Kill the Messenger

48

On weekends the plaza on Olvera Street is ringed with tourists and Mexican families watching Aztec dancers or listening to Mariachi bands. On a weeknight in the dead of winter, there are no tourists, only transients looking for a park bench to sleep on.

Jace paced a slow half circle at the edge of the plaza, feeling like a goat that had been staked out as lion bait, waiting for the guy who had tried repeatedly to kill him. Waiting for the guy who had twisted his life into a nightmare, who had murdered an innocent woman. Jace let his outrage singe the edges of his fear. He would be a part of taking down Eta’s killer. He had argued with Parker to be in on it. It was his duty to Eta.

The wind was rustling the leaves of the big fig trees, putting him on edge as he tried to sharpen his ear for the sound of a shoe scraping on pavement, the hammer of a gun being cocked.

Jace had brought Tyler here a million times. It was an easy walk from Chinatown, and an inexpensive day out for people with limited resources. Free shows, an outdoor market of stalls with cheap trinkets and T-shirts.

The park was supposedly the heart of LA’s original 1781 settlement. In a city where change and all things cutting-edge rule, the adobe structures and old tile walkways gave the impression of being in another world. And Tyler, who absorbed detail and history like a sponge, loved it.

If anything happened to that kid, Jace was going to dismember Kev Parker with his bare hands. There had been no time to take Tyler home. They had to set up, get into their positions, and do it before Davis could arrive. He had asked for a couple of hours. There was no way of knowing what he meant to do with that time. His intentions could have been the same as theirs, to get here early with a plan.

Parker had given Tyler the job of lookout, and left him in the car with his walkie-talkie.

A big black guy was lying on his side on a bench Jace had walked past twice, sleeping, snoring, reeking of bourbon. He looked like a sea lion flopped on the beach, the moonlight washing over him and the rags he had covered himself with. Another innocent bystander unwittingly waiting to die, Jace thought. He knocked the guy on his shoes.

“Hey, buddy, wake up. Get up.”

The man didn’t move. Jace grabbed hold of an ankle and gave a yank. “Hey, mister, you need to get out of here.”

The old drunk just went on snoring. Jace moved away from him. If he was that dead to the world, he was probably as safe as he could be here. Jace walked away.

A dot of light flashed at him from across the plaza. Parker. Davis was coming.

The excitement building in Eddie’s gut was a lot like the anticipation of sex. A fist of tension, all his nerve endings starting to buzz. He loved his work.

He loved that he was so fucking smart. He’d come up with the perfect plan to cut away all the loose ends of this deal and ride off into the sunset. He could already see himself stretched out on the beach in Baja with a cigar, a bottle of tequila, and some topless Mexican babe ready to do whatever freaky, kinky thing he wanted her to do.

He could see the kid pacing around the plaza, probably ready to shit his pants. Stupid kid. Except that he probably wasn’t so stupid that he hadn’t brought a gun or something this time to protect himself.

What he hadn’t brought with him was cops. Eddie had done his recon. No plainclothes cop–looking cars in the area. You could always tell cops by the shit rides the city gave them. The place was deserted except for a few homeless losers with their shopping carts parked next to benches.

Eddie himself was traveling light. The only thing he carried with him was his knife.

Parker had given Jace a gun, a .22 caliber handgun he had taken out of a case in the trunk of his car. It seemed a pretty wild thing for a cop to do, but Jace had figured out quickly that Kev Parker was not a mainstream kind of guy. He was riding around in a convertible with no police radio, only a scanner. He didn’t have a partner—not with him anyway. They had stopped en route and picked up a crazy woman who was a newspaper reporter.

If Jace hadn’t looked at Parker’s ID, he wouldn’t have believed the guy was a cop at all. First of all, he dressed too well to be a cop. Even his shoes looked expensive, and that was one thing you could always count on with cops—the bad shoes.

Still, Jace didn’t like the idea of trusting him. This was all happening too fast. But he didn’t see that he had any choice. The only way he was getting out of this mess alive was for someone to take Eddie Davis out.

He could see Davis coming, the shape of a small vending machine in a long dark coat. His palms started to sweat and acid rose in his throat like the red stuff in a thermometer.

It would be over in the next few minutes. Jace’s only hope was that he would live to tell the tale.

Parker watched Eddie Davis through night-vision binoculars as he crossed the plaza. LAPD may not have been able to afford pens that didn’t leak, but Parker had no such budget limitations. He kept a small treasure trove of gadgets in the trunk of his car.

Clipped to the bridge of the binoculars was a small, wireless parabolic microphone that fed him sound through a discreet earphone. In his other ear was an earbud for the walkie-talkie that connected him to Tyler, in the car.

He had left the boy with Andi Kelly, and didn’t know which one was more liable to keep the other out of trouble. They had picked Kelly up on their way. If Parker’s hunch paid off, she was going to get one hell of a story.

“Where’s the money?” Jace asked. Davis was still ten feet away.

“It’s on the way.”

“What? You never said anything about anybody else,” Jace said. He was trembling. The guy standing in front of him was a murderer.

“You never asked,” Davis said. “I don’t carry that kind of cash around. What did you think? That I’d rob an ATM?”

He looked like something from Dawn of the Dead as he stood there with the streetlight washing over him. He had a strip of white tape across his nose. One eye was almost swollen shut, and he looked like someone had hit him across the left side of his face with a brick.

He stood with his arms crossed, casual, like they were a couple of strangers chatting while they waited for a bus.

“So where are the negatives?”

“They’re safe,” Jace said. He rubbed his hand over the gun in his pocket. He didn’t know anything about using a gun. Parker had said, What’s to know? Point and shoot.

“There must be someone big in those pictures to be worth all this, for people to be killed over them,” Jace said now.

Davis smiled like a crocodile. “The killing’s the fun part.”

He started to take a step closer.

Jace pulled the .22 out of his pocket. “You’re fine right there. I don’t want you coming any closer.”

Davis gave a little huff. “You’re some pain in the ass, kid. How do I know you’ve even got the negatives? Maybe you came here to rob me.”

“Maybe I came here to kill you,” Jace said. “That woman you murdered at Speed Couriers? She was a good person.”

“So?” Davis shrugged. “I just do my job. It’s nothing personal.”

Jace wanted to shoot him then, just Bam! point-blank in the face. That was what he deserved. No need for the taxpayers to waste a nickel on him.

This is for Eta. . . .

“I hope my brother doesn’t get killed.” Tyler tried to sound matter-of-fact about it. The truth was, he was so scared, he thought he might throw up.

“Kev won’t let that happen.”

They sat hunched down in the front seat of Parker’s car. Well, Andi was hunched more than he was. It didn’t take that much hunching for Tyler to be pretty much out of sight.

“Are you his girlfriend?” he asked.

“Naw . . . Kev’s a loner. Until this week, I hadn’t seen him in a long time,” she said. “He’s a good guy. He didn’t used to be, but he is now. He used to be a jerk.”

“And then what?”

“And then he took a long look at himself and he didn’t like what he saw. I’m pretty sure he’s the first man in recorded history to make the decision to grow and change, and actually pull it off.”

“He seems pretty cool—for a cop.”

“You don’t like cops?”

Tyler shook his head.

“Why is that?”

He shrugged with one shoulder. “’Cause that’s how it is.”

He turned away to avoid her trying to figure him out. Headlights flashed as a car turned toward them.

Tyler jumped in his seat, fumbled for the walkie-talkie, pressed the call button.

“Scout to Leader, Scout to Leader! Bogie! Bogie!”

If there was one thing Parker hated, it was a wild card, unless the wild card was himself. Davis had called in a ringer, and what the hell was that about? He didn’t need help getting a pack of negatives from one kid, and there was no way he was actually going to pay for them.

He touched the button on his mike. “Roger that. We’ve got a bogie coming in.”

Countdown to showtime.

“You’re a real piece of shit,” Jace said.

Davis didn’t react. “Yeah, people tell me that all the time.” He went to reach inside his coat. “I want a smoke.”

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Jace ordered.

Davis gave a big sigh. “Amateurs.”

“Yeah,” Jace said. “Amateurs make mistakes. Get jumpy. Pull the trigger when they don’t mean to.”

That smile crawled across Davis’s wide face again. “You want to kill me so bad, you can taste it. Maybe you’ve got a future in my business.”

Jace said nothing. The creep was trying to yank his chain, distract him. His arms were getting tired holding the gun out in front of him. Where the hell was the guy with the money?

Headlights bobbed nearby. He almost made the mistake of turning to look.

The air around them seemed as thick as the ocean. Hard to breathe. The only sound he could hear was the black guy snoring on the park bench.

“Here comes the money, honey,” Davis said.

Parker waited for the new member of the troupe to appear. At Tyler’s alert, his sensitivity to every stimulus heightened to an almost unbearable level. Every sound seemed louder. The touch of the night air on his skin was too much. He was more aware of his breathing, of his heart tripping faster.

His money was on Phillip Crowne.

The daughter, Caroline, may have had motive, but he couldn’t see a girl that age being able to pull it off—having her mother killed, setting up her lover to take the fall, and keeping it all quiet. No. Young women in love were all about passion and drama and over-the-top demonstrations of both.

Nor would Rob Cole have taken the fall for her. Guys like Cole didn’t take responsibility for their own actions, let alone someone else’s. If Rob Cole had thought that Caroline had murdered Tricia, he would have been singing that song at the top of his lungs.

Parker liked the brother for it. Andi Kelly had told him Phillip Crowne had been seen having dinner with his sister the night she was killed. The dinner conversation had been serious. Phillip claimed Tricia had talked about divorcing Cole, but the discussion could just as easily have been about Tricia wanting to blow the whistle on her brother’s siphoning of funds from the charitable trust.

No one had ever been able to prove Phillip had been helping himself—but then, everyone had been focused on stringing up Rob Cole. A celebrity scandal was so much more interesting than plain old vanilla embezzling. There was nothing sexy or exciting about Phillip Crowne, while going after Rob Cole had all the ingredients of America’s favorite pastime: tearing down the idol.

Besides, Rob Cole had motive, means, and opportunity. He’d been right there at the scene of the crime when it had happened. He had no viable alibi for the time of the murder. Parker was willing to bet Phillip Crowne hadn’t gotten more than a perfunctory look from RHD, if that. And it hadn’t hurt him to be the son of one of the most influential men in the city either. Norman Crowne backed the DA. Phillip Crowne and Tony Giradello had known each other since law school.

If Eddie Davis and Lenny Lowell had been blackmailing Phillip, was it such a stretch to imagine Phillip Crowne going to his old buddy Giradello for a favor? It wasn’t that difficult for Parker to imagine Giradello selling justice to Crowne. There wasn’t a man on the planet hungrier or more ambitious than Anthony Giradello.

All of it fell into place like the heavy, glossy pieces of an expensive puzzle. Giradello couldn’t let a couple of mutts like Davis and Lowell bring down his well-heeled pal, or ruin the trial that would make his own name a household word. If he sent in Bradley Kyle and Moose Roddick, who also stood to benefit from convicting Rob Cole, he could manipulate the situation, make it go away.

Parker’s blood went cold at the idea that maybe Kyle hadn’t meant to miss anybody he’d been shooting at in Pershing Square. Davis was a big loose end. Jace Damon had the negatives. Abby Lowell was a wild card.

He had wished for a case to make a comeback. This one was an embarrassment of scandalous riches and human tragedy. He thought of Eta Fitzgerald and her four motherless children, and wished he could trade the case to give her back her life. But the best he could do was nail her killer and the people whose actions had ultimately been the catalyst for her murder.

A figure was walking toward the plaza, toward Davis and Damon. The moment of truth was at hand.

Parker raised his glasses and focused in . . . and the world dropped from under him.