Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

“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 face-down 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 fire-fighters 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.”