“I don’t like answers that are not answers, JayCee.”
Hands on his hips, Jace looked away, fixing his gaze on a wall calendar from a local bank, which wished everyone a happy Chinese New Year. Madame Chen turned on the small space heater beneath her desk, and the thing made a humming sound and released a hot electrical smell that was unnerving. He thought for a moment about what to tell her. She probably deserved the truth, out of respect alone, but he didn’t want to involve the Chens in this mess. He didn’t understand it all himself yet. No one could trace him to this address, so there seemed no reason to alarm her.
“A truth does not take so long to tell,” she said firmly. “Only a fiction requires so much thought.”
Jace sighed. “I was making a delivery late yesterday, and someone almost ran me over. I took a bad fall.”
“And you called the police to report this, which is why you were so late in returning home,” she said, clearly not believing that to have been the case.
“No. It was dark. It happened fast. I couldn’t get the license plate number.”
“Instead, you went to the emergency room to be examined by a doctor.”
Jace looked away again, more out of aggravation than evasiveness. Madame Chen was the only person besides his own mother he could not lie to successfully. He could fool and trick anyone else into believing anything he wanted them to believe. Because no one else cared enough about what he was telling them. He was just a messenger, and they heard what they wanted to hear, what was easiest to accept.
“I walked home,” he said. “It took a long time because it was a long way and my bike is broken.”
Madame Chen said something in Chinese that was probably not very ladylike.
“You don’t call a cab?”
“Cabs cost money.”
“You don’t call me?” she said, offended.
“I tried to call. The line was busy.”
“You have no respect,” she said, jamming her hands on her hips. “Six years I worry about you. You have no respect for me.”
“That’s not true,” Jace protested. “I respect you very much, Madame Chen. I don’t want to worry you.”
She hissed like a snake and shook a finger at him. “You are like Boo Zhu now? With stones in your head? You think I am like Boo Zhu?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You are like my family, JayCee,” she said quietly.
Jace felt a burning at the backs of his eyes. He never allowed himself to want that, not in any way less abstract than the loose sense of community he had thought about earlier. Tyler was his family.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“That you offended me, or that I consider you family?”
A crooked smile twisted his mouth. “Both, I guess. I don’t like to burden you.”
She shook her head sadly. “You were old in the womb. Not in the way of your brother, but in the way of a man who has seen too much.”
It wasn’t the first time she had made this particular comment. Jace never replied. There was no point in stating the obvious.
“I have to go, Madame Chen. I have business to take care of. I have to get the bike fixed.”
“And how will you get where you are going? On a magic carpet?”
He didn’t answer. She pulled a set of keys off a nail on the wall. “Take my car. And don’t tell me you can’t. You will.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
Madame Chen owned a two-year-old Mini Cooper, black with a cream-colored top and a moon roof. Jace carefully wedged The Beast into the car and crept out into the early traffic. The car gave him a disguise of sorts. Predator wouldn’t be looking for a Mini Cooper.
The trick of the day would be getting in and out of the Speed offices without being seen by anyone watching the building. He needed to get to Eta before the cops did.
10
Here’s your shit work,” Ruiz said, throwing a single sheet of paper down on Parker’s desk. The paper floated and settled gently on a stack of files, ruining her big show of affront.
Parker glanced at it. A list of messenger companies within a five-mile radius of Lenny Lowell’s office. It had to have taken her all of three minutes to get it off Yahoo!
“You do realize ‘plays well with others’ is a part of your evaluation, don’t you?” he said, as he got up to go to the coffee machine.
It was 6:43 A.M. He’d had roughly two hours’ sleep. There were two other detectives in the room. Yamoto and Kray had caught the family annihilation Nicholson had been at before she showed up at Lowell’s office. Multiple murders and a suicide. An all-nighter just dealing with the paperwork.
Yamoto, another trainee, was writing reports on a snazzy laptop computer he’d brought in himself. He was neat, courteous, professional, and wore better than average suits. Kray didn’t deserve a trainee like Yamoto.
Kray was facedown on his desk, sound asleep, drooling a puddle onto a bright green memo reminding everyone that it wasn’t too late to sign up for the stress-management seminar: Life and Death Don’t Have to Kill You.
Parker went back to his chair and sat down. “You’ve got to learn to lock down that temper, doll,” he said seriously. “What happens when you get some dirtbag killer in the box and he starts in with you?” he asked. “He’ll call you names filthier than any even you know. He’ll suggest you let him perform eighty-three different kinds of unnatural acts on your naked body. You need to get a confession out of the guy, and you go off calling him a fucking whatever? That’s not acceptable.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” she pouted.
“You just did it with me.”
“You’re not a suspect.”
“No, I’m your immediate boss. You have to respect that whether you like it or not. You’re always going to have a boss in this business, and a lot of them will make me look like a prize. Chances are better than even, you’ll be answering to one or another asshole from now until you need your first face-lift.”
He rose and dumped the coffee in the trash. Two slugs of it was enough to jump-start a truck engine. “Fire in the belly is a good thing. Use it while you’ve got it. But if you don’t learn to control it, you won’t last on this job. Anger alone won’t keep you going. It clouds your judgment. You’ll alienate people you need, and piss off people you shouldn’t.”
“You’re the voice of experience on that,” she said.
“Yeah,” Parker said quietly. “I am. You’re learning from a master.”
He felt a hundred years old, most of them spent running up mountains, cocky and sure of himself, then skidding down the other side face-first.
Parker shrugged into his charcoal raincoat, an Armani take on the classic trench. A recent splurge courtesy of his other life. He flipped the collar up and reached for the old fedora he’d had since he made detective. A detective had worn it before him, and another before him, going like that all the way back to the thirties. The good old days when LA was still a frontier town and the Miranda warning wasn’t even a twinkle in the court’s eye. Back when cops used to meet gangsters as they got off the plane from New York or Chicago, beat the hell out of them, and send them back to where they came from.
“Come on,” he said to Ruiz. “We’re starting on these messenger companies. We’ll start with the ones closest to Lowell’s office and work our way outward until we find who got the call.”
“Can’t we just do it on the phone?” she whined. “It’s raining.”
“You don’t learn how to read people over the damn phone,” Parker snapped. “You want to solve mysteries over the phone, get a job with the Psychic Friends Hotline.”
She gave him the finger.