The Twelfth Card

Geneva closed her eyes for a moment. Then she asked, “How far down?”

“Two months.”

“Hook yourself up with a doctor. We’ll go to the clinic, you and me. I’ll -”

Her friend frowned. “Why I do that? It ain’t like I laid no baby on him. He say he use protection if I say so but he really want to have a baby with me. He say it be like part of both of us.”

“It was a line, Keesh. He’s working you.”

Her friend glared. “Oh, that cold.”

“No, that’s word, girl. He’s been fronting. He’s working some angle.” Geneva wondered what he wanted from her. It wouldn’t be grades, not in Keesha’s case. Probably money. Everybody in school knew she worked hard at her two jobs and saved what she earned. Her parents had income too. Her moms’d worked for the Postal Service for years and her father had a job at CBS and another one nights at the Sheraton Hotel. Her brother worked, as well. Kevin’d have an eye on the whole family’s benjamins.

“You loan him any money?” Geneva asked.

Her friend looked down. Said nothing. Meaning yes.

“We had a deal, you and me. We were going to graduate, go to college.”

Lakeesha wiped tears from her round face with her round hand. “Oh, Gen, you a trip. What planet you be livin’ on? We talk, you and me, ’bout college and fancy jobs but fo’ me, it just talk. You write yo’ papers like they nothin’ and take yo’ tests and you be number one at ever’thing. You know I ain’t like that.”

“You were going to be the successful one, with your business. Remember, girl? I’ll be a poor professor somewhere, eating tuna out of a can and having Cheerios for di

Keesh shook her head, her braids dangling. “Shit, girl, that just claimin’. I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Best I can hope for is what I doin’ now – servin’ up salads and burgers at T.G.I. Friday’s. Or doing braids and extensions till they go outa style. Which you ask me’ll be all of six months.”

Geneva gave a weak smile. “We always said ’fros’d be coming back in.”

Keesha laughed. “Word. All you need fo’ them is a pick and spray; ain’t no need fo’ no fresh artist like me.” She twined her own blonde extensions around her finger then lowered her hands, her smile fading. “By myself, I’ll end up a played-out old bag. Only way I’ma get over is with a man.”

“Now who’s talking trash ’bout herself, girl? Kevin’s been feeding you crap. You never used to talk this way.”

“He take care of me. He be lookin’ steady for work. An’ he promise he help me take care of the baby. He different. He not like them other boys he hang with.”

“Yes, he is. You can’t give up, Keesh. Don’t do it! Stay in school at least. You really want a baby, fine, but stay in school. You can – ”

“You ain’t my moms, girl,” Keesh snapped. “I know what I’m about.” Anger flashed in the girl’s eyes – all the more heartbreaking because it was the very same fury that had filled the girl’s round face when she stepped up to protect Geneva from the Delano or St. Nicholas project girls moving on her in the street.

Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch…

Then Keesh added softly, “What it is, girl, he sayin’ I can’t hang with you no more.”

“You can’t -”

“Kevin say you treat him bad at school.”

“Treated him bad?” A cold laugh. “He wanted me to help him cheat. I said no.”

“I told him it was fucked up, what he was sayin’, me and you being so tight and ever’thing. But he wouldn’t listen. He say I can’t see you none.”

“So you’re choosing him,” Geneva said.

“I ain’t got no choice.” The big girl looked down. “I can’t take no present from you. Here.” She thrust the necklace into Geneva ’s hand and released it fast, as if she were letting go of a hot pan. It fell to the filthy sidewalk.

“Don’t do it, Keesh. Please!”

Geneva reached for the girl but her fingers closed on nothing but cool air.

Chapter Forty-Five

Ten days after the meeting with Sanford Bank President Gregory Hanson and his lawyer, Lincoln Rhyme was having a phone conversation with Ron Pulaski, the young rookie, who was on medical leave but expected to return to duty in a month or so. His memory was coming back and he was helping them shore up the case against Thompson Boyd.

“So you going to a Halloween party?” Pulaski asked. Then paused and added a quick “Or whatever.” The last two words probably were meant to counteract any faux pas created by suggesting that a quadriplegic might attend parties.

But Rhyme put him at ease by saying, “I am, as a matter of fact. I’m going as Gle

Sachs stifled a laugh.

“Really?” the rookie asked. “Uhm, who’s that exactly?”

“Why don’t you look it up, Patrolman.”

“Yes, sir. I will.”

Rhyme disco

He was gazing at the card when the doorbell rang.

Lon Sellitto, probably. He was due soon from a therapy session. He’d stopped rubbing the phantom bloodstain and practicing his Billy the Kid quick draw – which nobody’d yet explained to Rhyme. He’d tried to ask Sachs about it but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say much. Which was fine. Sometimes, Lincoln Rhyme firmly believed, you just didn’t need to know all the details.

But his visitor at the moment, it turned out, wasn’t the rumpled detective.

Rhyme glanced into the doorway and saw Geneva Settle standing there, listing against her book bag. “Welcome,” he said.

Sachs too said hello, pulling off the safety glasses she’d been wearing as she filled out chain-of-custody cards for blood samples she’d collected at a homicide crime scene that morning.

Wesley Goades had all the paperwork ready to file in the lawsuit against Sanford Bank and reported to Geneva that she could expect a realistic offer from Hanson by Monday. If not, the legal cruise missile had warned his opponents that he would file suit the next day. A press conference would accompany the event (Goades’s opinion was that the bad publicity would last considerably longer than an “ugly ten minutes”).

Rhyme looked the girl over. Unseasonably warm weather made gangsta sweats and stocking caps impractical so she was in blue jeans and a sleeve-less T-shirt with Guess! in glittery letters across the chest. She’d gained a little weight, her hair was longer. She even had some makeup on (Rhyme had wondered what was in the bag that Thom had mysteriously slipped her the other day). The girl looked good.

Geneva’s life had achieved a certain stability. Jax Jackson had been released from the hospital and was undergoing physical therapy. Thanks to some prodding by Sellitto, the man had been officially transferred to the care and feeding of the New York City parole authorities. Geneva was living in his minuscule apartment in Harlem, an arrangement that was not as dire as she’d anticipated (the girl had confessed this not to Rhyme or Roland Bell but to Thom – who’d become a mother hen to the girl and invited her to the town house regularly, to give her cooking lessons, watch TV and argue books and politics, none of which Rhyme had any interest in). As soon as they could afford a bigger place, she and her father were going to have Aunt Lilly move in with them.

The girl had given up her job slinging McHash and was now employed after school by Wesley Goades as a legal researcher and gofer. She was also helping him set up the Charles Singleton Trust, which would disburse the settlement money to the freedman’s heirs. Geneva’s interest in fleeing the city at the earliest opportunity for a life in London or Rome hadn’t flagged, but the cases that Rhyme overheard her passionately talking about all seemed to involve Harlem residents who’d been discriminated against because they were black, Latino, Islamic, women or poor.