Free Kill the Messenger by Tami Hoag

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