The Twelfth Card

“Oh, man,” Jax said, his voice hollow. “I don’t need this shit.”

“Well, guess what, so

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 pla

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 fu

“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 co

“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, “Wo

Rhyme asked, “You’re saying -?”

“That’s right.” Jax sighed. “ Geneva. She’s my little girl.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

“From the begi

“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.”

The sorrow in his face seemed real. “There were signs she was a troubled soul when we hooked up. But, you know, nothing like love to make you a blind fool. Anyways, we were going to be kicked out of the apartment and I didn’t have money for Geneva ’s clothes or schoolbooks or even food sometimes. That girl needed a normal life. I thought if I could get together some benjamins I’d get Venus into treatment or something, get her straight. And if she wouldn’t do it, then I’d take Geneva away from her, give the girl a good home.

“What happened was this buddy, Joey Stokes, told me ’bout this deal he had going on up in Buffalo. Word was up there was some armored car making fat runs every Saturday, picking up receipts from malls outside of town. Couple of lazy guards. It’d be a milk run.

“Joey and me left on Saturday morning, thinking we’d be back with fifty, sixty thousand each that night.” A sad shake of the head. “Oh, man, I don’t know what I was doing, listening to that claiming dude. The minute the driver handed over the money, everything went bad. He had this secret alarm we didn’t know about. He hit it and next thing there’re sirens all over the place.