Kill the Messenger

22

Jace parked Madame Chen’s car in the narrow space reserved for her behind the office. He wiped down the interior with wet paper napkins, trying to erase any sign he’d been behind the wheel, or touched a door, or left a handprint on a seat. Then he stood beside the car for he didn’t know how long, trying to decide what to do next.

A thick fog had rolled in off the ocean and settled into the nooks and crannies of the city, a milky filter softening the lines of buildings, diffusing the yellow light glowing in windows. He felt like he was a character in a dream, like he could be gone in the blink of an eye and no one would quite remember him.

Maybe that was what he was supposed to do—go underground completely. That was what Alicia would have done. She would have packed them up without a word, moved out in the middle of the night. They would have popped up like toadstools in another part of town, with new names and no explanation why.

Jace had wondered why, many times. When he was Tyler’s age, he had dreamed up all kinds of stories about his mother, always painting her as the heroine. She was protecting her children from one kind of danger or another. As he had grown older and wiser, more savvy about life and the streets, he had wondered all the time if Alicia had been evading the police.

Why, he couldn’t imagine. His mother had been a quiet, kind person who had made him cry after she caught him shoplifting just by telling him how disappointed in him she was.

Maybe she was like me, he thought now, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Why don’t you want to come into the light, JayCee?”

Madame Chen came into focus as she spoke, as if she had just magically appeared beneath the dim light over the office door.

“I have a lot on my mind,” Jace said.

“Your thoughts are heavy like stones.”

“I’m sorry I’m so late with your car, Madame Chen.”

“Where did you go to fix the bicycle? The moon?”

Jace opened his mouth to answer, but his voice stuck in his throat like a ball of dough. He thought again of the day his mother had caught him stealing.

“I have to talk to you about something important,” he said at last. “In private.”

She nodded and went back inside. Jace followed, head down. She motioned him to a hard wooden straight-backed chair beside her desk, and kept her back to him as she made two cups of tea from the ever-present hot pot perched precariously on the window ledge above the cluttered desk.

“They have no phones on the moon, I suppose,” she said matter-of-factly. “Moon men have no families worrying about them.”

“I’m in a bad situation, Madame Chen,” Jace said.

“You are in trouble,” she corrected him, turning to face him. She couldn’t hide her reaction. The color left her face, her small mouth formed an O of shock.

He had tried to clean up with some paper napkins and a bottle of water he got out of a vending machine outside a Mexican market in Los Feliz. Water didn’t wash away cuts or bruises or swollen knobs of flesh. He knew he looked like he’d been on the wrong side of a prizefight.

Madame Chen said something in Chinese, her voice soft and frightened. Her hand was shaking as she set a cup on three square inches of desktop not covered in paperwork. She lowered herself to her chair. Jace could see her gathering her composure, trying to come up with a strategy for a situation completely beyond her experience.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

Jace tried to take a deep breath and let it out. His body reminded him not to do that. He had gone round and round in his mind trying to decide what to tell her, what not to tell her, what would be safer for her, for Tyler.

“You might hear some things about me,” he said. “Bad things. I want you to know they aren’t true.”

She arched a brow. “You think so little of my loyalty that you would say this to me? You are like a son to me.”

If her son was living a secret life under half a dozen aliases. If her son was wanted for murder and assault. If her son had someone trying to kill him.

Madame Chen had no children. Maybe she stuck with him because of that, Jace thought. She had no frame of reference.

“The attorney I was delivering a package for last night was found murdered after I’d been in his office. The police are looking for me.”

“Bah! They are crazy! You would never kill a man!” she said emphatically, offended at the idea. “You did not kill him. They cannot put you in jail for something you didn’t do. I will call my attorney. Everything will be fine.”

“It’s not that simple, Madame Chen. They probably have my fingerprints from the office.” And I was caught in the victim’s daughter’s ransacked apartment, he added mentally. I had a conversation with her. She can identify me. She’ll say I attacked her. . . .

“Why would the police think you would kill this man?” she asked, calmer. “What motive would you have to do such a terrible thing?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was robbed or something.”

“An innocent man has nothing to hide. You have to go to the police, tell them what you know.”

Jace was shaking his head halfway through the last sentence. “No. If they have evidence, if they can make an easy case against me, they will.”

“But you aren’t guilty—”

“But I look guilty.”

She sighed and reached for the phone. “Let me call the attorney—”

“No!” Jace came up out of his seat, reached across the desk, and pushed the receiver back down in the cradle with more force than he wished he had. For a second, Madame Chen looked at him as if she had never seen him before.

“I can’t go to the police,” he said quietly, sinking back down. “Please understand. I can’t take that chance.”

He started to rub a hand over his face and winced as he brushed the cut where the broken glass of Abby Lowell’s mirror had sliced his cheek open. He probably needed stitches, but he wouldn’t be getting them.

“If I go to the police,” he said, “then it’s all over.”

“Your life is not over—”

“I’ll go to jail. Even if I eventually get off, I’ll go to jail first. It takes months for cases to go to trial. What happens to Tyler? If Children and Family Services find out about Tyler, they take him. He goes to foster care—”

“I would never allow that to happen!” Madame Chen said, angry he would consider the possibility. “Tyler belongs with us. His home is here.”

“CFS won’t see it that way. They’ll take him, and they sure as hell won’t ever give him back to me.”

“There is no need for foster care.”

“That doesn’t matter to them,” Jace said bitterly, his mother’s warnings branded in his head, along with the cautionary stories he’d heard on the street, read in the paper. “They’re all about rules and regulations, and laws made by people who never have to deal with them. They’ll look at you and see someone who isn’t in their system, who hasn’t filled out their paperwork. They’ll look at you and say, what’s this Chinese woman doing with a motherless little white kid who isn’t in any of their files.”

“You exaggerate—”

“No,” Jace said angrily. “I don’t. They’ll give him to people who take kids in just to get the check, and they won’t tell anyone where he is. They could lose track of him—that happens, you know. Jesus, for all I know, you might even be in trouble for having him here in the first place. You could be fined, or charged with something. Then what?”

“Let me talk to the attorney.”

Jace shook his head vehemently, more afraid of the prospect of losing Tyler to the system than he had been of getting killed in Abby Lowell’s bathroom.

“I can’t take that chance,” he said again. “I won’t. I want him to be safe. I’d rather leave him here with you. He’d be safer with you, but I’ll take him if I have to. I’ll take him and we’ll just go. Now. Tonight.”

“You talk crazy!” Madame Chen argued. “You can’t take him! You can’t go!”

“I can’t stay!” Jace argued back. His voice was shaking. He tried to pull himself together, lowered his voice, tried to sound rational. “I can’t stay here. I can’t come back until it’s over. I don’t want you in danger, Madame Chen, or your father-in-law. I don’t want Tyler in danger, but I can’t leave him if I have to worry he won’t be here when I come back.”

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Jace couldn’t bring himself to look at this woman who had been kind enough to take the Damon brothers in, give them a home, treat Tyler like family. Treat him as family. He wished he hadn’t told her. He should have followed his instincts, just plucked his brother out of bed in the dead of night and vanished.

God, what a mess. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

If he went to the police and they took him into custody, that news would make the papers. Reporters would want to know more. If they found Tyler and the Chens, Predator could find Tyler and the Chens.

If he got rid of the evidence or gave it back somehow, or gave it to Abby Lowell, he had still seen the negatives. They hadn’t meant anything to him, but he had seen them, and Predator wasn’t going to leave a loose end that might come back and hang him. He wouldn’t leave witnesses.

“I’m so sorry I’m dragging you into this,” he said softly, aching in a way that had nothing to do with the beatings he had taken. “I wish I didn’t have to tell you, but I don’t see a way around it. If someone comes here looking for me . . . if the police come . . . You deserve to know why. I owe you that. I owe you more—”

One sharp knock warned them a split second before Chi opened the office door and stuck his head inside. He gave Jace a hard look.

“What happened to you?” he asked bluntly.

Jace’s eyelids went to half-mast. He wondered how long Chi had been standing outside that door. “I fell,” he said.

“You didn’t total my aunt’s car? It was gone so long, I thought it was stolen. I was ready to call the police.”

Jace didn’t answer. He didn’t like or trust Chi. His show of caring for his aunt, of looking out for her interests, was just a veneer. Chi would always do whatever would most benefit Chi. He had himself first in line to take over the business.

Chi glanced at Madame Chen and said something in Chinese.

Her face was like iron, her back straight. “If you have something to say, Chi, speak English. Have more respect than to be rude in my presence.”

Chi’s dark eyes were like cold stones as he looked at Jace. He didn’t apologize. “I was wondering if all my help will be here in the morning, or if I get left in the lurch again because some people are unreliable.”

Jace stood up. “If you want to have a conversation with me, Chi, why don’t we step outside?”

“You don’t look up to it,” Chi said, one corner of his mouth turning.

“Only Chi is going outside,” Madame Chen said firmly, staring at her nephew. “If you have waited to go home for such an insignificant reason, Chi, you have little value for your time.”

Chi was still watching Jace. “No, Aunt. I’ve used my time very well.”

Jace said nothing as Chi left the room. He wouldn’t say anything against the man to Madame Chen. But Chi’s parting remark left him with a sick feeling curdling in his stomach.

“It shouldn’t be easy for anyone to trace me here,” he said quietly. Unless Chi dropped a dime on him, or someone had gotten the license plate number on the Mini Cooper as he sped away from Abby Lowell’s apartment. “I don’t give out this address to anyone. But I want you to be prepared in case the police show up.”

“What will you do?” Madame Chen asked. “If they think you killed this attorney, and you act like a guilty man, how will they know to look for someone else? They will look only for you. The true killer will go free.”

Jace put his head in his hands and stared down between his boots. His head was pounding. His ankle was pounding. He could feel the swelling flesh pressing over the top of the boot. A nasty combination of nausea and hunger washed around in his belly.

“Is that what you want?” she asked. “For this evil person to go free to do more harm?”

He wanted to say he didn’t care so long as he was out of it, so long as nothing threatened Tyler, but he knew that wasn’t what Madame Chen wanted to hear. And he knew it couldn’t be that way, no matter what he wanted.

“No, that’s not what I want. I just need to figure it out before I . . . I’ll work it out . . . I’ll figure it out. I just need time.”

“If the police come,” Madame Chen said softly, sadly, “I will tell them nothing.”

Jace looked up at her.

“I don’t agree with what you are doing, JayCee, but my loyalty is to you, as I know yours would be to me. And I know you did not commit this crime.”

One of the few truly good people Jace had ever known in his life, and he was putting her in the untenable position of having to lie for him. Possibly putting her in harm’s way. All because he had answered one last call for one last run on the shittiest night of the year. A favor to Eta. Another few bucks to support himself and his brother.

He could almost hear Lenny Lowell saying it: No good deed goes unpunished, kid.