“How you know so much, mister?”
“You live long enough, you naturally learn.”
“My granmom says the same thing.”
Clay eyed Anthony Taylor. “You want to do somethin’ for me while I count out?”
“What?”
“There’s a broom in the back room, leaning up against my desk. And a dustpan right next to it. You feel like sweeping up out here, I’d be obliged.”
“Will I get paid?”
“We’ll take a look at the job you do first. Decide then.”
Clay watched the kid’s miniswagger as he headed toward the back room. This Anthony Taylor was just eight years older than Marcus Jr. Clay wondered, would his little boy be out on these streets someday, just hanging like this kid? He thought of Anthony Taylor on the corner, standing out there in the cold.
“I swear to God,” said Clay in a very soft voice, “I’ll never let you be that kind of alone.”
Richard Tutt parked his Bronco with the oversized tires in a lot filled with trucks with oversized tires and walked into the Gold’s Gym on Georgia Avenue. He changed into his shorts and tank top, went out into the gym, did some warm-ups in front of a wall-to-wall mirror, and then began to pump hard iron.
Tutt only did free weights. The Nautilus and the Universal were for beach-boy types, slope-backed lawyers, kids, and girls, and anyway, you couldn’t get that vein action going with those machines like you could with the free weights. Or that sound. He liked the clang of the plates.
Tutt did some benches with a spotter he knew, then went to the curl bar to work on his guns. He was proud of his arms; he liked to pyramid the sets, really max it out so the veins popped on his biceps like fat pink wire.
He pushed it hard. It helped when he thought of people he’d like to kill. Like Tyrell’s enforcer, Short Man Monroe. Short Nigger was more like it. Like Tutt would ever let some sawed-off little spade give him any kind of shit. And now this toy fuck was going to try and show Tutt up, chase off those kids that were playing dealer down around U, or find the money that was missing from Junie’s car. Tutt wouldn’t let that happen. He was still a cop, and Tyrell and the rest of them were nothing more than the shit on his shoe. Sure, he’d taken their money, and he’d keep taking it as long as the ride lasted. But they didn’t own him. It was Tutt who was in charge. They’d find that out eventually. Then he’d move on to the next bunch of geniuses, because there was always someone out there looking to get shook down.
Tutt finished a full circuit, glanced in the mirror, twisted his torso to check himself out. Was he getting a little small? Hell, he’d never be as big as he was that summer down at Ocean City, when he was working as a bouncer at the Hurricane Club, lifting with those Salisbury State boys with the close-set eyes, shooting monkey hormones, walking down the beach, and looking big as Joe Jacoby. That was the summer they had taken this little waitress out on a boat, gotten her drunk on Busch beer, asked her if she was a good girl or a bad girl. She had smiled coyly and said, “I guess I’m half good and half bad,” and Tutt’s friend Dewey said, “Is this the bad half?” and put his hand, big as a bear’s paw, right on her snatch. Man, did she jump back. And did what they told her to do after that. That was one crazy summer. He’d never be that maxed out again, but he’d sworn off the ’roids ever since, because right after that he had come back and taken the test to be a cop. No drugs of any kind since then. You came up positive on a test, it could get you bounced right off the force.
Tutt wiped his face dry with a towel as he walked toward the locker room. He passed a guy he recognized, good-sized arms but talked kind of funny, like maybe he worked in a library or some shit like that. He stopped to tell the guy a joke.
“Hey, buddy,” said Tutt. “Know what ‘gay’ stands for?”
“No.”
“‘Got AIDS yet?’”
If the guy smiled, then Tutt missed it. “Oh, you mean like an acronym.”
“Huh?”
“You know, each letter of the word stands for another word.”
“Whatever.”
Tutt entered the locker room shaking his head, wondering when they started letting pencil-necks join this place.
Tutt showered. He got dressed next to a Montgomery County cop, last name of Penny. Penny had a second-degree black belt. He claimed the dojo workout made him skinny, so he came here three times a week to pump iron.
“Hey, Tutt. What you carrying these days?”
“Police-issue thirty-eights. But the solid citizens they got us goin’ up against got autos holding fourteen to a clip. Mini-Tec nines, all that. So you can believe I’m packin’ something else.”
“What?”
“Got me a forty-five. A thirty-eight shoots nice and straight and all that, but the Colt’s got more stopping power.”
“Tell me about it.”
“And there’s something else.” Tutt looked around the locker room, lowered his voice. “When the jungle heats up and boils over, you’re gonna see a lot of those candy-ass National Guardsmen dead in the street. They carry forty-fives. Gonna be a lot of ammo lying around out there for the real soldiers, the frontline cops, to pick up and slap right into our guns.”
Penny low-chuckled. “Shit, Tutt. You better watch what you say with that jungle shit. Anyway, I thought your partner was a brother.”
“He is. But he’s one of the good ones. You can believe that.” Tutt shut his locker. “Take care, Penny.”
“You, too.”
Tutt went outside to the pay phone. He searched his pocket for a coin, watched a short female lifter walk toward the gym. She had on leg warmers and a sweatshirt worn off one shoulder, her tank-top strap showing. Reminded Tutt of that Flashdance chick who everyone claimed was half jig.
“What a feeling, sweetness,” said Tutt, giving her a toothy smile. “Ain’t nothin’ I like better than a woman with nice, strong thighs.”
“Pig,” said the girl, walking quickly through the front door.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Tutt.
He found a quarter and dropped it in the slot. He made his call.
Kevin Murphy sipped from his beer, watched the point guard take the ball down the court. The guard had a nice way of protecting the ball on the dribble. And his teammate, this Farmer kid from Alabama, he could really play.
Murphy leaned back on the couch, used the remote to kick up the volume on his brand new Mitsubishi set. He didn’t want to hear his wife’s footsteps. He knew his wife Wanda was in the bedroom doing a little crying this time of night, maybe getting up off the bed, walking around the room, sitting back down on the bed, rubbing her hands together, like that. Hers were ordinary footsteps, nothing unusual in their sound, except that he could picture Wanda’s troubled face, all wrinkled up as she made those footsteps in that dark room, not going anywhere, not knowing where to go.
This new set, it sure did have a nice picture. Murphy had read about the special blue picture tube, Diamond Vision, some shit like that, in a magazine before he had even walked into the store. The salesman, side-burned white dude trying to talk black after he had a look at Murphy, called it an “ass-kickin’, booty-whippin’” picture. Went so far as to call it the Cadillac of televisions, winking on the word Cadillac, like the mention of that car would trigger a black man’s hot button. Murphy stayed cool and disinterested, smiled inside when the salesman thought he had lost the handle and said something good and stupid about how owning this television was like having a “poontang magnet” in your very own home. Despite the fact that he was ignorant, there was something about this salesman’s blind determination that Murphy had liked. So he bought the set. But he couldn’t let this guy get away with all that fool talk. So after Murphy had paid from a roll of hundreds, he shook the salesman’s hand and said, “By the way, haven’t heard the word poontang in about twenty years. Can’t recall if I’ve ever heard a black man use it.” And to the salesman’s nervous smirk he added, “Smooth as your rap is, I thought you might like to know.”