Clockers by Richard Price Read Free Book Online Page A

Gear sneakers with the price tag still attached and a Chicago Bulls cap jerked sideways. “C’mere for a minute.”
    The kid groaned to his feet—definitely holding, Rocco decided—and limped to the car.
    “Let me ask you something.” Rocco squinted up. “Where do you get those hats with the bills over the ear like that? Alls I can find are the ones with the bills in front. I looked all over…”
    The kid shrugged, scowled down the street. “All you got to do is turn them around sideways.” The answer was so straightforward that Rocco couldn’t tell if the kid was stupid or just throwing it right back at him.
    “Yeah? Let me ask you. We’re looking for a guy, he wears two hats, one on top of each other, like this.” Rocco mimed holding a cap bill over each ear. “You know anybody who does that? It’s real important.”
    “I knew a guy with two heads once.” The kid fought down a smile, still looking off.
    “Oh yeah?”
    “He was in my homeroom.”
    “Did he graduate?”
    “Yeah, but he only wore one hat.”
    The kid looked Rocco in the eye, Rocco reading it clear: Fuck you too. Despite the challenge. Rocco let it slide, rolling off with a little wave.
    The kid’s play was pretty subtle considering he was living in a city that had always valued lungs and legs over brains, and Rocco was never one for coming down on a good mind out here just because a kid refused to kiss his ass. Besides, he was tiring of the streets and no longer had much stomach for the million little attitude contests every tour, to say nothing of the occasional roll-around or footrace.
    In the beginning, the Job had seemed more of a privilege than anything else—getting paid to walk through walls and witness the wildest and most riveting details of human struggle—but after a few years you could drown in it, and what had once made you step back in awe could begin to slide past your eyes, as unseen as the air you breathed.
    You had to be like Mazilli to keep it up out here after a certain number of years. Mazilli was so deep into the streets that he regularly hired his own informants and their girlfriends to do the shit work around his house and his war-zone liquor store, even babysit his kids. He paid them five dollars an hour too.
    Mazilli and Rocco were an odd-looking team. Rocco was heavyset and ruddy, his usual expression one of sly expectation, as if listening to a long-winded but funny joke, and Mazilli was dead white and painfully thin, all blaze and bones with a teenager’s waistline, a forward-thrusting blond-turning-gray duck’s ass haircut and a humorless, thin-lipped pucker of a mouth. And while Rocco usually got by on the street with a laid-back talk-show affability, Mazilli counted on his naturally choleric aura to survive, although in the eight years they had been partners, Rocco had never seen Mazilli ever truly lose control.
    Cruising up JFK Boulevard, Rocco spotted some unscheduled activity alongside the Eisenhower Houses: three plainclothes Housing cops stood on the street side of a primer-splotched Plymouth Fury, nervously stepping in place and trying to ignore a growing crowd of hotted-up tenants. As Rocco rolled up, one of the cops, Big Chief Scanlon, stepped up to the driver’s window, his face melting a little in relief.
    “Rocco, Rocco, how you doin’ there,” Big Chief said. “The fuckin’ war wagon died.” He had one hand around the neck of a Latino kid in cuffs, and when Big Chief stooped to speak with Rocco, the kid was forced to bow too. “The herd’s getting restless there. Give us a lift?”
    The other two cops, Thumper and Crunch, both wearing high-top sneakers and cut-off sweatshirts, started walking backwards to the Aries, the crowd getting louder, bold now that Housing was making its getaway.
    The three of them slid into the back, big, quick, the suddenness of their bulk making the car buck and tilt. The last cop in, Thumper, grabbed the kid in cuffs and passed him over thighs until he