The Twelfth Card (51 page)

Man, I’m feeling bad.

But ain’t got no choice here.

Things we do ’cause we gotta . . .

Come on, Keesha said to herself. Got to get over. Let’s go. Bring it on . . . .

She crushed out her cigarette and left the park, headed west then north on Malcolm X, past church after church. They were everywhere. Mt. Morris Ascension, Bethelite Community, Ephesus Adventist church, Baptist—plenty of those. A mosque or two, a synagogue.

And the stores and shops: Papaya King, a botanica, a tuxedo-rental shop, a check-cashing outlet. She passed a gypsy cab garage, the owner sitting outside, holding his taped-together dispatch radio, the long cord disappearing into the unlit office. He smiled at her pleasantly. How Lakeesha envied them: the reverends in the grimy storefronts under the neon crosses, the carefree men slipping hot dogs into the steamed buns, the fat man on the cheap chair, with his cigarette and his fucked-up microphone.

They ain’t betraying nobody, she thought.

They ain’t betraying the person was one of their best friends for years.

Snapping her gum, gripping her purse strap hard with her pudgy fingers tipped in black and yellow nails. Ignoring three Dominican boys.

“Psssst.”

She heard “booty.” She heard “bitch.”

“Pssssst.”

Keesh reached into her purse and gripped her spring knife. She nearly flicked it open, just to see ’em flinch. She glared but left the long, sharp blade
where it was, deciding she’d have a world of trouble when she got to the school. Let it go for now.

“Pssst.”

She moved on, her nervous hands opening a pack of gum. Shoving two fruity pieces into her mouth, Lakeesha struggled to find her angry heart.

Get yourself mad, girl. Think of everything Geneva done to piss you off, think of everything she be that you ain’t and never gonna be. The fact the girl was so smart it hurt, that she came to school every single fucking day, that she kept her skinny little white-girl figure without looking like some AIDS ho, that she managed to keep her legs together and told other girls to do the same like some prissy moms.

Acting like she better than us all.

But she wasn’t. Geneva Settle was just another kid from a mommy-got-a-habit, daddy-done-run-off family.

She one of us.

Get mad at the fact that she’d look you in the eye and say, “You can do it, girl, you can do it, you can do it, you can get outa here, you got the world ahead of you.”

Well, no, bitch, sometimes you just
can’t
do it. Sometimes it’s just too fucking much to bear. You need help to get over. You need somebody with benjamins, somebody watching your back.

And for a moment the anger at Geneva boiled up inside her and she gripped the purse strap even tighter.

But she couldn’t hold it. The anger vanished, blew away like it was nothing more than the light brown baby powder she’d sprinkle on her twin cousins’ buns when she changed their diapers.

As Lakeesha walked in a daze past Lenox Terrace
toward their school, where Geneva Settle would soon be, she realized that she couldn’t rely on anger or excuses.

All she could rely on was survival. Sometimes you gotta look out for yourself and take the hand somebody offers you.

Things we do ’cause we gotta . . .

At school, Geneva collected her homework and wouldn’t you know it, her next language arts assignment was to report on Claude McKay’s
Home to Harlem,
the 1928 book that was the first best-selling novel by a black author.

“Can’t I have e. e. cummings?” she asked. “Or John Cheever?”

“It’s our African-American sequence, Gen,” her language arts teacher pointed out, smiling.

“Then Frank Yerby,” she bargained. “Or Octavia Butler.”

“Ah, they’re wonderful authors, Gen,” her teacher said, “but they don’t write about Harlem. That’s what we’re studying in this segment. But I gave you McKay because I thought you’d like him. He’s one of the most controversial writers to come out of the Renaissance. McKay took a lot of flak because he looked at the underside of Harlem. He wrote about the primitive aspects of the place. That upset DuBois and a lot of other thinkers at the time. It’s right up your alley.”

Maybe her father could help her interpret, she thought cynically, since he loved the neighborhood and its patois so much.

“Try it,” the man offered. “You might like it.”

Oh, no, I won’t, Geneva thought.

Outside the school, she joined her father. They came to the bus stop and both closed their eyes as a swirl of chill, dusty air swept around them. They’d
reached a detente of sorts and she’d agreed to let him take her to a Jamaican restaurant that he’d been dreaming about for the past six years.

“Is it even still there?” she asked coolly.

“Dunno. But we’ll find something. Be an adventure.”

“I don’t have much time.” She shivered in the cold.

“Where’s that bus?” he asked.

Geneva looked across the street and frowned. Oh, no . . . . There was Lakeesha. This was
so
her; she hadn’t even listened to what Geneva’d said and had come here anyway.

Keesh waved.

“Who’s that?” her father asked.

“My girlfriend.”

Lakeesha glanced uncertainly toward her father and then gestured for Gen to cross the street.

What’s wrong? The girl’s face was smiling but it was clear she had something on her mind. Maybe she was wondering what Geneva was doing with an older man.

“Wait here,” she told her father. And she started toward Lakeesha, who blinked and seemed to take a deep breath. She opened her purse and reached inside.

What’s the 411 on
this
? Geneva wondered. She crossed the street and paused at the curb. Keesha hesitated then stepped forward. “Gen,” she said, her eyes going dark.

Geneva frowned. “Girl, what’s—”

Keesh stopped fast as a car pulled to the curb past Geneva, who blinked in surprise. Behind the wheel was the school counselor, Mrs. Barton. The woman gestured the student to the car. Geneva hesitated, told Keesh to wait a minute and joined the counselor.

“Hey, Geneva. I just missed you inside.”

“Hi.” The girl was cautious, not sure what the woman knew and didn’t about her parents.

“Mr. Rhyme’s assistant told me that they caught the man who tried to hurt you. And your parents finally got back.”

“My father.” She pointed. “That’s him right there.”

The counselor regarded the stocky man in the shabby T-shirt and jacket. “And everything’s okay?”

Out of earshot, Lakeesha watched them with a frown. Her expression was even more troubled than before. She’d seemed cheerful on the phone, but now that Geneva thought about it, maybe she’d been fronting. And who was that guy she’d been talking to?

Nobody . . .

I don’t think so.

“Geneva?” Mrs. Barton asked. “You all right?”

She looked back at the counselor. “Sorry. Yeah, it’s fine.”

The woman again studied her father closely and then turned her brown eyes on the girl, who looked away.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

“Uhm . . . ”

“What’s the real story here?”

“I—”

It was one of those situations when the truth was going to come out no matter what. “Okay, look, Mrs. Barton, I’m sorry. I wasn’t completely honest. My father’s not a professor. He’s been in prison. But he got released.”

“So where
have
you been living?”

“On my own.”

With no trace of judgment in her eyes the woman nodded. “Your mother?”

“Dead.”

She frowned. “I’m sorry . . . . And is he going to take custody?”

“We haven’t really talked about it. Anything he does he has to get it worked out with the court or something.” She said this to buy time. Geneva had half formulated a plan for her father to come back, technically take custody, but she’d continue to live on her own. “For a few days I’m going to stay with Mr. Rhyme and Amelia, at their place.”

The woman looked once more at her father, who was offering a faint smile toward the pair.

“This’s pretty unusual.”

Geneva said defiantly, “I won’t go into a foster home. I won’t lose everything I’ve been working for. I’ll run away. I’ll—”

“Whoa, slow up.” The counselor smiled. “I don’t think we need to make an issue of anything now. You’ve been through enough. We’ll talk about it in a few days. Where’re you going now?”

“To Mr. Rhyme’s.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

Geneva gestured her father over. The man ambled up to the car, and the girl introduced them.

“Nice to meet you, ma’am. And thanks for looking out for Geneva.”

“Come on, get in.”

Geneva looked across the street. Keesh was still there.

She shouted, “I gotta go. I’ll call you.” She mimicked holding a phone to her ear.

Lakeesha nodded uncertainly, withdrew her hand from her purse.

Geneva climbed into the backseat, behind her father. A glance through the back window at Keesh’s grim face.

Then Mrs. Barton pulled away from the curb and her father started up with another ridiculous history lesson, rambling on and on, you know I did a ’piece once ’bout the Collyer brothers? Homer and Langley. Lived at 128th and Fifth. They were recluses and the weirdest men ever lived. They were terrified of crime in Harlem and barricaded themselves in their apartment, set up booby traps, never threw a single thing out. One of ’em got crushed under a pile of newspapers he’d stacked up. When they died, police had to cart over a hundred tons of trash out of their place. He asked, “You ever hear about them?”

The counselor said she thought she had.

“No,” Geneva replied. And thought: Ask me if I care.

*   *   *

Lincoln Rhyme was directing Mel Cooper to organize the evidence that they’d collected from the bombing scene, in between reviewing some of the evidence-analysis reports that had returned.

A federal team, under Dellray’s direction, had tracked down Jon Earle Wilson, the man whose fingerprints were on the transistor radio bomb in Boyd’s safe house. He’d been collared and a couple of agents were going to bring him over to Rhyme’s for interrogation to shore up the case against Thompson Boyd.

It was then that Bell’s phone rang. He answered, “Bell here . . . Luis, what’s up?” He cocked his head to listen.

Luis . . .

This would be Martinez, who had been tailing Geneva and her father on foot since they’d left Rhyme’s to go to Langston Hughes. They were convinced
that Jax, Alonzo Jackson, was her father and no threat to the girl, and that the terrorist had been working alone. But that didn’t mean Bell and Rhyme were going to let Geneva go anywhere in the immediate future without protection.

But something was wrong. Rhyme could read it in Bell’s eyes. The detective said to Cooper, “We need a DMV check. Fast.” He jotted a tag number on a Post-it note then hung up, handed the slip of paper to the CS tech.

“What’s happening?” Sachs asked.

“Geneva and her father were at the bus stop near the school. A car pulled up. They got inside. Luis wasn’t expecting that and couldn’t get across the street fast enough to stop them.”

“Car? Who was driving?”

“Heavyset black woman. Way he described her, sounds like it might’ve been that counselor, Barton.”

Nothing to worry about necessarily, Rhyme reflected. Maybe the woman just saw them at the bus stop and offered them a ride.

Information from the DMV flickered over his screen.

“What do we have, Mel?” Rhyme asked.

Cooper squinted as he read. He typed some more. He looked up, eyes wide through his thick glasses. “A problem. We have a problem.”

*   *   *

Mrs. Barton was heading into south-central Harlem, moving slowly though the early evening traffic. She slowed as they drove past yet another real estate redevelopment project.

Her father shook his head. “Look at all this.” He nodded at the billboard. “Developers, banks, architects.”
A sour laugh. “Betcha there’s not a single black person running any of ’em.”

Lame, Geneva thought. She wanted to tune him out.

Whining about the past . . .

The counselor glanced at the site and, shrugged. “You see that a lot around here.” She braked and turned down an alley between one of the old buildings being gutted and a deep excavation site.

In response to her father’s questioning glance, Mrs. Barton said, “Shortcut.”

But her father looked around. “Shortcut?”

“Just to miss some of the southbound traffic.”

He looked again, squinted. Then spat out, “Bullshit.”

“Dad!” Geneva cried.

“I know this block. Road’s closed off up ahead. They’re tearing down some old factory.”

“No,” Mrs. Barton said. “I just came this way and—”

But her father grabbed the parking brake and pulled up as hard as he could, then spun the wheel to the left. The car skidded into the brick wall with the wrenching sound of metal and plastic grinding into stone.

Grabbing the counselor’s arm, the man shouted, “She’s with them, baby. Trying to hurt you! Get out, run!”

“Dad, no, you’re crazy! You can’t—”

But the confirmation came a moment later as a pistol appeared from the woman’s pocket. She aimed it at her father’s chest and pulled the trigger. He blinked in shock and jerked back, gripping the wound. “Oh. Oh, my,” he whispered.

Geneva leapt back as the woman turned the silver gun toward her. Just as it fired, her father swung his
fist into the woman’s jaw and stunned her. Flame and bits of gunpowder peppered Geneva’s face but the bullet missed. It blew the car’s rear window into a thousand tiny cubes.

“Run, baby!” her father muttered and slumped against the dashboard.

Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch . . . .

Sobbing, Geneva crawled out the shattered back window and fell to the ground. She struggled to her feet and started sprinting down the ramp into the murky demolition site.

Alina Frazier—the woman fronting as the counselor Patricia Barton—didn’t have the cool of her partner. Thompson Boyd was ice itself. He never got rattled. But Alina had always been emotional. She was furious, cursing, as she scrabbled over the body of Geneva’s father and stumbled out into the alley, looking left and right for the girl.