Clockers

Clockers

Richard Price

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON / NEW YORK / LONDON / 1992

Copyright © 1992 by Richard Price

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from

this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Price, Richard, date.

Clockers / Richard Price.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-395-53761-4

I. Title.

PS3566.R544C56 1992 91-43318

813’.54—dc20 cip

Printed in the United States of America

MP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

With deepest love for my wife,

Judy Hudson,

and my daughters,

Annie and Gen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been

written without the guidance and

generosity of many people

Foremost, Larry Mullane, who

was helpful beyond calculation

My editor, the brilliant

and relentless John Sterling

Geoff Sanford, whose friendship

often kept me afloat

And Gene Canfield,

who opened the first door

And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature.

And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.

—Numbers 13:32–33

PART 1

A Death in the Land of the Two-Minute Clock

1

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.