Free Kill the Messenger by Tami Hoag Page A

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.”
    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.
    “Here’s what I can control, buddy: that I love you and I’ll