Kill the Messenger

pick him out in a heartbeat. He could pick him out of a lineup.

The trouble was, if he went to the cops, he’d be tossed into a cell, and they wouldn’t want to listen to anything he had to say about anything. They wanted him for Lenny, and he had no alibi for the time of the murder that could be corroborated by anyone other than the man who’d tried to kill him. They wanted him for Abby Lowell’s break-in. She would happily identify him. Now Eta. He didn’t know what time she’d been killed, didn’t know whether he had an alibi or not. But he did know that the one thing all three people had in common—besides Predator—was him.

“You won’t go,” Mojo said angrily, keeping abreast of him. “Eta’s dead. She has family, children—”

“And I don’t, so what’s the difference if I wind up in prison,” Jace said, glancing over. He sat up straight, let go of the handlebars, and pulled his swim goggles up from around his neck and settled them in place.

“You don’t care about no one but you.”

“You don’t know shit about me, Mojo. You don’t know shit about what’s going on. Stay out of it.”

Jace raised up on his pedals and sprinted ahead, wanting to distance himself from Mojo, and from the guilt he was trying to impose. He wanted to outdistance the image in his head of Eta Fitzgerald with her throat cut, her life running out on the oily, filthy ground behind Speed. He wanted not to think about what her last moments must have been like, what her last thoughts might have been.

The Beast swayed hard from side to side as he pumped. The new rear tire grabbed the road and propelled him forward. He took a right on Figueroa, where traffic was picking up. Produce delivery trucks, and Brinks trucks, and commuters coming into the city early to beat the worst of the crush on the freeways.

The smell of exhaust, the sounds of squeaking brakes and diesel engines were familiar, normal. As was the feel of speed beneath him. If nothing else in his life was normal, there was the smallest comfort of being in his element: feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling things he understood.

He glanced back to see if Mojo had taken the hint and backed off, but the other messenger was coming up on his left. Jace touched the brakes and dove around the corner, right onto Fourth, where his day had begun. Messengers had started to gather under the bridge. They registered as a blur of colors as he flew past.

Mojo was stuck at his left flank, his face grim. He motioned angrily for Jace to pull over. Jace gave him the finger and pumped harder. He was a decade younger than Mojo, but he was injured and exhausted. Mojo was sound and determined, and came up even with him, his U-lock in his right hand. He pointed with the lock for Jace to pull over, tried to crowd him over toward the curb, reached down and made to jam the lock into Jace’s spokes.

Jace dipped right and jumped The Beast up onto the sidewalk as they crossed Olive, drawing a blast of horn from a car trying to make a right-hand turn onto Fourth. Pedestrians on the sidewalk jumped back, cursed him. He clipped the arm of a guy with a Starbucks cup in his hand, and coffee went into the air like a geyser.

Mojo was still in the street and pushing ahead of him, his eyes on the next intersection.

A million tiny, instant calculations went through Jace’s brain like data in a computer—speed, velocity, trajectory, angles, obstacles.

A siren pierced his thought process. A black-and-white was coming up on Mojo, lights rolling. A voice cracked over a bullhorn: “LAPD! You on the bikes! Pull up!”

As they made the corner of Fourth and Hill, Mojo turned hard right, into Jace’s path. Jace angled his front wheel to the left. The light on Fourth had turned yellow. The intersection was almost clear.

The Beast rocketed off the curb, just missing Mojo’s rear wheel. Airborne, Jace shifted his weight, turning the bike.

The cop car was at the corner, turning right from the outside lane, cutting off a truck. The Beast’s rear tire landed just past the black-and-white’s left front headlight. A loud crash sounded, and the cop car jumped forward as something hit it from behind.

Jace took the jolt from the landing, jumped on the pedals, and gunned the bike straight into the oncoming one-way traffic from Hill Street.

A chorus of horns. Tires screeching on pavement. He split the two lanes like a thread through the eye of a needle, just missing side mirrors and running boards. Drivers shouted obscenities at him. He prayed no one opened a door.

He kept going, turning, cutting through alleys, turning, moving. Not even a heat-seeking missile could have followed him. He was one of the fastest messengers in the city. This was his turf. He didn’t even think. He just rode, burning off the adrenaline, sweating out the fear shaking down his arms and flailing in his chest.

Fucking Mojo, chasing him. Jesus H. One wrong move and they might both have ended up in a hospital, or in the morgue. Jace could have ended up in jail, hauled in for operating a bicycle in a dangerous manner, or something more serious, depending on how pissed off the cop had been. And it would have taken only a few minutes, maybe an hour, before they figured out they had the guy every cop in the city was looking for—if Mojo hadn’t volunteered the information first.

That’s what you get for trusting someone, J.C.

And what about what other people got for having him come to them? He thought again of Eta, and wanted to be sick.

Cruising through a green light, Jace checked the street sign, and might have laughed if he’d had it in him. Hope Street.

He pulled off at the Music Center Plaza, situated amid a trio of entertainment venues: the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson Theater, and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, home of the Oscars until Hollywood had rejuvenated itself and reclaimed the awards.

The plaza was deserted. Nothing opened for another hour or so. Jace parked The Beast and sat down on a bench, trying to let go of all the tension in his body. He stared at the rise and fall of the many waterspouts around the Peace on Earth sculpture, and tried to clear his mind for just a moment.

The sculpture was allegedly famous. To Jace it looked like a monkey pile of people trying to hold up a giant artichoke that a dove had dive-bombed nose-first. All he could think looking at it was that the man who had created it had not lived in the same world he did, or the same world Eta Fitzgerald had lived in.

The sculpture was timeless. A thing without life that would live forever. A thing without emotion, meant to evoke emotion. It would sit on this spot forever, barring nuclear attack or the Big Quake.

Jace couldn’t imagine that anyone would really care if it was there or not, but there it would remain. Instead, people would come and go, live and die, and years would pass, and some would be missed and some would never be thought of at all.

He tried to imagine what Eta would have had to say about Peace on Earth, but he couldn’t hear her voice, and he would never hear her voice again. He could only put his head in his hands and cry for the loss of her.

                              29

Chen’s Fish Market was five minutes from Parker’s loft. According to the DMV, one of the Mini Coopers that may have fled the scene of Abby Lowell’s break-in lived here. Parker pulled up in front and went to the public entrance first, finding the place hadn’t yet opened for business. But in the loading bay two men were shoveling shaved ice for the coolers that would chill the day’s deliveries.

Parker held up his badge. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m looking for a Lu Chen.”

The men straightened immediately, one wide-eyed with fear, the other narrow-eyed with suspicion. The first had the round, doughy features of someone with Down syndrome. Parker addressed the other man. “I’m Detective Parker, LAPD. Is there a Lu Chen here?”

“Why?”

Parker smiled. “That was a yes or no question. Unless your name is Lu Chen.”

“Lu Chen is my aunt.”

“And you are?”

“Chi.”

“Just Chi?” Parker asked. “Like Cher? Like Prince?”

The steel-eyed stare. No sense of humor.

“Is your aunt here?”