Watch the bench.”

“Where you goin’?”

“If I wanted you to know, I would’ve said to you.”

“You goin’ to Rodney’s store?”

Strike stared at him.

“Gimme back the book, OK?”

Strike continued to stare, as if his silence carried some kind of lesson he wanted Futon to learn.

“I got it covered. Gimme back the motherfuckin’ book.” Futon faked left around Strike, then snatched the catalogue from the right side, laughing. Strike guessed he liked Futon as much as he liked anyone: not much.

On his way out of the projects, Strike spotted the boy who had stared down Crunch—Tyrone. He was standing by the fence, watching Horace and Peanut huff and puff, looking disgusted. Strike noticed that Tyrone had a half-assed Mercedes symbol shaved into his hair, mostly grown in now, looking more like some kind of indentation than a design. Strike walked up closer to the boy, checked him out a little, got the smell of him, the boy so aware of Strike coming near that he locked his head at an angle to be looking away, Strike taking that as a sign that the kid was alert. Tyrone … the kid needed a street name. Strike would think about it.

Walking the three blocks to his car, Strike performed casual 360-degree turns every minute or two to see if anybody was walking behind him. He had no money on him, no dope, but he was known.

He kept his car in an old lady’s driveway, paid her a hundred a month to keep it off the street. The lady was seventy-five, half blind, liked to listen to gospel radio and sit in her window, watching the two-year-old Accord as if it might drive away by itself. Strike liked old people. They were more sensible, less likely to be greedy, had no taste or inclination for getting high. He had six of them on his payroll: this one for the car; three others to keep Sears-bought safes in their houses, for his money; another to keep a safe for his surplus bottles; and another to do his laundry. Old people were his biggest expense, $2,000 a month. But he was making between $1,500 and $2,000 a week now, his cut for selling anywhere from fifteen hundred to two thousand bottles, depending on what kind of shorts he encountered—thefts, breakage, police. He was afraid to do anything with the money, didn’t want to flaunt it or acquire anything that could be taken away from him, so all he had to show for his hard work was cash, more cash than he could count. His car was used and leased; the cops couldn’t confiscate a leased car, and a used car didn’t draw that much attention anyway. His apartment was rented in someone else’s name, in a bad but quiet neighborhood, a whore strip, but there weren’t any clockers and a bank of pay phones stood right across the street.

His apartment was spotless and spare. No great sound machine or television setup, no phone, nothing hanging on the walls, just a three-piece bedroom set and a four-piece living room ensemble, all bought in a half hour at the House of Bamboo in a shopping center over in Queens where no one knew him. He had moved in six months before, after a showdown with his mother over his dealing. Even though he was only nineteen, he had enough money to buy himself a house somewhere, but if he got arrested the house would be confiscated; even if he bought it in someone else’s name, jail time would mean no cash flow, no payments to the bank, and the place would be repossessed. But at least Strike had considered the idea: most of the dealers he knew never even thought about houses. Like Horace, they spent all their money on toys—man-toys maybe, but lightweight vanity buys—living in dumps and wearing too much gold. They couldn’t get out of that minute-to-minute survival head long enough to take the money and buy something substantial. “They don’t have no future because they don’t believe in no future” was the way Rodney put it, although in Strike’s mind Rodney wasn’t really anybody to talk.

Every time Strike stopped on JFK for a red light on his way over to Rodney’s store, his hand dropped to the .25 automatic he’d stashed under a homemade flip-up lid on the step well. There was a stickup crew from Newark that was hitting on Dempsy dealers, following them home or getting them at the lights. And they were shooting too: one guy in the Sullivan crew was on a respirator, and some docker from Cleary Avenue was dead. Of course some people said it was Erroll Barnes, but every time some no-witness mayhem went down, Erroll’s name came up. Erroll Barnes was a Dempsy bad man, had served seven years for killing a TV reporter who was accompanying the cops during a raid in Elizabeth. He didn’t get life because his lawyer convinced the jury that Erroll thought it was other dealers coming to kill him, that he’d never knowingly shoot at cops.