Kill the Messenger

Eddie thought about it for a minute. He wanted a place where there wouldn’t be a lot of people around at this time of night. Had to have escape routes and good access to a freeway. “Olvera Street Plaza. Two hours. And, kid? Double-cross me, and I’ll skin your dick and feed it to you while you bleed to death. You got that?”

“Yeah. Whatever. Just bring the money.”

Eddie ended the call and got off the exam table. The door cracked open again, and Hector slithered in. He was skinny and oily, and shook all over like a shit-ass Chihuahua dog. The little Mexican chick hurried up to him and rattled off a lot of gibberish, gesturing at Eddie. Eddie took a last drag on his cigarette, and shrugged into his shirt.

“Hector, I need to borrow your car.”

Hector smiled that nervous smile again. “Sure, man, whatever.” He pulled a set of keys out of his pants pocket and tossed them to Eddie. “It’s the blue Toyota with the flames all down the sides.”

“Great.”

“What you gonna do, man?”

Eddie looked at him with his dead eyes and said, “I’m gonna go kill somebody. I’ll see you later.”

                              48

On weekends the plaza on Olvera Street is ringed with tourists and Mexican families watching Aztec dancers or listening to Mariachi bands. On a weeknight in the dead of winter, there are no tourists, only transients looking for a park bench to sleep on.

Jace paced a slow half circle at the edge of the plaza, feeling like a goat that had been staked out as lion bait, waiting for the guy who had tried repeatedly to kill him. Waiting for the guy who had twisted his life into a nightmare, who had murdered an innocent woman. Jace let his outrage singe the edges of his fear. He would be a part of taking down Eta’s killer. He had argued with Parker to be in on it. It was his duty to Eta.

The wind was rustling the leaves of the big fig trees, putting him on edge as he tried to sharpen his ear for the sound of a shoe scraping on pavement, the hammer of a gun being cocked.

Jace had brought Tyler here a million times. It was an easy walk from Chinatown, and an inexpensive day out for people with limited resources. Free shows, an outdoor market of stalls with cheap trinkets and T-shirts.

The park was supposedly the heart of LA’s original 1781 settlement. In a city where change and all things cutting-edge rule, the adobe structures and old tile walkways gave the impression of being in another world. And Tyler, who absorbed detail and history like a sponge, loved it.

If anything happened to that kid, Jace was going to dismember Kev Parker with his bare hands. There had been no time to take Tyler home. They had to set up, get into their positions, and do it before Davis could arrive. He had asked for a couple of hours. There was no way of knowing what he meant to do with that time. His intentions could have been the same as theirs, to get here early with a plan.

Parker had given Tyler the job of lookout, and left him in the car with his walkie-talkie.

A big black guy was lying on his side on a bench Jace had walked past twice, sleeping, snoring, reeking of bourbon. He looked like a sea lion flopped on the beach, the moonlight washing over him and the rags he had covered himself with. Another innocent bystander unwittingly waiting to die, Jace thought. He knocked the guy on his shoes.

“Hey, buddy, wake up. Get up.”

The man didn’t move. Jace grabbed hold of an ankle and gave a yank. “Hey, mister, you need to get out of here.”

The old drunk just went on snoring. Jace moved away from him. If he was that dead to the world, he was probably as safe as he could be here. Jace walked away.

A dot of light flashed at him from across the plaza. Parker. Davis was coming.

The excitement building in Eddie’s gut was a lot like the anticipation of sex. A fist of tension, all his nerve endings starting to buzz. He loved his work.

He loved that he was so fucking smart. He’d come up with the perfect plan to cut away all the loose ends of this deal and ride off into the sunset. He could already see himself stretched out on the beach in Baja with a cigar, a bottle of tequila, and some topless Mexican babe ready to do whatever freaky, kinky thing he wanted her to do.

He could see the kid pacing around the plaza, probably ready to shit his pants. Stupid kid. Except that he probably wasn’t so stupid that he hadn’t brought a gun or something this time to protect himself.

What he hadn’t brought with him was cops. Eddie had done his recon. No plainclothes cop–looking cars in the area. You could always tell cops by the shit rides the city gave them. The place was deserted except for a few homeless losers with their shopping carts parked next to benches.

Eddie himself was traveling light. The only thing he carried with him was his knife.

Parker had given Jace a gun, a .22 caliber handgun he had taken out of a case in the trunk of his car. It seemed a pretty wild thing for a cop to do, but Jace had figured out quickly that Kev Parker was not a mainstream kind of guy. He was riding around in a convertible with no police radio, only a scanner. He didn’t have a partner—not with him anyway. They had stopped en route and picked up a crazy woman who was a newspaper reporter.

If Jace hadn’t looked at Parker’s ID, he wouldn’t have believed the guy was a cop at all. First of all, he dressed too well to be a cop. Even his shoes looked expensive, and that was one thing you could always count on with cops—the bad shoes.

Still, Jace didn’t like the idea of trusting him. This was all happening too fast. But he didn’t see that he had any choice. The only way he was getting out of this mess alive was for someone to take Eddie Davis out.

He could see Davis coming, the shape of a small vending machine in a long dark coat. His palms started to sweat and acid rose in his throat like the red stuff in a thermometer.

It would be over in the next few minutes. Jace’s only hope was that he would live to tell the tale.

Parker watched Eddie Davis through night-vision binoculars as he crossed the plaza. LAPD may not have been able to afford pens that didn’t leak, but Parker had no such budget limitations. He kept a small treasure trove of gadgets in the trunk of his car.

Clipped to the bridge of the binoculars was a small, wireless parabolic microphone that fed him sound through a discreet earphone. In his other ear was an earbud for the walkie-talkie that connected him to Tyler, in the car.

He had left the boy with Andi Kelly, and didn’t know which one was more liable to keep the other out of trouble. They had picked Kelly up on their way. If Parker’s hunch paid off, she was going to get one hell of a story.

“Where’s the money?” Jace asked. Davis was still ten feet away.

“It’s on the way.”

“What? You never said anything about anybody else,” Jace said. He was trembling. The guy standing in front of him was a murderer.

“You never asked,” Davis said. “I don’t carry that kind of cash around. What did you think? That I’d rob an ATM?”

He looked like something from Dawn of the Dead as he stood there with the streetlight washing over him. He had a strip of white tape across his nose. One eye was almost swollen shut, and he looked like someone had hit him across the left side of his face with a brick.

He stood with his arms crossed, casual, like they were a couple of strangers chatting while they waited for a bus.

“So where are the negatives?”

“They’re safe,” Jace said. He rubbed his hand over the gun in his pocket. He didn’t know anything about using a gun. Parker had said, What’s to know? Point and shoot.

“There must be someone big in those pictures to be worth all this, for people to be killed over them,” Jace said now.

Davis smiled like a crocodile. “The killing’s the fun part.”

He started to take a step closer.

Jace pulled the .22 out of his pocket. “You’re fine right there. I don’t want you coming any closer.”

Davis gave a little huff. “You’re some pain in the ass, kid. How do I know you’ve even got the negatives?