Kill the Messenger (2 page)

                      
      2

The television was playing in the overflowing bookcase across the room as Lenny Lowell prepared the packet for pickup. His office was an oasis of amber light in an otherwise dark strip of low-end storefronts—a yoga place, a psychic, a nail salon frequented by hookers. Across the street and down the block, the bail-bonds/check-cashing place was open, and farther down a 76 station lit up the night with more lights than a prison yard.

The gas-station attendant would already be locked in his booth like a veal calf behind a couple of inches of bulletproof Plexiglas. But there wouldn’t be much crime tonight for either the station attendant or the bail bondsman to worry about. It was raining. In LA even the criminals don’t do rain.

On the TV, a hot brunette was reporting on the latest crime of the century. Jury selection continued for the upcoming trial of actor Rob Cole, accused in the brutal murder of his wife, Tricia.

Lenny watched with one eye, listened with one ear. Only his jealousy was fully committed. Cole had retained the services of Martin Gorman, whose client list read like a Who’s Who of Hollywood’s most famous screwups. Lenny’s client list read like a Who’s Who of LAPD’s best-known dirtbags.

Not that he hadn’t done well for himself. The world was full of recidivists too flush for a public defender and too stupid to keep from getting caught. Lenny had a thriving practice. And his extracurricular activities of late had netted him a new Cadillac and a ticket to Tahiti. Still, he had always coveted the spotlight claimed by lawyers like Martin Gorman and Johnnie Cochran and Robert Shapiro. He had just never found a way to get there that didn’t involve talent and social connections.

A photograph of Tricia Crowne-Cole filled the television screen. She wasn’t especially attractive, kind of pudgy and mousy with brown hair too long for a woman her age. (She had to be fifty-something—significantly older than Cole, provided he was the forty-something he claimed to be.) She wore glasses that made her look like a spinster librarian.

You would’ve thought the daughter of a bazillionaire would have used some of that money to jazz herself up a little. Especially in this town, where women kept the numbers of their plastic surgeons and their favorite designers on speed dial. A bazillion dollars could make plain look pretty damn gorgeous.

It was hard for the average person to imagine why anyone would have wanted her dead. She had devoted her life to overseeing her father’s philanthropic trust. There wasn’t a disease Norman Crowne wasn’t trying to cure, a liberal social cause he didn’t champion, a highfalutin art he didn’t support—via Tricia. She was her father’s social conscience.

It was impossible for the average person to imagine how anyone could have killed her so brutally, strangling her, then smashing her face in with a piece of sculpture the size of a bowling ball. Lenny was not the average person. He had heard it all a thousand times and knew full well what people were capable of, what jealousy and hate could drive them to.

Word around town was that Tricia, fed up with Cole’s infidelities and endless dramas, had been about to dump Rob Cole off the gravy train at long last. Cole had tanked his career with sulkiness, stupidity, and a shallow store of talent. He had run through all of his money and plenty of hers. A lot of it had gone up his nose. A lot had gone to rehab clinics—charitable donations, as it turned out. Rob Cole didn’t have the character to pull himself out of the train wreck, or sense enough to keep his weaknesses private.

The tailor-made Leonard Lowell client, Lenny lamented. He could have made a big name for himself getting Rob Cole off the hook—a name that would be recognized even by people who didn’t have rap sheets. But Rob Cole was Martin Gorman’s headache. Lenny had other fish to fry.

The front buzzer sounded, announcing the arrival of the messenger. As he rounded the desk, Lenny glanced at the brochures he had gotten from the redhead at the travel agency on the second floor and wondered if he could sweet-talk her into going with him. The Cayman Islands and a hot broad. Paradise.

Jace leaned on the buzzer a second time, even though he could see Lenny Lowell coming out of the office and into the dark cubicle occupied in daylight hours by Lowell’s secretary—a woman with cotton-candy blond hair and cat-eye glasses, known only as “Doll.” Lenny was like a character out of an old movie where all the men wore hats and baggy suits, and everybody smoked cigarettes and talked fast.

Jace had been to Lowell’s office many times. A lot of a messenger’s runs were to or from lawyers of one kind or another—much to the displeasure of the messengers. Lawyers were notoriously cheap and impossible to please. At the annual Thanksgiving bash—Cranksgiving—the messengers always had a piñata in the image of their least favorite attorney of the year. They made the thing extra tough so everyone could get their chance to beat on it repeatedly.

Jace played along with the game and kept to himself the fact that he intended to join the ranks of the loathed someday. Growing up the way he had, he had seen the law work against a lot of people, especially kids. He meant to turn it in his favor—turn his life around, and hopefully some others’ too. But he was taking only two college courses a semester, so most of his messenger cohorts would be dead or gone by the time he passed the bar. If Jace was ever to be immortalized as a piñata, it would be strangers beating the stuffing out of him.

In the meantime, he always made an effort to chat up any lawyers he could, trying to make a good impression, trying to pick up whatever he could about the profession and the people in it. Networking. Working toward the day when he might be looking for a job, a recommendation, career advice.

Lowell pulled the door open, an unnaturally white smile splitting his long, horsey face.

“Neither rain, nor smog, nor gloom of night,” he boomed. He’d been drinking. Jace could smell the bourbon hanging over the bad cologne.

“Hey, Lenny,” he said, pushing his way inside. “It’s raining, man.”

“That’s why they pay you the big bucks, kid.”

“Yeah, right. I’m rolling in it,” Jace said, resisting the urge to shake himself like a wet dog. “I just do this gig for the rush.”

“You got a simple life,” the lawyer said, weaving his way back to his office. “There’s a lot to be said for that.”

“Yeah, like it sucks. Believe me, Lenny, I’d rather be driving your new Cadillac than my bike. Especially tonight. Man, I hate the rain.”

Lowell waved a big bony hand at him. “Nah. It never rains in Southern California. Unless you’re some poor stiff like Rob Cole. Then you get a shitstorm on your head.”

Jace glanced around the office piled with books and papers and file folders. Next to a bowling trophy dated 1974, two framed photographs sat on the desk—one of a racehorse in the winner’s circle with a bunch of flowers around its neck, and one of a pretty young woman with long dark hair and a confident smile—Lenny’s daughter, Abby. A law student, Lenny had told him.

“Gorman will get him off,” Jace said, picking up the bowling trophy to read the inscription:
2ND PLACE TEAM, HOLLYWOOD BOWL, 1974.
It wasn’t difficult to picture Lenny in one of those bowling shirts from the fifties, his hair greased back. “Gorman is good. Better than good.”

“It’s better to be lucky than good, kid,” Lowell returned. “Martin’s betting against the house in a rigged game. Money talks. Remember that.”

“I would if I had any.” Jace put the trophy back and scratched his arm under the sleeve of his cheap plastic rain jacket. He had bought half a dozen at the 99 Cent Store because they came folded to the size of a wallet and didn’t take up any space in his messenger bag. One seldom lasted more than a single storm, but the odds were good that six would last him the winter.

“Here,” Lowell said, thrusting a twenty at him. “For your trouble, kid. Don’t let it shoot its mouth off all in one place.”

Jace wanted to hold it up to the light.

Lowell snorted. “It’s real. Jesus. The last paperhanger I defended went to San Quentin in 1987. Counterfeiting is all Russian mob now. I don’t want any part of that. Those bastards make Hannibal Lecter look like a moody guy with an eating disorder.” He raised his glass in a toast to himself. “To long life. Mine. You want a toot, kid?”

“No, thanks, I don’t drink.”

“Designated driver?”

“Something like that.”

Designated adult, as long as he could remember, but he didn’t tell Leonard Lowell that. He never told anyone anything about his life. Below the radar. The less people knew, the less curious they would be, the less apt to want to “help.” An extra twenty bucks was the only kind of help Jace wanted.

“Thanks, Lenny. I appreciate it.”

“I know you do, kid. Tell your mother she raised a good one.”

“I will.”

He wouldn’t. His mother had been dead six years. He had mostly raised himself, and Tyler too.

Lowell handed him a five-by-seven-inch padded manila envelope. He hung a cigarette on his lip and it bobbed up and down as he spoke while he fished in his baggy pants pocket for a lighter. “I appreciate you dropping this off for me, kid. You’ve got the address?”

Jace repeated it from memory.

“Keep it dry,” Lowell said, blowing smoke at the dingy ceiling.

“Like my life depends on it.”

                      
      3

Famous last words,
Jace would think later when he looked back on this night. But he didn’t think anything as he went out into the rain and pulled the U-lock off his bike.

Instead of putting the package in his bag, he slipped it up under his T-shirt and tucked the shirt and the package inside the waistband of his bike shorts. Warm and dry.

He climbed on the bike under the blue neon of the
PSYCHIC READINGS
sign and started to pedal, legs heavy, back aching, fingers cold and slipping on the wet handlebars. His weight shifted from pedal to pedal, the bike tilting side to side, the lateral motion gradually becoming forward motion as he picked up speed, the aches gradually melding into a familiar numbness.

One last run.

He would leave his paperwork ’til morning. Drop this package, go home, and crawl into that hot shower. He tried to imagine it: hot water pounding on his shoulders, massaging out the knots in the muscles, warm steam cleansing the stink of the city from his nostrils and soothing lungs that had spent the day sucking in car exhaust. He imagined Madame Chen’s hot and sour soup, and clean sheets on the futon, and did his best to ignore the cold rain pelting his face and deglazing the oil on the surface of the street.

His mind distracted, he rode on autopilot. Past the 76 station, take a right. Down two blocks, take a left. The side streets were empty, dark. Nobody hung around in this part of town at this time of night for any good reason. The businesses—a glass shop, an air-conditioning place, a furniture-stripping place, an auto-body shop—in the dirty, low, flat-roofed buildings closed up at six.

He might have thought it was a strange destination for a package from a lawyer, except that the lawyer was Lenny, and Lenny’s clients were low-end career criminals.

He checked address numbers as lighting allowed. The drop would be the first place on the right on the next block. Except that the first place on the right on the next block was a vacant lot.

Jace cruised past, checked the number on the next available building, which was dark, save for the security light hanging over the front door.

Apprehension scratched like a fingernail on the back of his neck. He swung around in the street and rode slowly past the vacant lot again.

Headlights flashed on, blinding him for a second.

What the hell kind of drop was this? Drugs? A payoff? Whatever it was, Jace wasn’t making it. Only a fool would ride into this and ask for a signature on a manifest.

Now he was pissed. Pissed and scared. Sent to a vacant lot in the dead of fucking night. Fuck that. Fuck Lenny Lowell. He could take his package and shove it up his ass.

Jace stood on his pedals and started to go.

The car lurched forward, engine roaring like a charging beast as it made straight for him.

For a split second it seemed Jace didn’t—couldn’t—move. Then he was going, legs pumping like pistons, the bike’s tires slipping on the wet street. If he ran straight, the car would be on him like a cat on a mouse. He turned hard left instead. The bike’s back end skated sideways on the slick pavement. He stuck a foot down to keep from falling, pulled the bike back under himself. Then he was charging the car.

Heart in his throat, he juked right, nearly too late, jumped the curb back into the vacant lot, shooting past the car—big, dark, domestic. He heard the grind of metal on pavement as the car went off the curb and bottomed out. Tires squealed on the wet street as it swung a wide, awkward, skidding turn.

Jace made for the alley as hard as he could go, praying it wouldn’t dead-end. In the heart of downtown he was like a street rat that knew every sewer pipe, every Dumpster, every crack in a wall that could offer a shortcut, escape, shelter, a hiding place. Here he was vulnerable, a rabbit caught in the open. Prey.

The car was coming after him. The predator. The headlights bucked up and down in the gloom as the car banged back up over the curb.

Jace had had cars come after him in traffic—kids screwing around, men with rage disorders pissed off that he had cut in front of them or skitched a ride up a hill or knocked a side mirror. Assholes trying to make a point, trying to give him a scare. He had never been set up. He had never been hunted.

If he could get to the end of the alley before the car turned down it and spotlit him, he had a fifty-fifty shot at ditching it. The end of the alley looked nine miles away.

And it was already too late.

The high beams slapped at his back like a paw reaching out to tag him. The car came, as loud as a train, sending trash cans scattering like bowling pins.

Shit, shit, shit.

His luck was running out faster than the alley was. He couldn’t outrun the car. He couldn’t turn and ditch the car. To his left: buildings shoulder to shoulder, backed with Dumpsters and boxes and discarded junk—an obstacle course. To his right: a chain-link fence crowned with razor wire. On his ass: the angel of death.

Jace reached back with one hand and jerked his U-lock out of his messenger bag. The bumper kissed his back tire. He nearly fell onto the hood of the car. Moving as close as he could against the fence, Jace touched his brakes, dropped just behind Predator’s bumper.

Jace swung the heavy U-lock left-handed into the windshield. A spiderweb of cracks exploded across the span of glass. The car swerved into him, drove him sideways into the fence. Jace turned and grabbed hold of the chain-link fence with both hands, hanging on hard as the bike was yanked out from under him. The toe of his right shoe hung up in the pedal clip and his body jerked wildly sideways as the car pushed the bike forward.

The fence bit into his fingers as the bike tried to drag him. It felt like his arms were tearing out of their sockets, that his foot was being wrenched off at the ankle, then suddenly he was free and falling.

He landed on his back on the cracked asphalt, rolled, and scrambled up onto his knees, his eyes on the car as his bike went under the back tire and died a terrible death.

His only transportation. His livelihood. Gone.

He was on his own. On foot. And one foot was missing a shoe. Pain burned through his wrenched ankle as Jace pushed himself to his feet and ran for the buildings before the car could come to a complete stop.

The voice of his survival instinct screamed through his brain.
Go, go, go!!!

He was young, he was fast, he was highly motivated. He set his sights on a half wall blocking the space between two buildings. He would hit it running, vault over the side, and be gone. Bum ankle or no, he could damn well outrun the asshole driving that car.

But he couldn’t outrun a bullet.

The shot hit the Dumpster a foot to Jace’s left almost simultaneously as he heard the report.

Fuck!

He had to get over that wall. He had to get over it. Get over it and run like hell.

Footfalls were coming hard behind him.

The second shot went wide right and hit another Dumpster.

A man shouted, “Fuck!”

Too close. Too close.

Footfalls coming hard behind him.

Jace launched himself at the wall and was summarily yanked backward as his pursuer grabbed hold of the messenger bag he wore strapped across his back.

He fell into the man, and momentum carried them both backward, their feet tangling. Predator’s body cushioned the fall as they went down. Jace scrambled to get his feet under him, to wriggle away. Predator hung tight to the messenger bag.

“Fucking little shit!”

Jace swung an elbow back, connected hard with some part of the guy’s face. A bone cracked nearly as loudly as the gunshot had, and for a split second the bastard’s hold let loose and he cursed a blue streak. Jace ducked down and twisted out of the bag’s strap and lunged toward the wall again.

Predator grabbed hold of the back of Jace’s rain slicker with one hand and swung at him with the other. The cheap poncho tore away like wet tissue. The butt of the gun glanced off the back of Jace’s helmet. Stars burst bright before his eyes, but he kept moving.

Over the wall! Over the wall!

He hit it running, scrambled up and over, and tumbled ass-over-teakettle as he landed, rolling through mud and muck and garbage and water.

The canyon between the buildings was pitch-black, the only light at the end of the tunnel the dim silver glow of a distant sodium vapor light. He ran toward it, never expecting to reach it, expecting to feel the thump and burn of a bullet passing through his back, tearing through his body, ripping apart organs and blood vessels. He would probably be dead before he hit the ground.

But still he ran.

The bullet didn’t come.

He broke out of the alley, turned left, and raced past the fronts of dark buildings, jumping shrubbery and low walls of tired landscaping. As he landed on the other side of a row of bushes, his bad ankle buckled beneath him and he fell, gravel tearing at his hands as he tried to break the impact. He expected to hear footfalls behind him, another shot aimed at his back, but no one was coming yet.

Panting, dizzy, Jace rose and stumbled down the narrow corridor between two buildings. He stopped and fell against the rough concrete wall, wanting to puke, afraid the sound would draw his predator and get him killed.

Doubled over, he cupped his hands over his mouth and tried to slow his breathing. His heart felt like it would burst through his chest wall and flop out onto the ground, bouncing and twitching like a beached fish. His head was spinning. His brain felt like it was swirling around in a toilet bowl, ready to be sucked down the drain.

Oh, God. Oh, my God.

The God he didn’t believe in.

Someone’s trying to kill me.

Jesus H.

He was shaking violently, suddenly cold, suddenly aware of the winter rain pouring down on him, soaking his clothes. Pain throbbed and burned in his ankle. A sharper pain pierced his foot. He felt along the bottom of his wet sock and pulled out a sliver of broken glass. He sank down into a squat, hugged his arms around his legs as he leaned against the wall.

The two-way was still strapped to his thigh. He could try to call Base, but Eta was long gone home to her kids by now. If he had a cell phone, he could call the cops. But he couldn’t afford a cell phone, and he had no faith in the police. He had no real faith in anyone but himself. He never had.

The dizziness was swept away by a wave of weakness, the wake of the initial adrenaline rush. He strained to hear past his own breathing, past the sound of his pulse pounding in his ears. He tried to listen for the sounds of pursuit. He tried to think what to do next.

Best to stay where he was. He was out of sight and had an escape route if his assailant did flush him out. Unless there were two of them—
assailants,
plural. One on either end of this tunnel and he was cooked.

He thought of Tyler, who would by now be wondering where he was. Not that the kid was sitting alone somewhere, waiting. Tyler was never alone. A brainiac little white kid living in Chinatown and speaking fluent Mandarin sort of stood out. Tyler was a novelty. People liked him and were bemused by him at the same time. The Chens treated him like some kind of golden child sent to them for good fortune.

Still, the only true family the Damon brothers had was each other. And that bond of family with Tyler was the strongest thing Jace had ever known. It was the thing he lived for, the motivation behind everything he did, every goal he had.

Gotta get out of here.

Footfalls slapped on pavement. Jace couldn’t tell from where. The alley? The street? He made himself as small as he could, a tight human ball tucked against the side of the building, and counted his heartbeats as he waited.

A dark figure stopped at the end of the building, street side, and stood there, arms slightly out to his sides, his movements hesitant as he turned one way and then the other. There wasn’t enough light to make out more than the vague shape of him. He had no face. He had no color.

Jace pressed his hand against his belly, against the envelope he had tucked inside his shirt for safekeeping. What the hell had Lenny gotten him into?

The dark figure at the end of the tunnel turned and went back the way he had come.

Jace waited, counting silently until he decided Predator wasn’t coming back. Then he crept along the wall through scraps of trash and puddles and broken glass, and cautiously peered out. A Dumpster blocked his view. He could see only one section of taillight, glowing like an evil red eye in the dark some distance down the alley.

His bike lay crumpled on the ground somewhere behind the car. Jace hoped against hope that the frame wasn’t shot, that maybe only a wheel had been mangled. He could fix that. He could fix a lot of damage. If the frame was bent, that was something else.

He could hear Mojo now, telling him the bike was cursed. Mojo, the tall, skinny Jamaican who had dreads down to his ass and wore the kind of black wraparound shades meant for blind people. Mojo was maybe thirty, an ancient among the messengers. A shaman to some. He would have plenty to say about that bike.

Jace had inherited the thing, in a manner of speaking. That was to say no one else would touch it when it had suddenly become available two years before. Its previous owner, a guy who called himself King and worked nights as an Elvis-impersonating stripper, had lost control dodging street traffic and ended up under the wheels of a garbage truck. The bike had survived. King had not.

Messengers were a superstitious bunch. King died in the line. Nobody wanted a dead guy’s bike if he died in the line. It sat in the back hall at Base for a week, waiting to be claimed by King’s next of kin, only it turned out he didn’t have any, at least none that gave a shit about him.

Jace didn’t believe in superstition. He believed you made your own luck. King went under the wheels because he was cranked up on speed most of the time and had poor judgment. Jace believed in focus and hustle. He had looked at the bike and seen a strong Cannondale frame, two good wheels, and a gel-cushioned seat. He saw himself cutting his delivery times, making more runs, making more money. He waved off all warnings, left the piece of shit he’d been riding leaning against an
LA Times
box for anyone who wanted to steal it, and rode home on the Cannondale. He named it The Beast.