The Twelfth Card (17 page)

Geneva, thinking, How weird is this? It took getting attacked to make people respect her. Her father always said that the best can come out of the worst.

Well, go ahead, girl; play back. The game was ridiculously juvenile, silly, but she knew how to snap; she and Keesh and Keesh’s sister’d go on for an hour straight.
Yo’ mama so fat her blood type is Ragu. Yo’ Chevy so old they stole the Club and left the car . . . .
But, her heart beating fiercely, Geneva now simply grinned and sweated silently. She tried desperately to think of something to say.

But this was Kevin Cheaney himself. Even if she could work up the courage to fire off a snap about his mother her mind was frozen.

She looked at her watch, then down at her language arts book. Sweet Jesus, you wack girl, she raged at herself. Say something!

But not a single syllable trickled from her mouth. She knew Kevin was about to give her that look she knew so well, that I-ain’t-got-time-t’waste-on-wack-bitches look, and walk off. But, no, it seemed he thought that she just wasn’t in the mood to play, probably still freaked from the morning’s events, and that was all right with him. He just said, “I’m serious, Gen, you’re about more’n just DJs and braids and bling. What it is, you’re smart. Nice to talk with somebody smart. My boys”—he nodded toward his posse’s table—“they’re not exactly rocket scientists, you know what I’m saying?”

A flash in her mind. Go for it, girl. “Yeah,” she
said, “some of ’em’re so dumb, if they spoke their minds, they’d be speechless.”

“Def, girl! Straight up.” Laughing, he tapped his fist to hers, and an electric jolt shot through her body. She struggled not to grin; it was way bad form to smile at your own snap.

Then, through the exhilaration of the moment, she was thinking how right he was, how rarely it happens, just talking with somebody smart, somebody who could listen, somebody who cared what you had to say.

Kevin lifted an eyebrow at Detective Bell, who was paying for the food, and said, “I know that dude fronting he’s a teacher is five-0.”

She whispered, “Man does sorta have ‘Cop’ written on his forehead.”

“That’s word,” Kevin said, laughing. “I know he’s stepping up for you and all and that’s cool. But I just wanta say I’ma watch yo’ back too. And my boys. We see anything wack, we’ll let him know.”

She was touched by this.

But then troubled. What if Kevin or one of his friends got hurt by that terrible man from the library? She was still sick with sorrow that Dr. Barry had been killed because of her, that the woman on the sidewalk had been wounded. She had a horrible premonition: Kevin laid out in the Williams Funeral Home parlor, like so many other Harlem boys, shot down on the street.

“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.”

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, Beyoncé, 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 . . . .