Clockers by Richard Price

sign while he was at it.
    Rodney climbed back into the van, pissing and moaning about the house. “I can get five, six families in there we get it fixed up right, you know? But I can’t get a goddamn home improvement loan. ‘Cause I do it up front with cash, the IRS is gonna say, Whoa, how you pay for this? Then it’s theirs, you know?”
    Strike was silent, shaking his head, thinking of the other five bottles still riding in Rodney’s pocket.
    “You got to have houses,” Rodney said as he pulled into the road. “I tell you niggers that all the time. This shit’s gonna be over someday. Put it in houses, you can get off the street and still make some serious bread. ‘Cause I’m getting too old for this shit and I got to make my break, you know? I got me the candy store, the crap house, and I got me four properties now like for rentals. Soon’s I get the motherfuckin’ improvement loans, I’m off the street, I’m in houses. “ He nodded, tight-lipped. “Give me houses, bawh…”
    Strike didn’t want to hear it: “What the fuck’s wrong with you, man, paying that nigger in bottles, drivin’ aroun’ with bottles. Let me know up front about that, OK?” Strike rubbed his gut, his face swelling with agitation. “I mean god damn, Rodney … I mean Jesus Christ.”
    Rodney smiled. “I say to the nigger, I give you fifty dollars clean out the ground floor. So it’s like this, do I give him five ten-dollar bottles cost me a dollar fifty each? Or do I give him fifty dollars cold cash? What do I do?”
    “What you do, “ Strike said, “is You don’t take a chance on getting caught holding. You pay the nigger his fifty dollars so this motherfucker”—he stabbed a finger at the Toys R Us bag—“don’t wind up in a goddamn police locker and this motherfucker”—he grabbed his own crotch—“don’t wind up in no county bullpen. Goddamn, how you get to be you anyhow?”
    Rodney was still smiling, off somewhere. “I tell you what happened last week? I got pulled over by this new knocko team. You know that new flyin’ squad they got? They got me with a clip. I’m thinking, I don’t even know these motherfuckers, ho shit, what do I do now, ‘cause I got so much violence on my goddamn jacket, they pull me in even with this itty bitty clip, I’m going away three years if a day, an’ like this flyin’ squad supposed to be the goddamn Texas Rangers or the Green Berets, you know? I don’t even know what to say, they got me hands up on the car, this little old pink-eyed Santa Claus-looking motherfucker patting me up my legs. He gets up around my chest, you know like holding me from behind? Starts whisperin’ in my ear, ‘I want 3. Cadillac’ Just like that.” Rodney drove on, smiling. “‘I want a Cadillac’”
    Strike stared at’him, waiting for more.
    “I had to give him five thousand dollars and I’m supposed to get up another five for him tonight. After that, me and him’ll work something out but goddamn, that little ol’ clip cost me a thousand a bottle, ain’t that some shit?”
    “So why you carrying again tonight for?” Strike’s voice dropped to a sullen mutter. He was thinking about the cop who had the message for Rodney, the cop working on getting a Caddy for himself.
    Rodney just shrugged. “I’m getting outa this life.”
    “Houses.” Strike said it to mock him.
    “Houses. You learnin’.”
    Strike knew why Rodney was carrying the bottles. He was a damn addict as sure as any other bug-eyed dope fiend out here, hooked on being the man. The man? Rodney was more like God because of those bottles. He couldn’t drive twenty feet without causing someone to bubble over with hope and joy. He couldn’t walk into a room without every lost child in there jerking his way like he was some kind of magnet. All that from bottles: the bottles were the beginning and the end of it. It wasn’t the money itself, because no one ever felt that way about a holdup man or some other kind of