Kill the Messenger

“Oh, yeah. What about him?”

He tossed a folded section of the Times on the passenger seat. “It’s in there. Someone killed him last night. After I made the pickup.”

Eta stared at him. This boy would no more kill someone than her mother would get up and dance the hoochie-coochie. But he was afraid of the cops, and someone was dead.

“The cops are looking for me,” he said. “I might have been the last person to see the guy alive—except for who killed him.”

“So you tell them what you know,” Eta said.

“No way. No way I go to the cops. I was in that office last night. I touched things. My fingerprints are there. They get me in the box, match my prints . . . It’s a slam dunk for them. No.”

“But, honey, someone tried to kill you,” Eta said reasonably.

Jace looked incredulous. “And you think they’d believe me? I don’t have any proof of that. I don’t have any witnesses.”

“Honey, have you looked in a mirror today?”

“All the more reason to consider me a suspect. There was a struggle. Eta, you’ve got to help me out here. The cops are going to show up at Speed sooner or later. They’re going to ask a lot of questions.”

“You want me to lie to the police?” she asked, frowning. “That’s not good, son. If you’ve got nothing to hide, then don’t hide nothing. I’ve known a lot of cops in my day, a lot of homicide detectives. They get the scent of something, they’re gonna track it down. And the harder you make it for them, the harder they’ll make it on you.”

“Eta, please. You don’t have to lie to them. Just—just stall them.”

The boy had the clearest, bluest eyes she’d ever seen. And all they were filled with now was fear.

He reached out and put his hand on her forearm. “Just tell them you don’t know anything about me.”

I don’t know anything about you, she thought. In the couple of years she’d known him she hadn’t learned a thing about him. She didn’t know if he had family, didn’t know where he lived, didn’t know what he did away from the job. He was still a mystery. He wasn’t antisocial, he was quiet. He wasn’t an introvert, he was a watcher. If he had a steady girlfriend, no one at Speed knew about it. He laughed at a joke, had a smile that could have sold movie tickets, but most of the time the look in his eyes was . . . careful. Not quite suspicious, but not inviting anyone in either.

Eta sighed. “What you gonna do, J.C.? You gonna run?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“That’s no good answer, you. You run, I guarantee they’ll hang this thing on you. Then what? You run for the rest of your life?”

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath that made him wince, then sighed. “I’ll figure it out. I have to. I just need some time.”

Eta shook her head sadly. “You won’t let anyone help you.”

“I’m asking you to help me. Please.”

“What do you need? You need a place to stay?”

“No, thanks, Eta.” He glanced away, embarrassed. “If you could advance me some cash . . . You know I’m good for it.”

“I don’t know anything about you,” she said, starting the van. “I got money in the safe at the office.”

“I can’t go there.”

“You can keep your skinny ass right where you at. I’ll park at the back door and bring the money out to you.”

“What if the cops are watching the place?”

“What do you take me for? Honey, I done forgot more about cops than you’ll ever know.”

Or so she wanted to think. Suddenly she wanted to ask him everything she didn’t know about him, but she knew he wouldn’t give her the answers. “Baby, that dead lawyer, he ain’t no crime kingpin. He ain’t running the mob out of some nasty office in some nasty strip mall. He ain’t worth the money it’d cost the taxpayers to set up surveillance on every courier service in LA. First they gots to figure out who done the pickup. Unless that man was the neat-and-tidy kind, keeping notes of who done what, when, why. He strike you like that?”

Jace shook his head.

“Then lay down on the floor and stay there ’til I tell you something else.”

“You’re the best, Eta.”

“You’re damn straight I am,” she grumbled, pulling away from the curb. “Y’all don’t appreciate Miss Eta. Hanging my big black bootie out there for y’all. I don’t know what you’d do without me.”

                              12

Speed Couriers. Stylish logo. A forties deco look. All caps, letters slanted steeply to the right, a series of horizontal lines extending to the left to suggest fast movement. The sign had probably cost more than a month’s rent on the dump it hung over.

The space had once been an Indian restaurant, and still smelled like it, Parker noticed as they went inside. The stale, sour ghost of old curry had permeated the royal blue walls and gold- painted ceiling. Ruiz wrinkled her nose and looked at Parker like it was his fault.

“Welcome to our house.” The guy who opened the door and stood back to let them in was tall and thin with the dark, shiny eyes of a zealot.

A punked-out kid with three nose rings and a blue Mohawk sat smoking a cigarette at a small table near the front window. After a furtive gaze at Parker and Ruiz, he put on a pair of curved silver shades, slipped out of his chair and out the door as they moved into the room.

“All guests are welcome, all sinners redeemed,” their doorman told them. He arched a brow in disapproval as he looked down on Ruiz and the red lace bra playing peekaboo out of her black suit jacket. “Are you familiar with the story of the wife of Heber?”

Parker looked around. The wall going down a long, narrow hall was covered with cheap, staple-riddled fake wood paneling and served as a giant bulletin board. Playbills and political propaganda. RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE—WAGE WAR AGAINST THE CAR CULTURE. A flyer advertised a messengers’ race that had happened two months previously. A poster recruited blood donors for cash. Snapshots showed a motley assortment of messengers at parties, on their bikes, clowning around. Hand-scrawled notes on torn scraps of paper advertised stuff for sale. Someone was looking for a nonsmoking roommate. Someone was moving to Holland, “Where the weed is legal and the sex is free. Bye-bye you cocksuckers!”

Parker showed his badge to their spirit guide. “We need to speak with your dispatcher.”

Their doorman smiled and gestured toward a scratched-up Plexiglas and drywall cubicle, where a large woman with a head of braids held back by a bright-colored scarf and a phone sandwiched between her shoulder and her ear was taking notes with one hand and reaching for a microphone with the other. “Eta, Queen of Africa.”

The woman’s voice boomed over a tinny speaker. “John Remko! Get your crazy ass on a bike! You got a pickup. Take this manifest and get the hell out of here!”

Frowning, the man went to the window cut into the hall side of the cubicle. “Miss Eta, such language—”

The woman’s eyes were bulging. “Don’t you give me no lip, Preacher John! You ain’t my cousin’s uncle’s son. You get out of here or you ain’t gonna be nobody’s relative no more, ’cause I will have done killed you!”

Preacher John took the manifest and disappeared down the dark hall, a retreating specter.

Parker stepped up to the window. The woman didn’t look at him. She slapped her note up on a magnet board. The magnets each had a word printed on them—MOJO, JC, GEMMA, SLIDE. She secured the note to the board with PJOHN.

“You want a job, honey, fill out the yellow form. You got a job for us, fill out the top of the manifest,” she said, reaching for the ringing phone. “You want something else, you ain’t gonna get it here.

“Speed Couriers,” she barked into the phone. “What you want, honey?”

Parker reached inside the window and slipped his shield into her line of sight. “Detective Parker, Detective Ruiz. We need a few minutes, ma’am. We have some questions.”

The dispatcher looked at the badge, not at Parker, as she listened to the person on the other end of the