The Twelfth Card

by Jeffery Deaver

  "You don't have to do that," she said, unsmiling.

  "I know I don't," he said. "I want to. Nobody's gonna hurt you. That's word. Okay, I'ma hang with my boys now. Catch you later? 'Fore math class?"

  Heart thudding, she stammered, "Sure."

  He tapped her fist again and walked off. Watching him, she felt feverish, hands shaking at the exchange. Please, she thought, don't let anything happen to him . . . .

  "Miss?"

  She looked up, blinked.

  Detective Bell was setting down a tray. The food smelled so fine . . . . She was even hungrier than she'd thought. She stared at the steaming plate.

  "You know him?" the policeman asked.

  "Yeah, he's down. We're in class together. Known him for years."

  "You look a little addled, miss."

  "Well . . . I don't know. Maybe I am. Yeah."

  "But it doesn't have anything to do with what happened at the museum, right?" he asked with a smile.

  She looked away, feeling heat across her face.

  "Now," the detective said, setting the steaming plate in front of her. "Chow down. Nothing like turkey tetrazzini to soothe a troubled soul. You know, I might just ask 'em for the recipe."

  Chapter Eleven

  These'd do just fine.

  Thompson Boyd looked down at his purchases in the basket, then started for the checkout counter. He just loved hardware stores. He wondered why that might be. Maybe because his father used to take him every Saturday to an Ace Hardware outside of Amarillo to stock up on what the man needed for his workshop in the shed outside their trailer.

  Or maybe it was because in most hardware stores, like here, all the tools were clean and organized, the paint and glues and tapes were all ordered logically and easy to find.

  Everything arranged by the book.

  Thompson liked the smell too, sort of a pungent fertilizer/oil/solvent smell that was impossible to describe, but one that everyone who'd ever been in an old hardware store would recognize instantly.

  The killer was pretty handy. This was something he'd picked up from his dad, who, even though he spent all day with tools, working on oil pipelines, derricks and the bobbing, dinosaur-head pumps, would still spend lots of time patiently teaching his son how to work with--and respect--tools, how to measure, how to draw plans. Thompson spent hours learning how to fix what was broken and how to turn wood and metal and plastic into things that hadn't existed. Together they'd work on the truck or the trailer, fix the fence, make furniture, build a present for his mom or aunt--a rolling pin or cigarette box or butcher block table. "Big or small," his father taught, "you put the same amount of skill into what you're doing, son. One's not better or harder than the other. It's only a question of where you put the decimal point."

  His father was a good teacher and he was proud of what his son built. When Hart Boyd died he had with him a shoeshine kit the boy had made, and a wooden key chain in the shape of an Indian head with the wood-burned letters "Dad" on it.

  It was fortunate, as it turned out, that Thompson learned these skills because that's what the business of death is all about. Mechanics and chemistry. No different from carpentry or painting or car repair.

  Where you put the decimal point.

  Standing at the checkout stand, he paid--cash, of course--and thanked the clerk. He took the shopping bag in his gloved hands. He started out the door, paused and looked at a small electric lawn mower, green and yellow. It was perfectly clean, polished, an emerald jewel of a device. It had a curious appeal to him. Why? he wondered. Well, since he'd been thinking of his father it occurred to him that the machine reminded him of times he'd mow the tiny yard behind his parents' trailer, Sunday morning, then go inside to watch the game with his dad while his mother baked.

  He remembered the sweet smell of the leaded gas exhaust, remembered the gunshot-sounding crack when the blade hit a stone and flung it into the air, the numbness in his hands from the vibration of the grips.

  Numb, the way you'd feel as you lay dying from a sidewinder snakebite, he assumed.

  He realized that the clerk was speaking to him.

  "What?" Thompson asked.

  "Make you a good deal," the clerk said, nodding at the mower.

  "No thanks."

  Stepping outside, he wondered why he'd spaced out--what had so appealed to him about the mower, why he wanted it so much. Then he had the troubling idea that it wasn't the family memory at all. Maybe it was because the machine was really a small guillotine, a very efficient way to kill.

  Maybe that was it.

  Didn't like that thought. But there it was.

  Numb . . .

  Whistling faintly, a song from his youth, Thompson started up the street, carrying the shopping bag in one hand and, in the other, his briefcase, containing his gun and billy club and a few other tools of the trade.

  He continued up the street, into Little Italy, where the crews were cleaning up after the street fair yesterday. He grew cautious, observing several police cars. Two officers were talking to a Korean fruit stand owner and his wife. He wondered what that was about. Then he continued on to a pay phone. He checked his voice mail once more, but there were no messages yet about Geneva's whereabouts. That wasn't a concern. His contact knew Harlem pretty good, and it'd only be a matter of time until Thompson found out where the girl went to school and where she lived. Besides, he could use the free time. He had another job, one that he'd been planning for even longer than Geneva Settle's death, and one that was just as important as that job.

  More important, really.

  And funny, now that he thought about it--this one also involved children.

  *

  "Yeah?" Jax said into his cell phone.

  "Ralph."

  "S'up, dog?" Jax wondered if the skinny little pharaoh was leaning against something at the moment. "You get the word from our friend?" Meaning the character reference DeLisle Marshall.

  "Yeah."

  "And the Graffiti King's cool?" Jax asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Good. So where are we on all this?"

  "Okay, I found what you want, man. It's--"

  "Don't say anything." Cell phones were the devil's own invention when it came to incriminating evidence. He gave the man an intersection on 116th Street. "Ten minutes."

  Jax disconnected and started up the street, as two ladies in their long overcoats, wearing elaborate church hats and clutching well-worn Bibles, detoured out of his way. He ignored their uneasy looks.

  Smoking, walking steady with his gunshot-not-gangsta limp, Jax inhaled the air, high on being home. Harlem . . . looking around him at stores, restaurants and street vendors. You could buy anything here: West African woven cloth--kente and Malinke--and Egyptian ankhs, Bolga baskets, masks and banners and framed pictures of silhouetted men and women on African National Congress black, green and yellow. Posters too: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tina, Tupac, Beyonce, Chris Rock, Shaq . . . . And dozens of pictures of Jam Master Jay, the brilliant and generous vinyl-spinning rapper with Run-D.M.C., gunned down by some asshole in his Queens recording studio a few years back.

  Jax was hit left and right by memories. He glanced at another corner. Well, lookit that. Now a fast food place, it had been the site of Jax's first crime, committed when he was fifteen--the crime that had launched him on the path to becoming righteously notorious. Because what he racked wasn't liquor or cigarettes or guns or cash, but a case of phat Krylon from a hardware store. Which he went on to use up over the next twenty-four hours, compounding the larceny with trespass and criminal property damage by spray-painting the graffitied bubble letters Jax 157 throughout Manhattan and the Bronx.

  Over the next few years Jax bombed that tag of his on thousands of surfaces: overpasses, bridges, viaducts, walls, billboards, stores, city buses, private buses, office buildings--he tagged Rockefeller Center, right beside that gold statue, before getting tackled by two massive security bulls, who laid into him hard with Mace and
nightsticks.

  If young Alonzo Jackson found himself with five minutes of privacy and a flat surface, Jax 157 appeared.

  Struggling to get through high school, the son of divorced parents, bored to death with normal jobs, steady in trouble, he found comfort as a writer (graffiti guerrillas were "writers," not "artists"--what Keith Haring, the Soho galleries and claimer ad agencies told everybody). He ran with some local Blood posses for a time, but he changed his mind one day when he was hanging with his set on 140th, and the Trey-Sevens drove by, and pop, pop, pop, Jimmy Stone, standing right next to him, went down with two holes in the temple, dead 'fore he hit the ground. All on account of a small bag of rock, or on account of no reason at all.

  Fuck that. Jax went out on his own. Less money. But a hell of a lot safer (despite spraying his tag on places like the Verrazano Bridge and a moving A train car--which was one phat story that even brothers in prison had heard of).

  Alonzo Jackson, unofficially but permanently renamed Jax, dove into his craft. He started out simply bombing his tag throughout the city. But, he learned early that if that's all you do, even if you lay it in every borough of the city, you're nothing but a lame "toy," and graffiti kings wouldn't give you the time of day.

  So, skipping school, working in fast food restaurants during the day to pay for paint, or racking what he could steal, Jax moved on to throw-ups--tags written fast but a lot bigger than bombing. He became a master of the top-to-bottom: doing the entire vertical height of a subway car. The A train, supposedly the longest route through town, was his personal favorite. Thousands of visitors would travel from Kennedy Airport into the city on a train that didn't say Welcome to the Big Apple; it offered the mysterious message: Jax 157.

  By the time Jax was twenty-one he'd done two total end-to-ends--covering the entire side of a subway car with his graffiti--and had come close to doing a whole train, every graffiti king's dream. He did his share of 'pieces too. Jax had tried to describe what a graffiti masterpiece was. But all he could come up with was that a 'piece was something more. Something breathtaking. A work that a cluckhead crack addict sitting in a gutter and a Wall Street trader on New Jersey Transit could both look at and think, Man, that is so fucking cool.

  Those were the days, Jax reflected. He was a graffiti king, in the middle of the most powerful black cultural movement since the Harlem Renaissance: hip-hop.

  Sure, the Renaissance must've been def. But to Jax it was a smart person's thing. It came from the head. Hip-hop burst from the soul and from the heart. It wasn't born in colleges and writer's lofts, it came right from the fucking streets, from the angry and striving and despairing kids who had impossibly hard lives and broken homes, who walked on sidewalks littered with cookie vials discarded by the crackheads and dotted with brown, dried blood. It was the raw shout from people who had to shout to be heard . . . . Hip-hop's four legs delivered everything: music in DJ'ing, poetry in MC rapping, dance in the b-boy's breakdancing and art in Jax's own contribution, graffiti.

  In fact, here on 116th Street, he paused and looked at the place where the Woolworth's five-and-dime had stood. The store hadn't survived the chaos after the famous blackout of 1977 but what had sprouted in its place was a righteous miracle, the number-one hip-hop club in the nation, Harlem World. Three floors of every kind of music you could imagine, radical, addictive, electrifying. B-boys spinning like tops, writhing like stormy waves. DJs spinning vinyl for the packed dance floors, and MCs making love to their microphones and filling the room with their raw, don't-fuck-with-me poems, pounding in time to the rhythm of a real heart. Harlem World was where the throw-downs started, the battles of the rappers. Jax had been lucky enough to see what was considered the most famous of all time: the Cold Crush Brothers and the Fantastic Five . . . .

  Harlem World was long gone, of course. Also gone--scrubbed or worn away or painted over--were the thousands of Jax's tags and 'pieces, along with those by the other graffiti legends of the early hip-hop era, Julio and Kool and Taki. The kings of graffiti.

  Oh, there were those lamenting the demise of hip-hop, which had become BET, multimillionaire rappers in chrome Humvees, Bad Boys II, big business, suburban white kids, iPods and MP3 downloads and satellite radio. It was . . . well, case in point: Jax was watching a double-decker tour bus ease to the curb nearby. On the side was the sign Rap/Hip-Hop Tours. See the Real Harlem. The passengers were a mix of black and white and Asian tourists. He heard snatches of the driver's rehearsed spiel and the promise that they'd soon be stopping for lunch at an "authentic soul food" restaurant.

  But Jax didn't agree with the claimers bitching that the old days were gone. The heart of Uptown remained pure. Nothing could ever touch it. Take the Cotton Club, he reflected, that 1920s institution of jazz and swing and stride piano. Everybody thought it was the real Harlem, right? How many people knew that it was for white-only audiences (even the famed Harlem resident W. C. Handy, one of the greatest American composers of all time, was turned away at the door, while his own music was playing inside).

  Well, guess what? The Cotton Club was fucking gone. Harlem wasn't. And it never would be. The Renaissance was done and hip-hop had changed. But percolating right now in the streets around him was some brand-new movement. Jax wondered what exactly this one would be. And if he'd even be around to see it--if he didn't handle this thing with Geneva Settle right he'd be dead or back in prison within twenty-four hours.

  Enjoy your soul food, he thought to the tourists as the bus pulled away from the curb.

  Continuing up the street for a few blocks, Jax finally found Ralph, who was--sure enough--leaning against a boarded-up building.

  "Dog," Jax said.

  "S'up?"

  Jax kept on walking.

  "Where we goin'?" Ralph asked, speeding up to keep pace beside the large man.

  "Nice day for a walk."

  "It cold out."

  "Walking'll warm you up."

  They kept going for a time, Jax ignoring whatever the fuck Ralph was whining about. He stopped at Papaya King and bought four dogs and two fruit drinks, without asking Ralph if he was hungry. Or a vegetarian or puked when he drank mango juice. He paid and walked out onto the street again, handing the skinny man his lunch. "Don't eat it here. Come on." Jax looked up and down the street. Nobody was following. He started off again, moving fast. Ralph followed. "We walkin' 'cause you don' trust me?"

  "Yeah."

  "So why you ain't trust me all of a sudden?"

  " 'Cause you had time to dime me out since I saw you last. What exactly is the mystery here?"

  "Nice day fo' a walk," was Ralph's answer. He snuck a bite of hot dog.

  They continued for a half block to a street that seemed deserted and the pair turned south. Jax stopped. Ralph did too and leaned against a wrought-iron fence in front of a brownstone. Jax ate his hot dogs and sipped the mango juice. Ralph wolfed down his own lunch.

  Eating, drinking, just two workers on their meal break from a construction job or window washing. Nothing suspicious about this.

  "That place, shit, they make good dogs," Ralph said.

  Jax finished the food, wiped his hands on his jacket and patted down Ralph's T-shirt and jeans. No wires. "Let's get to it. What'd you find?"

  "The Settle girl, okay? She goin' to Langston Hughes. You know it? The high school."

  "Sure, I know it. She there now?"

  "I don't know. You ask where, not when. Only I hear something else from my boys in the hood."

  The hood . . .

  "They be saying somebody got her back. Stayin' on her steady."

  "Who?" Jax asked. "Cops?" Wondering why he even bothered. Of course it'd be them.

  "Seem to be."

  Jax finished his fruit juice. "And the other thing?"

  Ralph frowned.

  "That I asked for."

  "Oh." The pharaoh looked around. Then pulled a paper bag from his pocket and slipped it into Jax's hand. He could feel the gun was an automatic and that it
was small. Good. Like he asked. Loose bullets clicked in the bottom of the sack.

  "So," Ralph said cautiously.

  "So." Jax pulled some benjamins from his pocket and handed them to Ralph and then leaned close to the man. He smelled malt and onion and mango. "Now, listen up. Our business's done with. If I hear you told anybody 'bout this, or even mention my name, I will find you and cap your fucked-up ass. You can ask DeLisle and he will tell you I am one coal-bad person to cross. You know what I'm saying?"

  "Yes, sir," Ralph whispered to his mango juice.

  "Now get the fuck outa here. No, go that way. And don't look back."

  Then Jax was moving in the opposite direction, back to 116th Street, losing himself in the crowds of shoppers. Head down, moving fast, despite the limp, but not so fast as to attract attention.

  Up the street another tour bus squealed to a stop in front of the site of the long-dead Harlem World, and some anemic rap dribbled from a speaker inside the gaudy vehicle. But at the moment the blood-painting King of Graffiti wasn't reflecting on Harlem, hip-hop or his criminal past. He had his gun. He knew where the girl was. The only thing he was thinking about now was how long it would take him to get to Langston Hughes High.

  Chapter Twelve

  The petite Asian woman eyed Sachs cautiously.

  The uneasiness was no wonder, the detective supposed, considering that she was surrounded by a half dozen officers who were twice her size--and that another dozen waited on the sidewalk outside her store.

  "Good morning," Sachs said. "This man we're looking for? It's very important we find him. He may've committed some serious crimes." She was speaking a bit more slowly than she supposed was politically correct.

  Which was, it turned out, a tidy faux pas.

  "I understand that," the woman said in perfect English, with a French accent, no less. "I told those other officers everything I could think of. I was pretty scared. With him trying the stocking cap on, you understand. Pulling it down like it was a mask. Scary."

  "I'm sure it was," Sachs said, picking up her verbal pace a bit. "Say, you mind if we take your fingerprints?"

  This was to verify that they were her prints on the receipt and merchandise found at the museum library scene. The woman agreed, and a portable analyzer verified that they were hers.