She looked away, feeling heat across her face.

“Now,” the detective said, setting the steaming plate in front of her. “Chow down. Nothing like turkey tetrazzini to soothe a troubled soul. You know, I might just ask ’em for the recipe.”

These’d do just fine.

Thompson Boyd looked down at his purchases in the basket, then started for the checkout counter. He just loved hardware stores. He wondered why that might be. Maybe because his father used to take him every Saturday to an Ace Hardware outside of Amarillo to stock up on what the man needed for his workshop in the shed outside their trailer.

Or maybe it was because in most hardware stores, like here, all the tools were clean and organized, the paint and glues and tapes were all ordered logically and easy to find.

Everything arranged by the book.

Thompson liked the smell too, sort of a pungent fertilizer/oil/solvent smell that was impossible to describe, but one that everyone who’d ever been in an old hardware store would recognize instantly.

The killer was pretty handy. This was something he’d picked up from his dad, who, even though he spent all day with tools, working on oil pipelines, derricks and the bobbing, dinosaur-head pumps, would still spend lots of time patiently teaching his son how to work with – and respect – tools, how to measure, how to draw plans. Thompson spent hours learning how to fix what was broken and how to turn wood and metal and plastic into things that hadn’t existed. Together they’d work on the truck or the trailer, fix the fence, make furniture, build a present for his mom or aunt – a rolling pin or 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 King Jr., Tina, Tupac, Beyoncé, Chris Rock, Shaq… And dozens of pictures of Jam Master Jay, the brilliant and generous vinyl-spinning rapper with Run-D.M.C., gunned down by some asshole in his Queens recording studio a few years back.

Jax was hit left and right by memories. He glanced at another corner. Well, lookit that. Now a fast food place, it had been the site of Jax’s first crime, committed when he was fifteen – the crime that had launched him on the path to becoming righteously notorious. Because what he racked wasn’t liquor or cigarettes or guns or cash, but a case of phat Krylon from a hardware store. Which he went on to use up over the next twenty-four hours, compounding the larceny with trespass and criminal property damage by spray-painting the graffitied bubble letters Jax 157 throughout Manhattan and the Bronx.

Over the next few years Jax bombed that tag of his on thousands of surfaces: overpasses, bridges, viaducts, walls, billboards, stores, city buses, private buses, office buildings – he tagged Rockefeller Center, right beside that gold statue, before getting tackled by two massive security bulls, who laid into him hard with Mace and nightsticks.

If young Alonzo Jackson found himself with five minutes of privacy and a flat surface, Jax 157 appeared.

Struggling to get through high school, the son of divorced parents, bored to death with normal jobs, steady in trouble, he found comfort as a writer (graffiti guerrillas were “writers,” not “artists” – what Keith Haring, the Soho galleries and claimer ad agencies told everybody). He ran with some local Blood posses for a time, but he changed his mind one day when he was hanging with his set on 140th, and the Trey-Sevens drove by, and pop, pop, pop, Jimmy Stone, standing right next to him, went down with two holes in the temple, dead ’fore he hit the ground. All on account of a small bag of rock, or on account of no reason at all.