The Twelfth Card

goin’ to Langston Hughes. You know it? The high school.”
    “Sure, I know it. She there now?”
    “I don’t know. You ask where, not when. Only I hear something else from my boys in the hood.”
    The hood . . .
    “They be saying somebody got her back. Stayin’ on her steady.”
    “Who?” Jax asked. “Cops?” Wondering why he even bothered. Of course it’d be them.
    “Seem to be.”
    Jax finished his fruit juice. “And the other thing?”
    Ralph frowned.
    “That I asked for.”
    “Oh.” The pharaoh looked around. Then pulled a paper bag from his pocket and slipped it into Jax’s hand. He could feel the gun was an automatic and that it was small. Good. Like he asked. Loose bullets clicked in the bottom of the sack.
    “So,” Ralph said cautiously.
    “So.” Jax pulled some benjamins from his pocket and handed them to Ralph and then leaned close to the man. He smelled malt and onion and mango. “Now, listen up. Our business’s done with. If Ihear you told anybody ’bout this, or even mention my name, I will find you and cap your fucked-up ass. You can ask DeLisle and he will tell you I am one coal-bad person to cross. You know what I’m saying?”
    “Yes, sir,” Ralph whispered to his mango juice.
    “Now get the fuck outa here. No, go that way. And don’t look back.”
    Then Jax was moving in the opposite direction, back to 116th Street, losing himself in the crowds of shoppers. Head down, moving fast, despite the limp, but not so fast as to attract attention.
    Up the street another tour bus squealed to a stop in front of the site of the long-dead Harlem World, and some anemic rap dribbled from a speaker inside the gaudy vehicle. But at the moment the blood-painting King of Graffiti wasn’t reflecting on Harlem, hip-hop or his criminal past. He had his gun. He knew where the girl was. The only thing he was thinking about now was how long it would take him to get to Langston Hughes High.

Chapter Twelve
    The petite Asian woman eyed Sachs cautiously.
    The uneasiness was no wonder, the detective supposed, considering that she was surrounded by a half dozen officers who were twice her size—and that another dozen waited on the sidewalk outside her store.
    “Good morning,” Sachs said. “This man we’re looking for? It’s very important we find him. He may’ve committed some serious crimes.” She was speaking a bit more slowly than she supposed was politically correct.
    Which was, it turned out, a tidy faux pas.
    “I understand that,” the woman said in perfect English, with a French accent, no less. “I told those other officers everything I could think of. I was pretty scared. With him trying the stocking cap on, you understand. Pulling it down like it was a mask. Scary.”
    “I’m sure it was,” Sachs said, picking up her verbal pace a bit. “Say, you mind if we take your fingerprints?”
    This was to verify that they were her prints on the receipt and merchandise found at the museum library scene. The woman agreed, and a portable analyzer verified that they were hers.
    Sachs then asked, “You’re sure you don’t have any idea who he is or where he lives?”
    “None. He’s only been in here once or twice. Maybe more, but he’s the sort of person you neverseem to notice. Average. Didn’t smile, didn’t frown, didn’t say anything. Totally average.”
    Not a bad look for a killer, Sachs reflected. “What about your other employees?”
    “I asked them all. None of them remember him.”
    Sachs opened the suitcase, replaced the fingerprint analyzer and pulled out a Toshiba computer. In a minute she’d booted it up and loaded the Electronic Facial Identification Technique software. This was a computerized version of the old Identikit, used to re-create images of suspects’ faces. The manual system used preprinted cards of human features and hair, which officers combined and showed to witnesses to create a likeness of a suspect. EFIT used software to do the same, producing a nearly photographic image.
    Within five minutes, Sachs had a composite picture of a jowly, clean-shaven white man with trim, light brown hair, in his forties. He looked like any one of a million middle-aged businessmen or contractors or store clerks you’d find in the metro area.
    Average . . .
    “Do you remember what he wore?”
    There’s a companion program to EFIT, which will dress the suspect’s image in various outfits—like mounting clothes on paper dolls. But the woman couldn’t