The Twelfth Card (27 page)

They started to turn the corner but both of them stopped fast.

“Yo, check it out,” Kevin whispered. There was a Crown Vic—clearly an unmarked police car—double-parked in front of an old building.

“That’s her crib? The car’s in front of?”

“Naw. Hers’s two buildings closer. That one there.” He pointed.

It was old but in perfect shape. Flowers in the window boxes, everything clean. Nice curtains. Paint looked new.

Kevin asked, “You going to fuck up the bitch?” He looked Jax up and down.

“What I’m about is my business.”

“Your business, your business . . . . Sure it is,” Kevin said in a soft voice. “Only . . . the reason I’m asking is, ’cause if she
was
to get fucked up—which I have no problem with, I’m saying—but if something
was
to happen to her, yo, check it out: I’d know it
was you. And somebody might come round and wanna talk to me ’bout it. So, I’m thinking, with all that tall paper you carrying around in your pocket there, maybe I had a little more of it, I might forget I even seen you. On th’ other hand, it’s possible I could remember a
lot
’bout you and that you was interested in the little bitch.”

Jax had seen quite a bit of life. Been a graffiti king, been a soldier in Desert Storm, known gangstas in prison and outside, been shot at . . . If there was a rule in this crazy world it was that however stupid you thought people were, they were always happy to be stupider.

In a fraction of a second, Jax grabbed the boy’s collar with his left hand and swung his fist up hard into the boy’s gut, three times, four, five . . .

“Fuck—” was all the boy got out.

The way you fought in prison. Never give ’em a single second to recover.

Again, again, again . . .

Jax let go and the kid rolled into the alley, groaning in pain. With the deliberate, slow movement of a baseball player picking out a bat, Jax bent down and pulled the gun from his sock. As terrified Kevin watched helplessly, the ex-con worked the slide of the automatic to chamber a round then wrapped his do-rag around the barrel a number of times. This was, Jax had learned from DeLisle Marshall on S block, one of the best, and cheapest, ways to muffle the sound of a gunshot.

That evening, 7:30
P.M
., Thompson Boyd had just finished painting a cartoon bear on the wall of Lucy’s room. He stepped back and glanced at his work. He’d done what the book had told him to do and, sure enough, it looked pretty much like a bear. It was the first picture in his life he’d ever painted, outside of school—which is why he’d worked so hard studying the book in his safe house earlier today.

The girls seemed to love it. He thought he himself should be pleased with the picture. But he wasn’t sure. He stared at it for a long time, waiting to feel proud. He didn’t. Oh, well. He stepped into the hallway, glanced at his cell phone. “Got a message,” he said absently. He dialed. “Hey, it’s Thompson. How you doing? Saw you called.”

Jeanne glanced at him then returned to drying the dishes.

“No, kidding?” Thompson chuckled. For a man who didn’t laugh, he thought he sounded real. Of course, he’d done the same thing that morning, in the library, laughing to put the Settle girl at ease, and
that
hadn’t worked so well. He reminded himself not to overact. “Man, that’s a bummer,” he said into the dead phone. “Sure. Won’t take too long, will it? Got that negotiation again tomorrow, yeah, the one we postponed . . . Gimme ten and I’ll see you there.”

He folded the phone closed and said to Jeanne, “Vern’s over at Joey’s. He’s got a flat.”

Vernon Harber had once existed but no longer did. Thompson had killed him some years ago. But because he’d known Vern before he died, Thompson had turned him into a fictional neighborhood buddy he saw occasionally, a sidekick. Like the dead real Vern, the live fictional one drove a Supra and had a girlfriend named Renee and told plenty of funny stories about life on the docks and at the pork store and in his neighborhood. Thompson knew a lot more about Vern and he kept the details in mind. (When you lie, he knew, lie big, ballsy and specific.)

“He drove his Supra over a beer bottle.”

“Is he all right?” Jeanne asked.

“He was just parking. The putz can’t get the lug nuts off by himself.”

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.

Jeanne asked, “Oh, could you get some two-percent on the way home?”

“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 Jeanne when he’d told her he was going out. He’d noted that her concern for Vern seemed real and that she wasn’t the least suspicious, despite the fact he was going to see a man she’d never met. But this was typical. Tonight, he was helping a friend. Sometimes he said he wanted to place an OTB bet. Or he was going to see the boys at Joey’s for a fast one. He rotated his lies.

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 Jeanne Starke.

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 Jeanne at the Greek diner, he’d asked her for the ketchup and then apologized, noting that she had a broken arm and couldn’t reach it. He asked if she was all right, what had happened? She’d deflected the question, though tears filled her eyes. They’d continued to talk.

Soon they were dating. The truth about the arm finally came out and one weekend Thompson paid a visit to her ex-husband. Later, Jeanne told him that a miracle had happened: Her ex had left town and wasn’t even calling the girls anymore, which he’d done once a week, drunk, to rage at them about their mother.

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

It was a good arrangement for Jeanne and her daughters, it seemed. Here was a man who didn’t scream or take a belt to anyone, paid the rent and showed up when he said he would—why, they felt he was the greatest catch on earth. (Prison had taught Thompson a great deal about setting low bars.)

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 Jeanne Starke, a woman without excessive demands and with low expectations, could help him find it.

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, sunbathing, 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.) Jeanne and the girls would bring the feelings back. All he had to do was go through the motions. Do what other people did, normal people, people who weren’t numb: Paint the children’s rooms, watch
Judge Judy
with them, go on picnics in the park. Bring them what they’d asked for. Grape, cherry, milk. Grape, cherry, milk. Try an occasional cuss word, fuck, fuck, shit . . . Because that’s what people said when they were angry. And angry people
felt
things.

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.

Wait: “Pretty
fucking
good,” he whispered.

There, a cuss word.

Maybe he should try the sex thing again (usually once a month, in the morning, he could manage, but truth was he just didn’t want to—if the
mood’
s not there, even Viagra won’t do you much good). He now debated. Yes, that’s what he’d do—give it a couple of days and try with Jeanne. The thought made him uneasy. But maybe he’d give it a shot. That’d be a good test. Yeah, he’d try it and see if he was getting better.

Grape, cherry, milk . . .

Thompson now stopped at a pay phone in front of a Greek deli. He dialed the voice-mail box number again and punched in the code. He listened to a new message, which told him that there’d nearly been a chance to kill Geneva Settle at the school but too many police had been guarding her. The message continued, giving her address, on 118th Street, and reporting that at least one unmarked police car and a squad car were parked nearby, changing positions occasionally. The number of officers guarding her seemed to vary from one to three.

Thompson memorized the address and erased the message then continued on his complicated walk to a six-story apartment building that was considerably more dilapidated than Jeanne’s bungalow. He went
around to the back and opened the door. He climbed the stairs to the apartment that was his main safe house. He stepped inside, locked the door then disarmed the system he’d set up to stop intruders.

This place was a little nicer than the one on Elizabeth Street. It was covered in blond paneling carefully tacked up and featured brown shag carpet that smelled just like what brown shag would smell. There were a half dozen pieces of furniture. The place reminded Thompson of the rec room he and his father had built weekends in the Amarillo bungalow, which had replaced the tornado-shredded trailer.

From a large utility cabinet he carefully removed several jars and carried them to the desk, whistling the theme from
Pocohantas
. The girls had just loved that movie. He opened the toolbox, put on thick rubber gloves and a face mask and goggles and assembled the device that tomorrow would kill Geneva Settle—and anyone near her.