Kill the Messenger

by Tami Hoag

  He pushed to his feet, trying not to moan as stiff joints and tendons stretched reluctantly. He needed to keep moving or he wouldn’t be able to move at all, and some junkie could stumble along and knock his head in for his space blanket.

  Maybe if he could get the negatives to a reporter, to a TV station, he thought. Everyone in LA could find out about them together, decide together who was paying whom for what. Maybe this whole nightmare he was living could be made into a reality program. He should write the treatment himself, right now, get it off to an agent or a producer, or however that worked.

  “Scout to Ranger, Scout to Ranger. Ranger, do you read me?”

  The muffled voice came out of Jace’s coat pocket. He steeled himself against the need to answer.

  “Pick up, Ranger!” Tyler’s voice pleaded. “Jace! Pick up! I’m in trouble!”

  Parker grabbed the boy by the shoulders and pretended to jostle him. Tyler put his own hands around his throat and made a sound like he was being strangled.

  “Tyler!”

  “Ja—”

  He clamped his hand over his mouth, cutting off the sound.

  Parker snatched the walkie-talkie. “I want the negatives or the kid dies.”

  “Leave him alone, you motherfucker!”

  “I want the negatives!” Parker shouted.

  “You get the negatives when I get my brother.”

  Parker gave him instructions to meet them on the lowest level of the parking garage beneath the Bonaventure Hotel in half an hour.

  “If you hurt him,” Damon warned, “I’ll kill you.”

  “If you fuck this up, like you fucked up Jace in the park,” Parker said, “I’ll kill you both.”

  He turned the radio off, and looked at his young cohort.

  “That was mean,” Tyler said.

  Parker nodded. “Yeah, it was, but if you had just radioed him and told him to meet you because you had a cop sitting here telling you to, do you think he would have come?”

  “No.”

  “You think he’ll be mad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you rather he was mad, or dead?”

  The boy was silent for a moment as Parker started the car and pulled away from the front entrance of the hotel.

  “I wish this wasn’t happening,” Tyler said.

  “I know.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, waiting for Jace to emerge from the gloom.

  “Kev?” the boy asked in a small, shy voice.

  “Yes, Scout?”

  “When I asked you before what’s going to happen to Jace and me . . . I meant, like, after it’s over. Will Jace and I get to stay together?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jace always said that if anybody ever found out about us, Children and Family Services would come, and everything would change.”

  “You’re my partner,” Parker said. “I’d never rat you out.”

  “But that other detective knows I live with the Chens, and he knows Jace is my brother. And he’s pretty pissed off at you.”

  “Don’t worry about him, kid. Bradley Kyle is going to have a lot of other things to worry about. Trust me.”

  Tyler sat up, suddenly at attention. “There’s Jace!”

  “Okay. Down in your seat,” Parker said, putting the car in gear. “He can’t see you until we’re down there.”

  They rolled into the garage, well behind Jace, following from a distance, letting him move down from level to level to level.

  “Does your brother own a gun?” Parker asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Chinese throwing stars?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is he schooled in the ways of killing men with his mind?”

  “People can do that?” Tyler asked.

  “I saw it in a ninja movie.”

  The boy chuckled a little. “That’s not real.”

  “Perception is reality,” Parker said.

  Only a few cars occupied spaces on the lowest level. People who wanted to park nearest the elevators so they could become stuck in one during an earthquake while the building pancaked down on top of them.

  Jace kept his bike in motion, like it was a shark that had to stay moving to live. Parker slowed his car to a stop and popped the automatic locks.

  “Okay, Scout, you’re on.”

  Jace sat on The Beast, barely moving, going just enough so that he wouldn’t have to start from a dead standstill if he needed to move fast. Then suddenly Tyler was running to him.

  “Tyler! Run!” Jace called. “Get in the elevator! Go to security!”

  Tyler ran straight for him instead. Jace dumped the bike and grabbed his brother, shoving him toward the doors to the elevators. If Predator had them in his sights, he had no reason not to kill them both. The only good witness was a dead witness.

  “Tyler! Go!”

  Tyler spun around him in a circle. “Stop yelling! You have to listen to me for a change!”

  What a fucking nightmare, Jace thought. He reached inside his coat, pulled out the envelope with the negatives in it, hurled it as hard as he could away from the two of them, and away from the guy getting out of the silver convertible Tyler had tumbled from.

  Not Predator.

  “You have to listen!” Tyler said again.

  The guy at the car held his arms out to his sides. In one hand he held a badge.

  Jace shoved Tyler behind him and moved a couple of steps backward. “What the fuck is this?”

  “Jace, I’m Kev Parker. I’m here to help you out of this mess.”

  47

  Eddie Davis had been told numerous times in his life that he would never amount to anything. The reasons varied. Some people blamed him, said he was stupid and lazy and didn’t apply himself. Other people—his mother, specifically—had always blamed fate. Life just had it in for Eddie. Eddie chose to believe the second reason.

  He had plenty of brains, lots of great ideas. Of course, none of them involved needing an education or doing any kind of hard work—that was what made them great ideas. Only an idiot would want to have to work. People were jealous of him because he had figured out that particular life mystery, and they turned on him every time. That was what happened again and again to screw up his life.

  This fucking mess he was in now was a perfect example. He had masterminded a fucking brilliant plan. And the one person he should have been able to trust had turned on him. His own lawyer, for God’s sake.

  A person was supposed to be able to trust his lawyer. There was that confidential privilege thing, right? That had been the genius of the plan—he hooked his lawyer in when the game was already in motion. The murder had already happened. Whatever he told Lenny was confidential, so the lawyer couldn’t rat him out. Eddie had needed someone to take the pictures of the client paying him off. He would split the money 70–30. Of course he deserved more since it was his idea and he had done the killing. The deal was too sweet for Lenny to resist.

  They had milked the client a couple of times, then agreed to one final big payday in exchange for the negatives. It was then that Eddie had heard detectives were nosing around, asking questions about him. The detectives who had investigated the murder. That meant only one thing to Eddie: Lenny had dropped the dime on him and figured to end up with all the money and the one negative they had saved out in case they wanted to use it later on. Lenny would have cut him out of his own game, and run off to Tahiti or someplace no one would find him.

  A man’s lawyer was supposed to take his secrets to the grave, right?

  Lenny Lowell had taken Eddie’s there early. And it served him right.

  Eddie had set up the final drop, told Lenny the client would be there, told the client nothing. His plan had been to intercept the negatives and kill the messenger as a warning to Lenny. Then he’d have the lawyer in his pocket to stand up for him, lie for him, give him alibis, do whatever Eddie needed him for in the future.

  But everything had gone wrong
because of the fucking bike messenger, and Eddie had been so damned mad. And it was all Lenny’s fault anyway, so if he couldn’t kill the messenger, he might as well kill Lenny. Get the lawyer to give up the last negative, then beat his head to a pulp. There was just something so satisfying in beating a head in.

  “Ouch!” Eddie howled, twisting around to give the bitch stitching him an ugly look. “Fucking cunt! That hurts!”

  The woman averted her eyes and apologized in Mexican. At least, it sounded like an apology.

  He turned back around, and took a pull on the tequila bottle and a drag on his cigarette. One of the cops had nicked him good. The bullet had torn a gash in his side about three inches long, and it felt like it had maybe chipped a rib. If the bullet had hit a couple of inches to the left, it would have taken out a kidney, and he’d be dead. He should figure he was lucky, but he didn’t.

  If he was lucky, his fucking twelve-K Jap Ninja wouldn’t be scrap metal at the bottom of the fucking Bunker Hill Steps. The only lucky thing about it was that he hadn’t broken his neck, and he’d been able to jack a car and get the hell out of there.

  Now he sat in this shithole, backdoor, spic “clinic” in East LA, getting stitched up by some bitch who probably spent her days cleaning toilets for white people.

  Hector Munoz, the guy who ran the place, sure as hell wasn’t a doctor, but he would keep his mouth shut for a couple hundred bucks, and he always had a good supply of Oxycodone—Eddie’s drug of choice.

  The cell phone Eddie had left lying on the metal table beside him—the table with all the needles and scissors and the bedpan he was using for an ashtray—went off. He knew who it was. He’d been waiting for the call. He’d been working on his lie for two hours. His client was expecting the negatives. Now Eddie had to break the news that that wasn’t going to happen.

  He grabbed the phone. “Yeah?”

  “You can have the negatives.” He’d never heard the voice before, young, male. The bike messenger. “I just don’t want to die, that’s all. It’s not worth it. I thought Abby Lowell would pay for them. I never figured she’d call the cops. She told me she was in it with you—”

  “How the fuck did you get this phone number?”

  “From her.”

  He sounded scared. He should be. This kid had caused Eddie nothing but grief. He’d wrecked a windshield, wrecked the Ninja, cost Eddie time and money. Shit, he’d had to kill two extra people because of this little fuck. And now the kid thought he could shake him down.

  “What do you want?” Eddie snapped.

  Nurse Ratched jabbed him with the needle again. He swung around and backhanded her, knocking her into the metal table, making a lot of noise. The woman put her hands over her face and started to cry.

  “Tie the fucking knot and get the fuck away from me!”

  She started blabbering and jabbering. Hector Munoz cracked the door open from the other side of his business—a strip club featuring a naked all-girl Mariachi band. He smiled nervously, his thin mustache rippling over his upper lip like a worm.

  “Eddie? Muchacho?”

  “Shut the fucking door!”

  Eddie put his phone against his head again. “What do you want?”

  “I want out,” the kid said. “I just want out. I don’t even know who’s in the fucking pictures. I just knew if the negatives were worth killing for, they had to be worth money. Throw me a couple grand. Enough for me to get out of town—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Eddie snapped. “Be at Elysian Park in twenty minutes.”

  “Go out there so you can kill me? Fuck that. I’ve got what you want. You can come to me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Under the bridge at Fourth and Flower.”

  “How do I know you won’t set me up?”

  “With the cops? They think I killed the lawyer, why would I call them? If I wanted cops, I would have stayed in Pershing Square.”

  “I still don’t like it,” Eddie said.

  “Then don’t come. You know what? Forget it. Maybe I can sell them to a tabloid or something.”

  “All right. Don’t get your balls in a twist. There’s gotta be cops all over down there still. It’s too risky. I’m driving a stolen car, for Christ’s sake.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  Eddie wanted to reach through the phone and choke the little shit. “Look, I can get you five grand, but you have to give me a couple hours to get the money, and the meet has to be somewhere cops aren’t driving by every three minutes.”

  Eddie thought about it for a minute. He wanted a place where there wouldn’t be a lot of people around at this time of night. Had to have escape routes and good access to a freeway. “Olvera Street Plaza. Two hours. And, kid? Double-cross me, and I’ll skin your dick and feed it to you while you bleed to death. You got that?”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Just bring the money.”

  Eddie ended the call and got off the exam table. The door cracked open again, and Hector slithered in. He was skinny and oily, and shook all over like a shit-ass Chihuahua dog. The little Mexican chick hurried up to him and rattled off a lot of gibberish, gesturing at Eddie. Eddie took a last drag on his cigarette, and shrugged into his shirt.

  “Hector, I need to borrow your car.”

  Hector smiled that nervous smile again. “Sure, man, whatever.” He pulled a set of keys out of his pants pocket and tossed them to Eddie. “It’s the blue Toyota with the flames all down the sides.”

  “Great.”

  “What you gonna do, man?”

  Eddie looked at him with his dead eyes and said, “I’m gonna go kill somebody. I’ll see you later.”

  48

  On weekends the plaza on Olvera Street is ringed with tourists and Mexican families watching Aztec dancers or listening to Mariachi bands. On a weeknight in the dead of winter, there are no tourists, only transients looking for a park bench to sleep on.

  Jace paced a slow half circle at the edge of the plaza, feeling like a goat that had been staked out as lion bait, waiting for the guy who had tried repeatedly to kill him. Waiting for the guy who had twisted his life into a nightmare, who had murdered an innocent woman. Jace let his outrage singe the edges of his fear. He would be a part of taking down Eta’s killer. He had argued with Parker to be in on it. It was his duty to Eta.

  The wind was rustling the leaves of the big fig trees, putting him on edge as he tried to sharpen his ear for the sound of a shoe scraping on pavement, the hammer of a gun being cocked.

  Jace had brought Tyler here a million times. It was an easy walk from Chinatown, and an inexpensive day out for people with limited resources. Free shows, an outdoor market of stalls with cheap trinkets and T-shirts.

  The park was supposedly the heart of LA’s original 1781 settlement. In a city where change and all things cutting-edge rule, the adobe structures and old tile walkways gave the impression of being in another world. And Tyler, who absorbed detail and history like a sponge, loved it.

  If anything happened to that kid, Jace was going to dismember Kev Parker with his bare hands. There had been no time to take Tyler home. They had to set up, get into their positions, and do it before Davis could arrive. He had asked for a couple of hours. There was no way of knowing what he meant to do with that time. His intentions could have been the same as theirs, to get here early with a plan.

  Parker had given Tyler the job of lookout, and left him in the car with his walkie-talkie.

  A big black guy was lying on his side on a bench Jace had walked past twice, sleeping, snoring, reeking of bourbon. He looked like a sea lion flopped on the beach, the moonlight washing over him and the rags he had covered himself with. Another innocent bystander unwittingly waiting to die, Jace thought. He knocked the guy on his shoes.

  “Hey, buddy, wake up. Get up.”

  The man didn’t move. Jace grabbed hold of an ankle and gave a yank. “Hey, mister, you need to get out of here.”

  The old drunk just went on snoring.
Jace moved away from him. If he was that dead to the world, he was probably as safe as he could be here. Jace walked away.

  A dot of light flashed at him from across the plaza. Parker. Davis was coming.

  The excitement building in Eddie’s gut was a lot like the anticipation of sex. A fist of tension, all his nerve endings starting to buzz. He loved his work.

  He loved that he was so fucking smart. He’d come up with the perfect plan to cut away all the loose ends of this deal and ride off into the sunset. He could already see himself stretched out on the beach in Baja with a cigar, a bottle of tequila, and some topless Mexican babe ready to do whatever freaky, kinky thing he wanted her to do.

  He could see the kid pacing around the plaza, probably ready to shit his pants. Stupid kid. Except that he probably wasn’t so stupid that he hadn’t brought a gun or something this time to protect himself.

  What he hadn’t brought with him was cops. Eddie had done his recon. No plainclothes cop–looking cars in the area. You could always tell cops by the shit rides the city gave them. The place was deserted except for a few homeless losers with their shopping carts parked next to benches.

  Eddie himself was traveling light. The only thing he carried with him was his knife.

  Parker had given Jace a gun, a .22 caliber handgun he had taken out of a case in the trunk of his car. It seemed a pretty wild thing for a cop to do, but Jace had figured out quickly that Kev Parker was not a mainstream kind of guy. He was riding around in a convertible with no police radio, only a scanner. He didn’t have a partner—not with him anyway. They had stopped en route and picked up a crazy woman who was a newspaper reporter.

  If Jace hadn’t looked at Parker’s ID, he wouldn’t have believed the guy was a cop at all. First of all, he dressed too well to be a cop. Even his shoes looked expensive, and that was one thing you could always count on with cops—the bad shoes.

  Still, Jace didn’t like the idea of trusting him. This was all happening too fast. But he didn’t see that he had any choice. The only way he was getting out of this mess alive was for someone to take Eddie Davis out.

  He could see Davis coming, the shape of a small vending machine in a long dark coat. His palms started to sweat and acid rose in his throat like the red stuff in a thermometer.