Kill the Messenger

46

He needed to get rid of the negatives. Just get rid of them, get them to someone who didn’t want to kill him. He’d been stupid to try to get something for them, but he had wanted someone to pay for Eta. To appease his own conscience, Jace supposed.

But no. This wasn’t about him. He’d answered a call. He’d had no ulterior motive. It hadn’t been his choice to be put in this position, just as it hadn’t been Eta’s choice. Other people had made choices with malice aforethought. He and Eta had just gotten in the way. Now he had to get out.

The evening chill had grown more damp. He could smell the ocean in it. When he wasn’t sitting under a concrete bridge cocooned in a giant piece of Reynolds Wrap, Jace loved evenings like this. He liked to pull on a warm jacket and go up on the Chens’ roof and look at the lights. He liked the soft, diffused quality of them when the ocean mist hung in the air. Standing on that roof was one of the few times he actually liked feeling alone.

He pushed to his feet, trying not to moan as stiff joints and tendons stretched reluctantly. He needed to keep moving or he wouldn’t be able to move at all, and some junkie could stumble along and knock his head in for his space blanket.

Maybe if he could get the negatives to a reporter, to a TV station, he thought. Everyone in LA could find out about them together, decide together who was paying whom for what. Maybe this whole nightmare he was living could be made into a reality program. He should write the treatment himself, right now, get it off to an agent or a producer, or however that worked.

“Scout to Ranger, Scout to Ranger. Ranger, do you read me?”

The muffled voice came out of Jace’s coat pocket. He steeled himself against the need to answer.

“Pick up, Ranger!” Tyler’s voice pleaded. “Jace! Pick up! I’m in trouble!”

Parker grabbed the boy by the shoulders and pretended to jostle him. Tyler put his own hands around his throat and made a sound like he was being strangled.

“Tyler!”

“Ja—”

He clamped his hand over his mouth, cutting off the sound.

Parker snatched the walkie-talkie. “I want the negatives or the kid dies.”

“Leave him alone, you motherfucker!”

“I want the negatives!” Parker shouted.

“You get the negatives when I get my brother.”

Parker gave him instructions to meet them on the lowest level of the parking garage beneath the Bonaventure Hotel in half an hour.

“If you hurt him,” Damon warned, “I’ll kill you.”

“If you fuck this up, like you fucked up Jace in the park,” Parker said, “I’ll kill you both.”

He turned the radio off, and looked at his young cohort.

“That was mean,” Tyler said.

Parker nodded. “Yeah, it was, but if you had just radioed him and told him to meet you because you had a cop sitting here telling you to, do you think he would have come?”

“No.”

“You think he’ll be mad?”

“Yes.”

“Would you rather he was mad, or dead?”

The boy was silent for a moment as Parker started the car and pulled away from the front entrance of the hotel.

“I wish this wasn’t happening,” Tyler said.

“I know.”

They sat in silence for a moment, waiting for Jace to emerge from the gloom.

“Kev?” the boy asked in a small, shy voice.

“Yes, Scout?”

“When I asked you before what’s going to happen to Jace and me . . . I meant, like, after it’s over. Will Jace and I get to stay together?”

“What do you mean?”

“Jace always said that if anybody ever found out about us, Children and Family Services would come, and everything would change.”

“You’re my partner,” Parker said. “I’d never rat you out.”

“But that other detective knows I live with the Chens, and he knows Jace is my brother. And he’s pretty pissed off at you.”

“Don’t worry about him, kid. Bradley Kyle is going to have a lot of other things to worry about. Trust me.”

Tyler sat up, suddenly at attention. “There’s Jace!”

“Okay. Down in your seat,” Parker said, putting the car in gear. “He can’t see you until we’re down there.”

They rolled into the garage, well behind Jace, following from a distance, letting him move down from level to level to level.

“Does your brother own a gun?” Parker asked.

“No, sir.”

“Chinese throwing stars?”

“No, sir.”

“Is he schooled in the ways of killing men with his mind?”

“People can do that?” Tyler asked.

“I saw it in a ninja movie.”

The boy chuckled a little. “That’s not real.”

“Perception is reality,” Parker said.

Only a few cars occupied spaces on the lowest level. People who wanted to park nearest the elevators so they could become stuck in one during an earthquake while the building pancaked down on top of them.

Jace kept his bike in motion, like it was a shark that had to stay moving to live. Parker slowed his car to a stop and popped the automatic locks.

“Okay, Scout, you’re on.”

Jace sat on The Beast, barely moving, going just enough so that he wouldn’t have to start from a dead standstill if he needed to move fast. Then suddenly Tyler was running to him.

“Tyler! Run!” Jace called. “Get in the elevator! Go to security!”

Tyler ran straight for him instead. Jace dumped the bike and grabbed his brother, shoving him toward the doors to the elevators. If Predator had them in his sights, he had no reason not to kill them both. The only good witness was a dead witness.

“Tyler! Go!”

Tyler spun around him in a circle. “Stop yelling! You have to listen to me for a change!”

What a fucking nightmare, Jace thought. He reached inside his coat, pulled out the envelope with the negatives in it, hurled it as hard as he could away from the two of them, and away from the guy getting out of the silver convertible Tyler had tumbled from.

Not Predator.

“You have to listen!” Tyler said again.

The guy at the car held his arms out to his sides. In one hand he held a badge.

Jace shoved Tyler behind him and moved a couple of steps backward. “What the fuck is this?”

“Jace, I’m Kev Parker. I’m here to help you out of this mess.”