Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

Breathing deeply, looking up and down the deserted alley. Stalking back and forth. Where could the little bitch -?

A flash of gray to her right: Geneva was crawling out from behind a scabby blue Dumpster and disappearing deeper into the job site. The woman started off in pursuit, panting. She was large, yes, but also very strong and she moved quickly. You could let prison soften you, or you could let prison turn you into stone. She’d chosen the second.

Frazier’d been a gangsta in the early nineties, the leader of a girl wolf pack roaming Times Square and the Upper East Side, where tourists and residents – who’d be suspicious of a cluster of teen boys – didn’t think anything of a handful of boisterous sistas, toting Daffy Dan and Macy’s shopping bags. That is, until the knives or guns appeared and the rich bitches lost their cash and jewelry. After stints in juvie she’d gone down big and done time for manslaughter – it should’ve been murder, but the kid prosecutor had fucked up. After release she’d returned to New York. Here, she’d met Boyd through the guy she was living with, and when Frazier broke up with the claimer, Boyd had called her. At first she thought it was just one of those white-guy-hot-for-a-black-girl things. But when she’d taken up his invitation for coffee, he hadn’t come on to her at all. He’d just looked her over with those weird, dead eyes of his and said that it’d be helpful to have a woman work with him on some jobs. Was she interested?

Jobs? she’d asked, thinking drugs, thinking guns, thinking perped TVs.

But he’d explained in a whisper what his line of work was.

She’d blinked.

Then he’d added it could net her upwards of fifty thousand bucks for a few days’ work.

A brief pause. Then a grin. “Damn straight.”

For the Geneva Settle job, though, they were making five times that. This turned out to be a fair price, since it was the hardest kill they’d ever worked. After the hit at the museum yesterday morning hadn’t worked out, Boyd had called her and asked for her help (even offering an extra $50,000 if she killed the girl herself). Frazier, always the smartest in her crews, had come up with the idea of fronting as the counselor and had a fake board of education ID made up. She’d started calling public schools in Harlem, asking to speak to any of Geneva Settle’s teachers, and had received a dozen variations on, “She’s not enrolled here. Sorry.” Until Langston Hughes High, where some office worker had said that, yes, this was her school. Frazier had then simply put on a cheap business suit, dangled the ID over her imposing chest and strolled into the high school like she owned the place.

There, she’d learned about the girl’s mysterious parents, the apartment on 118th Street and – from that Detective Bell and the other cops – about the Central Park West town house and who was guarding Geneva. She’d fed all this information to Boyd to help in planning the kill.

She staked out the girl’s apartment near Morningside – until it got too risky because of Geneva’s bodyguards. (She’d been caught in the act this afternoon, when a squad car pulled her over near the place, but it turned out the cops hadn’t been looking for her.)

Frazier had talked a guard at Langston Hughes into giving her the security video of the school yard, and with that prop, she managed to get inside the crippled man’s town house, where she learned yet more information about the girl.

But then Boyd had been nailed – he’d told her all along how good the police were – and now it was up to Alina Frazier to finish the job if she wanted the rest of the fee, $125,000.

Gasping for breath, the big woman now paused thirty feet down a ramp that led to the foundation level of the excavation site. Squinting against a blast of low sun from the west, trying to see where the little bitch had gone. Damn, girl, show yourself.

Then: movement again. Geneva was making her way to the far side of the deserted job site, crawling fast over the ground, using cement mixers, Bobcats and piles of beams and supplies for cover. The girl disappeared behind an oil drum.

Stepping into the shadows for a better view, Frazier aimed at the middle of the drum and fired, hitting the metal with a loud ring.

It seemed to her that dirt danced up into the air just past the container. Had it slammed through the girl too?

But, no, she was up and moving fast to a low wall of rubble – brick, stone, pipes. Just as she vaulted it, Frazier fired again.

The girl tumbled over the other side of the wall with a shrill scream. Something puffed into the air. Dirt and stone dust? Or blood?

Had Frazier hit the girl? She was a good shot – she and her ex-boyfriend, a gunrunner in Newark, had spent hours picking off rats in abandoned buildings on the outskirts of town, trying out his products. She thought she’d been on the mark now. But she couldn’t wait long to find out; people would’ve heard the gunshots. Some’d ignore them, sure, and some’d think the workers were still on the job with heavy equipment. But at least one or two good citizens might be calling 911 just about now.

Well, go see…

She started slowly down the truck ramp, making sure she didn’t fall; the incline was very steep. But then a car horn began blaring from the alley, behind and above her. It was coming from her car.

Fuck, she thought angrily, the girl’s father was still alive.

Frazier hesitated. Then decided: time to get the hell out of here. Finish dad off. Geneva was probably hit and wouldn’t survive long. But even if she wasn’t wounded, Frazier could track her down later. There’d be plenty of opportunities.

Fucking horn…It seemed louder than the gunshot and had to be attracting attention. Worse, it would cover up the sound of any approaching sirens. Frazier climbed to the street level up the dirt ramp, gasping from the effort. But as she got to the car, she frowned, seeing that it was empty. Geneva’s father wasn’t in the driver’s seat, after all. A trail of blood led to a nearby alleyway, where his body lay. Frazier glanced inside her car. That’s what’d happened: Before he’d crawled away he’d pulled out the car’s jack and wedged it against the horn panel on the steering wheel.

Furious, Frazier yanked it away.

The piercing sound stopped.

She tossed the jack into the backseat and glanced at the man. Was he dead? Well, if not he soon would be. She walked toward him, her gun at her side. Then she paused, frowning… How had a man as badly wounded as this poor motherfucker opened the trunk, unscrewed the jack, lugged it to the front seat and rigged it against the wheel?

Frazier started to look around.

And saw a blur to her right, heard the whoosh of air as the tire iron swept down and crashed into her wrist, sending the gun flying and shooting a breathtaking jolt of pain through her body. The big woman screamed and dropped to her knees, lunging for the gun with her left hand. Just as she grabbed it, Geneva swung the iron again and caught the woman in the shoulder with a solid clonk. Frazier rolled to the ground, the gun sliding out of her reach. Blinded by the pain and the rage, the woman lunged and tackled the girl before she could swing the rod again. Geneva went down hard, the breath knocked out of her.

The woman turned toward where the pistol lay but, choking and gasping, Geneva crawled forward, grabbed her right arm and bit Frazier’s shattered wrist. The pain that could be no worse rose like a shriek through her. Frazier swung her good fist into the girl’s face and connected with her jaw. Geneva gave a cry and blinked tears as she rolled, helpless, onto her back. Frazier climbed unsteadily to her feet, cradling her bloody, broken wrist, and kicked the girl in the belly. The teenager began to retch.