“What if the cops are watching the place?”
“What do you take me for? Honey, I done forgot more about cops than you’ll ever know.”
Or so she wanted to think. Suddenly she wanted to ask him everything she didn’t know about him, but she knew he wouldn’t give her the answers. “Baby, that dead lawyer, he ain’t no crime kingpin. He ain’t running the mob out of some nasty office in some nasty strip mall. He ain’t worth the money it’d cost the taxpayers to set up surveillance on every courier service in LA. First they gots to figure out who done the pickup. Unless that man was the neat-and-tidy kind, keeping notes of who done what, when, why. He strike you like that?”
Jace shook his head.
“Then lay down on the floor and stay there ’til I tell you something else.”
“You’re the best, Eta.”
“You’re damn straight I am,” she grumbled, pulling away from the curb. “Y’all don’t appreciate Miss Eta. Hanging my big black bootie out there for y’all. I don’t know what you’d do without me.”
12
Speed Couriers. Stylish logo. A forties deco look. All caps, letters slanted steeply to the right, a series of horizontal lines extending to the left to suggest fast movement. The sign had probably cost more than a month’s rent on the dump it hung over.
The space had once been an Indian restaurant, and still smelled like it, Parker noticed as they went inside. The stale, sour ghost of old curry had permeated the royal blue walls and gold- painted ceiling. Ruiz wrinkled her nose and looked at Parker like it was his fault.
“Welcome to our house.” The guy who opened the door and stood back to let them in was tall and thin with the dark, shiny eyes of a zealot.
A punked-out kid with three nose rings and a blue Mohawk sat smoking a cigarette at a small table near the front window. After a furtive gaze at Parker and Ruiz, he put on a pair of curved silver shades, slipped out of his chair and out the door as they moved into the room.
“All guests are welcome, all sinners redeemed,” their doorman told them. He arched a brow in disapproval as he looked down on Ruiz and the red lace bra playing peekaboo out of her black suit jacket. “Are you familiar with the story of the wife of Heber?”
Parker looked around. The wall going down a long, narrow hall was covered with cheap, staple-riddled fake wood paneling and served as a giant bulletin board. Playbills and political propaganda. RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE—WAGE WAR AGAINST THE CAR CULTURE. A flyer advertised a messengers’ race that had happened two months previously. A poster recruited blood donors for cash. Snapshots showed a motley assortment of messengers at parties, on their bikes, clowning around. Hand-scrawled notes on torn scraps of paper advertised stuff for sale. Someone was looking for a nonsmoking roommate. Someone was moving to Holland, “Where the weed is legal and the sex is free. Bye-bye you cocksuckers!”
Parker showed his badge to their spirit guide. “We need to speak with your dispatcher.”
Their doorman smiled and gestured toward a scratched-up Plexiglas and drywall cubicle, where a large woman with a head of braids held back by a bright-colored scarf and a phone sandwiched between her shoulder and her ear was taking notes with one hand and reaching for a microphone with the other. “Eta, Queen of Africa.”
The woman’s voice boomed over a tinny speaker. “John Remko! Get your crazy ass on a bike! You got a pickup. Take this manifest and get the hell out of here!”
Frowning, the man went to the window cut into the hall side of the cubicle. “Miss Eta, such language—”
The woman’s eyes were bulging. “Don’t you give me no lip, Preacher John! You ain’t my cousin’s uncle’s son. You get out of here or you ain’t gonna be nobody’s relative no more, ’cause I will have done killed you!”
Preacher John took the manifest and disappeared down the dark hall, a retreating specter.
Parker stepped up to the window. The woman didn’t look at him. She slapped her note up on a magnet board. The magnets each had a word printed on them—MOJO, JC, GEMMA, SLIDE. She secured the note to the board with PJOHN.
“You want a job, honey, fill out the yellow form. You got a job for us, fill out the top of the manifest,” she said, reaching for the ringing phone. “You want something else, you ain’t gonna get it here.
“Speed Couriers,” she barked into the phone. “What you want, honey?”
Parker reached inside the window and slipped his shield into her line of sight. “Detective Parker, Detective Ruiz. We need a few minutes, ma’am. We have some questions.”
The dispatcher looked at the badge, not at Parker, as she listened to the person on the other end of the call.
“Well, whatever you got, Todd, babydoll, you better die of it. I’m already short a messenger. . . . Walking pneumonia? I don’t need you walking, honey. I need you on a bike.” She listened for a moment, huffed in offense, and said: “You don’t love me. That’s all there is to it.”
She slammed the receiver down, swiveled her tall wheeled stool around, and faced Parker with an imperious glare. “I got no time for you, Blue Eyes. You ain’t nothing but trouble. I can see that comin’ now. A sharp-dressed man with a hat ain’t never nothin’ but trouble. You gonna cost me nothin’ but time and money.”
Parker swept his fedora off, grinned, and held his raincoat open. “You like the suit? It’s Canali.”
“I’ll like it better from a distance. Aks what you gonna aks, honey. This ain’t the offices of GQ magazine. I got me a real business to run.”
“Did you send a messenger to the office of Leonard Lowell, Esquire, for a pickup last night around six-thirty?”
She stuck her chin out and didn’t blink. “We close at six P.M.”
“Good for you,” Parker said with a hint of a half smile. A dimple cut into his right cheek. “But that’s not what I asked.”
“I send out a whole lotta messengers on a whole lotta runs.”
“Do you want us to interview each of them?” Parker asked politely. “I can clear my calendar for the rest of the day. Of course, they’ll have to come down to the station. How many are there? I’ll have my partner call for a van.”
His nemesis narrowed her eyes.
“What do you call those notes you put up on that board?” Parker asked.
“Floaters.”
“Every order gets put on a floater. The floater goes on the board under the name of the messenger going on the run. Is that how it works?”
“You want my job?” she asked. “You need another line of work? You want me to train you? You can have this job. I’ll go file my nails and watch Oprah and Dr. Phil every day.”
Her fingernails were as long as bear claws, with metallic purple polish and hand-painted pink rose details.
“I want you to answer a simple question, ma’am. That’s all. You can answer me, or I can take all the floaters you wrote yesterday back to the station and go through them one by one. And what about the manifests? I’m guessing you match the two things up at the end of the day. We could take them too. Let you get on with your business.”
“You can get a damn warrant,” Eta barked. She grabbed her radio mike by the throat as incoming static and garbled words crackled over the speaker. “Ten-nine? Ten-nine, P.J.? What the hell do you mean you’re lost? You ain’t gone but two minutes. How could you be lost? You’re lost in your brain, that’s where you’re lost. What’s your twenty? Look at a damn street sign.”
The messenger answered, and Eta rolled her eyes. “You’re hardly across the damn street! I swear, John Remko, if you ain’t taking your meds, I’m gonna feed ’em to you my own self! Get yourself turned around and get gone before I got Money chewing on my tail.”