ask half a million questions about the catfish—where had they come from, how old were they, what kind were they, were they boys or girls, what did they eat, how often did the tank have to be cleaned.
The person he had chosen to ask was a tiny Chinese woman with the bearing of a queen, nicely dressed, dark hair done up in a bun. She was probably fifty-something, and looked as if she could have balanced a glass of champagne on top of her head and walked to the end of the block without spilling a drop.
She listened to Tyler’s stream-of-consciousness questions with one brow lifted, then took him by the hand, went to the fish tank, and patiently answered each of them. Tyler soaked up the information like a sponge, like he had never learned anything more fascinating. He looked up at the woman with wide-eyed eager wonder, and the woman’s heart melted.
Tyler had that sort of effect on people. There was something about him that seemed both wise and innocent at once. An old soul, Madame Chen called him. She had fed them dinner in the small restaurant next door, where everyone jumped to please her as she snapped at them in Chinese.
She had quizzed Jace about their background. He had been as vague as possible about most of it, but had told her about their mother’s death and that they had no relatives. He had admitted that they were afraid of being put into foster care, separated, possibly never to see each other again. Tyler was likely to be adopted, because he was young. Placing a teenage boy was a whole other thing.
Madame Chen had weighed all these matters as she sipped her tea. She was silent for so long, Jace was certain she was going to tell them to get lost. But when she finally spoke, she looked from Jace’s eyes to Tyler’s and back, and said: “Family is everything.”
The line reverberated in Jace’s head as he limped down the back alleys of Chinatown in the dead of night. In the best of times he felt detached from most of the world, the outsider, the loner. He relied on no one, confided in no one, expected nothing from anyone. He had been raised not to trust, had seen many reasons not to trust, so he didn’t trust.
But he liked the Chens, and was deeply grateful to them. He enjoyed the company of the other messengers, though he didn’t think he could call them friends. These were his connections, the circle of people around himself and Tyler, tied to him by thin threads that could be easily broken if necessary.
Someone had tried to kill him. The police wanted him for questioning at the very least, to charge him with the murder of Lenny Lowell at the worst. He couldn’t go to anyone he knew to share those burdens. Relying on someone else meant risking too much by dependence. And why would any of the people he knew risk part of their lives for him?
Jace could see that loose circle around him coming apart, sending the people of his life away from him like so many particles of a meteor as it hurtled through Earth’s atmosphere. He was surprised to realize how much those casual connections meant to him. He hadn’t felt so bleakly, completely alone since the days after his mother died.
His only real family was a ten-year-old boy, and Jace would go to any lengths to keep this danger from touching him.
He had managed to get back to Chinatown without arousing the suspicions of anyone except for a few street people camping out in boxes in the alleys Jace had taken. But tomorrow the cops would be making the rounds of the messenger agencies, trying to track down the messenger who had picked up a package at Lowell’s office. He would become the center of everyone’s suspicions then. For all Jace knew, his would-be killer would be making those same rounds, trying to get a name and address, trying to get to the package that was still pressed against his belly beneath his clothes.
Whoever was looking would have a hard time finding him. The address he had put on his job application at Speed wasn’t where he and Tyler lived. He gave that address to no one. He was paid in cash under the table—not an uncommon practice among the shadier agencies in the messenger game. Getting paid in cash meant none of his money went to the government; therefore, the government didn’t know he existed, and the agency didn’t have to provide him with health insurance and workers’ comp.
It was a risky proposition at first glance. If he was injured on the job, he had no medical coverage. And injury was inevitable. Statistics showed that the average cyclist could expect to have one serious accident every two thousand miles on the bike. Jace figured he clocked two thousand miles every couple of months, give or take. But he made more money this way—a straight fifty percent on the price of every run—and if the agency had to cover him, he might have his hospital bills paid once, but he probably wouldn’t have a job waiting for him when he got out. The company would consider him a risk and dump him.
No one could track him through utility bills, because he paid the Chens in cash for water and power, and for the cable feed to the television in the apartment. Rent was traded for work shoveling ice for the cases in the fish market. He never brought visitors home, wasn’t close enough to anyone to have reason to. He rarely dated, had no time for a relationship. The few girls he had gone out with knew little about him or where he lived. As he had been trained from a very young age, he left no paper trail that could lead anyone to him and Tyler.
Even knowing how difficult it would be for anyone to find him, Jace felt skittish about going home. Despite the fact that he hadn’t run into the cops or seen Predator’s car again, he couldn’t escape the feeling that someone was watching him, following him. Some omniscient evil floating over the city just beneath the storm clouds. Or maybe it was just the onset of hypothermia making him shake as he let himself in the back door of the fish market and climbed the stairs to the tiny apartment.
He heard voices as he neared the door. Male voices. Angry voices. Jace held his breath, pressed his ear to the door, and tried to make out the conversation over the roaring of his pulse in his ears. The voices went silent. His heart pounded harder. Then a louder voice shouted to shop for a car at Cerritos Auto Square.
Jace exhaled and let himself into the apartment.
The only light came from the television in the corner of the room, splashing colors across the small space and over the two bodies on the futon: Tyler, sprawled, head and one arm hanging over the edge of the cushion, legs splayed; and the old man Tyler called Grandfather Chen, the ancient father of Madame Chen’s deceased husband. Grandfather Chen sat upright on the futon, his head back, his mouth open, his arms out from his sides with palms up, like a painting of some tormented saint pleading with God to spare him.
Jace went to his brother, moved the boy’s dead weight up onto the cushion, and covered him with a blanket that had fallen to the floor. Tyler didn’t stir, didn’t open his eyes. Grandfather Chen made a crying sound and jerked awake, raising his arms in front of his face defensively.
“It’s okay. It’s only me,” Jace whispered.
The old man put his arms down and scowled at Jace, scolding him in rapid-fire Chinese, a language Jace had not managed to master in his six years of living in Chinatown. He could say
Jace held his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry. Something happened and I’m late, I know. I’m sorry.”
Grandfather Chen didn’t even take a breath. Outraged, he held his thumb and pinkie up against the side of his head and pantomimed talking on the phone.
“I tried to call,” Jace said, as if it would do him any good to explain. In fifty years of living in the United States, the old man had made no attempt to learn the language, turning his nose up at the very idea, as if it were beneath him to speak English for people too ignorant to learn Chinese.
“The line was busy.” Jace mimicked talking on the phone and made the busy signal.
Grandfather Chen huffed a sound of disgust and threw his hands at Jace as if to shoo him from the room.
Tyler woke then, rubbing his eyes, looking at Jace. “You’re really late.”
“I know, buddy. I’m sorry. I tried to call Madame Chen. The line was busy.”
“Grandfather Chen was on his computer, looking at Chinese girly sites.”
Jace cut a look of disapproval at the old man, who now wore the cold, inscrutable expression of a stone Buddha.
“I don’t want you looking at porn sites,” Jace said to his brother.
Tyler rolled his eyes. “They weren’t naked or anything. He’s shopping for a mail-order bride.”
