Authors: Richard Price

Clockers (89 page)

BOOK: Clockers

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Rocco sat stone-faced.

“You know, like it’s nuh-none of my business. I’m just curious.”

Rocco stared at the kid, thinking, It isn’t too late to take him back; then thinking, Yes it is. Each step, each mile since walking out of the prosecutor’s office, was impossible to explain in any salvageable way. And that tape was inadmissible, illegal—an embarrassment.

The beeper went off again. As if fearing that the number coming up would somehow put all his good luck in jeopardy, the kid quickly and wordlessly left the car.

Rocco watched Strike limp into the human slipstream of Eighth Avenue, watched him negotiate his way through lowlifes and taxpayers until he disappeared inside the terminal doors without a backward glance.

The kid didn’t even say thank you. Typical, thought Rocco. So fucking typical.

Rocco sat in the idling car, still debating whether to go home early or call in and find out where the scene was. He drove over to Seventh Avenue and then headed south. But once downtown, instead of turning east for the loft, he kept going until the traffic slowed as it bottlenecked at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. He’d be home soon enough.

Strike wandered the littered and seedy vastness of the terminal, the place so big that it seemed empty despite hundreds of people who were either race-walking or staggering everywhere he looked.

He wandered over to a pay phone, lifted the receiver and dialed his mother’s number, his stomach gently palpitating as he listened to the hollow ringing.

One of Victor’s kids picked up, filling Strike’s ear with short, heavy breaths.

“My mother there?”

The kid kept breathing at him, sounding as if his nose was stuffed.

“Get my mother.”

More breathing.

“Get your grandma.”

“Daddy,” the kid said, “Ivan fell down in the
bench.
”

Strike hung up, his stomach pounding him now. Daddy.

“Yo, yo.”

Strike turned to face a nervous-looking teenager talking to him out of the side of his mouth. The guy carried a small knapsack over his shoulder and some bills in his hand.

“Yo, buy me a ticket, man.
Charleston,
one way.” His eyes averted, his head jerking like a bird, the guy shoved the money at Strike.

Strike read his play immediately. The kid was muling dope down south and was afraid to buy his own ticket, as if that was the only thing that would give him away. The idiot didn’t even have enough sense to take some decoy luggage, look like everybody else traveling long distance. And with that stupid knapsack and those bug eyes, he might as well be wearing a sign.

Strike saw three white Port Authority knockos standing forty feet away by a newsstand. All three were dressed in dungarees and T-shirts, their heads buried in magazines.

“C’mon man, my boy dint show. Just buy me a ticket. I’ll wait for you right here.” The kid finally made eye contact and did a double take upon seeing Strike’s broken nose.

“Buy you
own
damn ticket,” Strike said, walking off to another bank of pay phones. Behind him, he heard the kid say only, ”
Shoo.
”

Strike picked up a phone and watched the kid get on the ticket line himself. The cops still had their heads down in their
Times
and
Newsweeks.

As
Strike fished through his pockets for the change to call home again, his eyes wandered to the departure board above the Greyhound counter. Forgetting his coins for a moment, he whispered the name of every city up there, getting sucked into the list, the variety of places somebody could go, getting that greedy covetous feeling that sometimes came on him around things for sale. All those cities: Strike felt woozy with options, enraptured, and he stood there squinting up, moving his lips…

Strike looked down from the board and saw that the dope mule had his ticket now. As the kid moved toward the escalators and the lower-level bus bays, one of the cops dropped his magazine and yawned, going up on tiptoes and running a hand over his bald head. A moment later, all three knockos ambled over to the escalators and glided silently down, out of sight.

Strike shook his head: Out of it for good, I swear to
God.

He picked up the phone again, but instead of calling home he dialed Dempsy information and got the number for Tyrone’s mother’s house. He started to dial, hesitated, then hung up when he forgot the rest of the number. He wanted to help Tyrone out, but he was too scared of the mother’s grief and anger. Maybe he could give his own mother the combination to one safe and mail Tyrone’s mother the combination to the other … Strike tried to convince himself that in the long run this whole thing would turn out fine for Tyrone. He’d be scared straight by his time in the Youth House; then, with Strike’s money, he could go to a good school when he got out. And the Youth House probably wouldn’t even be that bad, since nobody would mess with him, Tyrone being a killer and all…

Strike’s guts were rippling now,’ making him go for his medicine and take a long pull. He’d write Tyrone too, Strike thought, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Tell him,
explain
to him … He couldn’t feel the medicine coating the pain, so he drained the bottle. He burped wetly and then grabbed the phone again, pumping in silver.

“Hello?”

Strike was speechless—not scared, just unsure of what to say.

“Who’s this, hello?”

“Mommy.” Strike blew air to slow down his heart.

“Ronald. Where are you?”

“Mommy, I’m in New
York.
”

A
large hand snatched away the receiver and hung it up for him. Strike turned to face the three cops and the dope mule, the bald cop taking him by the wrist in a loose grip, carrying the mule’s knapsack in his other hand.

“Take us a walk, Yo.”

Strike stood his ground. They’d have to kill him. “I dint
do
nothin’.”

“What?” The bald cop handed off the knapsack and braced himself, rocking slightly from side to side.

The dope mule was in cuffs now, his head hanging, eyes still averted.

“Luh-look.” Strike blinked rapidly and palmed his own chest. “I never seen this guy. He come up in my face, say, ‘Buy me a ticket to Char-Charleston.’ I don’t even know what he’s
talkin
about, I swear. Ask him, man, ask
him.
”

Strike was addressing the cop but trying to meet the dope mule’s downcast eyes.

“Ask him,” Strike said again, feeling a trembling in his jaw, a shimmery film building in his eyes, thinking about these cops finding his seven thousand dollars; thinking how, one way or the other, nobody ever really got away with anything in this world.

The cop took his arm. “Come on.”

Strike felt his resistance drain, but then the kid spoke quietly to his shoes. “I don’t know this guy.”

Strike looked away, afraid to meet the kid’s eyes now, afraid that the knockos would misinterpret the flush of gratitude in his face.

The cops went into a silent conference that culminated in a ring of shrugs; they had their grab for the night.

“Well, what are
you
doing here, then?” the bald cop said.

“I was just leavin’ town.” Strike nodded fervently, figuring cops always liked that answer. “On my way out.”

Backpedaling, watching the cops watch him, Strike moved toward the ticket counter. Once in line, he eyed the departure board directly overhead, reading the cities again.

“Washington, D.C.,” Strike announced, dropping a pinch of tens and twenties in front of a barred window.

“Washington, D.C.,” the clerk repeated, taking Strike’s cash and moving to the keyboard of his computer.

“No, wait.” Still gaping up at the roll call of cities, Strike thrust a staying hand across the counter. “Philadelphia … Yeah, Philadelphia.”

The clerk gave him a quick dry look and started to recount the money.

“Wait a minute, wait.” Strike waggled his hand, licked his lips, squinted upward again. “Give me a second here. Just like one muh-more second…”

Thirty minutes later, Strike sat by the smoke-tinted window in the trembling bus, looking down at a scrawny line of passengers still toddling forward in the drafty bus bay. He held a dozen cities in his fist, the individual tickets in his See America booklet spread out in his grip like a fan. Strike gave himself a little breeze and thought about where to get off. Newark was coming up in about half an hour, but no
way
he’d be getting off there. The bus was scheduled to make stops in Philadelphia, Washington, Raleigh and Atlanta, but with the hand he was holding, he could get off just about anywhere and transfer to just about any other bus going somewhere else.

Strike thought of the hard-luck dope mule who had given him his reprieve from the Port Authority knockos. The kid didn’t have to do that; earlier he had asked Strike for help and Strike had turned his back. Strike couldn’t figure it. People were dropping out of the sky to cut him slack today, as if sending him a message, a blessing, a warning.

He thought of Victor’s son calling him Daddy on the phone. For a moment he was pulled into Victor’s world, Victor’s loss, and the echo of that boy had Strike writhing in his seat, desperate for this bus to back out and
roll.

Strike pondered Philadelphia coming up in about ninety minutes, wondering whether he should get off there, cash in all these tickets. Then he decided that he would probably stay on the bus, ride on to Washington, maybe even Atlanta. Maybe he’d try the South for a while, or maybe he’d use another ticket, go out west. He’d see when he got there. He’d just have to see how he felt, think about what he’d be thinking about when he got there.

Besides, there was hardly a place in America where you couldn’t find a pay phone. Just walk right up to it, call anybody you damn want to.

Unannounced and unnoticed, Rocco took up his customary starting position at the back of the crowd. He watched Mazilli and Rockets work the body, Rockets slowly circling with the Nikon, ringing the corpse in a series of flashes while Mazilli logged the shots on a clipboard.

The victim looked to be about eighteen or nineteen. Tall and emaciated, he lay on his back in a puddle, his arms crooked like a cactus, his eyes staring up at the shattered marquee of a long-gone movie theater. Even from thirty feet away, craning past the heads of the onlookers, Rocco counted at least a dozen entry wounds from groin to collarbone. A scatter of ejected shells lay about two feet from the left arm, another grouping a yard south of the right foot. The victim had obviously been killed in a crossfire, and Rocco wondered what the kid might have done to provoke this kind of end for himself.

Rocco watched as Mazilli began to undress the body, initiate the official probe and tally of wounds. The kid wore two pairs of filthy sweatpants, a ripped orange Seton Hall T-shirt, no underwear, no socks, and there were holes on the bottom of his laceless shoes—a basehead chopped down in mid-mission, by the look of him. The mystery began growing in Rocco, taking up house: Who the hell would have bothered to set up an automatic weapons massacre just to take out this stinky and pathetic bag of bones?

Rocco winced as Rockets accidentally backed into his forensic case, knocking his camera to the ground, the flash going off on impact. A ripple of derisive laughter rose from the crowd.

Enough.

Rocco took a deep breath, held it, then let it out nice and slow. He began easing his way up to the yellow tape.

“He was a nice guy, right?” Rocco declared in a conversational tone, his eyes casually scanning the crowd. “Who the hell would want to shoot him?”

Table of Contents

PART 1