Kill the Messenger

13

Jace watched from across the alley, from inside a soggy cardboard box that had been left behind an Italian furniture store. Crumbs of Styrofoam packing peanuts clung to him like fleas.

Staying in Eta’s backseat was too risky. He’d been a captive there, trapped, vulnerable. No good. He needed space, a vantage point, escape routes. As soon as she’d gone inside, he had slipped out of the van and gone across the alley. The box squatted, half-hidden, in front of the furniture store’s delivery truck. The store didn’t open for another couple of hours. He was safe to squat there for a while.

Eta had promised to come back out with the money right away, but half a minute after she had gone inside, Preacher John had shown up, chained his bike to the Dumpster, and gone in. Then came Mojo, then the guy they called Hardware because of his body piercings. They had probably cut out on their paperwork from the day before, wanting to get home and out of the rain, and had come in early to do it before they started their runs.

No Eta. No Eta.

All she had to do was put the cash in an envelope and step out to put it in her van. There was no sign of Rocco, the boss, or of his sidekick, Vlad, who seemed to do nothing all day but smoke, talk to other Russians on his cell phone, and putt golf balls around the office. Rocco usually showed up by nine. Vlad usually turned up around noon, and was almost always hungover.

Come on, Eta. Come on.

Jace huddled back into his oversize army jacket and looked at the newspaper page he had tried to show her in the van. He reread the piece for the hundredth time. Lenny Lowell’s violent passing from the world had been reduced to two column inches buried in the depths of the LA Times. It said the lawyer had been found by his daughter, Abigail (a twenty-three-year-old student at Southwestern Law), that he had been bludgeoned to death in his office. An autopsy was pending. Detectives from the LAPD were following all leads.

Abby Lowell. The pretty brunette in the photograph on Lenny’s desk. A law student. Jace wondered if she had seen anything. Maybe she’d seen Predator fleeing the scene. Maybe she knew who would want her father dead, and why. Maybe she knew who the people in the negatives were.

Speed’s back door opened, and two people came out. A man first: average height, average build, expensive-looking raincoat, and a hat like a 1940s movie detective. Sam Spade. Philip Marlowe. With a petite woman in a black suit, a flash of red in the V of the neckline. Pissed off. Hispanic. Sam Spade ignored her.

Cops. At least the guy was—even though he was really too well-dressed. Jace had a sixth sense for cops. They held themselves a certain way, walked a certain way, moved a certain way. Their eyes never stopped scanning the territory when they came into a new situation. They were taking in everything about their surroundings in case they needed to remember details later on.

This one walked around Eta’s van, slowly, looking in the windows. A chill swept over Jace, pebbling his skin with goose bumps. The woman seemed more interested in chewing out the guy than she was in the van. Neither of them tried to open a door, and then they went back inside the building.

Jace shivered. Why would the cops be interested in Eta’s van, unless someone had told them to be? She’d told him to go to the police. Maybe she had made the decision for him.

He told himself he couldn’t be disappointed, because he never really expected anything from anyone. Except that he was disappointed. People never meant what they said. Or they meant to keep a promise in the moment it was made, but not under pressure. That was always the fine print in a deal—Does not extend past the introduction of extenuating circumstances.

Eta treated the messengers like she was their cranky, surrogate mother. She had a good heart. But why would she put her neck on the line with the cops for him? She had her own life, her own real kids. He wasn’t part of her family. Or maybe she was the kind of mother who did things for her children “for their own good,” which almost always turned out to be bad.

Jace told himself he’d been stupid going to her for help, asking her to lie for him. Involving other people meant losing absolute control of the situation. But he’d seen a quick way to get his hands on a couple hundred bucks. Money he could use to lay low for a while, if he had to. He didn’t want to take money out of his bank, which was not a bank at all but a fireproof lockbox he kept hidden inside an air duct in the bathroom at the apartment. That money was for Tyler to live on, in case something happened.

Something had happened.

Time to go.

Using the delivery truck for cover, Jace crawled out of the box. He flipped up the collar of his coat, hunched his shoulders, held the newspaper like a tent over his head, and started down the alley. He tried not to limp, tried to look like he wasn’t in a hurry, like he had nowhere to go, like he didn’t want to run. He kept his eyes on the ground.

What now, J.C.?

The negatives were in their envelope under his shirt, strapped around him with athletic tape. He had to find a place to hide it, someplace away from Tyler, and away from the Chens. Obviously, it was valuable to someone. He could use it for leverage, use it as an insurance policy if things went further south than they already had. He needed to find safe, neutral ground. A public place. And he needed to get to Abby Lowell.

A car turned in at the mouth of the alley, crawling toward him. Maybe the two cops.

A dark sedan.

A cracked windshield.

Fear hit Jace in the belly and shot through his veins like mercury. Quick, toxic. He wanted to look, to put a face on his hunter. Humanize the monster. See that in the light of day the guy was just a small, inadequate man who posed no real threat. But of course none of that was true. He wanted something Jace had, and even if Jace simply gave it to him, the guy would probably kill him anyway because Jace knew too much—even though he really knew nothing at all.

The car slowed as it neared him. Jace’s chest tightened. He was on the driver’s side. Could the guy put a face on him? Flashes of the night before burst behind his eyes. He was on the bike, swinging his U-lock into the windshield. He couldn’t remember the driver’s face; could the driver remember his? He’d had his helmet on. And his goggles.

He glanced over out the corner of his eye as the car came even with him.

A head like a square block of stone, small, mean eyes, dark hair buzzed short. The guy’s skin was pale with blue undertones beneath his beard. He had a piece of white tape across the bridge of his nose, and a black mole on the back of his neck. The kind of mole that was more like a growth, sticking out, the size of a pencil eraser.

The sedan cruised past like a panther in the jungle, quiet, sleek, ominous.

Jace kept walking, refusing the urge to look back. His legs felt like jelly.

The guy was cruising the Speed office. Of course he knew where Jace worked. He had Jace’s messenger bag. Another flash of memory: being grabbed and yanked backward by the strap of his bag. There was nothing much in the bag—a tire pump, a spare tube, a couple of blank manifests . . . with the Speed logo and address in red at the top of the page.

Next the guy would try to find out where Jace lived, just as the cops would. But none of them would be able to, he assured himself. The only address Speed had for him was the old P.O. box. And the only address the P.O. box people had on file was an old apartment he had lived in briefly with his mother before Tyler was even born. No one would be able to find him.

But the sharks were in the water, moving, hunting.

Two cops and a killer.

I never wanted to be the popular guy, he thought as he crossed the street. The position came with too much trouble.

He chanced a look back over his shoulder. The sedan’s taillights glowed at the far end of the alley.

Jace broke into a jog, pain throbbing in his ankle with every footfall. He couldn’t afford to feel it. He didn’t have the luxury of time to heal. All his energy had to go to survival now.

He needed to find Abby Lowell.