The Twelfth Card

cigarette box or butcher block table. “Big or small,” his father taught, “you put the same amount of skill into what you’re doing, son. One’s not better or harder than the other. It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point.”
    His father was a good teacher and he was proud of what his son built. When Hart Boyd died he had with him a shoeshine kit the boy had made, and a wooden key chain in the shape of an Indian head with the wood-burned letters “Dad” on it.
    It was fortunate, as it turned out, that Thompson learned these skills because that’s what the business of death is all about. Mechanics and chemistry. No different from carpentry or painting or car repair.
    Where you put the decimal point.
    Standing at the checkout stand, he paid—cash, of course—and thanked the clerk. He took the shopping bag in his gloved hands. He started out the door, paused and looked at a small electric lawn mower, green and yellow. It was perfectly clean, polished, an emerald jewel of a device. It had a curious appeal to him. Why? he wondered. Well, since he’d been thinking of his father it occurred to him that the machine reminded him of times he’d mow the tiny yard behind his parents’ trailer, Sunday morning, then go inside to watch the game with his dad while his mother baked.
    He remembered the sweet smell of the leaded gas exhaust, remembered the gunshot-sounding crack when the blade hit a stone and flung it into the air, the numbness in his hands from the vibration of the grips.
    Numb, the way you’d feel as you lay dying from a sidewinder snakebite, he assumed.
    He realized that the clerk was speaking to him.
    “What?” Thompson asked.
    “Make you a good deal,” the clerk said, nodding at the mower.
    “No thanks.”
    Stepping outside, he wondered why he’d spaced out—what had so appealed to him about the mower, why he wanted it so much. Then he had the troubling idea that it wasn’t the family memory at all. Maybe it was because the machine was really a small guillotine, a very efficient way to kill.
    Maybe that was it.
    Didn’t like that thought. But there it was.
    Numb . . .
    Whistling faintly, a song from his youth, Thompson started up the street, carrying the shopping bag in one hand and, in the other, his briefcase, containing his gun and billy club and a few other tools of the trade.
    He continued up the street, into Little Italy, where the crews were cleaning up after the street fair yesterday. He grew cautious, observing several police cars. Two officers were talking to a Korean fruit stand owner and his wife. He wondered what that was about. Then he continued on to a pay phone. He checked his voice mail once more, but there were no messages yet about Geneva’s whereabouts. That wasn’t a concern. His contact knew Harlem pretty good, and it’d only be a matter of time until Thompson found out where the girl went to school and where she lived. Besides, he could use the free time. He had another job, one that he’d been planning for even longer than Geneva Settle’s death, and one that was just as important as that job.
    More important, really.
    And funny, now that he thought about it—this one also involved children.
    *   *   *
    “Yeah?” Jax said into his cell phone.
    “Ralph.”
    “S’up, dog?” Jax wondered if the skinny little pharaoh was leaning against something at the moment. “You get the word from our friend?” Meaning the character reference DeLisle Marshall.
    “Yeah.”
    “And the Graffiti King’s cool?” Jax asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Good. So where are we on all this?”
    “Okay, I found what you want, man. It’s—”
    “Don’t say anything.” Cell phones were the devil’s own invention when it came to incriminating evidence. He gave the man an intersection on 116th Street. “Ten minutes.”
    Jax disconnected and started up the street, as two ladies in their long overcoats, wearing elaborate church hats and clutching well-worn Bibles, detoured out of his way. He ignored their uneasy looks.
    Smoking, walking steady with his gunshot-not-gangsta limp, Jax inhaled the air, high on being home. Harlem . . . looking around him at stores, restaurants and street vendors. You could buy anything here: West African woven cloth—kente and Malinke—and Egyptian ankhs, Bolga baskets, masks and banners and framed pictures of silhouetted men and women on African National Congress black, green and yellow. Posters too: Malcolm X, Martin Luther