Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

Cheap pricks.

No longer in his olive-drab army jacket or the gray sweatshirt, but wearing a dusty black T-shirt under a torn beige sports coat (picked out of the garbage the way a real homeless person would do), Jax was sitting on the bench across from the town house on Central Park West, nursing a can wrapped up in a stained, brown-paper bag. Ought to be malt liquor, he thought sourly. Wished it was. But it was only Arizona iced tea. He sat back, like he was thinking about what kind of job he’d like to try for, though also enjoying the cool fall day, and sipped more of the sweet peach drink. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the stunningly clear sky.

He was watching the kid from Langston Hughes walk up, the one who’d just left that town house on Central Park West, where he’d delivered the bag to Geneva Settle. Still no sign of anyone checking out the street from inside, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anybody there. Besides, two police cars sat out front, one squad car and one unmarked, right by that wheelchair ramp. So Jax had waited here, a block away, for the boy to make the delivery.

The skinny kid came up and plopped down on the bench next to the not-really-homeless Graffiti King of Blood.

“Yo, yo, man.”

“Why do you kids say ‘yo’ all the time?” Jax asked, irritated. “And why the fuck do you say it twice?”

“Ever’body say it. Wus yo’ problem, man?”

“You gave her the bag?”

“What up with that dude ain’t got legs?”

“Who?”

“Dude in there ain’t got no legs. Or maybe he got legs but they ain’t work.”

Jax didn’t know what he was talking about. He would rather’ve had a smarter kid deliver the package to the town house, but this was the only one he’d found around the Langston Hughes school yard who had any connection at all with Geneva Settle – his sister sort of knew her. He repeated, “You give her the bag?”

“I give it to her, yeah.”

“What’d she say?”

“I don’t know. Some shit. Thanks. I don’t know.”

“She believed you?”

“She look like she ain’t know who I be at first, then she was cool, yeah. When I mention my sister.”

He gave the kid some bills.

“Phat…Yo, you got anything else fo’ me to do, I’m down, man. I – ”

“Get outa here.”

The kid shrugged and started away.

Jax said, “Wait.”

The loping boy stopped. He turned back.

“What was she like?”

“The bitch? What she look like?”

No, that wasn’t what he was curious about. But Jax didn’t quite know how to phrase the question. And then he decided he didn’t want to ask it. He shook his head. “Go on ’bout your business.”

“Later, man.”

The kid strolled off.

Part of Jax’s mind told him to stay here, where he was. But that’d be stupid. Better to put some distance between himself and the place. He’d find out soon enough, one way or the other, what happened when the girl looked through the bag.

Geneva sat on her bed, lay back, closed her eyes, wondering what she felt so good about.

Well, they’d caught the killer. But that couldn’t be all of the feeling, of course, since the man who’d hired him was still out there somewhere. And then there was also the man with the gun, the one at the school yard, the man in the army jacket.

She should be terrified, depressed.

But she wasn’t. She felt free, elated.

Why?

And then she understood: It was because she’d told her secret. Unburdened her heart about living alone, about her parents. And nobody’d been horrified and shocked and hated her because of the lie. Mr. Rhyme and Amelia had even backed her up, Detective Bell too. They hadn’t freaked, and dimed her out to the counselor.

Damn, it felt fine. How hard it’d been, carrying around this secret – just like Charles had carted his with him (whatever it was). If the former slave had told somebody, would he have avoided all the heartache that followed? According to his letter, he seemed to think so.

Geneva glanced at the shopping bag of books the girls at Langston Hughes had gotten for her. Curiosity got the better of her and she decided to look through them. She lifted the bag onto the bed. As Ronelle’s brother had said, it weighed a ton.

She reached inside and lifted out the Laura Ingalls Wilder book. Then the next one: Geneva laughed out loud. This was even stranger: It was a Nancy Drew mystery. Was this wack, or what? She looked at a few of the other titles, books by Judy Blume, Dr. Seuss, Pat McDonald. Children’s and young adult books. Wonderful authors, she knew them all. But she’d read their stories years ago. What was up with this? Didn’t Ronelle and the kids know her? The most recent books she’d read for pleasure had been novels for adults: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. The last time she’d read Green Eggs and Ham had been ten years ago.

Maybe there was something better in the bottom. She started to reach into it.

A knock on the door startled her.

“Come in.”

Thom entered, carrying a tray with a Pepsi and some snacks on it.

“Hi there,” he said.

“Hi.”

“Thought you’d need some sustenance.” He opened the soda for her. She shook her head at the glass he was about to pour it into. “The can’s fine,” she said. She wanted to keep all the empties so she knew exactly how much to repay Mr. Rhyme.

“And…health food.” He handed her a Kit Kat candy bar, and they laughed.

“Maybe later.” Everybody was trying to fatten her up. Fact was, she just wasn’t used to eating. That was something you did with family around a table, not by yourself, hunched over an unsteady table in a basement as you read a book or jotted notes for a paper about Hemingway.

Geneva sipped the soda, as Thom took over unloading the books for her. He held them up one by one. There was a novel by C. S. Lewis. Another: The Secret Garden .

Still nothing for adults.

“There’s a big one at the bottom,” he said, lifting it out. It was a Harry Potter book, the first one in the series. She’d read it when it had first come out.

“You want it?” Thom asked.

She hesitated. “Sure.”

The aide handed her the heavy volume.

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.”