Kill the Messenger

28

Morning was a soft, sweet dream on the horizon to the east of Los Angeles. Narrow stripes of indigo, tangerine, and rose waiting to come into bloom. The offshore weather system that had brought the rain had cleared out, leaving the air washed fresh and the promise of Technicolor blue skies.

On the rooftop of the converted warehouse, a man moved slowly through the elegant, focused steps of tai chi. White Crane Spreads Its Wings, Snake Creeps Down, Needle at Sea Bottom. His concentration was on breathing, moving, inner stillness. His breath escaped as delicate clouds that dissipated into the atmosphere.

On another rooftop to the west, an old man and a child moved in unison, side by side, their individual energies touching, their minds completely separate. Meditation in motion. Slowly reach, slowly step, shift weight back. Zuo xashi duli, shuangfeng guaner, duojuan gong. One posture leading to another, to another. A slow-motion dance.

Under a freeway overpass at Fourth and Flower in downtown LA, Jace huddled inside a survival blanket, his army surplus coat arranged over the blanket to hide the silver stuff it was made of. The blanket looked like a big sheet of aluminum foil, but it held his body heat, and it folded down to the size of a sandwich.

He had dozed off and on for a couple of hours, but he couldn’t say he’d slept. Crouched into a ball to stay warm and to draw as little attention to himself as possible, he felt as if his body had frozen into that position. Slowly he started to rise. His joints felt as if they were being wrenched apart.

A block down, at Fifth and Flower, messengers would be showing up for coffee and fuel at Carl’s Jr. He would have sold his soul for a hot cup of coffee. The Midnight Mission at Fourth and Los Angeles served a full breakfast to anyone who wanted it.

Maybe he would go there later. He wanted to talk to Mojo, get the lowdown on what people were saying, what was going on at Speed, what Eta might have told the cops. Later the space under the bridge would fill with messengers hanging out, waiting for calls. They would park their motley assortment of bikes and perch themselves on the guardrail like a bunch of crows, and talk about everything from vegan diets to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Of all the messengers, Mojo was the one Jace most respected and came closest to trusting. He came off like a crazy Rasta man with his voodoo and superstitions, but Jace knew him to be more crazy like a fox than crazy like Preacher John. Mojo had survived as a messenger for a lot of years. No one managed that by dumb luck. And every once in a while he would pull the mask back and give a glimpse of who he was behind it—an intelligent man with an enviable sense of calm at his core.

Mojo would give him the lowdown. If he could catch Mojo alone.

Jace folded his survival blanket and put it in his backpack. He went behind a concrete piling and took a whiz, then strapped on his pack, climbed on The Beast, and started down the street toward Carl’s Jr. There was no traffic. The city was just waking up, stretching and yawning.

This was Jace’s favorite time of day, now, when he could take a deep breath of clean air, when his head was still clear of noise and exhaust and the thousands of instant questions and answers that flash through the mind of a messenger as he dodged traffic, dodged pedestrians, made split-second decisions as to the shortest, fastest route to his delivery. At this early hour, the day still had a shot at being good. Usually.

He parked The Beast at the side of the restaurant, and ran the risk of leaving it unlocked, in favor of a quick getaway if he needed it. He couldn’t go inside. Instead, he crossed Fifth and stood there on the corner with his collar up high around his face, his shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, stocking cap pulled down to his eyebrows, looking like a lot of guys on these downtown streets. No one would give him a thought at all, much less a second thought.

The first couple of messengers who showed rode for another agency—one that put its messengers in logo jerseys and windbreakers. Jace knew guys who had turned down the better pay simply because they didn’t want to concede their individuality by dressing like drones. Jace would have worn a monkey suit for better pay, but agencies with uniforms didn’t pay riders off the books.

He’d been standing maybe ten minutes when he saw Mojo coming down Fifth. Even though the sun wasn’t really up yet, he wore his trademark Ray Charles shades. His ankles and shins were taped with bright green stretch tape over purple bike pants, and he wore several layers of ragged T-shirts and sweatshirts. He looked like a dancer who had hit hard times.

Jace started across the street as Mojo glided up onto the sidewalk at the alley entrance.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “Can you give me—”

“I got nothing for you, mon,” Mojo said, braking. He swung his right leg over the back of the still-moving bike and dismounted gracefully. “I got nothing for you but good wishes.”

Jace poked his head up out of his coat as he approached, hoping Mojo would recognize him. He glanced around to make sure there was no one else on the street. “Mojo, it’s me. Jace.”

Mojo stopped dead and stared at him. He pushed his shades up into his dreads and looked some more. He didn’t smile.

“Lone Ranger,” he said at last. “You look like the Devil been chasing your tail, and he caught you.”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Policemen came looking for you yesterday. Two different sets of them. First one asked me did I know you. I told him no one knows the Lone Ranger.”

“What did Eta tell him?”

“She didn’t know you neither,” he said, his face gaunt and sad like the old paintings of Christ on the cross—if Christ had had a headful of dreadlocks. “For someone nobody knows, you are a very popular man, J.C.”

“It’s complicated.”

“No, I don’t think so. You killed a man or you didn’t.”

Jace looked him straight-on. “I didn’t. Why would I do that?”

Mojo didn’t blink. “Money is generally the great motivator.”

“If I had money, I wouldn’t be standing here. I’d be on a plane to South America.”

He glanced nervously down the street, waiting for someone to come out of the restaurant and see him. “I need to talk to Eta, but I can’t go back to Speed and I don’t have her cell phone number.”

“They got no telephones where Eta is, mon,” Mojo said.

A strange tension crawled down Jace’s back as he stared at Mojo’s Jesus face. His eyes were puffy and rimmed in red, as if he had been crying. “What do you mean?”

“I came past Base on my way here. The alley is nothing but lines of yellow tape like a giant cat’s cradle. A policeman was walking inside the lines.”

Jace felt the kind of cold that had nothing to do with the weather. It was the kind of cold that came from deep within.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”

“I said to him, ‘I work here, mon.’ He said to me, ‘Not today you don’t, Rasta man.’” His eyes went glassy with tears. His voice thickened. “‘A lady had her throat cut here last night.’”

Jace backed away a step, turned one way and then the other, looking for escape from this moment, escape from the horrible images spreading in his brain like bloodstains on cloth. “It wasn’t her.”

“Her van was sitting there. She didn’t go home without it.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t start. Maybe she called a cab.”

Mojo just watched him. Jace turned around in a circle. In his mind he was shouting for help, but like in a dream, no one could hear him. There was a huge pressure expanding inside his head, pressing against his eardrums, pressing against the backs of his eyes. He clamped his hands around his skull, as if to keep it from bursting open, to keep the images, the thoughts, from spilling out. He felt like he couldn’t breathe.

Eta. She couldn’t be dead. There was too much of her. Too much opinion, too much bluster, too much mouth, too much. Guilt rolled over him for thinking she might have betrayed him to the police. Jesus God, she was dead. Her throat had been cut.

He could see the black sedan sliding down the alley that morning. He could see Predator behind the wheel. The square head, the beady eyes, the mole on the back of his neck. He could feel the raw terror of being recognized. But the car had glided past him like the shadow of death; Predator hadn’t spared him a glance.

“Bad neighborhood,” Mojo said. “Bad things happen. Or maybe you know something we don’t.”

Jace barely heard him. Eta wasn’t dead because they worked in a bad neighborhood. Eta was dead because of him. He didn’t know why the weight of that didn’t crush him where he stood.

He’d spent most of his life keeping people at a distance to protect himself, but those same people were now in danger—or dead—because of him. The irony tasted like bile in his mouth.

“Do you know something the rest of us don’t, Lone Ranger?”

Jace shook his head. “No. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

“Then how come you running? You didn’t kill a man. You didn’t kill Eta—”

“Jesus Christ, no!”

“Then what are you running from?”

“Look, Mojo, I’m stuck in the middle of something I don’t understand. The cops would be happy to throw my ass in jail and call it a day, but I’m not going there. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“But you’re looking for help?” Mojo raised his brows. “Is that why you’re here talking to me? You wanted help from Eta, and now she’s dead. That don’t seem like a good deal.”

“You don’t know she’s dead because of me,” Jace said. I know it, but you don’t. “She could have been mugged for her purse by some dopehead.”

“Is that what you believe, J.C.?”

No, it wasn’t. But he didn’t say it. There was no point in saying it. Mojo had made up his mind already. Funny how he could still feel disappointed when he knew better than to expect anything from anybody.

“I don’t want anything from you,” Jace said. “And I sure as hell didn’t want what’s happened.”

He started toward The Beast.

Mojo got in front of him. “Where you going?”

Jace didn’t answer, but tried to step around him. Mojo blocked him, shoved him back a step with a hand to Jace’s shoulder.

Jace pushed him back. “I wouldn’t want to make you an accessory after the fact, Mojo. Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

“I’m not worried about you. I care about Eta. I care about what happened to Eta. Police come looking for you, now Eta’s dead. I’m thinking you should talk with the police.”

“I’ll pass.” Jace pulled his helmet on, put his left foot on the pedal, and pushed off, swinging his right leg over as the bike moved slowly forward.

“You don’t care someone cut her throat?” Mojo said, his voice growing stronger, angrier. He mounted his own bike and came alongside Jace. They went over the curb and crossed Flower. “Someone has to pay for that.”

“It’s not going to be me,” Jace said, picking up speed. “I don’t know who killed her, and I can’t go to the cops.”

He kept his eyes on the road as he said it, not wanting Mojo to see the lie. He knew damn well who killed Eta. If he went to the cops, he could get with a composite artist and describe Predator down to the mole on the back of his neck. The guy probably had a record a mile long. His face was undoubtedly in the mug books. Jace could pick him out in a heartbeat. He could pick him out of a lineup.

The trouble was, if he went to the cops, he’d be tossed into a cell, and they wouldn’t want to listen to anything he had to say about anything. They wanted him for Lenny, and he had no alibi for the time of the murder that could be corroborated by anyone other than the man who’d tried to kill him. They wanted him for Abby Lowell’s break-in. She would happily identify him. Now Eta. He didn’t know what time she’d been killed, didn’t know whether he had an alibi or not. But he did know that the one thing all three people had in common—besides Predator—was him.

“You won’t go,” Mojo said angrily, keeping abreast of him. “Eta’s dead. She has family, children—”

“And I don’t, so what’s the difference if I wind up in prison,” Jace said, glancing over. He sat up straight, let go of the handlebars, and pulled his swim goggles up from around his neck and settled them in place.

“You don’t care about no one but you.”

“You don’t know shit about me, Mojo. You don’t know shit about what’s going on. Stay out of it.”

Jace raised up on his pedals and sprinted ahead, wanting to distance himself from Mojo, and from the guilt he was trying to impose. He wanted to outdistance the image in his head of Eta Fitzgerald with her throat cut, her life running out on the oily, filthy ground behind Speed. He wanted not to think about what her last moments must have been like, what her last thoughts might have been.

The Beast swayed hard from side to side as he pumped. The new rear tire grabbed the road and propelled him forward. He took a right on Figueroa, where traffic was picking up. Produce delivery trucks, and Brinks trucks, and commuters coming into the city early to beat the worst of the crush on the freeways.

The smell of exhaust, the sounds of squeaking brakes and diesel engines were familiar, normal. As was the feel of speed beneath him. If nothing else in his life was normal, there was the smallest comfort of being in his element: feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling things he understood.

He glanced back to see if Mojo had taken the hint and backed off, but the other messenger was coming up on his left. Jace touched the brakes and dove around the corner, right onto Fourth, where his day had begun. Messengers had started to gather under the bridge. They registered as a blur of colors as he flew past.

Mojo was stuck at his left flank, his face grim. He motioned angrily for Jace to pull over. Jace gave him the finger and pumped harder. He was a decade younger than Mojo, but he was injured and exhausted. Mojo was sound and determined, and came up even with him, his U-lock in his right hand. He pointed with the lock for Jace to pull over, tried to crowd him over toward the curb, reached down and made to jam the lock into Jace’s spokes.

Jace dipped right and jumped The Beast up onto the sidewalk as they crossed Olive, drawing a blast of horn from a car trying to make a right-hand turn onto Fourth. Pedestrians on the sidewalk jumped back, cursed him. He clipped the arm of a guy with a Starbucks cup in his hand, and coffee went into the air like a geyser.

Mojo was still in the street and pushing ahead of him, his eyes on the next intersection.

A million tiny, instant calculations went through Jace’s brain like data in a computer—speed, velocity, trajectory, angles, obstacles.

A siren pierced his thought process. A black-and-white was coming up on Mojo, lights rolling. A voice cracked over a bullhorn: “LAPD! You on the bikes! Pull up!”

As they made the corner of Fourth and Hill, Mojo turned hard right, into Jace’s path. Jace angled his front wheel to the left. The light on Fourth had turned yellow. The intersection was almost clear.

The Beast rocketed off the curb, just missing Mojo’s rear wheel. Airborne, Jace shifted his weight, turning the bike.

The cop car was at the corner, turning right from the outside lane, cutting off a truck. The Beast’s rear tire landed just past the black-and-white’s left front headlight. A loud crash sounded, and the cop car jumped forward as something hit it from behind.

Jace took the jolt from the landing, jumped on the pedals, and gunned the bike straight into the oncoming one-way traffic from Hill Street.

A chorus of horns. Tires screeching on pavement. He split the two lanes like a thread through the eye of a needle, just missing side mirrors and running boards. Drivers shouted obscenities at him. He prayed no one opened a door.

He kept going, turning, cutting through alleys, turning, moving. Not even a heat-seeking missile could have followed him. He was one of the fastest messengers in the city. This was his turf. He didn’t even think. He just rode, burning off the adrenaline, sweating out the fear shaking down his arms and flailing in his chest.

Fucking Mojo, chasing him. Jesus H. One wrong move and they might both have ended up in a hospital, or in the morgue. Jace could have ended up in jail, hauled in for operating a bicycle in a dangerous manner, or something more serious, depending on how pissed off the cop had been. And it would have taken only a few minutes, maybe an hour, before they figured out they had the guy every cop in the city was looking for—if Mojo hadn’t volunteered the information first.

That’s what you get for trusting someone, J.C.

And what about what other people got for having him come to them? He thought again of Eta, and wanted to be sick.

Cruising through a green light, Jace checked the street sign, and might have laughed if he’d had it in him. Hope Street.

He pulled off at the Music Center Plaza, situated amid a trio of entertainment venues: the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson Theater, and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, home of the Oscars until Hollywood had rejuvenated itself and reclaimed the awards.

The plaza was deserted. Nothing opened for another hour or so. Jace parked The Beast and sat down on a bench, trying to let go of all the tension in his body. He stared at the rise and fall of the many waterspouts around the Peace on Earth sculpture, and tried to clear his mind for just a moment.

The sculpture was allegedly famous. To Jace it looked like a monkey pile of people trying to hold up a giant artichoke that a dove had dive-bombed nose-first. All he could think looking at it was that the man who had created it had not lived in the same world he did, or the same world Eta Fitzgerald had lived in.

The sculpture was timeless. A thing without life that would live forever. A thing without emotion, meant to evoke emotion. It would sit on this spot forever, barring nuclear attack or the Big Quake.

Jace couldn’t imagine that anyone would really care if it was there or not, but there it would remain. Instead, people would come and go, live and die, and years would pass, and some would be missed and some would never be thought of at all.

He tried to imagine what Eta would have had to say about Peace on Earth, but he couldn’t hear her voice, and he would never hear her voice again. He could only put his head in his hands and cry for the loss of her.