The Twelfth Card

the crushing weight that rose like flooding water.
    Then Sachs screamed once more—as the sphere, carried by the current of dirt, dropped from the gapinghole in the brick wall and rolled against her immobilized body.
    *   *   *
    Jax was out of his area.
    He’d left Harlem behind, both the place and the state of mind. Left behind the empty lots filled with malt liquor bottles, left behind the storefront tabernacles, the faded, weather-battered posters for Red Devil lye, which black men had used to conk their hair straight in the Malcolm X era, left behind the teenage rapper wannabees and bucket percussion ensembles in Marcus Garvey Park, the stands selling toys and sandals and bling and kente-cloth wall hangings. Left behind all the new redevelopment construction, left behind the tour buses.
    He was now in one of the few places where he’d never bombed a Jax 157, never painted a throw-up. The elegant part of Central Park West.
    Staring at the building where Geneva Settle now was.
    After the incident in the alley, near her house on 118th Street, with Geneva and the guy in the gray car, Jax had jumped in another cab and followed the police cars here. He didn’t know what to make of this place: the two police cars out front, and from the stairs to the sidewalk a ramp, like they make for people in wheelchairs.
    Limping slowly through the park, scoping the building out. What was the girl doing inside? He tried to get a look. But the blinds were drawn.
    Another car—a Crown Vic, the kind the police drive a lot—pulled up and two cops got out, carryinga cheap suitcase, taped together, and boxes of books. Probably Geneva’s, he guessed. She was moving in.
    Protecting her even steadier, he thought, discouraged.
    He stepped into the bushes to get a better view when the door opened, but just then another squad car drove past, slow. It seemed that a cop inside was scanning the park as well as the sidewalk. Jax memorized the number of the building, then turned away and disappeared into the park. He headed north, walking back toward Harlem.
    Feeling the gun in his sock, feeling the tug of his parole officer two hundred miles to the north, who might be thinking about a surprise visit to his Buffalo apartment at this very moment, Jax remembered a question that Ralph the leaning Egyptian prince had asked him: Was what he was doing worth all the risk?
    He considered this now, as he returned home.
    And he thought: Had it been worth the risk twenty years ago, perching on the six-inch iron ledge of the overpass on the Grand Central Parkway, to tag Jax 157 thirty feet above traffic streaming by at sixty miles an hour?
    Had it been worth the risk six years ago, chambering a 12-gauge shell in the breakdown and shoving the muzzle into the face of the armored-truck driver, just to get that $50,000 or $60,000? Enough to help him get over, get his life back on track?
    And he knew that, fuck, Ralph’s wasn’t a question that made any sense, because it suggested there was a choice. Then and now, right or wrong, didn’t matter. Alonzo “Jax” Jackson was going right ahead. If this worked out he’d get back his righteouslife in Harlem, his home, the place that for good and bad had made him what he was—and the place that he himself had helped form, with his thousands of cans of spray paint. He was simply doing what he had to do.
    *   *   *
    Careful.
    In his safe house in Queens, Thompson Boyd was wearing a gas mask/respirator and thick gloves. He was slowly mixing acid and water, then checking the concentration.
    Careful . . .
    This was the tricky part. Certainly the potassium cyanide powder sitting nearby was dangerous—enough to kill thirty or forty people—but in its dried form it was relatively stable. Just like the bomb he’d planted in the police car, the white powder needed to be mixed with sulfuric acid to produce the deadly gas (the infamous Zyklon-B used by the Nazis in their extermination showers).
    But the big “if” is the sulfuric acid. Too weak a concentration will produce the gas slowly, which could give the victims a chance to detect the odor and escape. But too strong an acid—over 20 percent concentration—will cause the cyanide to explode before it’s dissolved, dissipating much of the desired deadly effect.
    Thompson needed the concentration to be as close to 20 percent as possible—for a simple reason: The place he was going to plant the device—that old Central Park West town house where