The Twelfth Card

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 hisfist into the woman’s jaw and stunned her. Flame and bits of gunpowder peppered Geneva’s face but the bullet missed. It blew the car’s rear window into a thousand tiny cubes.
    “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 hadfucked 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