So Strike wasn’t up on using girlfriends; he’d rather go slow and steady, get the boys to make the trip up to the apartment, at least for the Fury hours, four to ten. He moved the apartment around every day: knockos can’t go through a door without having paper, and by the time they got the paper signed by a judge, the apartment wasn’t there anymore.

Girls. Strike always told his crew: “Don’t let the girls wrap you around their little fingers. It’s just pussy, and if you play your cards right, pussy always be there, and you play your cards right by making the money, then saving it.” Strike would say it word for word, just like Rodney said it to him almost a year ago.

Strike watched the baby-fat girl—Sharelle, Sharette, something like that—finally get up for it, walk over to him, a smile pasted on her face like she was happy or something.

“Hi, Strike.”

“No.”

“I didn’t—”

“No. Go on outa here.”

Futon came out of 6 Weehawken scanning the street, eating Cheetos and holding a big jar of Gummi Bears, bobbing his head in time to whatever was coming in over his aqua-blue headphones. He nodded to Strike and walked back to the benches.

“Re-up, re-up,” he announced, blaring out the words over the music in his head.

Strike pursed his lips to respond and was startled to feel the sudden seizing up that hit somewhere between his mind and his mouth. “Woo-what you got?”

He hadn’t had a stammer attack in weeks: What a goddamn day.

“‘Bout forty, forty-five.” Futon seemed to ignore Strike’s flustered speech.

Strike thought about the night to come, calculating the traffic. It was the twelfth of the month. People still had some money from the mailbox. On the other hand it was Wednesday, five days from the last payday. Strike thought about the weather too: Rain coming, maybe. Two hundred bottles should do it.

Getting up off the bench, legs stiff, Strike limped to the pay phone and rang up Rodney’s pager, punching in the code for the day and then a two-zero on the end. The bottles would be coming by bicycle in about fifteen or twenty minutes, the delivery boy just another twelve-year-old zooming by, a kid going into 6 Weehawken with his schoolbooks under his arm and a lunch box. Strike hated beepers, kept his in his pocket, out of sight. It was too obvious, like wearing gold. Besides, everybody had a beeper these days. Strike preferred talking on the phone, mouth to ear—one thing about dope corners, nobody ever vandalized the phones. But Rodney said, Wear your beeper.

Back at the bench, Futon offered him the Gummi Bear jar. Strike waved it away, Futon saying “Lookit,” unscrewing the false bottom and revealing a nest of four bottles, his voice a slick murmur: “They sell it on JFK at that smoke shop.”

Strike scowled at him. “That’s stupid. I-I-If they sell it, the knockos be knowing about it. Soon they see anybody with that, they go right for the bottom, buh-bust your ass.” The stammer was coming on strong now, Strike’s consternation only making it worse.

Futon got sulky.

“Besides, what you got the Cheetos for too? Tha-that don’t look right, two kinds of junk you holdin’.”

Futon shrugged. “I don’t like Gummi Bears. And they ain’t coming back for a month anyhow, right?”

The day before, Futon had raced one of the Fury, a knocko named Thumper, and beat him by twenty feet. The Fury had said that if Futon won the race they’d lay off for thirty days—just a joke, but now Futon was acting like it was bonded and true. And Futon was Strike’s second in command.

The baby-fat girl started talking to The Word, saying something Strike couldn’t hear but knew was flirty because The Word started to dance around and grin like a fool. The girl was trying to mooch, a bottle, and The Word would have given it up in a minute if Strike wasn’t here. Always had to be here, always. He thought of telling Futon to go over and tell that girl he was going to tell her mother, but then decided he wasn’t Jesus on a stick. Girl wants to pipe up, it’s a free country.