Kill the Messenger

by Tami Hoag

  Jace had moved himself and Tyler to Chinatown after their mother died. They had dumped their meager possessions in a couple of laundry bags pilfered from the back of a delivery truck parked behind a restaurant, and jumped on a bus. Every evening when he returned to Chinatown, Jace recalled the day he had led his brother by the hand beneath the Gate of Filial Piety and to a place no one would ever come looking for them.

  Alicia Damon had died as a Jane Doe in Good Samaritan Hospital. Jace knew this because he had taken her to the emergency room himself, “borrowing” the car of a junkie neighbor who was too wasted to notice the scrawny kid next door taking his keys.

  His mother had not given the admissions clerk her name or address. She had not allowed Jace to appear to be with her, or to attract attention to himself in any way, or to give anyone his name or tell anyone where they lived.

  Alicia had trusted no one in any position of authority, her greatest fear being the Children and Family Services people, who had the power to take her sons away from her. What little mail they got came to a rented box, never to whatever crappy apartment they were living in at the time. They had no phone. Jace had been registered in public school under the name John Charles Jameson. They lived on what money Alicia could make at menial jobs that paid cash, and on a Social Security check that came monthly, made out to Allison Jennings.

  They had no family friends. Jace had never brought any school friends home with him. He had never met his father, or even seen a photograph of him. When he was younger, he had asked why, but he had stopped asking by the time he was six, because it upset his mother so much that she would go into another room and cry.

  He had an idea who Tyler’s dad might be—a bartender from a dive his mother had worked at briefly. He had seen the guy a couple of times because he had secretly followed his mother to work, afraid to stay alone in the room they were renting at the time. Twice he had seen them through a window, kissing after everyone else had gone from the bar. Then suddenly the Damons picked up and moved to another part of the city. Some months later, Tyler was born. Jace had never seen the bartender again.

  Whenever Jace had asked for an explanation about the way they lived, Alicia would only reply: “You can’t be too careful.”

  Jace had taken her at her word. After her death, he had made no claim on his mother’s body, because people would ask questions, and questions were never a good thing. He had been just thirteen at the time, and knew without having to be told that Children and Family Services would swoop in like hawks and he and Tyler would be put into foster care, probably not even together.

  There was no money for a funeral anyway. And besides, the mother he and Tyler had known was gone. The dead body had nothing really to do with who she had been and would never be again. And so the body had been shipped off to the LA County Coroner’s building to be stored in the morgue with the other three hundred or so Jane and John Does that came in every year, waiting in vain for someone to remember them and care enough to come looking for them.

  With stubby candles in cobalt blue votives from the Catholic church three blocks from their apartment, and wilted, unsalable flowers from the Korean market down the street, Jace and Tyler had made their own memorial to their mother. They had set up a little altar of sorts in the living room. Their centerpiece: a photograph of Alicia, taken long ago, in better times.

  Tyler had dug the picture out of a cloth-covered box their mother had had as long as Jace could remember. He had looked through it many times when his mother had been out, but not with her there. She hadn’t offered to share it. A box of memories with no stories, no explanations. Photographs of people Jace had never known, taken in places he had never been. Secrets that would forever remain secrets.

  Jace had given a short eulogy, then he and Tyler had each named the qualities about their mother they had loved most, and would miss most. They had said their good-byes and put out the candles. Then Jace had held his little brother tight, and both of them had cried, Jace as silently as he could because he was all they had now, and he had to be strong.

  Alicia had told Jace never to worry if something ever happened to her, that in the event of tragedy, he should call a phone number she made him memorize, and ask for Alli. Only, when Jace called the number from a pay phone, he was told it was no longer in service. And so there was no Alli, and there was plenty to worry about.

  The next day Jace had gone looking for another place for them to live. He had set his sights on Chinatown for a number of reasons. One, because he wanted Tyler to grow up in a place where he didn’t have to worry some junkie would beat his head in for a nickel or take him and sell him to a pedophile to get money for his next fix. Two, because the community was so eclectic, no one would think them out of place there. And three, because he figured if he could actually get them in among the Chinese, he wouldn’t have to worry someone would rat them out to Children and Family Services. The Chinese ran their community their own way, discouraging intrusion from the outside world. Family was more than just a word defined by the County of Los Angeles. The difficulty would be in getting accepted.

  Jace had gone up and down the streets, looking for a menial job, being turned down again and again. Nobody wanted him, nobody trusted him, and most of them conveyed the sentiment without speaking a word of English.

  At the end of the third fruitless day, when Jace had been almost ready to give up, Tyler had dragged him into a fish market to look at the live catfish in the tank in the front window.

  Typical Tyler, he had gone right up to the person who looked most likely to have answers, and proceeded to ask half a million questions about the catfish—where had they come from, how old were they, what kind were they, were they boys or girls, what did they eat, how often did the tank have to be cleaned.

  The person he had chosen to ask was a tiny Chinese woman with the bearing of a queen, nicely dressed, dark hair done up in a bun. She was probably fifty-something, and looked as if she could have balanced a glass of champagne on top of her head and walked to the end of the block without spilling a drop.

  She listened to Tyler’s stream-of-consciousness questions with one brow lifted, then took him by the hand, went to the fish tank, and patiently answered each of them. Tyler soaked up the information like a sponge, like he had never learned anything more fascinating. He looked up at the woman with wide-eyed eager wonder, and the woman’s heart melted.

  Tyler had that sort of effect on people. There was something about him that seemed both wise and innocent at once. An old soul, Madame Chen called him. She had fed them dinner in the small restaurant next door, where everyone jumped to please her as she snapped at them in Chinese.

  She had quizzed Jace about their background. He had been as vague as possible about most of it, but had told her about their mother’s death and that they had no relatives. He had admitted that they were afraid of being put into foster care, separated, possibly never to see each other again. Tyler was likely to be adopted, because he was young. Placing a teenage boy was a whole other thing.

  Madame Chen had weighed all these matters as she sipped her tea. She was silent for so long, Jace was certain she was going to tell them to get lost. But when she finally spoke, she looked from Jace’s eyes to Tyler’s and back, and said: “Family is everything.”

  The line reverberated in Jace’s head as he limped down the back alleys of Chinatown in the dead of night. In the best of times he felt detached from most of the world, the outsider, the loner. He relied on no one, confided in no one, expected nothing from anyone. He had been raised not to trust, had seen many reasons not to trust, so he didn’t trust.

  But he liked the Chens, and was deeply grateful to them. He enjoyed the company of the other messengers, though he didn’t think he could call them friends. These were his connections, the circle of people around himself and Tyler, tied to him by thin threads that could be easily broken if necessary.

  Someone had tried to kill him. The police wanted him for questioning at the
very least, to charge him with the murder of Lenny Lowell at the worst. He couldn’t go to anyone he knew to share those burdens. Relying on someone else meant risking too much by dependence. And why would any of the people he knew risk part of their lives for him?

  Jace could see that loose circle around him coming apart, sending the people of his life away from him like so many particles of a meteor as it hurtled through Earth’s atmosphere. He was surprised to realize how much those casual connections meant to him. He hadn’t felt so bleakly, completely alone since the days after his mother died.

  Family is everything.

  His only real family was a ten-year-old boy, and Jace would go to any lengths to keep this danger from touching him.

  He had managed to get back to Chinatown without arousing the suspicions of anyone except for a few street people camping out in boxes in the alleys Jace had taken. But tomorrow the cops would be making the rounds of the messenger agencies, trying to track down the messenger who had picked up a package at Lowell’s office. He would become the center of everyone’s suspicions then. For all Jace knew, his would-be killer would be making those same rounds, trying to get a name and address, trying to get to the package that was still pressed against his belly beneath his clothes.

  Whoever was looking would have a hard time finding him. The address he had put on his job application at Speed wasn’t where he and Tyler lived. He gave that address to no one. He was paid in cash under the table—not an uncommon practice among the shadier agencies in the messenger game. Getting paid in cash meant none of his money went to the government; therefore, the government didn’t know he existed, and the agency didn’t have to provide him with health insurance and workers’ comp.

  It was a risky proposition at first glance. If he was injured on the job, he had no medical coverage. And injury was inevitable. Statistics showed that the average cyclist could expect to have one serious accident every two thousand miles on the bike. Jace figured he clocked two thousand miles every couple of months, give or take. But he made more money this way—a straight fifty percent on the price of every run—and if the agency had to cover him, he might have his hospital bills paid once, but he probably wouldn’t have a job waiting for him when he got out. The company would consider him a risk and dump him.

  No one could track him through utility bills, because he paid the Chens in cash for water and power, and for the cable feed to the television in the apartment. Rent was traded for work shoveling ice for the cases in the fish market. He never brought visitors home, wasn’t close enough to anyone to have reason to. He rarely dated, had no time for a relationship. The few girls he had gone out with knew little about him or where he lived. As he had been trained from a very young age, he left no paper trail that could lead anyone to him and Tyler.

  Even knowing how difficult it would be for anyone to find him, Jace felt skittish about going home. Despite the fact that he hadn’t run into the cops or seen Predator’s car again, he couldn’t escape the feeling that someone was watching him, following him. Some omniscient evil floating over the city just beneath the storm clouds. Or maybe it was just the onset of hypothermia making him shake as he let himself in the back door of the fish market and climbed the stairs to the tiny apartment.

  He heard voices as he neared the door. Male voices. Angry voices. Jace held his breath, pressed his ear to the door, and tried to make out the conversation over the roaring of his pulse in his ears. The voices went silent. His heart pounded harder. Then a louder voice shouted to shop for a car at Cerritos Auto Square.

  “We save more, so you save more! Cerritos Auto Square.”

  Jace exhaled and let himself into the apartment.

  The only light came from the television in the corner of the room, splashing colors across the small space and over the two bodies on the futon: Tyler, sprawled, head and one arm hanging over the edge of the cushion, legs splayed; and the old man Tyler called Grandfather Chen, the ancient father of Madame Chen’s deceased husband. Grandfather Chen sat upright on the futon, his head back, his mouth open, his arms out from his sides with palms up, like a painting of some tormented saint pleading with God to spare him.

  Jace went to his brother, moved the boy’s dead weight up onto the cushion, and covered him with a blanket that had fallen to the floor. Tyler didn’t stir, didn’t open his eyes. Grandfather Chen made a crying sound and jerked awake, raising his arms in front of his face defensively.

  “It’s okay. It’s only me,” Jace whispered.

  The old man put his arms down and scowled at Jace, scolding him in rapid-fire Chinese, a language Jace had not managed to master in his six years of living in Chinatown. He could say good morning, and thank you, and that was about it. But he didn’t have to understand Grandfather Chen to understand that it was very late and Tyler had been worried about him. The old man went on like an automatic weapon, pointing to his watch, pointing to Tyler, shaking his finger at Jace.

  Jace held his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry. Something happened and I’m late, I know. I’m sorry.”

  Grandfather Chen didn’t even take a breath. Outraged, he held his thumb and pinkie up against the side of his head and pantomimed talking on the phone.

  “I tried to call,” Jace said, as if it would do him any good to explain. In fifty years of living in the United States, the old man had made no attempt to learn the language, turning his nose up at the very idea, as if it were beneath him to speak English for people too ignorant to learn Chinese.

  “The line was busy.” Jace mimicked talking on the phone and made the busy signal.

  Grandfather Chen huffed a sound of disgust and threw his hands at Jace as if to shoo him from the room.

  Tyler woke then, rubbing his eyes, looking at Jace. “You’re really late.”

  “I know, buddy. I’m sorry. I tried to call Madame Chen. The line was busy.”

  “Grandfather Chen was on his computer, looking at Chinese girly sites.”

  Jace cut a look of disapproval at the old man, who now wore the cold, inscrutable expression of a stone Buddha.

  “I don’t want you looking at porn sites,” Jace said to his brother.

  Tyler rolled his eyes. “They weren’t naked or anything. He’s shopping for a mail-order bride.”

  “He’s a hundred and twelve, what’s he going to do with a mail-order bride?”

  “He’s ninety-seven,” Tyler corrected him. “In the Chinese way of counting birthdays, where the day of your birth is considered your first birthday. So he’s only ninety-six by our way of celebrating, by the anniversary of our date of birth.”

  Jace listened patiently to the lesson. He tried never to be short with his brother. Tyler was as bright as a spotlight but very sensitive about Jace’s approval or disapproval.

  “Anyway,” Jace said. “He’s an antique. What’s he want with some young bride?”

  “Technically, he’s not an antique, because he isn’t a hundred years old. As for the bride—” Tyler gave an exaggerated shrug. “He says: If she dies, she dies.”

  He looked up at the old man beside him and rattled off something in Chinese. Grandfather Chen replied, and they both laughed.

  The old man ruffled Tyler’s hair fondly, then slapped his hands on his thighs and rocked himself off the futon. He was Jace’s height, his posture straight as a rail, his body thin, almost to skeletal proportions. His face was sunken in like a shrunken head, the skin as transparent as wet crepe paper, a road map of blue veins running just beneath the surface. He squinted at Jace’s face, frowning, brows knit. He pointed to the bruises and abrasions, and said something in a serious voice, too softly for Tyler to hear. Concern, Jace thought. Worry. Disapproval. Grandfather Chen figured—rightly—that whatever had caused Jace to be so late wasn’t anything good.

  The old man said good night to Tyler and left.

  Tyler turned on the table lamp and soberly studied his big brother. “What happened to your face?”

  “I had an accident.”
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  He lowered himself onto a hardwood Chinese stool and took his boots off, careful not to pull too hard on his right foot. The ankle was throbbing.

  “What kind of accident? I want to know exactly what happened.”

  They had been over this ground before. Tyler wanted to be able to visualize every aspect of Jace’s job, down to the smallest detail. But he was particularly obsessed with any kind of accident his big brother—or any of the messengers—might have.

  Jace wouldn’t tell him. He had made that mistake once, then came to find out that his brother was fretting about him to the point of making himself sick, playing out every horrible possibility over and over in his mind, fearing the day Jace would go out and never come back.

  “I fell. That’s all,” he said, dodging Tyler’s too-serious stare. “Got doored by an old lady in a Cadillac, twisted my ankle, and got some scrapes. Bent a wheel on The Beast and had to walk it home.”

  The short version of the story. Tyler knew it, too. His big eyes welled up with tears. “I thought you weren’t coming back. Ever.”

  Ignoring the fact that he was sopping wet, Jace moved to the futon and sank down beside the boy, sitting sideways to look into his brother’s face.

  “I’ll always come back, pal. Just for you.”

  One tear slipped over the rim of Tyler’s lower eyelid, over the eyelashes, and down his cheek. “That’s what Mom used to say too,” he reminded Jace. “And it wasn’t true. Stuff happens that a person can’t do anything about. It just happens. It’s karma.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and recited from memory what he had read in the dictionary he studied every evening: “Karma is the force generated by a person’s actions to per-pet-uate transmigration, and in its ethical consequences to determine his destiny in his next existence.”

  Jace wanted to say it was all bullshit, that there was no meaning in anything, and there was no “next existence.” But he knew it was important to Tyler to believe in something, to search for logic in an illogical world, so he made the same lame joke he always did. “And while you’re distracted worrying about it, you’ll step out into the street and get hit by a bus.