Kill the Messenger (31 page)

                        
      45

Tyler Damon gave Parker the saga of the Damon brothers, picking like a bird at a plate of pasta in Smeraldi’s. The big blue eyes periodically made passes around the room and out to the Biltmore’s Olive Street lobby, taking it all in like he’d fallen into an LA version of a Harry Potter book.

Parker’s heart went out to him. The poor kid was terrified for his big brother, and terrified for himself. He had to feel like everything about his life was changing on a dime, and here he sat, telling it all to a cop.

“What’s going to happen to us?” he asked miserably.

“You’re going to be fine, Tyler,” Parker said. “We need to find your brother so he’ll be fine too. Can we make that happen?”

The skinny shoulders went up to his ears. He stared at his plate. “He hasn’t answered any of my radio calls.”

“He’s been pretty busy today. I have a feeling we’ll have better luck tonight.”

“What if that guy with the motorcycle got him?”

“The guy with the motorcycle doesn’t have the motorcycle anymore,” Parker said. “According to what I was hearing across the street, your brother was hauling ass on that bike of his. The bad guy took a dive off the Bunker Hill Steps. He should have died.”

“But he got away?”

“Your brother was long gone by then.” Parker tossed some bills on the table and got up. “Come on, kiddo, let’s blow this shack. You’re riding shotgun.”

Tyler Damon’s eyes went huge. “Really?”

“You’ve got to be my partner. This isn’t going to work without you.”

“I have to call Madame Chen first.”

“We’ll call her from the car. She’s not going to ground you or anything, is she?”

The boy shook his head. “I just don’t want her to worry.”

“We’ll call her.”

They went out through the main lobby, where Andi Kelly was loitering. Parker raised a hand and gave the universal sign for “I’ll call you,” but didn’t pause. He needed Tyler Damon’s trust, and he wasn’t going to get it by giving his attention to other people.

Parker’s car sat in a red zone with an LAPD pass clipped to the sun visor. They got in, the boy trying not to make a big deal of being impressed with the convertible. Parker put the top up for privacy, and because, with the sun gone, it was damn cold. He made a mental note to take the kid out in the Jag after this mess was over.

“So,” he said, “does Jace have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“A boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Does he have any friends he might try to stay with?”

“I don’t think so,” Tyler said. “He’s too busy to hang out.”

The boy explained where he had been looking for his brother and why. Parker thought about it for a minute.

“Do you know if he was carrying much money with him?”

“We don’t have very much money,” the boy said.

“Credit cards?”

Tyler shook his head.

It wasn’t likely Damon would have gone to a hotel anyway, Parker thought. Too confined, too many people, too much potential for trouble.

He made a phone call to the Midnight Mission and asked a friend there if anyone matching Jace Damon’s description had come in, and to call him back if a possibility did show up.

His next call was to Madame Chen to allay her fears that Tyler had been abducted, or worse. She asked to speak to the boy, and they conversed in Mandarin, Tyler glancing up at Parker every so often, Parker pretending not to listen. Then the boy handed the phone back to him.

“I need Tyler to help me tonight, Madame Chen. I have to find Jace before anyone else does, and I can’t do that without Tyler.”

Parker could tell by the quality of the silence that she didn’t like the idea.

“I won’t let anything happen to him,” Parker promised.

“You will bring him back tonight?”

A question rather than an order. She was worried. Hell of a woman, Parker thought, taking these kids in literally off the street. He didn’t know a single person who would have done the same, himself included.

“I’ll bring him back as soon as I can.”

Another silence. Her voice was strained when she spoke again. “He has school tomorrow.”

Parker didn’t point out the incongruity of what she’d just said. She only wanted for their lives to go back to normal.

“I’ll bring him back as soon as I can,” he said again. He wanted to tell her that he could script this and that everything would work out like a Hallmark movie, but he couldn’t.

“Take care of him,” she said. “Take care of them both.”

“I will,” Parker said, and ended the call.

Tyler was watching him, watching his face, trying to read him the way he would read about Pythagoras, or figure out a math problem. It had to be frustrating for him in a way, Parker thought: having that big 168 IQ, but still being a little kid with little kid fears, and no real power over his life.

“You got a nickname?” Parker asked.

The boy hesitated for a minute. Like maybe he had one he didn’t want.

“On the radio, my name is Scout,” he said, brightening. “Jace is Ranger.”

Parker nodded. “Scout. I like that. Buckle up, Scout. Let’s ride.”

                        
      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.”

                        
      47

Eddie Davis had been told numerous times in his life that he would never amount to anything. The reasons varied. Some people blamed him, said he was stupid and lazy and didn’t apply himself. Other people—his mother, specifically—had always blamed fate. Life just had it in for Eddie. Eddie chose to believe the second reason.

He had plenty of brains, lots of great ideas. Of course, none of them involved needing an education or doing any kind of hard work—that was what made them great ideas. Only an idiot would want to have to work. People were jealous of him because he had figured out that particular life mystery, and they turned on him every time. That was what happened again and again to screw up his life.

This fucking mess he was in now was a perfect example. He had masterminded a fucking brilliant plan. And the one person he should have been able to trust had turned on him. His own lawyer, for God’s sake.

A person was supposed to be able to trust his lawyer. There was that confidential privilege thing, right? That had been the genius of the plan—he hooked his lawyer in when the game was already in motion. The murder had already happened. Whatever he told Lenny was confidential, so the lawyer couldn’t rat him out. Eddie had needed someone to take the pictures of the client paying him off. He would split the money 70–30. Of course he deserved more since it was his idea and he had done the killing. The deal was too sweet for Lenny to resist.

They had milked the client a couple of times, then agreed to one final big payday in exchange for the negatives. It was then that Eddie had heard detectives were nosing around, asking questions about him. The detectives who had investigated the murder. That meant only one thing to Eddie: Lenny had dropped the dime on him and figured to end up with all the money and the one negative they had saved out in case they wanted to use it later on. Lenny would have cut him out of his own game, and run off to Tahiti or someplace no one would find him.

A man’s lawyer was supposed to take his secrets to the grave, right?

Lenny Lowell had taken Eddie’s there early. And it served him right.

Eddie had set up the final drop, told Lenny the client would be there, told the client nothing. His plan had been to intercept the negatives and kill the messenger as a warning to Lenny. Then he’d have the lawyer in his pocket to stand up for him, lie for him, give him alibis, do whatever Eddie needed him for in the future.

But everything had gone wrong because of the fucking bike messenger, and Eddie had been so damned mad. And it was all Lenny’s fault anyway, so if he couldn’t kill the messenger, he might as well kill Lenny. Get the lawyer to give up the last negative, then beat his head to a pulp. There was just something so satisfying in beating a head in.

“Ouch!” Eddie howled, twisting around to give the bitch stitching him an ugly look. “Fucking cunt! That hurts!”

The woman averted her eyes and apologized in Mexican. At least, it sounded like an apology.

He turned back around, and took a pull on the tequila bottle and a drag on his cigarette. One of the cops had nicked him good. The bullet had torn a gash in his side about three inches long, and it felt like it had maybe chipped a rib. If the bullet had hit a couple of inches to the left, it would have taken out a kidney, and he’d be dead. He should figure he was lucky, but he didn’t.

If he was lucky, his fucking twelve-K Jap Ninja wouldn’t be scrap metal at the bottom of the fucking Bunker Hill Steps. The only lucky thing about it was that he hadn’t broken his neck, and he’d been able to jack a car and get the hell out of there.

Now he sat in this shithole, backdoor, spic “clinic” in East LA, getting stitched up by some bitch who probably spent her days cleaning toilets for white people.

Hector Munoz, the guy who ran the place, sure as hell wasn’t a doctor, but he would keep his mouth shut for a couple hundred bucks, and he always had a good supply of Oxycodone—Eddie’s drug of choice.

The cell phone Eddie had left lying on the metal table beside him—the table with all the needles and scissors and the bedpan he was using for an ashtray—went off. He knew who it was. He’d been waiting for the call. He’d been working on his lie for two hours. His client was expecting the negatives. Now Eddie had to break the news that that wasn’t going to happen.

He grabbed the phone. “Yeah?”

“You can have the negatives.” He’d never heard the voice before, young, male. The bike messenger. “I just don’t want to die, that’s all. It’s not worth it. I thought Abby Lowell would pay for them. I never figured she’d call the cops. She told me she was in it with you—”

“How the fuck did you get this phone number?”

“From her.”

He sounded scared. He should be. This kid had caused Eddie nothing but grief. He’d wrecked a windshield, wrecked the Ninja, cost Eddie time and money. Shit, he’d had to kill two extra people because of this little fuck. And now the kid thought he could shake him down.

“What do you want?” Eddie snapped.

Nurse Ratched jabbed him with the needle again. He swung around and backhanded her, knocking her into the metal table, making a lot of noise. The woman put her hands over her face and started to cry.

“Tie the fucking knot and get the fuck away from me!”

She started blabbering and jabbering. Hector Munoz cracked the door open from the other side of his business—a strip club featuring a naked all-girl Mariachi band. He smiled nervously, his thin mustache rippling over his upper lip like a worm.

“Eddie?
Muchacho
?”

“Shut the fucking door!”

Eddie put his phone against his head again. “What do you want?”

“I want out,” the kid said. “I just want out. I don’t even know who’s in the fucking pictures. I just knew if the negatives were worth killing for, they had to be worth money. Throw me a couple grand. Enough for me to get out of town—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie snapped. “Be at Elysian Park in twenty minutes.”

“Go out there so you can kill me? Fuck that. I’ve got what you want. You can come to me.”

“Where are you?”

“Under the bridge at Fourth and Flower.”

“How do I know you won’t set me up?”

“With the cops? They think I killed the lawyer, why would I call them? If I wanted cops, I would have stayed in Pershing Square.”

“I still don’t like it,” Eddie said.

“Then don’t come. You know what? Forget it. Maybe I can sell them to a tabloid or something.”

“All right. Don’t get your balls in a twist. There’s gotta be cops all over down there still. It’s too risky. I’m driving a stolen car, for Christ’s sake.”

“That’s your problem.”

Eddie wanted to reach through the phone and choke the little shit. “Look, I can get you five grand, but you have to give me a couple hours to get the money, and the meet has to be somewhere cops aren’t driving by every three minutes.”

Eddie thought about it for a minute. He wanted a place where there wouldn’t be a lot of people around at this time of night. Had to have escape routes and good access to a freeway. “Olvera Street Plaza. Two hours. And, kid? Double-cross me, and I’ll skin your dick and feed it to you while you bleed to death. You got that?”

“Yeah. Whatever. Just bring the money.”

Eddie ended the call and got off the exam table. The door cracked open again, and Hector slithered in. He was skinny and oily, and shook all over like a shit-ass Chihuahua dog. The little Mexican chick hurried up to him and rattled off a lot of gibberish, gesturing at Eddie. Eddie took a last drag on his cigarette, and shrugged into his shirt.

“Hector, I need to borrow your car.”

Hector smiled that nervous smile again. “Sure, man, whatever.” He pulled a set of keys out of his pants pocket and tossed them to Eddie. “It’s the blue Toyota with the flames all down the sides.”

“Great.”

“What you gonna do, man?”

Eddie looked at him with his dead eyes and said, “I’m gonna go kill somebody. I’ll see you later.”