Kill the Messenger

by Tami Hoag

  “Here’s what I can control, buddy: that I love you and I’ll be there for you, even if I have to crawl on my hands and knees over broken glass to get there.”

  He pulled the boy close and gave him a fierce hug. Tyler had reached the age where he was starting to think a real man didn’t need hugs, and the fact that he still needed them was embarrassing. But he gave in to that need and pressed his ear against Jace’s chest to listen to his heartbeat.

  Jace held his brother close for a moment, wondering what karma would dish out to him for withholding the whole truth from Tyler. Tonight, more than any other night, he was too aware of his own mortality. Death had come calling and sucked him into a dark vortex where he had no control over anything but his own will to come out of it alive. Even as Tyler leaned into him, he could feel Lenny Lowell’s package pressing against his belly beneath his shirt.

  In the morning he would have to explain some things, but he wouldn’t do it now. Now all he wanted was a hot shower and some sleep. The world would not look brighter come morning, but he would have more strength to deal with it.

  After Tyler had gone to bed and fallen asleep, Jace went into their small bathroom and squinted at himself in the small mirror over the small sink and beneath the small light fixture that stuck out from the wall like a glowing wart.

  He looked pretty damn bad. His face was pale and drawn, his only color the black circles beneath his eyes, a smear of mud on his cheek, and the angry red abrasions on his chin. His lower lip was split, the line drawn in clotted blood. No wonder the cop, Jimmy Chew, had taken him for a homeless kid.

  He washed his hands, wincing at the sting of soap in the torn skin of his fingertips and palms. He lathered his face, with the same resulting pain, and splashed it clean with ice-cold water that took his breath for a second. Then he stood straight and carefully worked his way out of his wet sweatshirt and tight T-shirt. His shoulders hurt, his back hurt, his chest hurt. There was hardly a body part that wasn’t aching, throbbing, swollen, bleeding, or bruised.

  Lenny Lowell’s package was still tucked inside the waistband of his tight bike pants. The padded envelope felt damp but otherwise undamaged. Jace pulled it free, stared at it as he turned it over and over in his hands. He was shaking. In normal circumstances he would never open a client’s package, no matter what it was. Rocco, the guy who ran Speed Couriers, would fire him in a heartbeat. Now he almost wanted to laugh. He had bigger problems than Rocco.

  He sat down on the lid of the toilet and picked at the edge of the envelope flap until he could get his finger inside and tear it open.

  There was no note of any kind. There was no thick wad of money. Sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard was a waxy envelope of photographic negatives. Jace took them out of the envelope and held a strip of them up to the light. Two people exchanging something or shaking hands. He couldn’t really tell.

  Someone was willing to kill for this.

  Blackmail.

  And I’m in the middle of it.

  With nowhere to turn. He couldn’t go to the cops, didn’t trust the cops. Even if he turned the negatives over to them, he would still be a target for Predator, who couldn’t afford to wonder what Jace knew or didn’t know. Predator wouldn’t know whether or not Jace had looked at the negatives, or that he hadn’t had them developed or given them to the cops. He was a loose thread a killer couldn’t leave dangling.

  If this was karma, then karma sucked.

  He wouldn’t wait to find out. Jace had never felt he was a victim of anything in his life. His mother had never allowed it, not for Jace, not for herself. Shit happened and he dealt with it and moved on, moved forward. He had to look at this situation in the same way. That was always the way out, to move forward.

  Shit happened. And he was up to his neck in it. There was nothing to do but start swimming.

  9

  Jace hobbled slowly down the stairs from the apartment in his socks, boots tied together and slung over his shoulder. He had slept maybe a total of an hour and a half. He had just drifted off again around four when Tyler had crawled onto the futon with him and whispered that he was scared. Jace told him it was okay, and to go to sleep.

  Tyler was still young enough to believe him about things he wanted to believe. Jace couldn’t remember ever having been that young. He’d never had the luxury of a buffer. Alicia may have wanted to protect him but hadn’t believed she should. Instead, she had given him the best gift she thought she had to give: survival skills.

  She had always told him not to waste valuable time panicking. There was no point in it, no benefit to be gained. Still, it was partly panic—and pain—that had kept his brain running like a hamster in a wheel those few precious hours he should have been sleeping. At four-thirty he slipped out of bed, onto the floor on his hands and knees, taking stock of what hurt most.

  The ankle felt thick and difficult to move. He had packed it in ice bags overnight, trying to bring down the swelling, hoping he could get by with taping it, that he hadn’t done more damage to the ligaments than he thought. Slowly, slowly, he braced a hand on the Chinese stool, took a deep breath, and struggled to stand.

  Even a normal, hectic day on the job could come back the next morning like a bad hangover. Back hurting, hamstrings tight, Achilles tendons hard as rocks. Bruises, cuts, scrapes. Lungs aching from breathing exhaust. Eyes stinging, fingers frozen in a curl from gripping the handlebars.

  Today seemed no worse than any bad day after a wreck, except for the idea that someone wanted to kill him.

  He went into the bathroom, took a quick cold shower to clear his pounding head, then taped the ankle as tight as he dared. It was half again the size it should have been, but he could put weight on it, and that was all that counted.

  At the bottom of the stairs he sat down and worked his boot on, clenching his jaw at the discomfort. Small beads of sweat popped on his forehead. He could hear the ice delivery truck idling outside the big door of the loading dock. The first call of morning in Chinatown, and most other ethnic neighborhoods Jace knew: deliveries to the small family grocers, the meat markets, the restaurants. Once a week the butcher across the street received crates of live chickens and ducks, adding to the wake-up call. Jace found the noise and routine comforting, the way he imagined he would feel if he had been born into a big family.

  The rattle of a chain. The grinding of the motor that lifted the overhead door. The voice of Madame Chen’s nephew, Chi, barking orders to third cousin Boo Zhu. The scrape of metal against the concrete as Boo Zhu hopped off the dock and dragged his shovel with him.

  Jace pulled in a deep breath of damp, fish-scented air, and went to work. He said nothing to Chi about being injured. Chi didn’t ask. Chi, who ran the day-to-day business of the fish market, disliked Jace and disapproved of his aunt’s decision to take the Damon brothers in. In six years he had not changed his mind.

  Jace didn’t care about Chi. He did his job and gave Chi no reason to complain about anything other than the fact that Jace wasn’t Chinese and didn’t speak Chinese. Something Chi found impossible to tolerate despite the fact that he had been born in Pasadena and spoke English as well as anyone.

  Madame Chen had very bluntly pointed out to Chi that bilingual skills were not a requirement for shoveling shaved ice from one place to the next. Boo Zhu, who was twenty-seven and mentally handicapped, barely spoke any language at all, and managed to get through his work without a problem.

  The rain had become a thick, cold drizzle. Still, Jace was sweating like a workhorse, feeling nauseous and weak as pain burned through his ankle with every shovelful of ice. Fifteen minutes into the job, Madame Chen appeared on the loading dock, a tiny figure swallowed up in a trench coat, a huge Burberry plaid umbrella in hand. She called to Jace to come into her office, earning him a withering glare from Chi.

  “My father-in-law tells me you are hurt,” she said, shutting the umbrella as she led the way into the cramped, cluttered space.

  “I’m fine,
Madame Chen.”

  Frowning, she stared up at his face—wet, pale, scraped, bruised. “Fine? You are not fine.”

  “It was just an accident. Being a messenger is sometimes a dangerous job. You know that.”

  “I know you are never coming home so late at night from your job. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Trouble? Why would you ask that? I’ve been hurt before. It’s nothing new.”

  “I don’t like answers that are not answers, JayCee.”

  Hands on his hips, Jace looked away, fixing his gaze on a wall calendar from a local bank, which wished everyone a happy Chinese New Year. Madame Chen turned on the small space heater beneath her desk, and the thing made a humming sound and released a hot electrical smell that was unnerving. He thought for a moment about what to tell her. She probably deserved the truth, out of respect alone, but he didn’t want to involve the Chens in this mess. He didn’t understand it all himself yet. No one could trace him to this address, so there seemed no reason to alarm her.

  “A truth does not take so long to tell,” she said firmly. “Only a fiction requires so much thought.”

  Jace sighed. “I was making a delivery late yesterday, and someone almost ran me over. I took a bad fall.”

  “And you called the police to report this, which is why you were so late in returning home,” she said, clearly not believing that to have been the case.

  “No. It was dark. It happened fast. I couldn’t get the license plate number.”

  “Instead, you went to the emergency room to be examined by a doctor.”

  Jace looked away again, more out of aggravation than evasiveness. Madame Chen was the only person besides his own mother he could not lie to successfully. He could fool and trick anyone else into believing anything he wanted them to believe. Because no one else cared enough about what he was telling them. He was just a messenger, and they heard what they wanted to hear, what was easiest to accept.

  “I walked home,” he said. “It took a long time because it was a long way and my bike is broken.”

  Madame Chen said something in Chinese that was probably not very ladylike.

  “You don’t call a cab?”

  “Cabs cost money.”

  “You don’t call me?” she said, offended.

  “I tried to call. The line was busy.”

  “You have no respect,” she said, jamming her hands on her hips. “Six years I worry about you. You have no respect for me.”

  “That’s not true,” Jace protested. “I respect you very much, Madame Chen. I don’t want to worry you.”

  She hissed like a snake and shook a finger at him. “You are like Boo Zhu now? With stones in your head? You think I am like Boo Zhu?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You are like my family, JayCee,” she said quietly.

  Jace felt a burning at the backs of his eyes. He never allowed himself to want that, not in any way less abstract than the loose sense of community he had thought about earlier. Tyler was his family.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “That you offended me, or that I consider you family?”

  A crooked smile twisted his mouth. “Both, I guess. I don’t like to burden you.”

  She shook her head sadly. “You were old in the womb. Not in the way of your brother, but in the way of a man who has seen too much.”

  It wasn’t the first time she had made this particular comment. Jace never replied. There was no point in stating the obvious.

  “I have to go, Madame Chen. I have business to take care of. I have to get the bike fixed.”

  “And how will you get where you are going? On a magic carpet?”

  He didn’t answer. She pulled a set of keys off a nail on the wall. “Take my car. And don’t tell me you can’t. You will.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  Madame Chen owned a two-year-old Mini Cooper, black with a cream-colored top and a moon roof. Jace carefully wedged The Beast into the car and crept out into the early traffic. The car gave him a disguise of sorts. Predator wouldn’t be looking for a Mini Cooper.

  The trick of the day would be getting in and out of the Speed offices without being seen by anyone watching the building. He needed to get to Eta before the cops did.

  10

  Here’s your shit work,” Ruiz said, throwing a single sheet of paper down on Parker’s desk. The paper floated and settled gently on a stack of files, ruining her big show of affront.

  Parker glanced at it. A list of messenger companies within a five-mile radius of Lenny Lowell’s office. It had to have taken her all of three minutes to get it off Yahoo!

  “You do realize ‘plays well with others’ is a part of your evaluation, don’t you?” he said, as he got up to go to the coffee machine.

  It was 6:43 A.M. He’d had roughly two hours’ sleep. There were two other detectives in the room. Yamoto and Kray had caught the family annihilation Nicholson had been at before she showed up at Lowell’s office. Multiple murders and a suicide. An all-nighter just dealing with the paperwork.

  Yamoto, another trainee, was writing reports on a snazzy laptop computer he’d brought in himself. He was neat, courteous, professional, and wore better than average suits. Kray didn’t deserve a trainee like Yamoto.

  Kray was facedown on his desk, sound asleep, drooling a puddle onto a bright green memo reminding everyone that it wasn’t too late to sign up for the stress-management seminar: Life and Death Don’t Have to Kill You.

  Parker went back to his chair and sat down. “You’ve got to learn to lock down that temper, doll,” he said seriously. “What happens when you get some dirtbag killer in the box and he starts in with you?” he asked. “He’ll call you names filthier than any even you know. He’ll suggest you let him perform eighty-three different kinds of unnatural acts on your naked body. You need to get a confession out of the guy, and you go off calling him a fucking whatever? That’s not acceptable.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she pouted.

  “You just did it with me.”

  “You’re not a suspect.”

  “No, I’m your immediate boss. You have to respect that whether you like it or not. You’re always going to have a boss in this business, and a lot of them will make me look like a prize. Chances are better than even, you’ll be answering to one or another asshole from now until you need your first face-lift.”

  He rose and dumped the coffee in the trash. Two slugs of it was enough to jump-start a truck engine. “Fire in the belly is a good thing. Use it while you’ve got it. But if you don’t learn to control it, you won’t last on this job. Anger alone won’t keep you going. It clouds your judgment. You’ll alienate people you need, and piss off people you shouldn’t.”

  “You’re the voice of experience on that,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Parker said quietly. “I am. You’re learning from a master.”

  He felt a hundred years old, most of them spent running up mountains, cocky and sure of himself, then skidding down the other side face-first.

  Parker shrugged into his charcoal raincoat, an Armani take on the classic trench. A recent splurge courtesy of his other life. He flipped the collar up and reached for the old fedora he’d had since he made detective. A detective had worn it before him, and another before him, going like that all the way back to the thirties. The good old days when LA was still a frontier town and the Miranda warning wasn’t even a twinkle in the court’s eye. Back when cops used to meet gangsters as they got off the plane from New York or Chicago, beat the hell out of them, and send them back to where they came from.

  “Come on,” he said to Ruiz. “We’re starting on these messenger companies. We’ll start with the ones closest to Lowell’s office and work our way outward until we find who got the call.”

  “Can’t we just do it on the phone?” she whined. “It’s raining.”

  “You don’t learn how to read people over the damn phone,” Parker snapped. “You want to solve myst
eries over the phone, get a job with the Psychic Friends Hotline.”

  She gave him the finger.

  Such a lady.

  The first agency they tried had gone out of business. Six days ago, according to the bag lady camped in the shelter of the empty office’s doorway. Parker thanked her, gave her his card and twenty bucks.

  “Why’d you do that?” Ruiz asked as they got back into the car. “Crazy, psycho bag lady. Man, did you get a whiff of her?”

  “They don’t offer steam showers and aromatherapy at the Midnight Mission. Besides, she’s not a psycho. She was lucid, at least she was today. Who knows what she might see living out here. If a couple of bucks makes her think more kindly about talking to cops . . .”

  Parker shot Ruiz a look out of the corner of his eye. “How long have you been on the job?”

  “Five years.”

  “And in five years you haven’t learned anything? Do you have pictures of the chief with a farm animal?”

  “Maybe I’m just cheap,” she returned, holding back the temper.

  “I’m not even touching that. It’s too easy.”

  “I mean, I can’t afford to run around handing out money to street people.”

  “Right. That would put a dent in your shoe budget.”

  “And you can afford to pass out money to whoever?”

  Parker frowned at her. “Twenty dollars? I’m not exactly going to have to give up eating red meat. Investing in a person like Mary there is like putting a few on a long shot at the track. Maybe you lose, but maybe you win and get a nice payout. You didn’t have snitches on that gang task force?”

  “Not my job. I worked undercover—and no wiseass remarks,” she cautioned.

  Parker raised his brows. “I didn’t say a word.”

  “And don’t talk to me about shoes. Those Tod’s wingtips on your feet are like six hundred fifty dollars. I don’t know any other cops wearing six-hundred-fifty-dollar shoes.”