The Twelfth Card

sidewalk and filled with, God bless you, thirty-seven cents.
    Cheap pricks.
    No longer in his olive-drab army jacket or the gray sweatshirt, but wearing a dusty black T-shirt under a torn beige sports coat (picked out of the garbage the way a real homeless person would do), Jax was sitting on the bench across from the town house on Central Park West, nursing a can wrapped up in a stained, brown-paper bag. Ought to be malt liquor, he thought sourly. Wished it was. But it was only Arizona iced tea. He sat back, like he was thinking about what kind of job he’d like to try for, though also enjoying the cool fall day, and sipped more of the sweet peach drink. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the stunningly clear sky.
    He was watching the kid from Langston Hughes walk up, the one who’d just left that town house on Central Park West, where he’d delivered the bag to Geneva Settle. Still no sign of anyone checking out the street from inside, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anybody there. Besides, two police cars sat out front, one squad car and one unmarked, right bythat wheelchair ramp. So Jax had waited here, a block away, for the boy to make the delivery.
    The skinny kid came up and plopped down on the bench next to the not-really-homeless Graffiti King of Blood.
    “Yo, yo, man.”
    “Why do you kids say ‘yo’ all the time?” Jax asked, irritated. “And why the fuck do you say it twice?”
    “Ever’body say it. Wus yo’ problem, man?”
    “You gave her the bag?”
    “What up with that dude ain’t got legs?”
    “Who?”
    “Dude in there ain’t got no legs. Or maybe he got legs but they ain’t work.”
    Jax didn’t know what he was talking about. He would rather’ve had a smarter kid deliver the package to the town house, but this was the only one he’d found around the Langston Hughes school yard who had any connection at all with Geneva Settle—his sister sort of knew her. He repeated, “You give her the bag?”
    “I give it to her, yeah.”
    “What’d she say?”
    “I don’t know. Some shit. Thanks. I don’t know.”
    “She believed you?”
    “She look like she ain’t know who I be at first, then she was cool, yeah. When I mention my sister.”
    He gave the kid some bills.
    “Phat . . . Yo, you got anything else fo’ me to do, I’m down, man. I—”
    “Get outa here.”
    The kid shrugged and started away.
    Jax said, “Wait.”
    The loping boy stopped. He turned back.
    “What was she like?”
    “The bitch? What she look like?”
    No, that wasn’t what he was curious about. But Jax didn’t quite know how to phrase the question. And then he decided he didn’t want to ask it. He shook his head. “Go on ’bout your business.”
    “Later, man.”
    The kid strolled off.
    Part of Jax’s mind told him to stay here, where he was. But that’d be stupid. Better to put some distance between himself and the place. He’d find out soon enough, one way or the other, what happened when the girl looked through the bag.
    *   *   *
    Geneva sat on her bed, lay back, closed her eyes, wondering what she felt so good about.
    Well, they’d caught the killer. But that couldn’t be all of the feeling, of course, since the man who’d hired him was still out there somewhere. And then there was also the man with the gun, the one at the school yard, the man in the army jacket.
    She should be terrified, depressed.
    But she wasn’t. She felt free, elated.
    Why?
    And then she understood: It was because she’d told her secret. Unburdened her heart about living alone, about her parents. And nobody’d been horrified and shocked and hated her because of the lie. Mr. Rhyme and Amelia had even backed her up, Detective Bell too. They hadn’t freaked, and dimed her out to the counselor.
    Damn, it felt fine. How hard it’d been, carrying around this secret—just like Charles had carted his with him (whatever it was). If the former slave had told somebody, would he have avoided all theheartache that followed? According to his letter, he seemed to think so.
    Geneva glanced at the shopping bag of books the girls at Langston Hughes had gotten for her. Curiosity got the better of her and she decided to look through them. She lifted the bag onto the bed. As Ronelle’s brother had said, it weighed a ton.
    She reached inside and lifted out the Laura Ingalls Wilder book. Then the next one: Geneva laughed out loud. This was even stranger: It was a Nancy Drew mystery. Was this wack, or