Maybe Lenny had called the cops when he figured out the package hadn’t been delivered. Maybe the envelope was stuffed with cash and everyone assumed the bike messenger had taken off with it. Maybe there was even now, as Jace stood trying to buy a candy bar from a guy in an orange turban who pointed a gun at him, an APB out on him, and LAPD cruisers were trolling the streets in search of him.
The clerk put his gun down on the counter, as casually as if he were putting a cigarette on the lip of an ashtray. “A murder,” he said. “I listen to the scanner.”
Jace felt the blood rush out of his head.
“Who?” he asked, still staring at the congregation of vehicles the next block down, on the other side of the street.
“Maybe you,” the clerk said.
Jace looked at him, a weird current of déjà vu going through him. Maybe he had been murdered? Maybe he was dead. Maybe he hadn’t gotten away. Maybe Predator’s bullet had gone through him, and this surreality he found himself in was the afterlife. Maybe this guy was the guardian at the gate.
“Maybe you are the killer,” the clerk said, then laughed as if he hadn’t three minutes ago assumed Jace was there to rob him.
“Who was killed?” Jace asked again. The shaking he had in part attributed to hunger was growing stronger, but he’d already forgotten his empty belly.
“They call no names, only codes,” the clerk said. “Codes and the address.”
He repeated the address aloud. Jace’s mouth moved along like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s, the words and numbers forming but no sound coming from him.
Lenny Lowell’s address. There was no one in Lenny’s office to kill except Lenny.
Jace wondered if the attorney had been murdered before or after Predator had tried to turn him into roadkill. Could have gone either way, he thought, if what the killer was after was the package tucked inside the waistband of Jace’s pants. Or maybe Lenny had blown away Predator. That could have happened. Except that the attorney had been too drunk to walk a straight line, let alone shoot a gun and actually hit somebody.
An LAPD black-and-white crawled up the street and turned in at the gas station. Jace quelled the urge to run. His hands were shaking as he removed his junk-food dinner from the pay tray. He stuffed the candy bar in his pocket, opened the soda, and gulped down half of it.
The cops pulled up maybe ten feet in front of the building. The cop riding shotgun opened the door and got out. A doughy-faced guy on the heavy side, all of him draped in a rain slicker.
“Hey, Habib,” the cop called in a voice too jovial for the weather. “Hell of a night, huh?”
“Jimmy Chew!” Habib exclaimed, a wide grin splitting his face. One of his upper front teeth was discolored gray and rimmed with gold. “It’s raining! I swear I should never have bothered to leave London!”
The cop laughed. “It’s fucking raining! Can you believe it?
“I need my usual, Habib,” he said. He produced a wallet from somewhere under his rain gear. Head bent, water running in a stream off his hood, the cop dug out a couple of bills. He flicked a glance at Jace. “Hell of a night,” he said again.
“Yeah,” Jace answered. “Fucking rain.”
“Your car break down, kid?”
“Something like that.” Jace raised the soda can to his lips again, trying to be nonchalant, but his hand was shaking and he knew the cop saw it.
“What happened to your face?”
“What about it?”
Chew pointed to his chin and jawline. “That’s some case of razor burn.”
Jace lifted a hand to his face and winced as he touched the part of his chin he had skinned falling on the gravel as he was running for his life. His knuckles were scrubbed and torn too.
“I fell,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Nothing. Minding my own business.”
“You got a place to stay, kid? Father Mike at the Midnight Mission can give you a hot meal and a dry bed.”
The cop had taken him for homeless, a street kid with nowhere to go. He probably figured Jace was either turning tricks or selling dope to stay alive, and that some lowlife pimp or dealer had smacked him around. Jace supposed that was what he appeared to be as he stood there wet and ragged and pathetic.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“You got a name?”
“John Jameson.” The lie tripped off his tongue without hesitation.
“You got ID?”
“Not on me. You gonna card me for buying a Mountain Dew?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
He knew the cop didn’t believe him, that he figured Jace was trying to pass for a legal adult. Compact and wiry, he had always looked young for his age. Wet and beat-up, standing there like a stray dog, he probably looked even younger.
“What are you doing out on a night like this?” the cop asked. “No hat, no coat.”
“I was hungry. I didn’t think it was raining that hard.”
“You live around here?”
“Yeah.” He gave an address two blocks away and waited for the cop to call his bluff.
“Are you come for the murder, Jimmy Chew?” Habib asked in the same kind of pleasant tone he might use to ask if his friend had come for a party. “I heard on the scanner.”
Chew answered the question with another question. “You see anything going on around here earlier tonight, Habib? Around six-thirty, seven?”
Habib pursed his lips and shook his head. He put a king-size Baby Ruth candy bar and two cans of Diet Coke in the drawer and shoved it out to the cop. “Cars go by. No fast getaways. Some poor bastard went past on a bicycle earlier. Can you imagine?”
“What time was that?”
“About when you said. I didn’t look at the clock. I’m working on my screenplay,” he said, gesturing to a mess of printed pages on the counter. He had slipped his gun out of sight.
“What direction did he come from?” Chew asked.
“The way you came. He went past and turned to the right at the corner.”
Jace felt like his heart had lodged at the base of his throat, the beating of it interrupting his ability to swallow.
“What’d he look like?”
Habib shrugged. “Like a miserable bastard riding a bicycle in the rain. I wasn’t really paying attention. For heaven’s sake, who would ride a bicycle to go commit a murder?”
“We’re just looking for anyone who might have been around, maybe saw something go down. You know how it is,” the cop said casually, including the gas station clerk in the cop process, as if Habib was some kind of auxiliary officer. He flicked another glance at Jace. “How about you? You hanging around this street six-thirty, seven o’clock?”
“I don’t own a watch,” Jace lied. “And I didn’t see anything.”
“You didn’t see a guy on a bike?”
“Who’s stupid enough to ride a bike in the rain?”
“A bike messenger, for one. You know any of those guys?”
“Why would I?”
“They hang out under the bridge at Fourth and Flower,” Chew said. “I just thought maybe you might have run into them.”
“I mind my own business,” Jace said, fronting attitude over the fear. “Can I go now? Am I under arrest?”
“Any reason you should be?”
“Yeah. I robbed the Mint,” he lipped off. “I’m just hanging around here for old times’ sake. Can I go? It’s fucking raining.”
The cop considered for a moment that seemed like half an hour. Jace kept his perturbed, defiant gaze steady and right on Jimmy Chew’s eyes.
“In a minute,” the cop said.
Jace watched Chew go back to the car, and wondered if running wasn’t his best option. The cops would probably just think he was a homeless kid who didn’t want a hassle. Or maybe Chew had taken Jace’s trembling hand as a sign he was on something, maybe had some rock cocaine in his pocket to smoke or to peddle.