The Twelfth Card

It was then that Bell’s phone rang. He answered, “Bell here…Luis, what’s up?” He cocked his head to listen.

Luis…

This would be Martinez, who had been tailing Geneva and her father on foot since they’d left Rhyme’s to go to Langston Hughes. They were convinced that Jax, Alonzo Jackson, was her father and no threat to the girl, and that the terrorist had been working alone. But that didn’t mean Bell and Rhyme were going to let Geneva go anywhere in the immediate future without protection.

But something was wrong. Rhyme could read it in Bell’s eyes. The detective said to Cooper, “We need a DMV check. Fast.” He jotted a tag number on a Post-it note then hung up, handed the slip of paper to the CS tech.

“What’s happening?” Sachs asked.

“Geneva and her father were at the bus stop near the school. A car pulled up. They got inside. Luis wasn’t expecting that and couldn’t get across the street fast enough to stop them.”

“Car? Who was driving?”

“Heavyset black woman. Way he described her, sounds like it might’ve been that counselor, Barton.”

Nothing to worry about necessarily, Rhyme reflected. Maybe the woman just saw them at the bus stop and offered them a ride.

Information from the DMV flickered over his screen.

“What do we have, Mel?” Rhyme asked.

Cooper squinted as he read. He typed some more. He looked up, eyes wide through his thick glasses. “A problem. We have a problem.”

Mrs. Barton was heading into south-central Harlem, moving slowly though the early evening traffic. She slowed as they drove past yet another real estate redevelopment project.

Her father shook his head. “Look at all this.” He nodded at the billboard. “Developers, banks, architects.” A sour laugh. “Betcha there’s not a single black person ru

Lame, Geneva thought. She wanted to tune him out.

Whining about the past…

The counselor glanced at the site and, shrugged. “You see that a lot around here.” She braked and turned down an alley between one of the old buildings being gutted and a deep excavation site.

In response to her father’s questioning glance, Mrs. Barton said, “Shortcut.”

But her father looked around. “Shortcut?”

“Just to miss some of the southbound traffic.”

He looked again, squinted. Then spat out, “Bullshit.”

“Dad!” Geneva cried.

“I know this block. Road’s closed off up ahead. They’re tearing down some old factory.”

“No,” Mrs. Barton said. “I just came this way and -”

But her father grabbed the parking brake and pulled up as hard as he could, then spun the wheel to the left. The car skidded into the brick wall with the wrenching sound of metal and plastic grinding into stone.

Grabbing the counselor’s arm, the man shouted, “She’s with them, baby. Trying to hurt you! Get out, run!”

“Dad, no, you’re crazy! You can’t -”

But the confirmation came a moment later as a pistol appeared from the woman’s pocket. She aimed it at her father’s chest and pulled the trigger. He blinked in shock and jerked back, gripping the wound. “Oh. Oh, my,” he whispered.

Geneva leapt back as the woman turned the silver gun toward her. Just as it fired, her father swung his fist into the woman’s jaw and stu

“Run, baby!” her father muttered and slumped against the dashboard.

Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch…

Sobbing, Geneva crawled out the shattered back window and fell to the ground. She struggled to her feet and started sprinting down the ramp into the murky demolition site.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Alina Frazier – the woman fronting as the counselor Patricia Barton – didn’t have the cool of her partner. Thompson Boyd was ice itself. He never got rattled. But Alina had always been emotional. She was furious, cursing, as she scrabbled over the body of Geneva ’s father and stumbled out into the alley, looking left and right for the girl.

Furious that Boyd was in jail, furious that the girl was getting away.

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 pla

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.

//