liked to use. Trembling and pop-eyed as if he was really holding, Ahmed squeaked back, “I ain’t going nowhere, Thumper!”
“Whatta you so nervous about, Home?” Thumper was already in his pockets, shaking out the snotrag, scrabbling through his vinyl wallet.
“I ain’t nervous!” Ahmed sounded like a fire alarm at noon.
“Ya ain’t nervous? Feel ya heart!” Thumper squawked, moving his hand on Ahmed’s chest, whump whump, as if it was pulsing. He pulled out Ahmed’s money—two dollars, a real big-time gangster—then put the bills back in Ahmed’s pocket and pulled off his Batman hat, checking inside before flipping it over the fence, into the grass.
Big Chief was giving Peanut the same drill, while Smurf sniffed around the benches, picking up paper bags and looking for bottles, rooting around in the garbage cans like a bum. They all looked like bums, except they were healthy bums, six-foot, two-hundred-pound white bums with lead saps and Clock Nineteens on their hips.
Strike had no idea why, but the Fury definitely had a thing for the Weehawken benches. Knockos, whether Housing, City or County, were just like that, getting fixated on one corner, one building, one dealer, even though their arrest turf took in entire cities. It was known as the Knocko’s Prerogative.
“Pea-nut, Pea-nut, gimme some bottles, Pea-nut.” Big Chief towered over him, crowding him against the fence. “You ain’t no raiser, Pea-nut. Where them bottles?” Then he saw the bang on Peanut’s cheek. “You do something bad, Peanut?”
Big Chief turned slowly, looking over to Strike.
Strike stared at his own sneakers, taking a breath, recalling the exercise the speech therapist had taught him back in school: envision a scene that relaxes you, she’d said, and now Strike conjured up a picture of palm trees and ocean, literally a picture, since he had never seen a real palm tree.
“Strike,” Big Chief said, “Peanut do something bad?”
Strike took a swig of Yoo-Hoo, shrugged, said nothing. Futon ignored it all, bobbing his head to his Walkman, his fingers orange from Cheetos dust as he scraped the bottom of the bag.
Peanut did his gooney-bird dance: arms raised, elbows cocked, wrists curled. “C’mon, Big Chief, you know I ain’t do nothin’, ‘cause how come I ain’t runnin’ nowhere?”
Big Chief pulled at the front of Peanut’s pants, looked down into his crotch, growling, “Pea-nut, Pea-nut, lemme see ya pea-nuts.”
“Watch out it don’t bite you.” Peanut laughed. Big Chief laughed right back.
Strike heard the white guy going on to Crunch about how he just got engaged, how he did A.A., a hundred meetings in a hundred days, how his father was a fireman in Jersey City. Strike could see Crunch’s eyes going dull.
White people. Strike thought the Fury was OK but most of the others, in his experience, were for shit. Whenever they got grabbed, they got so scared they babbled; at least most of the boys around here knew to get stony stupid when the police came down. No matter what the knockos did to you, whatever they called you, all you had to do was weather it out, because the knockos couldn’t do shit if they couldn’t find nothing, so anybody who understood survival out here just hung tight and took the abuse until the knockos went away.
But if Big Chief or Thumper caught one of the boys dirty, someone like Peanut, then got him alone . . . well, everybody was out for himself. Peanut was being cool and funny with Strike sitting there, but Peanut went to Catholic pay school, his mother was a working woman and he was scared of her. If Peanut ever got caught, he might turn.
Big Chief had finished with Peanut, and now both of them were looking over at Strike. Big Chief knew Strike was clean, but here it came anyhow, just like always. Strike took a swig of Yoo-Hoo to brace himself.
Big Chief clomped over, six foot five, reddish-gray hair, bounce-lurching on the toes of his sneakers like a playground Frankenstein, wearing his Fury T-shirt—six wolves hanging out of a police car—growling, “Strike, Strike, Strike.” Thumper shoved Ahmed away and chimed in, “No, Big Chief, it be S-S-S-Strike S-S-S-Strike.”
Strike eased off the bench top, raising his arms, looking deadpan, solemn, enduring.
“You got bottles there, Strike?” Big Chief began finger-walking his front pockets, pulling out Strike’s money—ten dollars, never more—his house keys and the house keys for three other people who held his dope, his money.
“What are you, a janitor?” Big Chief jingled the keys, giving them to a baby in a stroller, and lazily scanned the curious and growing crowd around the benches.
Strike’s eyes went straight to Big Chief’s throat, then shifted over his shoulder, across the projects to where his mother lived with his brother, Victor. Strike imagined them looking out now, seeing this, drawing down the shade.
Thumper barked to a few eight-year-olds, “What’s up, yo, you got bottles?”
“I ain’t got no bottles,” said one little kid, rearing back in disdain.
“Who’s Mister Big?” Thumper leaned down, growling like Big Chief.
“This Mister Big,” the kid said, grabbing his own crotch, then running away.
“Open your mouth there, Strike.” Big Chief checked his teeth as if he was a horse, or a slave.
Strike, yawning wide, saw Rodney roll by in the beat-up rust-colored Cadillac that he’d bought from a pipehead for two hundred dollars cash and another hundred in bottles, kicking the guy in the ass on his way out the door. Rodney in his Jheri curls, his gold wraparound sunglasses and his Cadillac: an old-timer, thirty-five, maybe older.
Strike saw Rodney smirk in disgust, shake his head and raise a lazy hand off the seat back. But he kept moving; he never even slowed down.
“OK.” Big Chief looked right, left, then moved close. “Drop your drawers there, Strike. Dicky check.”
Strike hesitated as always, holding it in, weighing his options, finally unzipping and pulling down, some of the tenants in the crowd looking away and talking under their breath, some cursing out the Fury, some cursing out Strike.
“Drop your drawers, bend over, say ah-h-h,” Thumper said, getting in on it now.
Strike held his underwear band out so Big Chief could look in.
“Short and sweet there, Strike.” Big Chief frowned. “Let’s see under your balls, there. See what you got taped under your balls.”
“Strike’s balls,” Thumper drawled. “Strikes and balls, three and two, full count.”
Strike pulled up his scrotum, caught Peanut grinning on the sidewalk and then looking away quick when he saw Strike watching him, Strike thinking, Peanut’s a dead man.
Thumper peeked in. “Jesus, Strike, you got some bacon strips in there, brother. Where’s your hygiene?”
Strike bugged out: it was a damn lie. Nothing sickened Strike more than filth, any kind of filth. He was clean, cleaner than any of them. Losing it, Strike looked right into Thumper’s eyes, totally blowing his own play.
“W-w-w-what’s a m-m-m-matter, S-S-Strike? Y-y-you OK?”
Strike looked away, pulled up his pants, took his keys back from the baby. It was all Thumper’s show now, Big Chief moving off to look under the bench for bottles.
“How come you never smile, Strike? You’re clean, man. Crack a smile.”
Strike looked off sourly, although he was smiling a little on the inside as he caught sight of the twelve-year-old mule with his two-hundred-bottle lunch box zooming right by Big Chief—Big Chief even stepping out of the way, the kid going into 6 Weehawken to make his delivery.
“Look at Futon.” Thumper used his chin as a pointer. “We bust Futon every month, right, Futon?”
Futon smiled, holding the bottles in the Gummi Bear jar.
“See? Futon smiles all the time. What’s your problem, man?”
Strike stayed mute, glancing over at Futon doing the gooney bird.
“It takes six muscles to smile, two hundred forty-eight to frown, you know that?”
“C’mon there, Thumper.” Big Chief rummaged in the garbage can now like a hungry bear. “Strike’s got rights.”
“I never said that,” Strike protested, flinching as soon as he opened his mouth. Shit.
“Hey, you didn’t stutter, that was very good.” Thumper put out his hand, forcing Strike to shake it. “Now say, ‘She sells seashells by the seashore.’”
Strike’s stomach turned red, pulsing. Thumper held his hand, waiting.
Big Chief yawned, going up on tiptoe, then grabbed a bunch of Gummi Bears from Futon’s jar, chewing them open-mouthed and then lazily sticking his big paws in Futon’s pockets, feeling around in his socks, up his legs.
“Cold, Big Chief, cold, cold . . . warm, getting warm now,” Futon said. He offered the Gummi Bears to Thumper. A dumb play, to Strike’s eye, but at least Thumper let go of Strike’s hand to take some candy.
“Yo, Big Chief,” Futon said, feigning anger. “What you doin’ back here anyhow? You said if I won Thumper, you leave off on us for a month.”
“You know not to trust the police,” Big Chief grunted. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Gah-damn, ain’t that right? Man, I dint even get out of first gear. I was like lopin’.” Futon was talking to Strike now, as if Strike hadn’t been there. “Thumper was like, huh huh huh. Man, he was huffin’ so bad I thought he was gonna drown me in wheeze snot. You alls drink too much, eat too much, smoke too much.” Futon counted off their habits on his fingers, making a face.
“See, the problem is, I don’t like to run.” Thumper flashed teeth. “So how ‘bout next time we get into an elevator, push fourteen, and have us a one-on-one?” Strike could almost smell the rage coming off Thumper now, behind the grin. “‘Cause I hate to run.”
“Yeah? I put my whooping crane style on you?” Oblivious to Thumper’s heat, Futon went up on one leg, wrists high over his head like the Karate Kid, lashing out a kick, switching feet, trying to come off delicate and lethal. “You be beggin’ to get off by three, bawh.”
The Word came out of 6 Weehawken too soon. Big Chief saw the St. Louis Cardinals hat and went after him with a little hobble skip, snatching him up against the fence, a big hand on his heart. “What’s up, yo?” Big Chief plucked a fat roll of singles, fives and tens out of The Word’s pocket.
The Word started to whine. “I dint serve no one, Big Chief! It’s for mah mother’s birthday, I swear.”
All the knockos bellowed in chorus, “Mother’s Day! Mother’s Day!,” everybody having a good laugh as Big Chief escorted The Word to the car.
“Please, Big Chief . . . My mother, I swear.”
Strike forgot about Thumper for a second, thinking, What’s that nigger doing still holding all the money? Was he stealing? Will he set me up? Rodney just met guys in diners, made payoffs over coffee like a gentleman. Strike swore to himself: If I don’t step up, I’m stepping out. I can’t take it no more.
The bounty run over for now, two of the knockos walked back through the projects toward the second hidden car.
Thumper came back in his face. “Strike, why you always look depressed? Are you depressed? Are you angry at me?” Thumper looked concerned, waiting for an answer.
“You gotta do what you gotta do.” Strike controlled himself, the words coming out low and lazy.
“Yeah? Let me ask you something else. Do you think I’m an effective deterrent in the war on drugs?” He stared Strike in the eye, mouth open, innocent and earnest. Strike turned his head away, but Thumper moved his own head to keep up the eye contact. “Or do you think I’m just a big asshole?”
Strike caught Peanut looking at him again: Peanut definitely out of work. The Word out too.
“Oh shit.” Thumper snapped his fingers. “Did we do socks and shoes?”
Strike breathed through his nose and hunched over to unlace. Thumper said, “Allow me,” then dropped to one knee as if they were in a shoe store, undoing Strike’s sneakers and then slipping off his socks.
“Let’s go, there, Thumper,” Big Chief yelled from the car. Thumper sighed, rising, shaking out the socks for hidden dope.
“OK. I gotta go, hon.” Thumper swiveled on his hips like a discus thrower. Strike tensed, bracing himself for the goodbye. Thumper uncorked it, slapping Strike between the shoulder blades, a heavy, bone-rattling pock, sending a shock wave of pain through Strike’s 125-pound frame. “Catch you later.”
Thumper walked over to a group of little kids who were watching the show, dropped his hand on a six-year-old shoulder: “Walk me, Big Time.” He strolled to the car with the kid as security against a toaster thrown out a window, Strike’s socks dangling from his back pocket.
Strike pulled on his sneakers over bare feet, clenching his teeth so the porcelain squeak was a hundred times magnified in his head, thinking: Lose all the idiots around me. Clowns, thieves, juveniles . . .
Strike walked to the curb and looked into the Fury: The Word sat in the back. Strike tried to catch his eye, throw some fear, but The Word was sitting on the street side and wouldn’t look his way. Crunch sat on the curb side, elbow out the window, waiting to roll. Little kids hung all over the car, wide-eyed; Big Chief nodded to one kid and growled, “What’s up, yo? Dempsy burnin’?”
Strike turned and noticed a boy of eleven or twelve standing there staring at Crunch, stick legs in wide-cut shorts, arms crossed high on his chest like an old-time comic-book weightlifter. The kid was giving Crunch the thousand-yard stare, testing himself, putting on his I-ain’t-afraid-a-no-knocko face. Crunch, feeling the eyes, the attitude, stared right back. “What’s your problem?”
The skinny boy didn’t answer, just kept staring, and Crunch went with it, playing, staring back.
But Crunch couldn’t hold it. He started laughing, and what happened next threw Strike completely. Strike expected the kid to go on staring or walk away triumphant, but when Crunch started laughing, the kid laughed too. The kid had play in him. The kid had flex, and flex was rare. Flex was intelligent, special, a good sign, like big paws on a puppy. For a minute Strike lost his anger, entranced by this kid, by possibilities.
As the Fury rolled off, Big Chief said goodbye to Strike by making a gun with his fingers and winking. As soon as they were gone, the baby-fat girl came up to him again.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. Her smile was tense, jittery, begging.
Strike ignored her, then asked a question of his own. “Who’s that kid there?”
“Where?”
“Him.”
“That Tyrone Jeeter.”
“He live here?”
“He just moved into Eight Weehawken from over on the other side. You know his mother? That woman Iris? Strike, can I borrow a bottle?”
Strike started to walk away, thinking about flex, when the rust-colored Caddy came rolling up again, Rodney at the wheel with his arm flung out along the back of the shotgun seat. Rodney ducked his head down to see over the gold frames of his sunglasses, then curled a finger for Strike.
Strike looked right and left, frowning, not liking to be seen talking to Rodney out in the open, even though any kid in the street could draw a diagram: Champ on top, then down to Rodney, then down to Strike and finally down to whomever Strike was trusting this week.
Strike walked to the car, stuck his head in the passenger-side window and got hit with a heavy cherry smell coming from the deodorizers Rodney had in front and back. Six Garfield cats were suction-cupped and spread-eagled on all the rear and side windows, staring bug-eyed out at the traffic.
Rodney sat with a hand on his crotch. Zodiac and Apollo XII patches sprouted from the thighs of his dry-cleaned jeans, and a button was missing from the belly of his white ruffle-paneled shirt. But he was handsome, smooth-skinned and in pretty good shape from all the prison time and from being an ex-boxer.
“Who’d they take?” Rodney thumbed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“The Woo-Word.” Strike was annoyed to hear the stutter come back on him. “He ain’t holding or nothing.”
“You gonna go tell his aunt to get him?” Rodney spoke in singsong, like a schoolteacher.
“I’ll take care of it.” Maybe Rodney should take care of some things too, Strike thought, like losing the Garfields. And lose the Caddy while he was at it—the only monied nigger left in creation to drive a big-body Cadillac.
“What you want?” Strike sniffed, picking up a vague fried-food smell underneath the cherry scent.
“You go to that doctor yet?” Another singsong nag.
“I ain’t had time.”
“That shit’ll kill you quicker than anything out here.” Rodney tilted his chin at the Yoo-Hoo.
“What you want, Rodney?” Strike tried to come off patient, but barely, wanting to get back to the bench and reorganize the post-attack situation.
“Come by the store.”
Rodney’s long fingernails were shiny and gray with food grease. Strike’s gut rippled reflexively. “When?”
“Later.”
“It gonna be busy.”
Rodney shrugged. “Let Futon run it.”
“Futon’s a idiot.” Strike looked away, scowling, not wanting to see those fingernails anymore.
Rodney sighed, shook his head. “You got to get off that bench every now and then, my man. You gonna get all crabbed up.”
Strike couldn’t respond, the stammer hitting strong, right up from his feet. And he didn’t even know the words yet.
“Just come by, OK?”
“I-i-if I can.”
The baby-fat girl worked her way up to Rodney’s window in a shy slide. She peeked in, smiling. “I like them Garfields.”
Rodney gave her a slow eye, fanning his knees. “What you want?”
Strike pushed away from the car, headed back to the bench. Turn my stomach.
“Yo yo, check it out.” Horace shoved a Childcraft catalogue under Strike’s nose and pointed to a brightly colored set of 250 blocks standing at twice the height of a blank-faced, five-year-old redhead. “That’s some bad shit for a kid, them blocks.”
They were sitting on the top bench slat, thigh to thigh.
“What the hell you want with blocks for? You a infant?” Strike had a Hold Everything catalogue open on his knees.
“Not for me, motherfucker. I’m just sayin’. . .” Horace got all red and choke-faced.
“Yo yo, Horace want play blocks.” Peanut haw-hawed, spinning out in a tight circle, his own catalogue rolled up into a baton.
“Hey, fuck you, nigger!” Horace flew off the bench and Peanut danced away, his laugh exaggerated, pushing it.
Strike thought Horace did want the blocks. He wanted the blocks, the deluxe colored pencil sets, the construct-a-castle, the miniature rescue vehicles and maybe even the plastic microbots. Strike knew Horace had been taking his money and buying toys on the sly since the beginning, but he never said anything about it because Horace never had anything before in his life, and he was only thirteen.
Ever since Peanut fished a dozen catalogues out of a garbage can, everybody was in a state of mild disorder, passing around the thin glossies as if they were sex books. Strike would have cracked a whip if it was anything else, but he was the worst. He’d meant to go over to Rodney’s store an hour before, during the dinner lull, but had remained glued to the bench, a half-dozen catalogues on his lap, running his fingers down page after page of camisoles, hand-carved Christmas-tree angels, computerized jogging machines, golf putting sets for den and office, personalized stationery, lawn furniture—anything and everything for man, woman or child. The catalogues made him weak in the knees, fascinated him to the point of helplessness, the idea of all these things to be had, organized in a book that he could hold in one hand. Not that he would ever order anything—possessions drew attention, made you a target. None of the boys would order out of a catalogue either, not necessarily because they were paranoid like Strike, but because the ordering process—telephones, mailings, deliveries—required too much contact with the world outside the street. It was easier to go to a store on JFK Boulevard, flash your roll and say “Gimme that.”
Strike didn’t have a watch, but he knew it was seven o’clock because Popeye came out of 4 Weehawken. Popeye was forty-five but looked sixty, a hobbled-up twist-backed pipehead with a bulging left eye. He shuffled over to the bench licking his lips, probably broke but liking to be near the bottles anyhow, hoping he’d find one in the grass or something. Strike had given Popeye a bottle out of pity a few weeks back, but that had turned out to be a bad mistake, because the only thing worse than a pipehead with no bottle to smoke was a pipehead with one bottle, and Popeye had spent the rest of that night in a frantic scuttle, hassling the crew for hours until Strike had to slap his face. Strike still remembered the slick bristles of Popeye’s cheek and something wet—spit, blood—left on his own hand. Strike had rubbed it off against his pant leg in disgust, and all that night he dreamed about that wetness on his palm and fingers.
Popeye came hobbling past the bench now, not looking at Strike but pacing back and forth like a sentry, mumbling, “Strike the man . . . Strike the man.”
Seven o’clock: the Fury last rolled on them at four-thirty, and processing The Word at Juvie, if it went that far, would take them out of action for about ninety minutes. Then they’d probably hit O’Brien, then Sullivan, which meant they’d probably roll on Strike again about eight, eight-fifteen—unless they scored at those other two projects, in which case they wouldn’t come back tonight, because a second booking would bring them to about ten o’clock and the Fury always knocked off at ten to drink away the last two hours of the four-to-midnight shift. They didn’t like to snatch clockers later than ten and risk getting stuck until two A.M. with paperwork and all the requisite stops along the way to the county bullpen. So they were either coming in an hour or not at all. Strike couldn’t take another dicky check tonight, decided to be out of there before eight, come back at ten when all was clear one way or the other.
He went back to the pictures on his lap, flipping past a gold-plated razor, bocce balls, thick merino wool undersheets and a child-size police cruiser, four feet high like a bright blue cartoon car, a blond three-year-old grinning behind the wheel like he’d just shit his pants.
Strike had no real love of things for themselves, but he loved the idea of things, the concept of possession. Sometimes he was crazed with wanting, blind with visions of things he was too cagey to buy, and at moments like this he felt tortured, tantalized, sensing in some joyless way that he was outsmarting someone, but he wasn’t sure who.
Finally revolted with the catalogues, with himself, he slid off the bench top, walked over to Futon and took away Futon’s catalogue, a sexy Victoria’s Secret, Futon going, “Hey hey,” his fingers snapping like fish after the pages. Strike had to hold the catalogue behind his back to get Futon’s attention.
“I’m going out. Watch the bench.”
“Where you goin’?”
“If I wanted you to know, I would’ve said to you.”
“You goin’ to Rodney’s store?”
Strike stared at him.
“Gimme back the book, OK?”
Strike continued to stare, as if his silence carried some kind of lesson he wanted Futon to learn.
“I got it covered. Gimme back the motherfuckin’ book.” Futon faked left around Strike, then snatched the catalogue from the right side, laughing. Strike guessed he liked Futon as much as he liked anyone: not much.
On his way out of the projects, Strike spotted the boy who had stared down Crunch—Tyrone. He was standing by the fence, watching Horace and Peanut huff and puff, looking disgusted. Strike noticed that Tyrone had a half-assed Mercedes symbol shaved into his hair, mostly grown in now, looking more like some kind of indentation than a design. Strike walked up closer to the boy, checked him out a little, got the smell of him, the boy so aware of Strike coming near that he locked his head at an angle to be looking away, Strike taking that as a sign that the kid was alert. Tyrone . . . the kid needed a street name. Strike would think about it.
Walking the three blocks to his car, Strike performed casual 360-degree turns every minute or two to see if anybody was walking behind him. He had no money on him, no dope, but he was known.
He kept his car in an old lady’s driveway, paid her a hundred a month to keep it off the street. The lady was seventy-five, half blind, liked to listen to gospel radio and sit in her window, watching the two-year-old Accord as if it might drive away by itself. Strike liked old people. They were more sensible, less likely to be greedy, had no taste or inclination for getting high. He had six of them on his payroll: this one for the car; three others to keep Sears-bought safes in their houses, for his money; another to keep a safe for his surplus bottles; and another to do his laundry. Old people were his biggest expense, $2,000 a month. But he was making between $1,500 and $2,000 a week now, his cut for selling anywhere from fifteen hundred to two thousand bottles, depending on what kind of shorts he encountered—thefts, breakage, police. He was afraid to do anything with the money, didn’t want to flaunt it or acquire anything that could be taken away from him, so all he had to show for his hard work was cash, more cash than he could count. His car was used and leased; the cops couldn’t confiscate a leased car, and a used car didn’t draw that much attention anyway. His apartment was rented in someone else’s name, in a bad but quiet neighborhood, a whore strip, but there weren’t any clockers and a bank of pay phones stood right across the street.
His apartment was spotless and spare. No great sound machine or television setup, no phone, nothing hanging on the walls, just a three-piece bedroom set and a four-piece living room ensemble, all bought in a half hour at the House of Bamboo in a shopping center over in Queens where no one knew him. He had moved in six months before, after a showdown with his mother over his dealing. Even though he was only nineteen, he had enough money to buy himself a house somewhere, but if he got arrested the house would be confiscated; even if he bought it in someone else’s name, jail time would mean no cash flow, no payments to the bank, and the place would be repossessed. But at least Strike had considered the idea: most of the dealers he knew never even thought about houses. Like Horace, they spent all their money on toys—man-toys maybe, but lightweight vanity buys—living in dumps and wearing too much gold. They couldn’t get out of that minute-to-minute survival head long enough to take the money and buy something substantial. “They don’t have no future because they don’t believe in no future” was the way Rodney put it, although in Strike’s mind Rodney wasn’t really anybody to talk.
Every time Strike stopped on JFK for a red light on his way over to Rodney’s store, his hand dropped to the .25 automatic he’d stashed under a homemade flip-up lid on the step well. There was a stickup crew from Newark that was hitting on Dempsy dealers, following them home or getting them at the lights. And they were shooting too: one guy in the Sullivan crew was on a respirator, and some docker from Cleary Avenue was dead. Of course some people said it was Erroll Barnes, but every time some no-witness mayhem went down, Erroll’s name came up. Erroll Barnes was a Dempsy bad man, had served seven years for killing a TV reporter who was accompanying the cops during a raid in Elizabeth. He didn’t get life because his lawyer convinced the jury that Erroll thought it was other dealers coming to kill him, that he’d never knowingly shoot at cops. That’s how it went sometimes. But if Erroll Barnes was behind all this, that could be the best insurance for Strike, because Erroll and Rodney grew up together used to pull stickups together, did time together, and now Erroll was Rodney’s troubleshooter and dope mule and Strike couldn’t see Erroll shooting up Rodney’s people. Still, it wasn’t unheard-of once you understood that after all the We Are Family bullshit went down everybody was really just out for themselves.
Strike hated having a gun, only got it because Rodney had told him he was too little and skinny to get anybody to toe the line just on say-so, that he had to have a piece to do the job. But the truth of it was, he was scared of the gun once he got it—not scared of shooting somebody, but scared of his own anger and what trouble he could get into for shooting somebody. His fear of having to use it probably served him just as well, sometimes even made him cre ative. One evening three months before, he had found out that some kid working for him was going over to Rydell and selling his bottles for fifteen instead of ten, then pocketing the extra five for himself. Not wanting to use the gun, Strike went over to a pet store, bought a dog chain and whipped this greedy little motherfucker to the ground in front of an entire Saturday night’s playground crowd, standing over him like some heave-chested slave master. It was just business, but Strike didn’t like to think about how good it felt, didn’t like to imagine where that might have ended for him if he’d had that gun in his hand.
Strike took a vanilla Yoo-Hoo out of the glove compartment and sipped it as he trolled the boulevard. About every two blocks some JFK docker would wave in recognition or yell out his name, or some pipehead girl from the projects would get all happy-faced seeing him, tiptoe out into traffic and try to wheedle a bottle out of him before the light changed. Despite his wariness, there was a part of him that loved the charge he generated in others: the lit-up look the pipeheads got on seeing him, the salute of the clockers. Someday it would be the end of him, this recognition, this power, but other than the lifelong tug of war between him and his mother, it was the closest thing to love he had ever experienced.
At the light before the turn to Rodney’s store, two plainclothes cops pulled up alongside the Accord. Strike made a point of casually looking into their window, then looking away. It was only natural to look at a cop car; nothing gave a docker away to a profiling cop like that stony straight-ahead stare at a red light.
The cop in the shotgun seat, a pink-skinned albino with a wild white Santa Claus beard, rolled down his window and tilted his chin at Strike. Panicking a little, Strike forgot about the gun in the step well and worried instead about the open Yoo-Hoo.
“Yo, Strike.”
Strike rolled down his window.
“Tell Rodney to give me a call.”
Strike nodded, relieved, but freaked too. The guy must be on Rodney’s payroll, but how did the cop know who he was? Strike had never seen him before. The light turned green and Strike let him roll off first.
Give me a call . . . like Rodney would know which cop this was. The guy probably thought he was the only eyes and ears Rodney had. Strike hissed out his disgust: everybody was full of shit in this game. The cops bullshitted each other, the dealers bullshitted each other, the cops bullshitted the dealers, the dealers bullshitted the cops, the cops took bribes, the dealers ratted each other out. Nobody knew for sure which side anybody was on; no one really knew how much or how little money anybody else was making. Everything was smoke. Everything was pay phones in the middle of the night. Being in this business was like walking blindfolded through a minefield. It was hard to know what to do or what not to do, but in order to survive Strike went by three unbreakable rules: trust no one, don’t get greedy, and never do product. Most people who lasted out here lived by the same rules as Strike did, plus rule number four, which was kind of a balancing act with rule number one: you got to have someone watch your back. You got to have a main somebody to cover your ass. You didn’t have to trust him completely but alone is tough There’s always something you’ll need help with. Bail jail collections muscle the impossibility of being in two places at one time. That’s why Rodney had Erroll. Strike didn’t have anybody like that in his life yet, but he thinking hard on it.
The store was called Rodney’s Place, a little hole in the wall on a side street off JFK Boulevard. Rodney had hand lettered the name on the painted sky-blue cinder blocks under the window, following it with a partial list: “candy, sofe drinks, milk, games.” No one, if they noticed, had the guts to tell Rodney that he’d misspelled “soft.” Rodney had learned to read and write in prison when he was twenty-one, had earned his high school equivalency degree there and had been reading- and writing-crazy ever since. He was obsessed with tests, taking every possible written exam just to show he could pass and get some payback for all those humiliating classroom years. He now held six licenses: barber, beautician, real estate, travel agent, driving instructor and Xerox repair. Strike knew Rodney was deeply proud of his mail-order education, even though he had little to show for it outside of a bunch of framed diplomas hanging on the walls of the candy store. He never used any of the skills that came with all that paper, save for giving the occasional free haircut when he couldn’t stand looking at some kid’s scruffed-up head anymore.
Rodney wasn’t there when Strike walked in. Six young teenagers played pool under the harsh fluorescent overheads, another two banged away on the Super Mario video game, all of them silently taking in Strike with dopey frowns. The kids weren’t clockers: Rod ney didn’t allow any hustling in the store, and working for Rodney meant working.
Strike knew about that up front. He had spent a full year in here making five dollars an hour under the table, straight, no-nonsense, mule-team shopkeeping—inventory, cash register, mopping the floor, sometimes putting in fifteen-hour days, sleeping in back, then putting in another twelve. He had loved every minute of it and thought he was rolling in dough until Rodney sat him down one day and offered him a different kind of job. Now Rodney carried Strike on the books as the night manager of Rodney’s Place; if Strike ever got stopped with a few thousand on him, he could account for the roll by saying he was on his way to the bank to make a night deposit for the store. Rodney was smart that way, and he charged Strike only five hundred dollars for the honorary title. Sometimes Strike missed working here; his stomach hurt him less back then, and he used to savor the charge he felt whenever Rodney would roll in and make some noise about how shipshape the place looked.
The first time they met, Rodney had startled Strike by telling him that he “admired” his speech defect because Strike didn’t let it stop him from wanting to make something of himself, didn’t let it turn him into one of those people who would drown in a rain puddle. Rodney said he could see that Strike knew that the only place a man can be truly handicapped is in his mind, and that a man who can conquer his own mind has got the world at his feet.
Strike didn’t know he knew all this until Rodney said he did, but once he heard it, Strike began believing it. Rodney was always doing that to him: teaching him things in a way that made him feel as if he knew it all along, making Strike recognize himself. And sometimes Rodney introduced Strike to people as “my son.” He was smart that way too.
The only other guy who had worked as hard as Strike in here, and who Rodney liked as much as Strike, was a kid named Darryl Adams. Darryl was a lot like Strike’s older brother, Victor: heads down, brick-by-brick, never shooting off his mouth but never smiling either. He was quiet, neat and dependable, the sort of person Strike’s mother would like. These days Darryl held down an assistant manager’s job at Ahab’s, a fast-food shithole a few blocks from Rodney’s store, the same kind of job Strike’s brother had over at a competing grease pit called Hambone’s.
Strike wandered the cramped store in a lazy circle, scowling, resisting the impulse to clean up: the place looked like shit.
Rodney’s chubby teenage daughter sat behind the counter, staring into space and chewing air. Across the room and under a Budweiser Kings of Africa poster, Rodney’s father sat propped up on a bar stool behind his thick glasses and his cigarette smoke, watching the game of pool and jabbering away, mostly to himself. An eighteen-month-old boy chewing a Pay Day bar sat in a stroller in front of the candy counter, dressed in a denim jumpsuit. His hair had two neat slices running front to back like stripes on a football helmet, and he wore high-top baby Nikes on his feet. He was Rodney’s son, one of three Strike knew about, this one by the woman who lived a few houses up from where Rodney lived with his wife and two teenage daughters.
The kids around the pool table and video game were mostly here by default, half of them living on the street or with mothers on the pipe. Rodney kept the store open twenty-four hours, and a lot of them never went home. They wore linty sweat suits and cheap sneakers, baseball hats and no jewelry. Two of them were still sucking their thumbs.
Strike watched the game for a minute. None of the kids could sink more than one ball at a time or had the patience to line up a shot right, and with him standing there, they all got worse, knowing he wasn’t just a docker but Rodney’s lieutenant. Some of them, and some of the other kids Rodney was constantly collecting, would be getting a tryout on the street in the coming months. Most would fall off into the product right away, but a few would wear Nike Airs and gold for at least a little while before they went down too. A good run on the street was six months, and you had to have a clear head and a lot of self-confidence to make it even that long. Strike had been out there almost nine months now, and he knew that almost nobody made it out of the game in one piece, and almost everybody thought they would be the exception.
Strike turned away so the players could relax. Everything for sale in the store was behind the counter; that way no one could walk out with anything. Strike scanned the shelves: diapers, Similac, light bulbs, Tampax, dry cereal, kitty litter, coffee, kitchen matches, lighters, plus the trinity of base coke preparation: Arm and Hammer baking soda, Chore Boy scouring pads and McKesson rubbing alcohol. A pinch of baking soda mixed with a ten-dollar bottle of powder, sprinkled with water, heated, then cooled, left you with a pure nugget of smoking cocaine. And a pinch of Chore Boy wedged into your pipe would trap some of the cocaine vapors as they fled the burning nugget. Once the fumes hit the Chore Boy they reverted to an oily substance that hung in the strands; you could fire up the Chore Boy itself for a second hit, not as strong as the first but still included in the price. And the rubbing alcohol was just a poor man’s butane, although some people preferred 151 proof rum.
Every small grocery and candy store on every poor street in Dempsy always carried the trinity, no matter how skimpy and random the stock behind the counter. Not only did they carry it but they charged double what it would cost in a wealthier neighborhood—supply and demand being what they were. Rodney was a full-service ghetto capitalist: he’d sell you the bottles on the street and the paraphernalia in the store.
Strike walked over to the glass counter and stood in front of Rodney’s daughter. She stared right through his chest, her jaw rolling, her hands palm up in her lap.
“Where’s he at?”
She shrugged and gave him a barely raised eyebrow.
Strike went over to the refrigerator where Rodney stocked milk and drinks. It was a regular kitchen refrigerator but nothing in it came free. It always caught Strike up short, taking a Yoo-Hoo out of the refrigerator and then having to pay for it. And you had to pay for it, no matter who you were. One of Rodney’s favorite quotes was from some billionaire: “A dime’s a dime.” Twisting the cap and leaving two quarters on the counter, Strike wandered the small room feeling restless. He hated waiting for people, became vaguely jumpy when there was nothing to react to, nothing to be in motion for, and too much time to think random thoughts.
The overhead fluorescents were cold and ugly, their light bouncing harshly off the chipboard walls. Rodney had this store plus a craps house, both of them lined with salami-textured composition board. The man cleared twenty to forty thousand dollars on the two-plus kilos sold every week by Strike and his two other lieutenants, but he couldn’t put up decent wood or even a coat of paint. It was like buying a ten-year-old fat-ass Cadillac instead of something that didn’t cough blood every time you put the key in. Strike understood Quiet Storm, but to him this seemed like a sickness.
Strike turned to Rodney’s diplomas, correspondence degrees for the most part, all hanging in Woolworth frames on pushpins jammed into the chipboard. Strike thought all this was some silly shit on Rodney’s part—who went to school to cut hair? Anyway, he knew that Rodney really learned barbering in jail.
But Strike felt a little tug when his eye fell on the New Jersey State high school equivalency diploma. He had never finished school himself. It took too much time away from making money, first in here and then out on the street. Anybody could get a high school diploma if they hung in, but it didn’t lead to anything except more school, or some hour-pay job.
Besides, his stammer had made each school day hell. Nobody ever made fun of him directly, but they always watched him talk, and usually the teachers wouldn’t call on him if the answer required more than one word. One time in English, after a particularly bad attack complete with head-whip and eye-flutter, the teacher had said, “Well, we have a Claudius among us.” After class Strike had gone in his face for an explanation, and the guy had danced out of it by telling Strike it was a compliment, that Claudius was an emperor of Rome, but the teacher’s jittery grin betrayed him. School had made him sick to his stomach with anger, and the speech therapy class he had taken two afternoons a week was more like a punishment than a help, the other two kids in it almost retarded. Strike remembered that the therapist smelled like a cafeteria, like a big vat of boiling hot dogs. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that his stammer had started lifting from the moment he had dropped out of school, so that now, except for the bad days, like today, his tongue rarely seized on him.
Still, he hadn’t been a bad student. He was bright and he had worried over his work the way he worried over everything. Once in tenth grade, one of his teachers called in his mother and told her about a boarding school up in Maine that was giving out scholarships to inner-city kids. A few weeks later he took a three-hour test in English and math, and then spent another three hours being interviewed by a white-haired white man and then by a black lady with an Afro and glasses on a bead chain. He didn’t get accepted: he was smart but there were other kids who were smarter, and that was that.
He felt bad about being rejected only because it meant his mother had lost a day of work for nothing. Work had always been a kind of religion with her, and Strike couldn’t remember a time growing up when his mother didn’t have two jobs, sometimes three—everything from geriatric care to waitressing to supermarket cashiering. He must have gotten his work drive from her—that and his bad stomach. He remembered their kitchen in the Roosevelt Houses: all those bottles with the chalky stuff for her to drink, and sometimes the caked residue of the medicine around her mouth. At least he didn’t inherit her asthma.
When Rodney finally walked in, waddling with the weight of three cartons of Coca-Cola, it was like an underwater surge: everybody felt pulled toward his presence. Even the baby kicked his heels and yelled, “Yahh!” The kids around the pool table and the video machine forgot about their games and began sputtering out his name as he dropped the cases by the refrigerator with a sharp whack.
“Yo yo, Rodney, this nigger say Chuckie could kill Freddy, man,” said a skinny snaggle-toothed kid holding a cue stick with no tip.
“Freddie who?” Rodney bent over and began filling the shelves with cans, both hands moving from crate to shelf to crate as if working a speed bag.
“Freddy Kruger, man, who you think?” They all watched Rodney work, as if his hands and body might speak to them.
“Yeah, and who’s Chuckie?” Strike noticed that Rodney always sounded slightly pissed off and threatening when talking to kids, as if he’d just about had it with them, although none of them ever seemed to care.
“Chuckie, man, you know, the doll from Child Play.”
“I don’t know none of that horror shit,” Rodney said, “But I do know y’alls wasting time on it. I know that.”
Strike seconded that with a nod. A movie was ninety minutes of sitting there.
“Who-alls minding the bench?” Rodney asked Strike without looking up.
“Futon’s on it.” Strike watched Rodney hunched over the soda in a spread-legged stoop, wearing high-top boxing shoes and a broad leather weightlifter’s belt. His hands were a blur and there was a constellation of sweat breaking out on his forehead and through the back of his shiny gold acetate T-shirt.
Strike grunted in amazement: the man was making almost a million a year on the street, yet here he was unloading sodas. Well, a hustler hustles; that’s what he does.
“Feels good to stretch your legs, don’t it?” Rodney was puffing a little, working with his head lower than his chest. “Walk around, take a ride, see the sights.”
Strike found himself going glassy staring at Rodney, struck with a hazy memory of who he looked like, someone from Strike’s past, the face and the name just out of reach. Strike only knew that part of his fascination with Rodney had always been connected to this vague memory of another man from somewhere, his childhood or something. Not Strike’s real father, dead eleven years now, but maybe a friend of his father’s. He couldn’t remember who.
“So I’m here now. So what’s up?” Strike sounded pissy even to himself, a man with a watch.
“We get there, we get there,” Rodney said, his voice going high and singsong. “Y’all gotta relax, learn how to relax.”
Strike rolled his eyes. Nothing made him more tense than relaxing.
“Yo, Rodney, Rodney, you know what?” said a kid whose sweat suit was so thin and cheap it looked as if he was wearing pajamas. “Jason the baddest, ‘cause Jason be dead already, so you can’t kill him.”
“Freddy dead too!” bellowed another kid. “Freddy dead too!”
“Gah-damn Jason fuck Freddy up, man, he’d just fuck him up.”
Rodney straightened, arching his back and pushing out his stomach. “Yeah, well, I tell you who the baddest. The baddest is me ‘cause I’m for real, so why don’t you all go out to the van and get the rest a them sodas before I drop some heavy violence on your ass.” Watching three of the kids mill out the door, Rodney unbuckled the weightlifter’s belt and dropped it between the wall and the refrigerator.
Strike took his measure—the sweat-blotched, gaudy T-shirt, the dark blue polyester warm-up pants with white piping down the leg, a loud gold ID bracelet on one wrist, six rubber bands on the other—Strike thinking, Goddamn, where do all the money go?
Rodney frowned down at his son in the stroller, clucking his tongue in disgust, snatching the Pay Day sucker away from him and moving to the shelves behind the counter.
“What you let him have this shit for?” Rodney crabbed at his daughter as he pulled down a Frosted Flakes box, ripped it open and dropped it in the baby’s lap. “Where’s his ma at?” But Strike could see that Rodney wasn’t really interested in getting an answer. Rodney considered himself the only responsible adult in the world, a notion that he cherished, like his diplomas.
The Yoo-Hoo quarters were still on the glass counter. Rodney absently swept them into his pocket and nodded to Strike. “Let’s go.”
He took two steps to the door, then wheeled back, snapping his fingers and sliding past his blank-faced daughter again, squatting down behind the counter and coming up with a Toys R Us shopping bag folded over and Scotch-taped into the size and shape of a double bread loaf. From the bulk, Strike figured the bag held about twenty-odd thousand, probably in twenties and smaller bills, the money explaining the rubber bands on Rodney’s wrist.
But before Rodney could make it out to the street, his beeper went off and he stopped in the doorway, squinting down at the numbers coming up on his hip.
Strike stole a peek: just two zeros. Rodney scratched his neck, made a face and returned the Toys R Us bag under the counter. He walked Strike out of the store with a palm on the small of his back, stood out in the night with him, humming something tuneless.
Rodney started to shadowbox. “Futon’s a little immature yet, so why don’t you go back to the benches before he fucks everything up, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Inexplicably disappointed, Strike shrugged. For a moment they watched the traffic on the boulevard, Strike musing on the fact that Rodney was about the only guy in town who could leave a kilo’s worth of cash with a mopey teenage girl and not have to worry about it.
“C’mon by tomorrow night.” Rodney cocked his head, giving Strike a smile as if he could read his mind. “Give them legs another stretch-out.”
Strike drove back to the projects, thinking, Shopping for kilos. How come and why with me?