Déjà vu. He’d had this dream a hundred times. Out of control, hurtling down, his equilibrium rolling and tumbling in his head. He couldn’t tell if he was right side up or ass over teakettle. Nausea rose in his throat.
The bike banged down the steps, back end threatening to overtake the front. Jace tried to make a correction, shifting his weight, and The Beast kicked out from under him and tumbled the last fifteen steps to the sidewalk. Jace rolled and bounced after it, trying to grab hold of something, anything to slow his fall.
He landed at the bottom, and immediately looked back up toward the fountain, toward Fourth Street. The motorcycle sat at the top. Even as he watched, the lunatic with the throttle in his hand made a decision, and the angle of the headlights tipped dramatically downward.
Crazy bastard.
Jace grabbed his bike up off the ground, climbed on, pointed it down Fifth. He raced around the corner at Figueroa, turning toward the Bonaventure Hotel. He checked back over his shoulder again and again. No motorcycle.
He lost himself then, in the same spot he had started his day, under the tangle of bridges that connected downtown to the Harbor Freeway. The place where, three days ago, he had hung out with the other messengers waiting for calls from their dispatchers, all of them complaining that it was going to rain.
His pursuer—if he survived his descent to Fifth Street—would assume Jace had turned down one street or another. He wouldn’t think to look here. Jace hoped.
Jace hid the bike and himself behind a huge concrete footing, out of sight from the street. He stripped off his backpack and dropped it, stripped off his coat and threw it on the ground, so hot he thought he was going to vomit. His shirt was soaked with sweat, the kind that reeked of fear. He was shaking like a malaria victim. His legs gave way beneath him and he went down on his knees.
Shit like this only happens in the movies, he thought, bending forward, curling himself into a ball on the ground.
What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck just happened?
The images flashed through his head. He was going to have nightmares for the rest of his life. The panhandler with the green hair. The cops, the guns. The guy on the motorcycle.
Who the hell was he? Predator? He’d ditched the big gas hog for a rice burner? He had been scary enough in a car. With the motorcycle helmet, the extreme shape of the sport bike, he was a demon from hell for the Matrix age.
How had he known to be there? How had the cops known? It didn’t make sense to Jace that Abby Lowell would have tipped off either of them. Why would she? She was in on it, whatever “it” was.
Jace had tried to call the detective she had told him was in charge of the case, Parker. But he hadn’t gotten him, and even if the woman he’d spoken to had acted immediately, there’d been no time for them to get people set up in the park. The green-haired guy had been there an hour before Jace had made the call.
Abby Lowell had double-crossed him. She had thought she could get him arrested and walk away scot-free. So she had called Parker earlier in the day, probably right after Jace had spoken with her. But if she had set it up, she would have walked away without the negatives, and the negatives were what everybody wanted. The negatives were still in their envelope, still taped to Jace’s belly.
And even if she had called in the cops, that still didn’t explain Predator, if that was even who had been chasing him.
What the hell could he do now?
His pulse had slowed. His breathing had evened out. He was cold, the sweat dried on his skin by the chill of the night air. He wanted not to think, not to have to. He was alone. The light was weird under the bridge, dark, but dappled in spots with the diffused white glow from the streetlights above, like moonlight filtering down through a concrete forest. The hum of tires on the road above him was like white noise seeping into his exhausted brain.
He pushed himself up onto his knees, shrugged into his coat, reached for his backpack, and dug out his space blanket. The walkie-talkie fell out of it as he unfolded the blanket.
Jace picked it up, turned it on, and held it next to his face, but he didn’t press the call button.
His voice would telegraph his fear, his fear would leap across the airwaves, go into Tyler’s ear, and frighten him to the core. Bad enough not to know what his big brother was up to, worse to know what he was up to, worse still to know that he was afraid.
What could he say to the kid anyway? He didn’t know what to do. People were trying to kill him. Every way he turned, he only became more entangled in the mess, like he’d walked into a bramble bush.
I’m fresh out of plans, he thought. He felt hollow inside, like he was just a shell, and if someone was to give him a good kick, the shell would shatter into a million pieces and he would cease to exist.
“Scout to Ranger. Scout to Ranger. Come in, Ranger. Do you read me?”
The walkie-talkie crackled, speaking into the side of Jace’s head. He didn’t even jump. It was as if his mind had conjured his brother’s voice.
“Ranger, do you copy? Come on, Jace. Be there.”
He could hear the worry, the uncertainty in Tyler’s voice. But he didn’t answer. He couldn’t. What could he say to Tyler after screwing up their lives this way?
He just squeezed his eyes shut tight, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
43
Tyler put the radio in his backpack and tried really hard not to start crying. He thought maybe he would pull out a granola bar and eat it to distract himself. It was suppertime anyway. But the idea of eating made him feel sick, so he didn’t.
He went back inside the Central Library, his base of operations for most of the day. It somehow made him feel calmer to be in this big, solid, beautiful building full of things he loved, books. All that knowledge and wisdom and excitement and mystery around him, his for the small price of reading words.
But he was really tired now, and he still didn’t have a plan that didn’t involve superpowers, like Spider-Man had. And he doubted there was a single book in this building that could tell him what to do next. He kept thinking if only he could talk to Jace, but Jace hadn’t answered a single radio call all day, and that made him worry.
Why would Jace have bothered to take the radio with him if he wasn’t going to use it? Did the fact that he wasn’t answering mean he was out of range, or that his batteries were dead? Or did the fact that he wasn’t answering mean he couldn’t answer? And if he couldn’t answer, was it because he was in jail, or in a hospital because he’d been shot, or that he was dead?
Or maybe he was just plain gone—out of LA to Mexico or someplace—and Tyler would never see him again. Just like when their mother had died. She’d gone out the door with Jace to go to the hospital, and never came back. No good-bye, no I love you, no I’ll miss you. Just gone.
That horrible empty feeling came over him from the inside out, like giant jaws opening to swallow him whole. Tyler pulled his feet up on the bench and hugged his arms around his knees, holding tight as his eyes welled up again.
Jace always told him he borrowed trouble. That wasn’t true, Tyler thought, or else he would have for sure given it back to whoever he was supposed to have borrowed it from.
He had thought maybe if he went to the places he knew the bike messengers hung out, he would find Jace.
Jace never told him anything, but Tyler had long ago gotten on the Internet to find out everything he could about the bike messengers who worked downtown. He knew there were about a hundred messengers working for about fifteen different companies. He knew the “tag price” was the base price the client paid for the delivery. He knew the difference between being W-4 (having taxes withheld from salary) and 1099 (being an independent contractor).