Kill the Messenger

50

Tyler felt all his blood drain to his feet when the shooting started.

“Jace!” he shouted. He grabbed the radio and pressed the button. “Scout to Leader! Scout to Leader!”

He turned to Andi Kelly. Her eyes looked as wide as his felt.

The person from the Lexus ran out of the park, running for the car that was left way down the street from them. Someone came chasing after, closing ground. He sprinted through a cone of light from a street lamp. Parker.

“Jace! Jace!” Tyler screamed his brother’s name over and over. He shoved open the car door and started running for the plaza as fast as his legs could carry him.

“Tyler!” Andi Kelly called.

She caught him from behind, grabbing him by the arm. Tyler struggled and kicked and yanked, shouting, “Let me go! Let me go!”

But the woman didn’t let go. Instead, she pulled him against her and held tight. His screams became sobs, and he went limp in her arms.

They call it “suicide by cop.” Someone wants to die but doesn’t have the guts to stick the gun in their own mouth and pull the trigger, so they get the cops to do it for them. If the person wants it badly enough, there isn’t any way to stop them. All that person has to do is turn the gun on the cops and start shooting.

Parker’s heart was in his throat as he held his hand out to Diane. “Diane. Honey. Please put the gun down.”

The despair in her face was a terrible thing to see. She was giving up right before his eyes. He took a step closer.

Behind him, Jimmy Chew said, “Kev, don’t get close.” Chew was worried Diane would turn the gun on Parker.

Parker took another step.

The streetlight shone silver over the tears on her cheeks. She looked at him and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. . . .”

He took another step.

Shaking and weak, she tried to lift the gun out to the side. It wobbled in her hand like a dying bird.

“It’s okay,” Parker whispered. Stupid thing to say. What was okay about any of this? What would be okay after this moment had passed? Nothing. But he said it again anyway. “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.”

The gun dropped from her limp hand, and she melted into his arms, sobbing.

Parker held her as tightly as he could. He was shaking. Tears burned his eyes. He held her and rocked her.

Behind them, he could hear the radio chatter coming from the black-and-white. Chew’s partner was calling for backup, asking to have a supervisor and detectives sent.

Parker hoped to God they didn’t send Ruiz, or Kray.

An ambulance siren was already wailing, coming from the other side of the plaza. Metheny also would have called them in, and requested backup, and asked for detectives and a supervisor. In a very short time the plaza would be ablaze with lights, alive with people. He wished he could make it all recede and go away. He didn’t want people seeing this. Diane was a proud and private person. She wouldn’t want anyone seeing her like this.

It was a strange thought, he supposed. She had shot a man in the head. She had as much as confessed to having paid Eddie Davis to murder Tricia Crowne-Cole. But he didn’t know the person who had done those things. He knew the woman he held. He wished he had known her better.

Jimmy Chew put a hand on his shoulder. “Kev,” he said quietly. “They’re coming.”

Parker nodded. He led Diane to the black-and-white and put her in the backseat. Chew handed him a blanket from the trunk of the car, and Parker wrapped it around her and kissed her cheek, and whispered something to her that even he didn’t understand.

As he straightened away from the interior of the car, he turned to Chewalski and said, “Jimmy—uh—can you just see that no one bothers her? I—uh—have to go over there. . . .”

“Sure, Kev.”

Parker nodded and tried to say thank you, but his voice didn’t work. He walked a few steps away, rubbed his hands over his face, took a deep breath, and let it out. He had a job to do. That was the only thing that was going to keep him from falling apart.

He walked away from the black-and-white without looking back, and returned to the plaza, where Metheny knelt on the ground, with Eddie Davis’s head in his big hands.

“Is he alive?” Parker asked.

“So far.”

Metheny pressed a thumb against bullet holes on either side of Davis’s forehead. Diane’s shot had gone in one side and out the other, straight through the frontal lobes. Davis appeared to be surprised, but Parker couldn’t tell if he was actually conscious or not. Still, he was breathing.

Metheny looked up at him. “I feel like the damn little Dutch boy plugging the dike. If I take my thumbs away, this guy’s brains are gonna run out.”

“Eddie. Can you hear me?” Parker asked, leaning down to him. Davis didn’t respond. “Shit.”

“That chick was a wild card, man,” Metheny said. “Did you see that coming?”

“No,” Parker said. “I didn’t.”

“I didn’t get a good look at her. Do you know who she is?”

Parker didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

He stepped over Davis and went to Jace Damon. The kid was lying on his back, staring up.

“Knocked the wind out of you?” Parker asked.

The kid nodded.

Parker kneeled down and helped him onto his hands and knees. Jace sat back on his heels and wheezed.

“You shouldn’t have stepped that close to him,” Parker said. “I told you not to get close. I gave you the gun so you’d stay back from him. Of course, it wasn’t loaded. . . .”

Damon turned his head and glared at him, mouthing the word “What?”

“Jesus, I’d never give a loaded gun to a civilian. Get my ass fired,” Parker muttered. “Not that that won’t happen anyway. Metheny had your back.”

The kid finally got his breath. “Who the hell is Metheny?”

Parker nodded in his former partner’s direction. “I didn’t want you to know he was there. I didn’t want you glancing over at him, tipping Davis.”

“Well, thanks for thinking about me,” Jace said. He struggled to get a deep breath. “I think I broke a rib.”

He sat up a little more on his heels and opened his coat, revealing the light-colored Kevlar vest Parker had strapped him into. And thank God, was all Parker could think. The kid had taken the force of Davis’s blow with the knife, and could well have broken a rib, but the blade hadn’t penetrated the material of the vest, which was five times stronger than steel.

“Just sit still and try to relax,” Parker told him as the ambulance came into sight. “We’ll get an EMT to check you out after they take care of your friend here.”

He put a hand on Jace’s shoulder. “That was a really brave thing you did, Jace.”

“For Eta,” Jace said. “Partly anyway.”

Parker nodded. “I know. But it’s not your fault she died. That’s on Davis. His choice.”

“But if I’d turned myself in—”

“How about if Davis and Lowell hadn’t cooked up the blackmail scheme? How about if none of this had happened? How about if we could all fly to Mars and start over? There are a lot of what-ifs on that list before it gets to you.”

The kid nodded, but with his eyes pointed at the ground, the guilt still weighing on him.

“Jace,” Parker said. “You don’t know me. You don’t know I’m not just full of shit. But I’m telling you, you did what you believed you had to do through all of this. Not what was easiest or best for you. You did what you did, and you’re owning it. And I don’t know ten men who would be brave enough to do that.”

“Jace!”

The excited shriek arrived about a nanosecond before Tyler hurled himself at his brother.

Parker leaned over and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Good work, Scout.”

Tyler beamed up at him. “Me and Andi let the air out of the tires on that Lexus!”

Parker turned to Andi, who shrugged and made a face, waiting for him to yell at her. Instead, he took a few steps away from the boys, and rested his hands on his hips.

“Well, this is a hell of a mess,” he said.

Kelly studied his face, sober as a judge. “Who’s down there, Kev? Phillip?”

“Diane Nicholson.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, well, that makes two of us,” Parker said. He looked across the plaza as an ambulance arrived and EMTs piled out of it. “It looks like she hired Davis to kill Tricia, and she set up Rob Cole to take the fall.”

“Oh, my God. Diane Nicholson? From the coroner’s office?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. He watched the paramedics swarm around Eddie Davis.

“What the hell happened?” one of them asked. “Ice pick? Twin ice picks?”

“Shot,” Metheny said. “Through-and-through.”

The paramedic turned Davis’s head one way, then the other. “The poor man’s lobotomy.”

“He won’t miss it,” Metheny said. “He wasn’t using that part anyway.”

It was something Parker would have said himself, but the black humor every cop he knew used to diffuse the stress wasn’t there for him. Numbness had begun to set in. Thank God.

Kelly touched his hand. “Kev? Are you all right?”

“No,” he whispered. “I’m not.”

And he turned and walked away.