He didn’t get accepted: he was smart but there were other kids who were smarter, and that was that.

He felt bad about being rejected only because it meant his mother had lost a day of work for nothing. Work had always been a kind of religion with her, and Strike couldn’t remember a time growing up when his mother didn’t have two jobs, sometimes three—everything from geriatric care to waitressing to supermarket cashiering. He must have gotten his work drive from her—that and his bad stomach. He remembered their kitchen in the Roosevelt Houses: all those bottles with the chalky stuff for her to drink, and sometimes the caked residue of the medicine around her mouth. At least he didn’t inherit her asthma.

When Rodney finally walked in, waddling with the weight of three cartons of Coca-Cola, it was like an underwater surge: everybody felt pulled toward his presence. Even the baby kicked his heels and yelled, “Yahh!” The kids around the pool table and the video machine forgot about their games and began sputtering out his name as he dropped the cases by the refrigerator with a sharp whack.

“Yo yo, Rodney, this nigger say Chuckie could kill Freddy, man,” said a skinny snaggle-toothed kid holding a cue stick with no tip.

“Freddie who?“ Rodney bent over and began filling the shelves with cans, both hands moving from crate to shelf to crate as if working a speed bag.

“Freddy Kruger, man, who you think?” They all watched Rodney work, as if his hands and body might speak to them.

“Yeah, and who’s Chuckie?” Strike noticed that Rodney always sounded slightly pissed off and threatening when talking to kids, as if he’d just about had it with them, although none of them ever seemed to care.

”Chuckie, man, you know, the doll from Child Play.”

“I don’t know none of that horror shit,” Rodney said, “But I do know y’alls wasting time on it. I know that.”

Strike seconded that with a nod. A movie was ninety minutes of sitting there.

“Who-alls minding the bench?” Rodney asked Strike without looking up.

“Futon’s on it.” Strike watched Rodney hunched over the soda in a spread-legged stoop, wearing high-top boxing shoes and a broad leather weightlifter’s belt. His hands were a blur and there was a constellation of sweat breaking out on his forehead and through the back of his shiny gold acetate T-shirt.

Strike grunted in amazement: the man was making almost a million a year on the street, yet here he was unloading sodas. Well, a hustler hustles; that’s what he does.

“Feels good to stretch your legs, don’t it?” Rodney was puffing a little, working with his head lower than his chest. “Walk around, take a ride, see the sights.”

Strike found himself going glassy staring at Rodney, struck with a hazy memory of who he looked like, someone from Strike’s past, the face and the name just out of reach. Strike only knew that part of his fascination with Rodney had always been connected to this vague memory of another man from somewhere, his childhood or something. Not Strike’s real father, dead eleven years now, but maybe a friend of his father’s. He couldn’t remember who.

“So I’m here now. So what’s up?” Strike sounded pissy even to himself, a man with a watch.

“We get there, we get there,” Rodney said, his voice going high and singsong. “Y’all gotta relax, learn how to relax.”

Strike rolled his eyes. Nothing made him more tense than relaxing.

“Yo, Rodney, Rodney, you know what?” said a kid whose sweat suit was so thin and cheap it looked as if he was wearing pajamas. “Jason the baddest, ‘cause Jason be dead already, so you can’t kill him.”

“Freddy dead too!” bellowed another kid. “Freddy dead too!”

“Gah-damn Jason fuck Freddy up, man, he’d just fuck him up.”

Rodney straightened, arching his back and pushing out his stomach. “Yeah, well, I tell you who the baddest. The baddest is me ‘cause I’m for real, so why don’t you all go out to the van and get the rest a them sodas before I drop some heavy violence on your ass.” Watching three of the kids mill out the door, Rodney unbuckled the weightlifter’s belt and dropped it between the wall and the refrigerator.

Strike took his measure—the sweat-blotched, gaudy T-shirt, the dark blue polyester warm-up pants with white piping down the leg, a loud gold ID bracelet on one wrist, six rubber bands on the other—Strike thinking, Goddamn, where do all the money go?

Rodney frowned down at his son in the stroller, clucking his tongue in disgust, snatching the Pay Day sucker away from him and moving to the shelves behind the counter.

“What you let him have this shit for?” Rodney crabbed at his daughter as he pulled down a Frosted Flakes box, ripped it open and dropped it in the baby’s lap. “Where’s his ma at?” But Strike could see that Rodney wasn’t really interested in getting an answer. Rodney considered himself the only responsible adult in the world, a notion that he cherished, like his diplomas.

The Yoo-Hoo quarters were still on the glass counter. Rodney absently swept them into his pocket and nodded to Strike. “Let’s go.”

He took two steps to the door, then wheeled back, snapping his fingers and sliding past his blank-faced daughter again, squatting down behind the counter and coming up with a Toys R Us shopping bag folded over and Scotch-taped into the size and shape of a double bread loaf. From the bulk, Strike figured the bag held about twenty-odd thousand, probably in twenties and smaller bills, the money explaining the rubber bands on Rodney’s wrist.

But before Rodney could make it out to the street, his beeper went off and he stopped in the doorway, squinting down at the numbers coming up on his hip.

Strike stole a peek: just two zeros. Rodney scratched his neck, made a face and returned the Toys R Us bag under the counter. He walked Strike out of the store with a palm on the small of his back, stood out in the night with him, humming something tuneless.

Rodney started to shadowbox. “Futon’s a little immature yet, so why don’t you go back to the benches before he fucks everything up, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Inexplicably disappointed, Strike shrugged. For a moment they watched the traffic on the boulevard, Strike musing on the fact that Rodney was about the only guy in town who could leave a kilo’s worth of cash with a mopey teenage girl and not have to worry about it.

“C’mon by tomorrow night.” Rodney cocked his head, giving Strike a smile as if he could read his mind.