The Twelfth Card

Alive and dead, Vern Harber was a couch potato.

Thompson took the paintbrush and cardboard bucket to the laundry room and set them in the basin, ran water to soak the brush. He slipped on his jacket.

Jea

“Quart?”

“That’s fine.”

“And some roll-ups!” Lucy called.

“What flavor?”

“Grape.”

“All right. Brit?”

“Cherry!” the girl said. Her memory nudged her. “Please,” she added.

“Grape and cherry and milk.” Pointing at each of the females, according to her order.

Thompson stepped outside and started walking in a convoluted path up and down the streets of Queens, glancing back occasionally to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Breathing cold air into his lungs, exhaling it hotter and in the form of soft musical notes: the Celine Dion song from Titanic.

The killer had kept an eye on Jea

The lean, curly-haired brunette never asked much about where he went, or about the phoney computer salesman job he claimed he had, which required him to be away from home frequently. Never asked details about why his business was so secret he had to keep his home office door locked. She was smart and clever, two very different things, and most any other smart and clever woman would have insisted on being included more in his life. But not Jea

He’d met her at a lunch counter here in Astoria a few years ago after he’d gone to ground following the murder of a Newark drug dealer he’d been hired to kill. Sitting next to Jea

Soon they were dating. The truth about the arm finally came out and one weekend Thompson paid a visit to her ex-husband. Later, Jea

A month later Thompson moved in with her and the children.

It was a good arrangement for Jea

A good arrangement for them, and good for a professional killer too: Someone in his line of work who has a wife or girlfriend and children is far less suspicious than a single person.

But there was another reason he was with her, more important than simple logistics and convenience. Thompson Boyd was waiting. Something had been missing from his life for a long time and he was awaiting its return. He believed that someone like Jea

And what was this missing thing? Simple: Thompson Boyd was waiting for the numbness to go away and for the feeling in his soul to return, the way your foot comes back to life after it’s fallen asleep.

Thompson had many recollections of his childhood in Texas, images of his parents and his aunt Sandra, cousins, friends from school. Watching Texas A &M games on the tube, sitting around the Sears electric organ, Thompson pushing the button for the chords while his aunt or father played the melody as best they could with their pudgy fingers (they ran in the family line). Singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” and the theme from The Green Berets. Playing hearts. Learning how to use tools with his father in the perfectly neat work shed. Walking beside the big man in the desert, marveling at the sunsets, the lava beds, coyotes, the sidewinders, which moved like music but could still sting you to death in a flash.

He recalled his mother’s life of church, packing sandwiches, sun-bathing, sweeping Texas dust out the trailer door and sitting in aluminum chairs with her girlfriends. He recalled his father’s life of church, collecting LP records, spending Saturdays with his boy and weekdays wildcatting on the derricks. He recalled those wonderful Friday evenings, going to the Goldenlight Café on Route 66 for Harleyburgers and fries, Texas swing music pumping through the speakers.

Thompson Boyd wasn’t numb then.

Even during that hard time after a June twister took their double-wide and his mother’s right arm, and nearly her life, even when his father lost his job in the layoffs that swept the Panhandle like an Okie dust storm, Thompson wasn’t numb.

And he sure wasn’t numb when he watched his mother gasp and stifle tears on the streets of Amarillo after some kid called her “one-arm” and Thompson had followed and made sure the boy never made fun of anybody again.

But then came the prison years. And somewhere in those Lysol-stinking halls numbness crawled over feeling and put it to sleep. So deep asleep that he didn’t even feel a blip when he got the word that a driver snoozing at the cab of a Peterbilt killed his parents and aunt simultaneously, the only thing that survived being the shoe-shine kit the boy had made his father for the man’s fortieth birthday. So deep asleep that when, after he left prison and tracked down the guard Charlie Tucker, Thompson Boyd felt nothing as he watched the man die slowly, face purple from the noose, struggling desperately to grip the rope and hoist himself up to stop the strangulation. Which you just can’t do, no matter how strong you are.

Numb, as he’d watched the pendulum of the guard’s corpse, twisting slowly to stillness. Numb, as he’d set the candles on the ground at Tucker’s feet to make the murder look like some psycho, satanic thing and glanced up into the man’s glazed eyes.

Numb…

But Thompson believed he could repair himself, just like he fixed the bathroom door and the loose stair railing at the bungalow. (They were both tasks, the only difference being where you put the decimal point.) Jea

This was also why he whistled – he believed music could transport him back to those earlier days, before prison. People who liked music weren’t numb. People who whistled felt things, they had families, they’d turn the heads of strangers with a good trill. They were people you could stop on the street corner and talk to, people you could offer a french fry to, right off your Harleyburger plate, with giddy music pounding in the next room, ain’t them musicians something, son? How ’bout that?

Do it by the book and the numbness would go away. The feeling would return.

Was it working, he wondered, the regimen he’d set up for himself to get the feeling back in his soul? The whistling, reciting the things he felt he should recite, grape and cherry, cussing, laughing? Maybe a little, he believed. He remembered watching the woman in white that morning, back and forth, back and forth. He could honestly say that he’d enjoyed watching her at work. A small pleasure, but it was a feeling nonetheless. Pretty good.