The Twelfth Card

Then: movement again. Geneva was making her way to the far side of the deserted job site, crawling fast over the ground, using cement mixers, Bobcats and piles of beams and supplies for cover. The girl disappeared behind an oil drum.

Stepping into the shadows for a better view, Frazier aimed at the middle of the drum and fired, hitting the metal with a loud ring.

It seemed to her that dirt danced up into the air just past the container. Had it slammed through the girl too?

But, no, she was up and moving fast to a low wall of rubble – brick, stone, pipes. Just as she vaulted it, Frazier fired again.

The girl tumbled over the other side of the wall with a shrill scream. Something puffed into the air. Dirt and stone dust? Or blood?

Had Frazier hit the girl? She was a good shot – she and her ex-boyfriend, a gunru

Well, go see…

She started slowly down the truck ramp, making sure she didn’t fall; the incline was very steep. But then a car horn began blaring from the alley, behind and above her. It was coming from her car.

Fuck, she thought angrily, the girl’s father was still alive.

Frazier hesitated. Then decided: time to get the hell out of here. Finish dad off. Geneva was probably hit and wouldn’t survive long. But even if she wasn’t wounded, Frazier could track her down later. There’d be plenty of opportunities.

Fucking horn…It seemed louder than the gunshot and had to be attracting attention. Worse, it would cover up the sound of any approaching sirens. Frazier climbed to the street level up the dirt ramp, gasping from the effort. But as she got to the car, she frowned, seeing that it was empty. Geneva’s father wasn’t in the driver’s seat, after all. A trail of blood led to a nearby alleyway, where his body lay. Frazier glanced inside her car. That’s what’d happened: Before he’d crawled away he’d pulled out the car’s jack and wedged it against the horn panel on the steering wheel.

Furious, Frazier yanked it away.

The piercing sound stopped.

She tossed the jack into the backseat and glanced at the man. Was he dead? Well, if not he soon would be. She walked toward him, her gun at her side. Then she paused, frowning… How had a man as badly wounded as this poor motherfucker opened the trunk, unscrewed the jack, lugged it to the front seat and rigged it against the wheel?

Frazier started to look around.

And saw a blur to her right, heard the whoosh of air as the tire iron swept down and crashed into her wrist, sending the gun flying and shooting a breathtaking jolt of pain through her body. The big woman screamed and dropped to her knees, lunging for the gun with her left hand. Just as she grabbed it, Geneva swung the iron again and caught the woman in the shoulder with a solid clonk. Frazier rolled to the ground, the gun sliding out of her reach. Blinded by the pain and the rage, the woman lunged and tackled the girl before she could swing the rod again. Geneva went down hard, the breath knocked out of her.

The woman turned toward where the pistol lay but, choking and gasping, Geneva crawled forward, grabbed her right arm and bit Frazier’s shattered wrist. The pain that could be no worse rose like a shriek through her. Frazier swung her good fist into the girl’s face and co

Standing unsteadily, Frazier looked for the gun, which was ten feet away. Don’t need it, don’t want it. The tire iron’d do just fine. Seething with anger, she picked it up and started forward. She looked down at the girl with undiluted hate and lifted the metal rod above her head. Geneva cringed and covered her face with her hands.

Then a voice from behind the big woman shouted, “No!”

Frazier turned to see that redheaded policewoman from the crippled man’s apartment walking slowly forward, her large automatic pistol held in both hands.

Alina Frazier looked down at the revolver nearby.

“I’d like the excuse,” the policewoman said. “I really would.”

Frazier slumped, tossed the tire iron aside and, feeling faint, dropped into a sitting position. She cradled her shattered hand.

The cop moved close and kicked the pistol and tire iron away, as Geneva rose to her feet and staggered toward a duo of medics who were ru

Tears of pain in her eyes, Frazier demanded, “I need a doctor.”

“You’ll have to wait in line,” the policewoman muttered and slipped a plastic restraint around her wrists with what, under the circumstances, Frazier decided, was really a pretty gentle touch.

“He’s in stable condition,” Lon Sellitto a

Rhyme nodded at this news about Jax Jackson. Whatever “stable” meant, at least the man was alive, for which Rhyme was immensely grateful – for Geneva ’s sake.

The girl herself had been treated for contusions and abrasions and released.

It had been a photo finish to save her from Boyd’s accomplice. Mel Cooper had run the tags on the car that the girl and her father had gotten into and found it registered to someone named Alina Frazier. A fast check of NCIC and state databases revealed that she had a record: a manslaughter charge in Ohio and two assaults with deadly weapons in New York, as well as a slew of sealed juvie offenses.

Sellitto had put out an Emergency Vehicle Locator, which alerted all law enforcers in the area to look for Frazier’s sedan. A traffic enforcement cop had radioed a short time later that the vehicle had been seen near a demolition site in South Harlem. There’d also been a report of shots fired in the vicinity. At Rhyme’s town house Amelia Sachs jumped into her Camaro and sped to the scene, where she found Frazier about to beat Geneva to death.

Frazier had been interrogated but was no more cooperative than her accomplice. Rhyme guessed that one had to think long and hard about betraying Thompson Boyd, especially in jail, given the long reach of his prison co

Was Geneva finally safe or not? Most likely she was. Two killers under wraps and the main actor blown to pieces. Sachs had searched Alina Frazier’s apartment and found nothing except weapons and cash – no information that would suggest there was anyone else who wanted to kill Geneva Settle. Jon Earle Wilson, the ex-con from New Jersey who’d made the booby trap in Boyd’s Queens safe house, was presently en route to Rhyme’s, and the criminalist hoped he’d confirm their conclusions. Still, Rhyme and Bell decided to dedicate a uniformed officer in a squad car to protection detail for Geneva.

Now, a computer sounded a friendly chirp and Mel Cooper looked over at the screen. He opened an email. “Ah, the mystery is solved.”

“Which mystery would that be?” Rhyme said this gruffly. His moods, forever fragile, tended to sour toward the end of a case, when boredom loomed.

“‘Winskinskie.’”

The Indian word on the ring Sachs had found around the finger bone beneath the ruins of Potters’ Field tavern.

“And?”

“This’s from a professor at the University of Maryland. Aside from the literal translation in the Delaware language, ‘Winskinskie’ was a title in the Tammany Society.”