“He’s a hundred and twelve, what’s he going to do with a mail-order bride?”
“He’s ninety-seven,” Tyler corrected him. “In the Chinese way of counting birthdays, where the day of your birth is considered your first birthday. So he’s only ninety-six by our way of celebrating, by the
Jace listened patiently to the lesson. He tried never to be short with his brother. Tyler was as bright as a spotlight but very sensitive about Jace’s approval or disapproval.
“Anyway,” Jace said. “He’s an antique. What’s he want with some young bride?”
“Technically, he’s not an antique, because he isn’t a hundred years old. As for the bride—” Tyler gave an exaggerated shrug. “He says: If she dies, she dies.”
He looked up at the old man beside him and rattled off something in Chinese. Grandfather Chen replied, and they both laughed.
The old man ruffled Tyler’s hair fondly, then slapped his hands on his thighs and rocked himself off the futon. He was Jace’s height, his posture straight as a rail, his body thin, almost to skeletal proportions. His face was sunken in like a shrunken head, the skin as transparent as wet crepe paper, a road map of blue veins running just beneath the surface. He squinted at Jace’s face, frowning, brows knit. He pointed to the bruises and abrasions, and said something in a serious voice, too softly for Tyler to hear. Concern, Jace thought. Worry. Disapproval. Grandfather Chen figured—rightly—that whatever had caused Jace to be so late wasn’t anything good.
The old man said good night to Tyler and left.
Tyler turned on the table lamp and soberly studied his big brother. “What happened to your face?”
“I had an accident.”
He lowered himself onto a hardwood Chinese stool and took his boots off, careful not to pull too hard on his right foot. The ankle was throbbing.
“What kind of accident? I want to know
They had been over this ground before. Tyler wanted to be able to visualize every aspect of Jace’s job, down to the smallest detail. But he was particularly obsessed with any kind of accident his big brother—or any of the messengers—might have.
Jace wouldn’t tell him. He had made that mistake once, then came to find out that his brother was fretting about him to the point of making himself sick, playing out every horrible possibility over and over in his mind, fearing the day Jace would go out and never come back.
“I fell. That’s all,” he said, dodging Tyler’s too-serious stare. “Got doored by an old lady in a Cadillac, twisted my ankle, and got some scrapes. Bent a wheel on The Beast and had to walk it home.”
The short version of the story. Tyler knew it, too. His big eyes welled up with tears. “I thought you weren’t coming back. Ever.”
Ignoring the fact that he was sopping wet, Jace moved to the futon and sank down beside the boy, sitting sideways to look into his brother’s face.
“I’ll always come back, pal. Just for you.”
One tear slipped over the rim of Tyler’s lower eyelid, over the eyelashes, and down his cheek. “That’s what Mom used to say too,” he reminded Jace. “And it wasn’t true. Stuff happens that a person can’t do anything about. It just happens. It’s karma.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and recited from memory what he had read in the dictionary he studied every evening: “Karma is the force generated by a person’s actions to per-pet-uate transmigration, and in its ethical consequences to determine his destiny in his next existence.”
Jace wanted to say it was all bullshit, that there was no meaning in anything, and there was no “next existence.” But he knew it was important to Tyler to believe in something, to search for logic in an illogical world, so he made the same lame joke he always did. “And while you’re distracted worrying about it, you’ll step out into the street and get hit by a bus.
“Here’s what I can control, buddy: that I love you and I’ll be there for you, even if I have to crawl on my hands and knees over broken glass to get there.”
He pulled the boy close and gave him a fierce hug. Tyler had reached the age where he was starting to think a real man didn’t need hugs, and the fact that he still needed them was embarrassing. But he gave in to that need and pressed his ear against Jace’s chest to listen to his heartbeat.
Jace held his brother close for a moment, wondering what karma would dish out to him for withholding the whole truth from Tyler. Tonight, more than any other night, he was too aware of his own mortality. Death had come calling and sucked him into a dark vortex where he had no control over anything but his own will to come out of it alive. Even as Tyler leaned into him, he could feel Lenny Lowell’s package pressing against his belly beneath his shirt.
In the morning he would have to explain some things, but he wouldn’t do it now. Now all he wanted was a hot shower and some sleep. The world would not look brighter come morning, but he would have more strength to deal with it.
After Tyler had gone to bed and fallen asleep, Jace went into their small bathroom and squinted at himself in the small mirror over the small sink and beneath the small light fixture that stuck out from the wall like a glowing wart.
He looked pretty damn bad. His face was pale and drawn, his only color the black circles beneath his eyes, a smear of mud on his cheek, and the angry red abrasions on his chin. His lower lip was split, the line drawn in clotted blood. No wonder the cop, Jimmy Chew, had taken him for a homeless kid.
He washed his hands, wincing at the sting of soap in the torn skin of his fingertips and palms. He lathered his face, with the same resulting pain, and splashed it clean with ice-cold water that took his breath for a second. Then he stood straight and carefully worked his way out of his wet sweatshirt and tight T-shirt. His shoulders hurt, his back hurt, his chest hurt. There was hardly a body part that wasn’t aching, throbbing, swollen, bleeding, or bruised.
Lenny Lowell’s package was still tucked inside the waistband of his tight bike pants. The padded envelope felt damp but otherwise undamaged. Jace pulled it free, stared at it as he turned it over and over in his hands. He was shaking. In normal circumstances he would never open a client’s package, no matter what it was. Rocco, the guy who ran Speed Couriers, would fire him in a heartbeat. Now he almost wanted to laugh. He had bigger problems than Rocco.
He sat down on the lid of the toilet and picked at the edge of the envelope flap until he could get his finger inside and tear it open.
There was no note of any kind. There was no thick wad of money. Sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard was a waxy envelope of photographic negatives. Jace took them out of the envelope and held a strip of them up to the light. Two people exchanging something or shaking hands. He couldn’t really tell.
Someone was willing to kill for this.
With nowhere to turn. He couldn’t go to the cops, didn’t trust the cops. Even if he turned the negatives over to them, he would still be a target for Predator, who couldn’t afford to wonder what Jace knew or didn’t know. Predator wouldn’t know whether or not Jace had looked at the negatives, or that he hadn’t had them developed or given them to the cops. He was a loose thread a killer couldn’t leave dangling.
If this was karma, then karma sucked.
He wouldn’t wait to find out. Jace had never felt he was a victim of anything in his life. His mother had never allowed it, not for Jace, not for herself. Shit happened and he dealt with it and moved on, moved forward. He had to look at this situation in the same way. That was always the way out, to move forward.
Shit happened. And he was up to his neck in it. There was nothing to do but start swimming.
9
Jace hobbled slowly down the stairs from the apartment in his socks, boots tied together and slung over his shoulder. He had slept maybe a total of an hour and a half. He had just drifted off again around four when Tyler had crawled onto the futon with him and whispered that he was scared. Jace told him it was okay, and to go to sleep.
