Kill the Messenger (29 page)

“I’ve got to take a rain check.”

“Again with the rejection!” she said, rolling her eyes. “Where are you going? Are you seeing another reporter?”

“I’m going to Pershing Square.”

“What’s at Pershing Square besides dope dealers?”

“A circus,” Parker said, starting toward his car. “You should bring a photographer. I think there might even be clowns.”

                        
      41

Pershing Square is an oasis of green in the middle of downtown LA, a checkerboard area of the best and the baddest. Across Olive Street stood the grande dame of 1920s luxury: the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, where ladies in sweaters and pearls enjoyed high tea, and debutante balls were not a thing of the past. A block in the other direction, unemployed men with hungry eyes loitered outside of check-cashing places with heavy iron bars over the windows, and Hispanic women who only visited Beverly Hills through service entrances pushed baby carriages and shopped in cheap clothing stores where no one spoke English. Five blocks away, justice was doled out in federal and county courthouses, but here a crazy, homeless guy was taking a dump behind the statue of General Pershing.

The park was drawn out in rectangles of grass divided by strips of concrete and broad steps that transitioned one level to the next. Bright-colored square concrete structures that had a bunkerlike quality to them hid the escalators down into the parking garage. A 120-foot purple concrete campanile jutted up in the middle of it.

During the Christmas season an ice-skating rink was featured at one end of the park. Only in LA: people figure skating in seventy-degree weather with a backdrop of palm trees. The rink had been gone for a month.

Jace had always found the place too planned, the lines too horizontal. There was too much concrete in the middle of it. The sculptures were cool—not so much the traditional statues, but the huge rust-colored spheres that perched here and there on concrete pedestals.

But the best thing about Pershing Square was the openness of it. From his vantage point, Jace could see most of the park. He could see people coming, going, loitering. He could see the security guards who came up out of the underground garage periodically to look around, then went back down to make sure no vagrants were trying to get into the restrooms reserved for the paying customers. Considering where the vagrants then relieved themselves, it seemed like a policy worth reviewing.

The working day was over for the people in suits who descended from the downtown towers to drive home to the Valley or the Westside, to Pasadena or Orange County. The word about downtown was that it was the hot new place to live, but Jace didn’t see that many hipsters ready to rub shoulders with the indigenous homeless population, or that many yuppies ready to stroll their kids past the junkies hanging out in Pershing Square.

Fifteen feet away from him, two guys were making a deal on a little bag of something. A stoner with lime green hair was sitting on a park bench across the way. Over by the concrete fountain, a group of teenage boys were standing around playing Hacky Sack. A movie crew had been shooting in the area all day and were in the process of setting up lights in the square for a night shoot.

It was just past five. The sun had set behind the tall buildings. Only people on the Westside had daylight now. Pershing Square had been cast into the artificial dusk of the inner city—not day, not night. The lights had come on.

Jace had stashed The Beast between a couple of equipment trucks parked across the street from the square, on Fifth. He had been hanging around since about three o’clock, keeping his eyes open for anyone who looked like a cop coming into the park, watching for Predator to cruise past, waiting for Abby Lowell to show. He had been all over the park, scouting vantage points, planning escape routes.

He figured she would show. If she was, as he believed, involved in the blackmail plot, she would come alone. She wouldn’t want the cops looking at her, and Predator had threatened to kill her, so she couldn’t be in on it with him. Whether or not she brought the money was something else.

The whole scheme was going to be all about timing. Timing, planning, thinking on his feet . . . and luck. He had taken triple care with the other factors, seeing as he hadn’t had much of the last one.

Tyler would be worrying about him by now. Jace knew his brother had probably tried a hundred times to contact him on the walkie-talkie. Thinking about Tyler, he felt a terrible sadness. Even if this scheme worked, Jace didn’t know that he would come out of it unscathed, that the cops wouldn’t still have an interest in him, that they wouldn’t then find out about Tyler. His instincts were telling him he and Tyler would have to run.

The idea of tearing his brother away from the Chens made him feel physically ill. Tyler was probably better off with them than he was with Jace, living like a hunted criminal, but Jace couldn’t leave him. He had promised their mother he would look after his little brother, see that he was safe, see that he was never pulled into the cogs of the child welfare system. They were family. Jace was Tyler’s only living family as far as Jace knew. He didn’t count the bartender who had probably fathered the boy. Sperm Donor didn’t qualify as family.

But Jace wondered if his reasons for sticking to his promise to Alicia weren’t more self-serving than serving Tyler. His brother was all he had, his anchor, his only real escape from emotional isolation. Because of Tyler he had the Chens. Because of Tyler he had goals, and hope for a better future. Without Tyler he would be adrift, connected to no one.

Jace felt as if his heart were lying in his stomach, throbbing and soaking up acid like a sponge. He blocked all thoughts about the unfairness of their lives, and the fact that they had been through more than their share. There was no point in thinking about it, and no time. Abby Lowell had just emerged from the parking garage. . . .

She had changed out of the perfect Prada suit from the bank, opting for camel-tan slacks and boots, a black turtleneck sweater, and a pale aqua quilted vest. The girl had style.

Parker watched through high-powered field glasses as she walked toward the Fifth Street end of the park, where the kid with lime green hair sat on a bench. She was carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag, and a small nylon tote.

Parker stood in a beautifully appointed room on the fifth floor of the Biltmore, overlooking Olive Street. Pershing Square was stretched out before him. The field of play in a game he wasn’t planning to join.

He didn’t believe Ruiz with her cock-and-bull story of Damon calling in. And the fact that she and her RHD pals couldn’t come up with a more viable setup than that was a sad commentary on the quality of that particular brain trust.

Parker’s take was that Abby Lowell had gone to Robbery-Homicide, and RHD had set up this little tableau to seduce Parker, so they could throw a net over him and get him out of the way. If Damon really was going to show, if Bradley Kyle knew that somehow, there was no way they would have invited Kev Parker to the party.

As to what Ms. Lowell ultimately had up her sleeve, he wasn’t exactly sure. She was in this thing up to her gorgeous big brown eyes, of that he had no doubt. But Eddie Davis was the muscle, and he had allegedly threatened to kill her.

Blackmailers were in it for two things: money and power. It wasn’t a group activity. The more people involved, the more diluted the power became, and the more opportunity for mistakes of some kind.

Across the street, Abby Lowell eyed the guy with the green hair, went to the other end of the bench, and sat down, putting the nylon tote on her lap.

Payoff, Parker thought. That’s how they were setting it up: making it look like she was there to pay off Damon in exchange for the negatives.

He scanned the perimeter of the park with the field glasses, looking for Kyle or Roddick. Then he tilted the glasses upward to check rooflines. Habit. He wondered where Kelly had taken herself off to. Probably downstairs in Smeraldi’s, eating a coconut-cream pie and looking out the window to the square, waiting for the action to start.

A movie crew was setting up equipment for a night shoot, backlighting the sculptures to give them a look that was mysterious or ominous, depending on what the script called for. They would be there half the night to get one scene. It took for-bloody-ever to set up lighting and get the cameras set to please the director of photography. Then, depending on director and budget, it would take for-bloody-ever to shoot the scene. They would rehearse it, talk about it, rehearse it, talk some more. They would shoot it one way, then another, then do close-ups. The excitement of the movie business. Like watching people sleep.

Parker ran the glasses over the couple of equipment trucks he could see parked on Fifth. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

Back in the park, Abby was waiting on the bench, tense. She gave the green-haired guy the skunk-eye, but the guy was stoned, and looked catatonic.

5:10.

On the low wall near the statues sat a guy in an army jacket, a black ball cap pulled low, his head down. For a moment he looked as out of it as the stoner on the bench. Then he turned his head a little to the side, toward Fifth Street. Toward Abby Lowell. Parker caught a brief glimpse of face in a wedge of light before it lowered again. Caucasian, young, beat-up.

Damon.

Parker had never seen the kid, and yet he knew in every fiber of his being it was J. C. Damon. There was a tension about the way the kid held himself as he sat there trying to look unconcerned. His gaze kept going back to the park bench, furtive, anxious, then moving to cover everything in his field of vision.

Parker drew a line with the glasses from Damon back to Abby Lowell, then past Abby Lowell to the area behind her, a wide half circle with a radius of about twenty feet, looking for cops. He widened the arc to include the area directly across from Damon. No sign of Kyle or Roddick, or anyone Parker knew.

5:12.

Once again he swept the field glasses around the area where Abby Lowell sat, where the kid he believed to be Damon sat. From one to the other, and back again.

Parker dropped the glasses around his neck, turned, and hurried out of the room. He found the stairs and raced down them, jogged into the Olive Street lobby and out the door.

The street was backed up with traffic from the Fifth Street light. Parker wove his way between the cars to get across, smacking a fist on the hood of a Volvo when the driver honked at him.

5:14.

As he came up from street level, he saw that Damon had gotten down off the wall and was moving toward Abby Lowell. The kid with the green hair got up off the bench and turned toward her as well.

Parker hurried his steps. Green Hair was not part of the equation. The kid moved toward her, one hand outstretched.

Damon kept coming.

Abby Lowell stood up.

In his peripheral vision, Parker caught someone else moving across the square, coming from the alcove hiding the escalators to the underground parking. Bulky trench coat, a little too long, collar up.

Bradley Kyle.

Parker hesitated.

A motorcycle engine revved nearby. Sound seemed magnified. The scene froze for an instant in Parker’s head.

Then someone screamed, and all hell broke loose.

                        
      42

Jace didn’t care about the kid with the green hair. The guy was just trying to panhandle. Besides, he created a little diversion. Abby was looking at him, worried, annoyed.

Jace’s heart was thumping. Shove the envelope at her, grab the black bag, run like hell. He reached a hand inside his shirt and started to peel back the tape that held the envelope to his belly.

A sound like a chain saw starting registered in the back of his mind. Then a scream. Then everything seemed to happen at once.

“Freeze! Police!”

He didn’t know where the shout had come from. His arms went out at his sides. Abby Lowell’s eyes were ringed in white.

The kid with green hair had a gun.

“Down on the ground! Down on the ground!”

The motorcycle roared from the Olive Street side of the square, coming straight for them.

Jace didn’t have time to even draw breath, or to think that the green-haired cop would shoot him. He lunged for Abby, knocking her to the park bench.

Jace fell into her sideways, just as the cycle hit the cop with the green hair, and blood exploded in every direction.

People were running now, shouting, screaming.

Guns were popping. He didn’t know who was shooting, or who was being shot at.

Jace scrambled to get his feet under him. His eyes were on the cycle. Red bike, black mask, helmet. The driver had already swung it around, one-eighty, almost laying it down on the ground. It came back at Jace like a rocket. He went over the bench and ran for his life.

Parker started running the instant he saw the motorcycle. A red Kawasaki Ninja ZX12R. Eddie Davis. He had to have doubled back to his house before the Hollywood cops got there, ditched the Town Car, and grabbed the bike. The bike racing straight at Damon and Abby Lowell, and at the kid with the green hair, who had his back to the danger bearing down on him.

Parker sprinted, opened his mouth to shout. He never heard the sound. The bike hit Green Hair. A nightmare scene of a body bending the wrong way, blood everywhere.

Davis hit the brakes and laid the cycle almost on its side. One-eighty. Up again and throttle wide open.

People were screaming. The movie crew scattered, some of them running toward the bike, some running toward the street, arms waving.

Parker pulled his gun.

To his right, Bradley Kyle had his weapon out, and was firing.

Damon went over the back of the park bench.

Abby Lowell tried to follow.

Davis roared past.

Parker fired.
BAM! BAM! BAM!

The cycle swung hard right and went after Damon.

Jace heard him coming. He hit Fifth Street. It was empty. Traffic was detoured because of the movie people. The equipment trucks seemed a mile away. People were standing near them, staring at him. There was nothing they could do.

He veered right in a wide arc, so he could get a look back without slowing down. The headlights blinded him. Way too close.

Four more strides to the trucks.

Three more strides.

He felt as if he wasn’t moving, couldn’t breathe.

Two strides.

He cut between the trucks, took a hard left, almost wiped out. Stumbling, stumbling, stumbling forward. Sheer will pulled him upright.

The cycle came up over the curb, onto the sidewalk, and around the back side of the trucks. Jace ducked between another pair of trucks. He grabbed The Beast and mounted from a run, fumbling to catch the pedals, to start pumping.

If he could stay hidden by the trucks, if he could get to the other side of Olive Street before the motorcycle came around . . .

He stood on the pedals, ran on the pedals, down Fifth to Olive, through the intersection, horns blaring, lights coming at him, lucky he didn’t end up on a windshield. He jumped the curb onto the sidewalk.

Glancing over his shoulder, Jace could see the cycle racing up the opposite side of the street. He would make it to the intersection before Jace did.

The light at Olive and Fourth turned red. Nothing blocked the intersection. The motorcycle bounced off the curb, hit Fourth, screamed into a hard left turn.

Pumping, pumping, pumping, Jace’s thighs felt as though they would burst. He willed more speed, but it didn’t seem to come. The motorcycle ran the intersection and horns blasted as he split the oncoming cars on the one-way street.

Jace made the corner, went left, stuck close to the meters so he couldn’t get pinned against the buildings if the cycle made it to the sidewalk. He could see his pursuer pushing between cars up ahead of him, trying to come across.

Turning left again, Jace cut through a small plaza with a fountain, and came to a halt. Before him was the precipitous drop of the Bunker Hill Steps, a stone double staircase with a waterfall running between the two sides. It dropped like a cliff down to Fifth Street, where traffic was now gridlocked. Sirens were screaming.

Jace looked down to the bottom. It would be his death or his salvation. He swallowed hard. Horns were still blasting behind him. He could hear the motorcycle getting closer.

Jace glanced back, saw the headlights coming, turned to the drop in front of him, took a deep breath, and went over the edge.

Several people rushed to the aid of the guy with green hair. Kyle ran past him, chasing the motorcycle, chasing Damon. Parker went to Abby Lowell. She lay over the back of the park bench, as if she had just turned to watch the action leave the park.

“Ms. Lowell? Are you all right?” he called above the noise. People were shouting, sirens were wailing.

Blood stained the back of her aqua vest. She’d caught a bullet. He rested a knee on the bench, bent over her, carefully swept her long hair back so he could see her face.

The brown eyes that rolled to look at him were wild with fear. Her breath was wheezing in the way of an asthmatic. “I can’t move! I can’t move! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

Parker didn’t try to move her to see if the bullet had exited. She could bleed to death right in front of him, but if he turned her and a bone or bullet fragment shifted the wrong way, she would be a quadriplegic. Hell of a choice.

“We’ll have an ambulance here in two minutes,” Parker said, pressing two fingers to the side of her throat. Her pulse was galloping like a racehorse. “What did you feel? Did you feel something hit you from behind?”

“In my shoulder. Yes. In my back. Twice. Am I shot? Oh, my God. Am I shot?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, my God!”

She was sobbing now, hysterical. No sign of the stoic, controlled woman trying to bravely deal with the fact that her murdered father lay on the floor at her feet.

“Why did you come here?” Parker asked. He pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket, carefully reached under her, and felt for exit wounds. “Who set it up?”

She was crying so hard, she was gagging and choking herself.

“Who told you to be here?” Parker asked again. He pulled the handkerchief back, dyed red with blood.

“He did!” she said on a wail. “Oh, my God, I’m going to die!”

“You’re not going to die,” Parker said calmly. “The paramedics are here. They’ll be with you in a minute.”

The EMTs had run to the fallen Green Hair and were trying to revive him. He lay on the ground like a broken doll, staring at the afterlife.

“Hey!” Parker called. “I’ve got a GSW here! She’s bleeding!”

One of the EMT crew looked up and acknowledged him. “Coming!”

Parker turned back to Abby. “Who called you? Who called Davis?”

She couldn’t have cared less about what Parker wanted to know.

It didn’t matter anyway. He had simply been shocked to see Damon show, and he wondered if the kid really had tried to reach out to him. And what it meant if he had.

He hoped he would get a chance to find out.

The Beast bounced and slipped on the stone steps. Going too fast. Jace touched the brakes, twisted a little sideways, angling the bike, trying to control his descent.

Déjà vu. He’d had this dream a hundred times. Out of control, hurtling down, his equilibrium rolling and tumbling in his head. He couldn’t tell if he was right side up or ass over teakettle. Nausea rose in his throat.

The bike banged down the steps, back end threatening to overtake the front. Jace tried to make a correction, shifting his weight, and The Beast kicked out from under him and tumbled the last fifteen steps to the sidewalk. Jace rolled and bounced after it, trying to grab hold of something, anything to slow his fall.

He landed at the bottom, and immediately looked back up toward the fountain, toward Fourth Street. The motorcycle sat at the top. Even as he watched, the lunatic with the throttle in his hand made a decision, and the angle of the headlights tipped dramatically downward.

Crazy bastard.

Jace grabbed his bike up off the ground, climbed on, pointed it down Fifth. He raced around the corner at Figueroa, turning toward the Bonaventure Hotel. He checked back over his shoulder again and again. No motorcycle.

He lost himself then, in the same spot he had started his day, under the tangle of bridges that connected downtown to the Harbor Freeway. The place where, three days ago, he had hung out with the other messengers waiting for calls from their dispatchers, all of them complaining that it was going to rain.

His pursuer—if he survived his descent to Fifth Street—would assume Jace had turned down one street or another. He wouldn’t think to look here. Jace hoped.

Jace hid the bike and himself behind a huge concrete footing, out of sight from the street. He stripped off his backpack and dropped it, stripped off his coat and threw it on the ground, so hot he thought he was going to vomit. His shirt was soaked with sweat, the kind that reeked of fear. He was shaking like a malaria victim. His legs gave way beneath him and he went down on his knees.

Shit like this only happens in the movies,
he thought, bending forward, curling himself into a ball on the ground.

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the
fuck
just happened?

The images flashed through his head. He was going to have nightmares for the rest of his life. The panhandler with the green hair. The cops, the guns. The guy on the motorcycle.

Who the hell was he? Predator? He’d ditched the big gas hog for a rice burner? He had been scary enough in a car. With the motorcycle helmet, the extreme shape of the sport bike, he was a demon from hell for the
Matrix
age.

How had he known to be there? How had the cops known? It didn’t make sense to Jace that Abby Lowell would have tipped off either of them. Why would she? She was in on it, whatever “it” was.

Jace had tried to call the detective she had told him was in charge of the case, Parker. But he hadn’t gotten him, and even if the woman he’d spoken to had acted immediately, there’d been no time for them to get people set up in the park. The green-haired guy had been there an hour
before
Jace had made the call.

Abby Lowell had double-crossed him. She had thought she could get him arrested and walk away scot-free. So she had called Parker earlier in the day, probably right after Jace had spoken with her. But if she had set it up, she would have walked away without the negatives, and the negatives were what everybody wanted. The negatives were still in their envelope, still taped to Jace’s belly.

And even if she had called in the cops, that still didn’t explain Predator, if that was even who had been chasing him.

What the hell could he do now?

His pulse had slowed. His breathing had evened out. He was cold, the sweat dried on his skin by the chill of the night air. He wanted not to think, not to have to. He was alone. The light was weird under the bridge, dark, but dappled in spots with the diffused white glow from the streetlights above, like moonlight filtering down through a concrete forest. The hum of tires on the road above him was like white noise seeping into his exhausted brain.

He pushed himself up onto his knees, shrugged into his coat, reached for his backpack, and dug out his space blanket. The walkie-talkie fell out of it as he unfolded the blanket.

Jace picked it up, turned it on, and held it next to his face, but he didn’t press the call button.

His voice would telegraph his fear, his fear would leap across the airwaves, go into Tyler’s ear, and frighten him to the core. Bad enough not to know what his big brother was up to, worse to know what he
was
up to, worse still to know that he was afraid.

What could he say to the kid anyway? He didn’t know what to do. People were trying to kill him. Every way he turned, he only became more entangled in the mess, like he’d walked into a bramble bush.

I’m fresh out of plans,
he thought. He felt hollow inside, like he was just a shell, and if someone was to give him a good kick, the shell would shatter into a million pieces and he would cease to exist.

“Scout to Ranger. Scout to Ranger. Come in, Ranger. Do you read me?”

The walkie-talkie crackled, speaking into the side of Jace’s head. He didn’t even jump. It was as if his mind had conjured his brother’s voice.

“Ranger, do you copy? Come on, Jace. Be there.”

He could hear the worry, the uncertainty in Tyler’s voice. But he didn’t answer. He couldn’t. What could he say to Tyler after screwing up their lives this way?

He just squeezed his eyes shut tight, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”