Clockers by Richard Price Page B

business.”
    Papi looked dreamily at Rodney for a beat, as if wondering where to take it. He abruptly reached behind him, elbow high, and Strike’s stomach shot a red stream: gun.
    But Papi only came up with a beeper that had been clipped to his belt. He pushed a button and it began to vibrate. Papi held it out in his palm to Rodney.
    Rodney took it, turning it this way and that. “Gah-damn, man, what the fuck?”
    Strike saw the black-eyed gun boy disappear around the street side of the van.
    “Sometime you don’t want the beeper noise, that beep-beep, you know?” Papi beamed.
    “Gah-damn, I stick this up some bitch’s pussy? She can take a message and get off at the same time, ain’t that something?”
    The boy rejoined the group holding something between his ribs and his elbow but out of sight under his jacket. Papi was howling at Rodney’s comment, staggering as if he was gut shot. The others seemed not to understand English. Rodney handed the vibrating beeper to Strike. Strike made a fast pass at looking intrigued but then didn’t know who to give it to. The thing had a powerful, insistent pulse that made it seem alive.
    Suddenly the two gun boys became casually alert, turning at the same time and leaning back to look down the dark sidewalk at a lone figure emerging from the shadows, walking toward the group, about a hundred yards off. Papi noticed him too, and his wet laughter subsided into sighs, then just a dewy smile. Rodney winked at Strike, Strike thinking: Ho shit, now what? But as the figure came closer—average height, shoulders hunched as if he was cold, taking small unhurried steps—Strike saw who it was: Erroll Barnes. Everybody made him out at the same time, became relaxed again, but Papi’s jokey hysteria was replaced by a sober calm. Strike watched Erroll draw near. He was thirty-five but looked fifty, frail with close-cropped gray hair and beard. His face was deeply furrowed, like a thumb had plowed lines though clay across his forehead and down his cheeks. His mouth was a flat line and his eyes were both furtive and blank He looked as if he had never uttered a full sentence of conversation in his life.
    When Erroll was still a few yards from the group, Rodney raised both hands overhead as if someone had said “Stick ‘em up.”
    “Papi,” Rodney barked, hands high, backpedaling to the van. “Vaya con Dios.”
    “Mi amor.” Papi saluted, then turned to Strike. “My friend…” He smiled expectantly, an open sentence.
    Strike nodded goodbye but didn’t think that was what the guy was driving at. It took a moment before he realized that Papi was asking for his beeper back.
    Strike and Rodney pulled away from the curb just as Erroll reached the group. Reading faces, Strike could tell that Papi had a completely different manner with Rodney gone and Erroll there.
    “What you into here?” Strike asked. “What was that?”
    “What was what?” Rodney said, his mouth puckered with secret amusements.
    “I didn’t like that.” Strike pointedly looked out his side window.
    “Didn’t like what?” Rodney laughed. “You just said you dint know what that was, so how you know you dint like it?”
    The gloomy towers of the O’Brien projects were coming up at the next light and Strike braced himself for the turn. “Just get the business over with and take me back to the benches.”
    But Rodney flew right by the projects, then drawled out of the side of his mouth, “Business is over with.”
    Startled, Strike sat up, automatically feeling under the seat for the money. The Toys R Us bag was gone.
     
    “See now usually I let Erroll do it all, you know? Carry the cash and take the dope, but tonight I figured I do the cash half so’s I could show you the people. Let everybody get a look at everybody for future reference, just in case I got to ever ask you for some help. See what I’m sayin’?”
    Strike was sitting in Rodney’s living room on a plastic-slipcovered turquoise couch,