“He’s an independent contractor,” Parker said. “No paperwork, no health insurance, no workers’ comp.”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll hazard a guess and say he might even get paid in cash.”
“That ain’t my department,” Eta snapped.
“Do you want me to call for the warrant?” Ruiz asked Parker, taking her cell phone out of her purse.
Parker held up a hand to hold her off. His attention was steady on the dispatcher. “You have his phone number.”
“He don’t have no phone.”
Ruiz sniffed and started punching numbers.
“He don’t! I got no number for him.”
Parker looked dubious. “He’s never called you? Called in sick, asked for something, let you know he’s running late?”
“He calls on the two-way. I got no phone number for the boy.”
Ruiz spoke into her phone. “Detective Renee Ruiz, LAPD. I need to speak with ADA Langfield regarding a warrant.”
“Maybe I got an address,” the dispatcher said grudgingly.
The phone was lighting up like a pinball machine, one call on hold, another coming in. She grabbed up the receiver, hit the second line button, and said, “You gotta call back, honey. I’m in the middle of a police harassment.”
She went to a file cabinet in the corner of the cubicle and dug through a drawer, pulling out what looked like an empty file folder.
“It’s just one of those mailbox places,” she said, handing it over. “That’s all I know. I wouldn’t say any different if you tortured me.”
Parker raised his eyebrows. “I hope we won’t have to find out. Can you tell me what he looks like?”
“He looks like a blond-haired, blue-eyed white boy.”
“Any pictures of him up on that wall?” he asked, nodding toward the paneled wall.
“No, sir.”
“Thank you for your cooperation, Ms. Fitzgerald. You’re a good citizen.”
Eta Fitzgerald scowled at him and grabbed her ringing phone, dismissing him. Parker opened the folder, scanned the single sheet of paper—a job application—for pertinent info.
NAME: J. C. Damon
Parker closed the folder and handed it to Ruiz. Instead of turning for the front door, he started down the hall toward the back of the restaurant-cum–courier service. The dispatcher jerked the telephone receiver away from her head and shouted at him.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Parker waved her off. “We’ll let ourselves out, Ms. Fitzgerald. Don’t worry about us. We’re parked closer to the back.”
He glanced into what used to be a small private dining room, now converted to office space for Speed’s executives, neither of whom had yet made it in to work. By the state of the place, it was safe to assume there was no high ladder of success to climb and nowhere lower to go. There were two beat-up desks littered with paperwork, and a dirty, bottle-green ashtray sitting on a coffee table in front of a sofa that looked like it might have been found along the freeway.
Farther down the hall, what had been a coatroom now was a dark red closet crammed with file cabinets.
Parker hit the swinging door into the kitchen, where conversation and cigarette smoke hung in the air, along with the slight, sweet, faded scent of pot. The kid with the blue Mohawk was sitting on a stainless-steel prep table. He froze like a small animal that knew it had been spotted by a predator that would kill it if it moved. A wild-looking Rasta man stood leaning back against a sink, smoking a cigarette. He seemed neither surprised nor alarmed to see a pair of cops walk in.
“May we help you good folks?” he asked. Jamaican.
“Either of you gentlemen know J. C. Damon?”
Mohawk said nothing. Rasta Man took a drag on his cigarette. “J.C.? Yes.”
“Seen him around today?”
“No. Not today.”
Parker did a slow scan of the space that had clearly been claimed by the messengers as their own. A couple of street-ravaged bikes leaned up against a wall. Random bike parts, beer bottles, and soda cans littered the counter. The room had been gutted of its commercial appliances. A filthy, old, once-white GE refrigerator stood in a fraction of the space occupied by what had been there before it. A nasty green sofa squatted where the range had been. A table and mismatched chairs sat near the back door, magazines and messy paperwork scattered over the table. The centerpiece was a hubcap being used as a giant ashtray.
“You know where he lives?”
Rasta Man shook his head. “What you need him for, mon?”
Parker shrugged. “He might have seen something go down last night.”
No reaction.
Ruiz stepped toward Mohawk. “What about you? What have you got to say for yourself?”
“I don’t know nothing about nobody.” Attitude now. He couldn’t run, he couldn’t hide, he went with attitude. “Nice bra.”
Ruiz tugged her coat into place. “The guy works here. How can you not know him, smart-ass?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t know him. I said I didn’t know anything about him.”
“Would you know him if I threw you up against that wall and found dope in your pockets?”
Mohawk frowned. Parker shook his head and rolled his eyes. “I apologize for my partner. She’s got a short fuse. One brutality charge after another.”
Ruiz cut him with a look. “He’s wasting our time. What do you want to do? Stand around and smoke a joint with them?”
“That would be against regulations,” Parker said easily.
She called him a turd in Spanish.
Rasta Man exhaled smoke through his nostrils. “J.C. We call him the Lone Ranger.”
“Why is that?” Parker asked. “Does he wear a mask? Carry a silver bullet? Shack up with an Indian?”
“Because he likes to be alone.”
“No man is an island.”
The courier pushed away from the sink. Standing beneath his spectacular head of gray-brown dreadlocks was a body as strong as a tree. His thigh muscles, clad in black spandex, looked as if they had been carved by a master sculptor. He walked over to the hubcap ashtray, the clips on the toes of his bike shoes clacking on the concrete floor.
“That one is,” he said.
Parker took out his wallet, flashing a stack of green bills as he dug out a business card and flicked it onto the worktable, in the direction of Mohawk. “If you hear from him, he should give me a call.”
He put his wallet away and went out the back door. Ruiz nearly knocked him down, shoving her way around him, trying to get in his face.
“What the fuck was that about?” She kept her voice low, but caustic nonetheless.
“What?”
“You could have gone with me. Backed me up on the drug thing. We could have twisted the little punk.”
Parker looked at a couple of bikes chained to a gas meter. “I could have. But that’s not the way I wanted to play it. My case, follow my lead. Your case, I’ll let you alienate as many people as you want.”
The alley was like any alley downtown, a narrow, dirty valley between brick buildings. The strip of sky above was the color of soot. The limited parking spots behind the businesses were crowded with delivery vans huddling together like horses in the soft rain.
“And your lead is to bribe everybody?” Ruiz said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ms. Ruiz. No money changed hands.”
