Kill the Messenger

42

Jace didn’t care about the kid with the green hair. The guy was just trying to panhandle. Besides, he created a little diversion. Abby was looking at him, worried, annoyed.

Jace’s heart was thumping. Shove the envelope at her, grab the black bag, run like hell. He reached a hand inside his shirt and started to peel back the tape that held the envelope to his belly.

A sound like a chain saw starting registered in the back of his mind. Then a scream. Then everything seemed to happen at once.

“Freeze! Police!”

He didn’t know where the shout had come from. His arms went out at his sides. Abby Lowell’s eyes were ringed in white.

The kid with green hair had a gun.

“Down on the ground! Down on the ground!”

The motorcycle roared from the Olive Street side of the square, coming straight for them.

Jace didn’t have time to even draw breath, or to think that the green-haired cop would shoot him. He lunged for Abby, knocking her to the park bench.

Jace fell into her sideways, just as the cycle hit the cop with the green hair, and blood exploded in every direction.

People were running now, shouting, screaming.

Guns were popping. He didn’t know who was shooting, or who was being shot at.

Jace scrambled to get his feet under him. His eyes were on the cycle. Red bike, black mask, helmet. The driver had already swung it around, one-eighty, almost laying it down on the ground. It came back at Jace like a rocket. He went over the bench and ran for his life.

Parker started running the instant he saw the motorcycle. A red Kawasaki Ninja ZX12R. Eddie Davis. He had to have doubled back to his house before the Hollywood cops got there, ditched the Town Car, and grabbed the bike. The bike racing straight at Damon and Abby Lowell, and at the kid with the green hair, who had his back to the danger bearing down on him.

Parker sprinted, opened his mouth to shout. He never heard the sound. The bike hit Green Hair. A nightmare scene of a body bending the wrong way, blood everywhere.

Davis hit the brakes and laid the cycle almost on its side. One-eighty. Up again and throttle wide open.

People were screaming. The movie crew scattered, some of them running toward the bike, some running toward the street, arms waving.

Parker pulled his gun.

To his right, Bradley Kyle had his weapon out, and was firing.

Damon went over the back of the park bench.

Abby Lowell tried to follow.

Davis roared past.

Parker fired. BAM! BAM! BAM!

The cycle swung hard right and went after Damon.

Jace heard him coming. He hit Fifth Street. It was empty. Traffic was detoured because of the movie people. The equipment trucks seemed a mile away. People were standing near them, staring at him. There was nothing they could do.

He veered right in a wide arc, so he could get a look back without slowing down. The headlights blinded him. Way too close.

Four more strides to the trucks.

Three more strides.

He felt as if he wasn’t moving, couldn’t breathe.

Two strides.

He cut between the trucks, took a hard left, almost wiped out. Stumbling, stumbling, stumbling forward. Sheer will pulled him upright.

The cycle came up over the curb, onto the sidewalk, and around the back side of the trucks. Jace ducked between another pair of trucks. He grabbed The Beast and mounted from a run, fumbling to catch the pedals, to start pumping.

If he could stay hidden by the trucks, if he could get to the other side of Olive Street before the motorcycle came around . . .

He stood on the pedals, ran on the pedals, down Fifth to Olive, through the intersection, horns blaring, lights coming at him, lucky he didn’t end up on a windshield. He jumped the curb onto the sidewalk.

Glancing over his shoulder, Jace could see the cycle racing up the opposite side of the street. He would make it to the intersection before Jace did.

The light at Olive and Fourth turned red. Nothing blocked the intersection. The motorcycle bounced off the curb, hit Fourth, screamed into a hard left turn.

Pumping, pumping, pumping, Jace’s thighs felt as though they would burst. He willed more speed, but it didn’t seem to come. The motorcycle ran the intersection and horns blasted as he split the oncoming cars on the one-way street.

Jace made the corner, went left, stuck close to the meters so he couldn’t get pinned against the buildings if the cycle made it to the sidewalk. He could see his pursuer pushing between cars up ahead of him, trying to come across.

Turning left again, Jace cut through a small plaza with a fountain, and came to a halt. Before him was the precipitous drop of the Bunker Hill Steps, a stone double staircase with a waterfall running between the two sides. It dropped like a cliff down to Fifth Street, where traffic was now gridlocked. Sirens were screaming.

Jace looked down to the bottom. It would be his death or his salvation. He swallowed hard. Horns were still blasting behind him. He could hear the motorcycle getting closer.

Jace glanced back, saw the headlights coming, turned to the drop in front of him, took a deep breath, and went over the edge.

Several people rushed to the aid of the guy with green hair. Kyle ran past him, chasing the motorcycle, chasing Damon. Parker went to Abby Lowell. She lay over the back of the park bench, as if she had just turned to watch the action leave the park.

“Ms. Lowell? Are you all right?” he called above the noise. People were shouting, sirens were wailing.

Blood stained the back of her aqua vest. She’d caught a bullet. He rested a knee on the bench, bent over her, carefully swept her long hair back so he could see her face.

The brown eyes that rolled to look at him were wild with fear. Her breath was wheezing in the way of an asthmatic. “I can’t move! I can’t move! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

Parker didn’t try to move her to see if the bullet had exited. She could bleed to death right in front of him, but if he turned her and a bone or bullet fragment shifted the wrong way, she would be a quadriplegic. Hell of a choice.

“We’ll have an ambulance here in two minutes,” Parker said, pressing two fingers to the side of her throat. Her pulse was galloping like a racehorse. “What did you feel? Did you feel something hit you from behind?”

“In my shoulder. Yes. In my back. Twice. Am I shot? Oh, my God. Am I shot?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, my God!”

She was sobbing now, hysterical. No sign of the stoic, controlled woman trying to bravely deal with the fact that her murdered father lay on the floor at her feet.

“Why did you come here?” Parker asked. He pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket, carefully reached under her, and felt for exit wounds. “Who set it up?”

She was crying so hard, she was gagging and choking herself.

“Who told you to be here?” Parker asked again. He pulled the handkerchief back, dyed red with blood.

“He did!” she said on a wail. “Oh, my God, I’m going to die!”

“You’re not going to die,” Parker said calmly. “The paramedics are here. They’ll be with you in a minute.”

The EMTs had run to the fallen Green Hair and were trying to revive him. He lay on the ground like a broken doll, staring at the afterlife.

“Hey!” Parker called. “I’ve got a GSW here! She’s bleeding!”

One of the EMT crew looked up and acknowledged him. “Coming!”

Parker turned back to Abby. “Who called you? Who called Davis?”

She couldn’t have cared less about what Parker wanted to know.

It didn’t matter anyway. He had simply been shocked to see Damon show, and he wondered if the kid really had tried to reach out to him. And what it meant if he had.

He hoped he would get a chance to find out.

The Beast bounced and slipped on the stone steps. Going too fast. Jace touched the brakes, twisted a little sideways, angling the bike, trying to control his descent.

Déjà vu. He’d had this dream a hundred times. Out of control, hurtling down, his equilibrium rolling and tumbling in his head. He couldn’t tell if he was right side up or ass over teakettle. Nausea rose in his throat.

The bike banged down the steps, back end threatening to overtake the front. Jace tried to make a correction, shifting his weight, and The Beast kicked out from under him and tumbled the last fifteen steps to the sidewalk. Jace rolled and bounced after it, trying to grab hold of something, anything to slow his fall.

He landed at the bottom, and immediately looked back up toward the fountain, toward Fourth Street. The motorcycle sat at the top. Even as he watched, the lunatic with the throttle in his hand made a decision, and the angle of the headlights tipped dramatically downward.

Crazy bastard.

Jace grabbed his bike up off the ground, climbed on, pointed it down Fifth. He raced around the corner at Figueroa, turning toward the Bonaventure Hotel. He checked back over his shoulder again and again. No motorcycle.

He lost himself then, in the same spot he had started his day, under the tangle of bridges that connected downtown to the Harbor Freeway. The place where, three days ago, he had hung out with the other messengers waiting for calls from their dispatchers, all of them complaining that it was going to rain.

His pursuer—if he survived his descent to Fifth Street—would assume Jace had turned down one street or another. He wouldn’t think to look here. Jace hoped.

Jace hid the bike and himself behind a huge concrete footing, out of sight from the street. He stripped off his backpack and dropped it, stripped off his coat and threw it on the ground, so hot he thought he was going to vomit. His shirt was soaked with sweat, the kind that reeked of fear. He was shaking like a malaria victim. His legs gave way beneath him and he went down on his knees.

Shit like this only happens in the movies, he thought, bending forward, curling himself into a ball on the ground.

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck just happened?

The images flashed through his head. He was going to have nightmares for the rest of his life. The panhandler with the green hair. The cops, the guns. The guy on the motorcycle.

Who the hell was he? Predator? He’d ditched the big gas hog for a rice burner? He had been scary enough in a car. With the motorcycle helmet, the extreme shape of the sport bike, he was a demon from hell for the Matrix age.

How had he known to be there? How had the cops known? It didn’t make sense to Jace that Abby Lowell would have tipped off either of them. Why would she? She was in on it, whatever “it” was.

Jace had tried to call the detective she had told him was in charge of the case, Parker. But he hadn’t gotten him, and even if the woman he’d spoken to had acted immediately, there’d been no time for them to get people set up in the park. The green-haired guy had been there an hour before Jace had made the call.

Abby Lowell had double-crossed him. She had thought she could get him arrested and walk away scot-free. So she had called Parker earlier in the day, probably right after Jace had spoken with her. But if she had set it up, she would have walked away without the negatives, and the negatives were what everybody wanted. The negatives were still in their envelope, still taped to Jace’s belly.

And even if she had called in the cops, that still didn’t explain Predator, if that was even who had been chasing him.

What the hell could he do now?

His pulse had slowed. His breathing had evened out. He was cold, the sweat dried on his skin by the chill of the night air. He wanted not to think, not to have to. He was alone. The light was weird under the bridge, dark, but dappled in spots with the diffused white glow from the streetlights above, like moonlight filtering down through a concrete forest. The hum of tires on the road above him was like white noise seeping into his exhausted brain.

He pushed himself up onto his knees, shrugged into his coat, reached for his backpack, and dug out his space blanket. The walkie-talkie fell out of it as he unfolded the blanket.

Jace picked it up, turned it on, and held it next to his face, but he didn’t press the call button.

His voice would telegraph his fear, his fear would leap across the airwaves, go into Tyler’s ear, and frighten him to the core. Bad enough not to know what his big brother was up to, worse to know what he was up to, worse still to know that he was afraid.

What could he say to the kid anyway? He didn’t know what to do. People were trying to kill him. Every way he turned, he only became more entangled in the mess, like he’d walked into a bramble bush.

I’m fresh out of plans, he thought. He felt hollow inside, like he was just a shell, and if someone was to give him a good kick, the shell would shatter into a million pieces and he would cease to exist.

“Scout to Ranger. Scout to Ranger. Come in, Ranger. Do you read me?”

The walkie-talkie crackled, speaking into the side of Jace’s head. He didn’t even jump. It was as if his mind had conjured his brother’s voice.

“Ranger, do you copy? Come on, Jace. Be there.”

He could hear the worry, the uncertainty in Tyler’s voice. But he didn’t answer. He couldn’t. What could he say to Tyler after screwing up their lives this way?

He just squeezed his eyes shut tight, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”