on?
He would have to lure her out somehow. Get her to meet him on neutral ground, somewhere with plenty of escape routes, somewhere he could see trouble coming. He would tell her he had the negatives, ask her what they meant to her. Ask her what they were worth to her.
Jace wondered what she’d told the police. She’d mentioned a particular detective. What was his name? Parker. He wondered if that was the guy in the hat behind the Speed office. And he wondered what Parker knew, what he had put together, what Eta had told him.
He still didn’t want to believe Eta had betrayed him. He wanted to contact her, talk to her. He wanted to be reassured.
“You’re leaving.”
Tyler stood in the doorway to the bedroom, wearing his Spider- Man pajamas, his blond hair sticking up in all directions.
“You’re leaving and you weren’t even going to tell me.”
“That’s not true,” Jace said. “I wouldn’t leave without telling you.”
“You told me you wouldn’t leave at all.”
“I said I would always come back,” Jace corrected him. “I will.”
Tyler was shaking his head, his eyes filling. “You’re in trouble. You weren’t gonna tell me that either, but I know.”
“What do you know?”
“You treat me like a baby, like I’m stupid and can’t figure anything out for myself. Like . . . like—”
“What do you know?” Jace said again.
“You’re leaving. You could take me with you, but you’re not going to, and I don’t get to say anything about it because you don’t think I should ever know what’s going on!”
“You can’t go with me, Tyler. I have to clear up some problems, and I have to be able to move fast.”
“We could too go,” Tyler argued. “We could go someplace nobody knows us, just like when Mom died.”
“It’s not that simple,” Jace said.
“’Cause you’re gonna go to jail?”
“What?” Jace dropped down on the futon. Tyler stood directly in front of him, his face tight with anger, a red flush mottling his pale skin.
“Don’t lie,” he said. “Don’t pretend you didn’t say it. I heard you say it.”
Jace didn’t bother to ask his brother if he’d been listening in on his conversation with Madame Chen. Obviously, he had, and Jace knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Tyler was notorious for turning up in places he shouldn’t have been, and knowing things he shouldn’t have known.
“I’m not going to jail,” Jace said. “I said that to Madame Chen to scare her. She wants me to go to the cops or talk to a lawyer. I don’t want to do that, and I have to make sure she doesn’t do it for me.”
“So CFS doesn’t come and get me and put me in foster care.”
“That’s right, pal.” Jace put his hands on his little brother’s small shoulders. “I won’t risk you. I would never risk you. Do you understand that?”
Tears glistened in Tyler’s eyes as he nodded soberly.
“We look out for each other, right?”
“Then you should let me help you, but you won’t.”
Jace shook his head. “It’s complicated. I need to figure out what’s really going on.”
“Then you should let me help you,” Tyler insisted again. “I’m way smarter than you are.”
Jace laughed wearily and mussed his brother’s hair. “If this was about geometry or science, I’d come straight to you, Ty. But it’s not. This is a whole lot more serious.”
“Some man got killed,” Tyler said quietly.
“Yes.”
“What if you get killed too?”
“I won’t let that happen,” Jace said, knowing it was an empty promise. Tyler knew it too. Even so, Jace said, “I’ll always come back.”
One tear and then another skittered down his brother’s face. The expression in his eyes was far older than he was. A deep, deep sadness, made all the more poignant by the weary resignation of past experience. In that moment Jace thought Tyler’s soul must be a hundred years old or more, and that he had lived through one disappointment after the next.
“You can’t come back if you’re dead,” Tyler whispered.
Jace pulled the boy close and held him tight, his own tears burning his eyes. “I love you, little guy. I’ll come back. Just for you.”
“You promise?” Tyler asked, his voice muffled against Jace’s shoulder.
“I promise,” Jace whispered, his throat aching, the promise he didn’t know if he could keep like a jagged rock he couldn’t swallow and wouldn’t let go of.
They both cried for a while, then they sat there for a while longer, time stretching, meaningless, into the dark night. Then Jace sighed and stood his brother back from him.
“I have to go, pal.”
“Wait,” Tyler said. He turned and ran into his room before Jace could say anything, and came back seconds later with the pair of small two-way radios Jace had given him for Christmas.
“Take one,” he said. “The batteries are new. Then you can call me and I can call you.”
Jace took the radio. “I might be out of range. But I’ll call you when I can.”
He put his army fatigue jacket on and slipped the radio into a pocket. Tyler walked with him to the door.
“Don’t get into any trouble,” Jace said. “And mind Madame Chen. You got that?”
Tyler nodded.
Jace expected Tyler to tell him to be careful, but he didn’t. He didn’t say good-bye. He didn’t say anything.
Jace touched his brother’s hair one last time, turned, and went down the stairs.
Chinatown was silent now, the streets glistening like black ice under the streetlights. Jace climbed on The Beast and started slowly down the alley. One foot pressing down, and then the other, in a weary climb to nowhere. The Beast rocked from side to side with each step, until momentum became forward energy. He took a right at the end of the alley and headed toward downtown, where lights in the windows of tall buildings glowed like columns of stars.
And as Jace turned one corner, a five-year-old Chrysler Sebring turned another just a few blocks away. A big iron gate slid back on electronic command and the car slipped into its parking slot beside a former textile warehouse building that had been brought back from the edge of condemnation and converted into trendy lofts.
And on another block, a low-slung black sedan with a brand-new windshield turned a corner and prowled down a wet street, past a laundry and a greengrocer’s and Chen’s Fish Market.
Parker let himself into his loft, dropped his keys on the narrow black-walnut Chinese altar table that served as a console in the slate-floored entry hall. He didn’t glance in the mirror above it. He didn’t need to look to know that the day hung on him like a lead cloak. There was no energy left in him to feel anger or sadness or anything but numb.
The soft glow of the small halogen lights spotlighting the art on his walls led him down the hall to his dressing room and into the master bath. He turned on the steam shower, stripped out of his suit, and laid it across a chair.
He would send it to the cleaners tomorrow. The idea of wearing it again after having stood in that alley looking at Eta Fitzgerald’s body wasn’t acceptable to him. Even though the scene hadn’t been something truly grotesque, like finding a dead body that had been left for days in a hot room, the scent of death was on it, the
The steam and pounding hot water melted some of it away—the smell of it, the weight of it—and soothed his muscles, warming away the chill both from without and from within.
The bedside lamps were turned on low—part of the elaborate electronic system a buddy had talked him into. Lights, music, room temperature—all were tied into a timed computer system so that he never came home to a
