The Twelfth Card

“Fu

“You’ve been putting off the test, but you’ve known all along you could do that?”

“I didn’t know I could. Until now. I wasn’t going to try – I was afraid it wouldn’t work. So I was going to give up all the exercise, just stop worrying about it.” He shrugged. “But I changed my mind. I wanted to give it a shot. But just us, no machines or doctors around.”

Not by myself, he added, though silently.

“And you didn’t tell me!” She slapped him on the arm.

“I didn’t feel that.”

They laughed.

“It’s amazing, Rhyme,” she whispered and hugged him hard. “You did it. You really did it.”

“I’ll try it again.” Rhyme looked at Sachs, then at his hand.

He paused a moment, then sent a burst of energy from his mind streaking through the nerves to his right hand. Each finger twitched a little. And then, as ungainly as a newborn colt, his hand swiveled across a two-inch Grand Canyon of blanket and seated itself firmly against Sachs’s wrist. He closed his thumb and index finger around it.

Tears in her eyes, she laughed with delight.

“How ’bout that,” he said.

“So you’ll keep up with the exercises?”

He nodded.

“We’ll set up the test with Dr. Sherman?” she asked.

“I suppose we could. Unless something else comes up. Been a busy time lately.”

“We’ll set up the test,” she said firmly.

She shut the light out and lay close to him. Which he could sense, though not feel.

In silence, Rhyme stared at the ceiling. Just as Sachs’s breathing stilled, he frowned, aware of an odd sensation trickling through his chest, where there ought to be none. At first he thought it was phantom. Then, alarmed, he wondered if it was perhaps the start of an attack of dysreflexia, or worse. But he realized that, no, this was something else entirely, something not rooted in nerve or muscle or organ. A scientist always, he analyzed the sensation empirically and noted that it was similar to what he’d felt watching Geneva Settle face down the bank’s attorney. Similar too to when he was reading about Charles Singleton’s mission to find justice at the Potters’ Field tavern that terrible night in July so many years ago, or about his passion for civil rights.

Then, suddenly, Rhyme understood what he was feeling: It was simple pride. Just like he’d been proud of Geneva and of her ancestor, he was proud of his own accomplishment. By tackling his exercises and then tonight testing himself, Lincoln Rhyme had confronted the terrifying, the impossible. Whether he’d regained any movement or not was irrelevant; the sensation came from what he had undeniably achieved: wholeness, the same wholeness that Charles had written of. He realized that nothing else – not politicians or fellow citizens or your haywire body – could make you a three-fifths man; it was solely your decision to view yourself as a complete or partial person and to live your life accordingly.

All things considered, he supposed, this understanding was as inconsequential as the slight movement he’d regained in his hand. But that didn’t matter. He thought of his profession: How a tiny flake of paint leads to a car that leads to a parking lot where a faint footprint leads to a doorway that reveals a fiber from a discarded coat with a fingerprint on the sleeve button – the one surface that the perp forgot to wipe clean.

The next day a tactical team knocks on his door.

And justice is served, a victim saved, a family reunited. All thanks to a minuscule bit of paint.

Small victories – that’s what Dr. Sherman had said. Small victories…Sometimes they’re all you can hope for, Lincoln Rhyme reflected, as he felt sleep closing in.

But sometimes they’re all you need.

Author’s Note

Authors are only as good as the friends and fellow professionals around them, and I’m extremely fortunate to be surrounded by a truly wonderful ensemble: Will and Tina Anderson, Alex Bonham, Louise Burke, Robby Burroughs, Britt Carlson, Jane Davis, Julie Reece Deaver, Jamie Hodder-Williams, John Gilstrap, Cahty Gleason, Carolyn Mays, Emma Longhurst, Dianal Mackay, Tara Parsons, Carolyn Reidy, David Rosenthal, Marysue Rucci, Deborah Schneider, Vivie

Special thanks, as always, to Madelyn Warcholik.

For those readers browsing through guide books in hopes of taking a walking tour of Gallows Heights, you can stop searching. While my depiction of life in nineteenth-century Manhattan is otherwise accurate and there were indeed a number of such villages on the Upper West Side that ultimately were swallowed up by the city’s urban sprawl, Gallows Heights and the nefarious doings I describe there are solely creations of my imagination. The eerie name served my purpose, and I figured that Boss Tweed and his cronies at Tammany Hall wouldn’t mind if I laid a few more crimes at their feet. After all, as Thompson Boyd would say, “It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point.”

About the Author

Former journalist, folksinger and attorney Jeffery Deavers’ novels have appeared on a number of best-seller lists around the world, including The New York Times, the Times of London and the Los Angeles Times. The author of twenty novels, he’s won a Steel Dagger (for Garden of Beasts) and a Short Story Dagger (for a story in Twisted) from the British Crime Writers Association, and has been nominated for five Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony Award and a Gumshoe Award. He is also a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and is a wi