The Twelfth Card (47 page)

*   *   *

A jogger, a man in his forties, approached, glancing toward Jax, the homeless vet, wearing his trash-picked jacket, sporting a hidden pistol in his sock and thirty-seven cents of charity in his pocket.

The jogger’s expression didn’t change as he ran past. But the man altered course just a tiny bit, to put an extra foot or so between him and the big black guy, a shift so little you could hardly see it. Except to Jax it was as clear as if the man had stopped, turned around and fled, calling out, “Keep your distance, nigger.”

He was sick of this racial-dodgeball shit. Always the same. Is it
ever
going to change?

Yes. No.

Who the hell knew?

Jax bent down casually and adjusted the pistol
that was stuffed into his sock and pressing uncomfortably against bone, then continued up the street, moving slow with his scar-tissue limp.

“Yo, you got some change?” He heard the voice from behind him as a man approached.

He glanced back at a tall, hunched-over man with very dark skin, ten feet behind him. The guy repeated, “Yo, change, man?”

He ignored the beggar, thinking, This’s pretty funny: All day he’d been fronting he was some homeless dude or another and here comes a real one. Serves me right.

“Yo, change?”

He said brusquely, “No, I don’t have any.”

“Come on. Ever’body got change. An’ they fuckin’ hate it. They
wanta
get rid of it. All them coins be heavy and you can’t buy shit with it. I be doing you a favor, brother. Come on.”

“Get lost.”

“I ain’t ate for two days.”

Jax glanced back, snapped, “Course not. ’Cause you spent all your paper on those Calvin Kleins.” He glanced at the man’s clothes—a dirty but otherwise nice-looking set of royal-blue Adidas workout clothes. “Go get a job.” Jax turned away and started up the street.

“Hokay,” the bum said. “You ain’t gimme any change, then how’s ’bout you gimme your motherfuckin’ hands?”

“My—?”

Jax found his legs pulled out from underneath him. He slammed facedown onto the sidewalk. Before he could twist around and grab his gun both wrists were pinned behind his back and what seemed to be a large pistol was shoved into the nook behind his ear.

“The fuck you doing, man?”

“Shut up.” Hands patted him down and found the hidden pistol. Handcuffs ratcheted on and Jax was jerked into a sitting position. He found himself looking over an FBI identification card. The first name on it was Frederick. The second was Dellray.

“Oh, man,” Jax said, his voice hollow. “I don’t need this shit.”

“Well, guess what, sonny, there a lot more manure comin’ yo’ way. So you better get used to it.” The agent stood up and a moment later Jax heard, “This is Dellray. I’m outside. I think I got Boyd’s boyfriend down. I just saw him slip some bills to a kid coming out of Lincoln’s town house. Black kid, maybe thirteen. What was he doing there? . . . A bag? Fuck, it’s a device! Probably gas. Boyd must’ve given it to this piece of crap to sneak inside. Get everybody out and call in a ten thirty-three . . . . And get somebody to Geneva now!”

*   *   *

In Rhyme’s lab the big man sat cuffed and leg-shackled in a chair, surrounded by Dellray, Rhyme, Bell, Sachs and Sellitto. He’d been relieved of a pistol, wallet, knife, keys, a cell phone, cigarettes, money.

For a half hour, utter chaos had reigned in Lincoln Rhyme’s town house. Bell and Sachs had literally grabbed Geneva and hustled her out the back door and into Bell’s car, which sped off in case there was yet another assailant planning to move on Geneva outside. Everyone else evacuated into the alley. The Bomb Squad, again in bio suits, had gone upstairs and X-rayed and then chemically tested the books. No explosives, no poison gas. They were just books,
the purpose being, Rhyme assumed, to make them
think
there was a device in the bag. After they’d evacuated the town house, the accomplice would sneak in through the back door or enter with firefighters or police and wait for a chance to kill Geneva.

So this was the man Dellray had heard rumors about yesterday, who’d almost gotten to Geneva at the Langston Hughes school yard, who’d found out where she lived and who’d followed her to Rhyme’s to carry out yet another attempt on her life.

He was also the man, Rhyme hoped, who could tell them who’d hired Boyd.

The criminalist now looked him over carefully, this large, unsmiling man. He’d traded in his combat jacket for a tattered tan sports coat, probably assuming that they’d spotted him at the school yesterday in the green jacket.

He blinked and looked down at the floor, diminished by his arrest but not intimidated by the crescent of officers around him. Finally he said, “Look, you don’t—”

“Shhhhh,” Dellray said ominously and continued to rifle through the man’s wallet, as he explained to the team what had happened. The agent had been coming to deliver reports about the FBI’s jewelry district money-laundering investigations when he’d seen the teenage boy come out of Rhyme’s. “Saw the beast pass the kid some bills then get his ass up off a bench and leave. Descrip and the limp matched what we heard before. Looked funny to me, ’specially when I saw he had a
de
-formed ankle.” The agent nodded toward the small .32 automatic he’d found in the man’s sock. Dellray explained that he’d pulled off his own jacket, wrapped it around the files and slipped them behind some bushes, then smeared
some dirt on his running suit to impersonate a homeless man, a role he’d made famous in New York when he was an undercover agent. He’d then proceeded to collar the man.

“Let me say something,” Boyd’s partner began.

Dellray wagged a huge finger at the man. “We’ll give ya this real clear little nod, we want any words trickling outa yo’ mouth. We altogether on that?”

“I—”

“Al-to-gether?”

He nodded grimly.

The FBI agent held up what he’d found in the wallet: money, a few family pictures, a faded, shabby photograph. “What’s this?” he asked.

“My tag.”

The agent held the snapshot closer to Rhyme. It was an old boxy New York City subway. The colorful graffiti on the side read,
Jax 157.

“Graffiti artist,” Sachs said, lifting an eyebrow. “Pretty good, too.”

“You still go by Jax?” Rhyme asked.

“Usually.”

Dellray was holding up a picture ID card. “You may’ve been Jax to the fine folk at the Transit Authority, but it’s lookin’ like you’re Alonzo Jackson to the rest of the world. Also known by the illuminating moniker Inmate Two-two-oh-nine-three-fo’, hailin’ from the Department of
Co
-rrections in the
bee
-yootiful city of Alden, New York.”

“That’s Buffalo, right?” Rhyme asked.

Boyd’s accomplice nodded.

“The prison connection again. That how you know him?”

“Who?”

“Thompson Boyd.”

“I don’t know anybody named Boyd.”

Dellray barked, “Then who hired ya for the job?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking. ’Bout a job. I swear I don’t.” He seemed genuinely confused. “And all this other stuff, gas or whatever you’re saying. I—”

“You were lookin’ for Geneva Settle. You bought a gun and you showed up at her school yesterday,” Sellitto pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s right.” He looked mystified at the level of their information.

“An’ you showed up
here
,” Dellray continued. “
That
’s the job we’re waggin’ our tongues about.”

“There’s no job. I don’t know what you mean. Honest.”

“What’s the story with the books?” Sellitto asked.

“Those’re just books my daughter read when she was little. They were for her.”

The agent muttered, “Wonnerful. But ’xplain to us why you paid somebody to deliver ’em to . . . ” He hesitated and frowned. For once words seemed to fail Fred Dellray.

Rhyme asked, “You’re saying—?”

“That’s right.” Jax sighed. “Geneva. She’s my little girl.”

“From the beginning,” Rhyme said.

“Okay. What it is—I got busted six years ago. Went six to nine at Wende.”

The DOC’s maximum security prison in Buffalo.

“For what?” Dellray snapped. “The AR and murder we heard about?”

“One count armed robbery. One count firearm. One count assault.”

“The twenty-five, twenty-five? The murder?”

He said firmly, “That was
not
a righteous count. Got knocked down to assault. And I didn’t do it in the first place.”

“Never heard
that
before,” Dellray muttered.

“But you did the robbery?” Sellitto asked.

A grimace. “Yeah.”

“Keep going.”

“Last year I got upped to Alden, minimum security. Work-release. I was working and going to school there. Got paroled seven weeks ago.”

“Tell me about the AR.”

“Okay. Few years back, I was a painter, working in Harlem.”

“Graffiti?” Rhyme asked, nodding at the picture of the subway car.

Laughing, Jax said, “
House
painting. You don’t make money at graffiti, ’less you were Keith Haring and his crowd. And they were just claimers. Anyway I was getting killed by the debt. See, Venus—Geneva’s mother—had righteous problems. First it
was blow, then smack then cookies—you know, crack. And we needed money for bail and lawyers too.”

The sorrow in his face seemed real. “There were signs she was a troubled soul when we hooked up. But, you know, nothing like love to make you a blind fool. Anyways, we were going to be kicked out of the apartment and I didn’t have money for Geneva’s clothes or schoolbooks or even food sometimes. That girl needed a normal life. I thought if I could get together some benjamins I’d get Venus into treatment or something, get her straight. And if she wouldn’t do it, then I’d take Geneva away from her, give the girl a good home.

“What happened was this buddy, Joey Stokes, told me ’bout this deal he had going on up in Buffalo. Word was up there was some armored car making fat runs every Saturday, picking up receipts from malls outside of town. Couple of lazy guards. It’d be a milk run.

“Joey and me left on Saturday morning, thinking we’d be back with fifty, sixty thousand each that night.” A sad shake of the head. “Oh, man, I don’t know what I was doing, listening to that claiming dude. The minute the driver handed over the money, everything went bad. He had this secret alarm we didn’t know about. He hit it and next thing there’re sirens all over the place.

“We headed south but came to a railroad crossing we hadn’t noticed. This freight train was stopped. We turned around and took some roads that weren’t on the map and had to go through a field. We got two flats and ran off on foot. The cops caught up with us a half hour later. Joey said let’s fight and I said no and called out we were giving up. But Joey got mad and shot me in the leg. The state troopers
thought we were shooting at
them
. That was the attempted murder.”

“Crime don’t pay,” Dellray said, with the intonation, if not the grammar, of the amateur philosopher that he was.

“We were in a holding cell for a week, ten days ’fore they let me make a phone call. I couldn’t call Venus anyway; our phone’d been shut off. My lawyer was some Legal Aid kid who didn’t do shit for me. I called some friends but nobody could find Venus or Geneva. They’d been kicked out of our apartment.

“I wrote letters from prison. They kept coming back. I called everybody I could think of. I wanted to find her so bad! Geneva’s mother and me lost a baby a while ago. And then I lost Geneva when I went into the system. I wanted my family back.

“After I got released I came here to look for her. Even spent what paper I had on this old computer to see if I could find her on the Internet or something. But I didn’t have any luck. All I heard was Venus was dead and Geneva was gone. It’s easy to fall through the cracks in Harlem. I couldn’t find my aunt either, who they stayed with some. Then yesterday morning this woman I know from the old days, works in Midtown, saw this hubbub at that black museum, some girl getting attacked and heard her name was Geneva and she was sixteen and lived in Harlem. She knew I was looking for my girl and called. I got myself hooked up with this claimer hangs out Uptown and he checked out the schools yesterday. Found out she went to Langston Hughes High. I went there to find her.”

“When they spotted you,” Sellitto said. “By the school yard.”

“That’s right. I was there. When y’all came after
me I took off. But I went back and found out from this kid where she lived, over in West Harlem, by Morningside. I went there today, was going to leave the books but I saw you put her in a car and take off.” He nodded at Bell.

The detective frowned. “You were pushing a cart.”

“I was fronting that, yeah. I got a cab and followed y’all here.”

“With a gun,” Bell pointed out.

He snapped, “Somebody’d tried to hurt my little girl! Hells yeah, I got myself that piece. I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.”

“You use it?” Rhyme asked. “The weapon?”

“No.”

“We’re going to test it.”

“All I did was pull it out and scare that asshole kid told me where Geneva lived, boy name of Kevin, who was speaking bad about my girl. Worst that happened to him was he peed his pants when I pointed it at him . . . which he deserved. But that’s all I did—’side from busting him up some. You can track him down and ask him.”

“What’s her name, the woman who called you yesterday?”

“Betty Carlson. She works next to the museum.” He nodded at his phone. “Her number’s on the incoming-call list. Seven-one-eight—that’s the area code.”

Sellitto took the man’s mobile and stepped into the hallway.

“What about your family in Chicago?”

“My what?” He frowned.

“Geneva’s mother said you moved to Chicago with somebody, married her,” Sachs explained.

Jax closed his eyes in disgust. “No, no . . . That was a lie. I never even been to Chicago. Venus must’ve
told her that to poison the girl against me . . . . That woman, why’d I ever fall in love with her?”

Then Rhyme glanced at Cooper. “Call DOC.”