Everything for sale in the store was behind the counter; that way no one could walk out with anything. Strike scanned the shelves: diapers, Similac, light bulbs, Tampax, dry cereal, kitty litter, coffee, kitchen matches, lighters, plus the trinity of base coke preparation: Arm and Hammer baking soda, Chore Boy scouring pads and McKesson rubbing alcohol. A pinch of baking soda mixed with a ten-dollar bottle of powder, sprinkled with water, heated, then cooled, left you with a pure nugget of smoking cocaine. And a pinch of Chore Boy wedged into your pipe would trap some of the cocaine vapors as they fled the burning nugget. Once the fumes hit the Chore Boy they reverted to an oily substance that hung in the strands; you could fire up the Chore Boy itself for a second hit, not as strong as the first but still included in the price. And the rubbing alcohol was just a poor man’s butane, although some people preferred 151 proof rum.

Every small grocery and candy store on every poor street in Dempsy always carried the trinity, no matter how skimpy and random the stock behind the counter. Not only did they carry it but they charged double what it would cost in a wealthier neighborhood—supply and demand being what they were. Rodney was a full-service ghetto capitalist: he’d sell you the bottles on the street and the paraphernalia in the store.

Strike walked over to the glass counter and stood in front of Rodney’s daughter. She stared right through his chest, her jaw rolling, her hands palm up in her lap.

“Where’s he at?”

She shrugged and gave him a barely raised eyebrow.

Strike went over to the refrigerator where Rodney stocked milk and drinks. It was a regular kitchen refrigerator but nothing in it came free. It always caught Strike up short, taking a Yoo-Hoo out of the refrigerator and then having to pay for it. And you had to pay for it, no matter who you were. One of Rodney’s favorite quotes was from some billionaire: “A dime’s a dime.” Twisting the cap and leaving two quarters on the counter, Strike wandered the small room feeling restless. He hated waiting for people, became vaguely jumpy when there was nothing to react to, nothing to be in motion for, and too much time to think random thoughts.

The overhead fluorescents were cold and ugly, their light bouncing harshly off the chipboard walls. Rodney had this store plus a craps house, both of them lined with salami-textured composition board. The man cleared twenty to forty thousand dollars on the two-plus kilos sold every week by Strike and his two other lieutenants, but he couldn’t put up decent wood or even a coat of paint. It was like buying a ten-year-old fat-ass Cadillac instead of something that didn’t cough blood every time you put the key in. Strike understood Quiet Storm, but to him this seemed like a sickness.

Strike turned to Rodney’s diplomas, correspondence degrees for the most part, all hanging in Woolworth frames on pushpins jammed into the chipboard. Strike thought all this was some silly shit on Rodney’s part—who went to school to cut hair? Anyway, he knew that Rodney really learned barbering in jail.

But Strike felt a little tug when his eye fell on the New Jersey State high school equivalency diploma. He had never finished school himself. It took too much time away from making money, first in here and then out on the street. Anybody could get a high school diploma if they hung in, but it didn’t lead to anything except more school, or some hour-pay job.

Besides, his stammer had made each school day hell. Nobody ever made fun of him directly, but they always watched him talk, and usually the teachers wouldn’t call on him if the answer required more than one word. One time in English, after a particularly bad attack complete with head-whip and eye-flutter, the teacher had said, “Well, we have a Claudius among us.” After class Strike had gone in his face for an explanation, and the guy had danced out of it by telling Strike it was a compliment, that Claudius was an emperor of Rome, but the teacher’s jittery grin betrayed him. School had made him sick to his stomach with anger, and the speech therapy class he had taken two afternoons a week was more like a punishment than a help, the other two kids in it almost retarded. Strike remembered that the therapist smelled like a cafeteria, like a big vat of boiling hot dogs. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that his stammer had started lifting from the moment he had dropped out of school, so that now, except for the bad days, like today, his tongue rarely seized on him.

Still, he hadn’t been a bad student. He was bright and he had worried over his work the way he worried over everything. Once in tenth grade, one of his teachers called in his mother and told her about a boarding school up in Maine that was giving out scholarships to inner-city kids. A few weeks later he took a three-hour test in English and math, and then spent another three hours being interviewed by a white-haired white man and then by a black lady with an Afro and glasses on a bead chain.