Kill the Messenger

41

Pershing Square is an oasis of green in the middle of downtown LA, a checkerboard area of the best and the baddest. Across Olive Street stood the grande dame of 1920s luxury: the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, where ladies in sweaters and pearls enjoyed high tea, and debutante balls were not a thing of the past. A block in the other direction, unemployed men with hungry eyes loitered outside of check-cashing places with heavy iron bars over the windows, and Hispanic women who only visited Beverly Hills through service entrances pushed baby carriages and shopped in cheap clothing stores where no one spoke English. Five blocks away, justice was doled out in federal and county courthouses, but here a crazy, homeless guy was taking a dump behind the statue of General Pershing.

The park was drawn out in rectangles of grass divided by strips of concrete and broad steps that transitioned one level to the next. Bright-colored square concrete structures that had a bunkerlike quality to them hid the escalators down into the parking garage. A 120-foot purple concrete campanile jutted up in the middle of it.

During the Christmas season an ice-skating rink was featured at one end of the park. Only in LA: people figure skating in seventy-degree weather with a backdrop of palm trees. The rink had been gone for a month.

Jace had always found the place too planned, the lines too horizontal. There was too much concrete in the middle of it. The sculptures were cool—not so much the traditional statues, but the huge rust-colored spheres that perched here and there on concrete pedestals.

But the best thing about Pershing Square was the openness of it. From his vantage point, Jace could see most of the park. He could see people coming, going, loitering. He could see the security guards who came up out of the underground garage periodically to look around, then went back down to make sure no vagrants were trying to get into the restrooms reserved for the paying customers. Considering where the vagrants then relieved themselves, it seemed like a policy worth reviewing.

The working day was over for the people in suits who descended from the downtown towers to drive home to the Valley or the Westside, to Pasadena or Orange County. The word about downtown was that it was the hot new place to live, but Jace didn’t see that many hipsters ready to rub shoulders with the indigenous homeless population, or that many yuppies ready to stroll their kids past the junkies hanging out in Pershing Square.

Fifteen feet away from him, two guys were making a deal on a little bag of something. A stoner with lime green hair was sitting on a park bench across the way. Over by the concrete fountain, a group of teenage boys were standing around playing Hacky Sack. A movie crew had been shooting in the area all day and were in the process of setting up lights in the square for a night shoot.

It was just past five. The sun had set behind the tall buildings. Only people on the Westside had daylight now. Pershing Square had been cast into the artificial dusk of the inner city—not day, not night. The lights had come on.

Jace had stashed The Beast between a couple of equipment trucks parked across the street from the square, on Fifth. He had been hanging around since about three o’clock, keeping his eyes open for anyone who looked like a cop coming into the park, watching for Predator to cruise past, waiting for Abby Lowell to show. He had been all over the park, scouting vantage points, planning escape routes.

He figured she would show. If she was, as he believed, involved in the blackmail plot, she would come alone. She wouldn’t want the cops looking at her, and Predator had threatened to kill her, so she couldn’t be in on it with him. Whether or not she brought the money was something else.

The whole scheme was going to be all about timing. Timing, planning, thinking on his feet . . . and luck. He had taken triple care with the other factors, seeing as he hadn’t had much of the last one.

Tyler would be worrying about him by now. Jace knew his brother had probably tried a hundred times to contact him on the walkie-talkie. Thinking about Tyler, he felt a terrible sadness. Even if this scheme worked, Jace didn’t know that he would come out of it unscathed, that the cops wouldn’t still have an interest in him, that they wouldn’t then find out about Tyler. His instincts were telling him he and Tyler would have to run.

The idea of tearing his brother away from the Chens made him feel physically ill. Tyler was probably better off with them than he was with Jace, living like a hunted criminal, but Jace couldn’t leave him. He had promised their mother he would look after his little brother, see that he was safe, see that he was never pulled into the cogs of the child welfare system. They were family. Jace was Tyler’s only living family as far as Jace knew. He didn’t count the bartender who had probably fathered the boy. Sperm Donor didn’t qualify as family.

But Jace wondered if his reasons for sticking to his promise to Alicia weren’t more self-serving than serving Tyler. His brother was all he had, his anchor, his only real escape from emotional isolation. Because of Tyler he had the Chens. Because of Tyler he had goals, and hope for a better future. Without Tyler he would be adrift, connected to no one.

Jace felt as if his heart were lying in his stomach, throbbing and soaking up acid like a sponge. He blocked all thoughts about the unfairness of their lives, and the fact that they had been through more than their share. There was no point in thinking about it, and no time. Abby Lowell had just emerged from the parking garage. . . .

She had changed out of the perfect Prada suit from the bank, opting for camel-tan slacks and boots, a black turtleneck sweater, and a pale aqua quilted vest. The girl had style.

Parker watched through high-powered field glasses as she walked toward the Fifth Street end of the park, where the kid with lime green hair sat on a bench. She was carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag, and a small nylon tote.

Parker stood in a beautifully appointed room on the fifth floor of the Biltmore, overlooking Olive Street. Pershing Square was stretched out before him. The field of play in a game he wasn’t planning to join.

He didn’t believe Ruiz with her cock-and-bull story of Damon calling in. And the fact that she and her RHD pals couldn’t come up with a more viable setup than that was a sad commentary on the quality of that particular brain trust.

Parker’s take was that Abby Lowell had gone to Robbery-Homicide, and RHD had set up this little tableau to seduce Parker, so they could throw a net over him and get him out of the way. If Damon really was going to show, if Bradley Kyle knew that somehow, there was no way they would have invited Kev Parker to the party.

As to what Ms. Lowell ultimately had up her sleeve, he wasn’t exactly sure. She was in this thing up to her gorgeous big brown eyes, of that he had no doubt. But Eddie Davis was the muscle, and he had allegedly threatened to kill her.

Blackmailers were in it for two things: money and power. It wasn’t a group activity. The more people involved, the more diluted the power became, and the more opportunity for mistakes of some kind.

Across the street, Abby Lowell eyed the guy with the green hair, went to the other end of the bench, and sat down, putting the nylon tote on her lap.

Payoff, Parker thought. That’s how they were setting it up: making it look like she was there to pay off Damon in exchange for the negatives.

He scanned the perimeter of the park with the field glasses, looking for Kyle or Roddick. Then he tilted the glasses upward to check rooflines. Habit. He wondered where Kelly had taken herself off to. Probably downstairs in Smeraldi’s, eating a coconut-cream pie and looking out the window to the square, waiting for the action to start.

A movie crew was setting up equipment for a night shoot, backlighting the sculptures to give them a look that was mysterious or ominous, depending on what the script called for. They would be there half the night to get one scene. It took for-bloody-ever to set up lighting and get the cameras set to please the director of photography. Then, depending on director and budget, it would take for-bloody-ever to shoot the scene. They would rehearse it, talk about it, rehearse it, talk some more. They would shoot it one way, then another, then do close-ups. The excitement of the movie business. Like watching people sleep.

Parker ran the glasses over the couple of equipment trucks he could see parked on Fifth. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

Back in the park, Abby was waiting on the bench, tense. She gave the green-haired guy the skunk-eye, but the guy was stoned, and looked catatonic.

5:10.

On the low wall near the statues sat a guy in an army jacket, a black ball cap pulled low, his head down. For a moment he looked as out of it as the stoner on the bench. Then he turned his head a little to the side, toward Fifth Street. Toward Abby Lowell. Parker caught a brief glimpse of face in a wedge of light before it lowered again. Caucasian, young, beat-up.

Damon.

Parker had never seen the kid, and yet he knew in every fiber of his being it was J. C. Damon. There was a tension about the way the kid held himself as he sat there trying to look unconcerned. His gaze kept going back to the park bench, furtive, anxious, then moving to cover everything in his field of vision.

Parker drew a line with the glasses from Damon back to Abby Lowell, then past Abby Lowell to the area behind her, a wide half circle with a radius of about twenty feet, looking for cops. He widened the arc to include the area directly across from Damon. No sign of Kyle or Roddick, or anyone Parker knew.

5:12.

Once again he swept the field glasses around the area where Abby Lowell sat, where the kid he believed to be Damon sat. From one to the other, and back again.

Parker dropped the glasses around his neck, turned, and hurried out of the room. He found the stairs and raced down them, jogged into the Olive Street lobby and out the door.

The street was backed up with traffic from the Fifth Street light. Parker wove his way between the cars to get across, smacking a fist on the hood of a Volvo when the driver honked at him.

5:14.

As he came up from street level, he saw that Damon had gotten down off the wall and was moving toward Abby Lowell. The kid with the green hair got up off the bench and turned toward her as well.

Parker hurried his steps. Green Hair was not part of the equation. The kid moved toward her, one hand outstretched.

Damon kept coming.

Abby Lowell stood up.

In his peripheral vision, Parker caught someone else moving across the square, coming from the alcove hiding the escalators to the underground parking. Bulky trench coat, a little too long, collar up.

Bradley Kyle.

Parker hesitated.

A motorcycle engine revved nearby. Sound seemed magnified. The scene froze for an instant in Parker’s head.

Then someone screamed, and all hell broke loose.