Free Kill the Messenger by Tami Hoag Page B

buddy: that I love you and I’ll be there for you, even if I have to crawl on my hands and knees over broken glass to get there.”
    He pulled the boy close and gave him a fierce hug. Tyler had reached the age where he was starting to think a real man didn’t need hugs, and the fact that he still needed them was embarrassing. But he gave in to that need and pressed his ear against Jace’s chest to listen to his heartbeat.
    Jace held his brother close for a moment, wondering what karma would dish out to him for withholding the whole truth from Tyler. Tonight, more than any other night, he was too aware of his own mortality. Death had come calling and sucked him into a dark vortex where he had no control over anything but his own will to come out of it alive. Even as Tyler leaned into him, he could feel Lenny Lowell’s package pressing against his belly beneath his shirt.
    In the morning he would have to explain some things, but he wouldn’t do it now. Now all he wanted was a hot shower and some sleep. The world would not look brighter come morning, but he would have more strength to deal with it.
    After Tyler had gone to bed and fallen asleep, Jace went into their small bathroom and squinted at himself in the small mirror over the small sink and beneath the small light fixture that stuck out from the wall like a glowing wart.
    He looked pretty damn bad. His face was pale and drawn, his only color the black circles beneath his eyes, a smear of mud on his cheek, and the angry red abrasions on his chin. His lower lip was split, the line drawn in clotted blood. No wonder the cop, Jimmy Chew, had taken him for a homeless kid.
    He washed his hands, wincing at the sting of soap in the torn skin of his fingertips and palms. He lathered his face, with the same resulting pain, and splashed it clean with ice-cold water that took his breath for a second. Then he stood straight and carefully worked his way out of his wet sweatshirt and tight T-shirt. His shoulders hurt, his back hurt, his chest hurt. There was hardly a body part that wasn’t aching, throbbing, swollen, bleeding, or bruised.
    Lenny Lowell’s package was still tucked inside the waistband of his tight bike pants. The padded envelope felt damp but otherwise undamaged. Jace pulled it free, stared at it as he turned it over and over in his hands. He was shaking. In normal circumstances he would never open a client’s package, no matter what it was. Rocco, the guy who ran Speed Couriers, would fire him in a heartbeat. Now he almost wanted to laugh. He had bigger problems than Rocco.
    He sat down on the lid of the toilet and picked at the edge of the envelope flap until he could get his finger inside and tear it open.
    There was no note of any kind. There was no thick wad of money. Sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard was a waxy envelope of photographic negatives. Jace took them out of the envelope and held a strip of them up to the light. Two people exchanging something or shaking hands. He couldn’t really tell.
    Someone was willing to kill for this.
    Blackmail.
    And I’m in the middle of it.
    With nowhere to turn. He couldn’t go to the cops, didn’t trust the cops. Even if he turned the negatives over to them, he would still be a target for Predator, who couldn’t afford to wonder what Jace knew or didn’t know. Predator wouldn’t know whether or not Jace had looked at the negatives, or that he hadn’t had them developed or given them to the cops. He was a loose thread a killer couldn’t leave dangling.
    If this was karma, then karma sucked.
    He wouldn’t wait to find out. Jace had never felt he was a victim of anything in his life. His mother had never allowed it, not for Jace, not for herself. Shit happened and he dealt with it and moved on, moved forward. He had to look at this situation in the same way. That was always the way out, to move forward.
    Shit happened. And he was up to his neck in it. There was nothing to do but start