Clockers by Richard Price Page B

sweet, but the nigger a thief, so like, you know.” Rodney stared at Strike as if looking at someone through blasted black earth. Strike stared back at him, as still as a cat.
    Rodney cocked his head and spoke with a terrible softness. “He got to be got.”
    And there it was. Strike had been thinking all along that Rodney was about to offer him something for free, had been debating with himself whether to pass it up, but now Rodney was telling him that it would cost to get in on this partnership and that the cost was high to the point of stupidity. And despite his passion for prudence, Strike suddenly couldn’t imagine saying no.
    Got to be got. No one had ever challenged him with something like this, but he couldn’t think clearly now, couldn’t mount any arguments and instead was reduced to blindly searching for something he knew was inside him, an impulse that as yet had no name.
    “Yeah, ol’ Erroll want to go to heaven, ain’t that a bitch? Useless Virus-ass motherfucker—after all I done for him.”
    Strike stumbled for a second: maybe Rodney was talking about taking out Erroll all this time. But that didn’t make sense. Rodney was just underlining the problem. Well, who was this partner he was talking about? But it didn’t make a difference yet. It was a secondary consideration right now.
    Strike tried to examine the pros and cons, the Fury versus Champ, the relative jail time for selling bottles versus ounces. But pounding up from under the practical concerns, his heart was quick with colors, brilliant colors that had nothing to do with business, with judgment. He was a virgin in some areas of experience, and somewhere inside his head, inarticulate but powerful, was the understanding that all his life he had it building in him—the stammer, the burning in his gut, the crazed cautiousness, the dicky checks, the minute-to-minute rage and disgust, all begging for an outlet just like the one being offered him right now.
    “And you gonna fall out when I tell you who I’m talking about too.”
    Strike knew that Rodney was trying to tantalize him, draw him in. But there was no need for that now. Strike was so unmanned, so filled with a primitive recognition, that his hands were shaking. “You sellin’ this shit out of town, right?” They were just words.
    “Just about,” Rodney said pleasantly. “Just about.”
    “Yeah … huh.”
    “Say, what the fuck you doin’!” Rodney’s voice climbed to a raw squawk.
    “What…” Strike jerked as if an alarm had gone off.
    “Lookit.” Rodney pointed at the last one hundred bottles Strike had stoppered. He had forgotten to put in the coke.
    Strike stared at the empty vials and shook his head. He wondered if this was what it felt like to get high.
     
    After Rodney dropped him off by his car, Strike drove back to the benches, forgetting to perk up at the red lights, forgetting the Newark stickup artists, even flooring it a little on the boulevard.
    Strike had been so overwhelmed with his decision to get wet and do this that at first he hadn’t given the target more than a passing thought. But when Rodney dropped Darryl Adams’s name Strike had almost fallen down, stumbling backwards against the coffee table, and flopped into the easy chair.
    Darryl Adams: the hardest-working and least-smiling kid in the history of the grocery business. Strike had worked with him six, seven days a week for an entire year in Rodney’s Place, and he had been the only guy who had ever made Strike feel like a frivolous fuck-up.
    Darryl Adams. Goddamn Darryl Adams. Strike thought of his mother, spoke to her out loud—“What you think of him now?”— even though she didn’t know Darryl from the mayor of Dempsy.
    Darryl had been selling ounces for Rodney out of Ahab’s, the fast-food hole three blocks from Rodney’s store. Trying to figure out why the ounces were selling so slowly, Rodney had found out that Darryl had picked up a second supplier, a white guy in Bayonne who