"She was."
"And the shots were grouped tight? The ones that hit the librarian?"
"Real tight. Inches apart. He knows how to shoot."
Rhyme muttered, "It wasn't a miss, the woman. He shot her on purpose."
"What?"
The criminalist asked the best pistol shot in the room, "Sachs, when you're rapid-firing, what's the one shot that's bound to be the most accurate?"
"The first. You're not fighting recoil."
Rhyme said, "He wounded her intentionally--aimed for a major blood vessel--to draw off as many officers as he could and give him a chance to get away."
Cooper muttered, "Jesus."
"Tell Bell. And Bo Haumann and his people at Emergency Servi
ces. Let 'em know that's the kind of perp we're dealing with--one who's more than happy to target innocents."
II
THE GRAFFITI KING
Chapter Eight
The big man walked down the Harlem sidewalk, thinking about the phone conversation he'd had an hour ago. It'd made him happy, made him nervous, made him cautious. But mostly he was thinking: Maybe, at last, things are looking up.
Well, he deserved a boost, just something to help him get over.
Jax hadn't had much luck lately. Sure, he'd been glad to get out of the system. But the two months since his release from prison had been coal hard: lonely and without a single lick of anything by way of righteous fortune falling into his lap. But today was different. The phone call about Geneva Settle could change his life forever.
He was walking along upper Fifth Avenue, heading toward St. Ambrose Park, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Enjoying the cold fall air, enjoying the sun. Enjoying the fact that people round here gave him a wide berth. Some of it was his unsmiling face. Some of it the prison tat. The limp too. (Though, truth be told, his wasn't any hard-ass, playa limp, wasn't a gimme-respect gangsta limp, it was an oh-fuck-I-been-shot limp. But nobody here knew that.)
Jax wore what he always wore: jeans and a tattered combat jacket and clunky leather work shoes nearly worn through. In his pocket he carried a good-size wad of benjamins, mostly twenties, as well as a horn-handled knife, a pack of cigarettes and on a single chain a single key to his small apartment on 136th Street. Its two rooms featured one bed, one table, two chairs, a second-hand computer and grocery-store two-for-one cookware. It was only a notch better than his recent residence in the New York State Department of Corrections.
He paused and looked around.
There he was, the skinny dude with dusty-brown skin--a man who could've been thirty-five or sixty. He leaned against an unsteady chain-link fence around this park in the heart of Harlem. The sun flared off the wet lip of a malt or wine bottle half-hidden in the yellow grass behind him.
"S'up, man?" Jax asked, lighting another cigarette as he strode up and stopped.
A blink from the skinny guy. He looked at the pack Jax offered. He wasn't sure what this was about but he took a cigarette anyway. He put it in his pocket.
Jax continued, "You Ralph?"
"Who you?"
"Friend of DeLisle Marshall. Was on S block with him."
"Lisle?" The skinny guy relaxed. Some. He looked away from the man who could break him in half and surveyed the world from his chain-link perch. "Lisle out?"
Jax laughed. "Lisle put four rounds into some sad motherfucker's head. There'll be a nigger in the White House 'fore Lisle gets out."
"They do parole dudes," Ralph said, his indignation unsuccessfully masking the fact he'd been caught testing Jax. "So what Lisle say?"
"Sends his word. Told me to look you up. He'll speak for me."