Fish on a Bicycle

by Amy Lane

  Words about what?

  Jackson narrowed his eyes, a hunch building. “Fine. But bring your computer and AJ’s thumb drive. I want to see what the video says.”

  Two Bettas in a Bowl

  ELLERY COULD see why Jackson—and Henry, for that matter—had been so protective of Reg Williams.

  Sure, he was built, as, apparently, all the guys on the website were, but he was also… young in a way that had nothing to do with his birthday, and curiously fragile.

  By the time Jackson had pulled his gargantuan car up to the house—which looked to be in a state of recent repair, judging by the new porch with the old siding and the new kitchen flooring inside with the battered walls—Ellery had looked at the footage on his computer twice. And he’d seen exactly what he’d been expecting to see: Henry, coming down the stairs shirtless, wearing a pair of basketball shorts, lifting up the lid of the dumpster and recoiling in horror.

  The end.

  Everything that had followed—guys on the stairs, cops in the parking lot, ambulance, forensics team, all of it—was exactly what Henry had said.

  No surprises.

  But when Ellery told Jackson that, he’d merely nodded and said, “Good!” Then he stepped on the accelerator.

  When they got to the house, Jackson had flown out of the car, Ellery hot on his heels, and had burst in without any preamble. What they saw there was, well, chaos, but also pretty much what Reg had promised.

  A giant of a young man in his boxer shorts, over six feet tall and built like a tank brigade, with sandy-brown hair and hazel eyes, was sitting on a much smaller, wiry man, holding both of his prisoner’s wrists in a one-handed grip with a little help from a twisted dishtowel.

  A slightly built man with his receding hairline cut close to his scalp was practically dancing around them in his boxer shorts, fussing.

  “Bobby, they’re here. Should we let him up now?” said the man who must have been Reg.

  “Nope,” Bobby said, eyeballing Jackson and Ellery with no excitement whatsoever. “Not happening.”

  “Man…,” the prisoner panted. “You’ve got to let me up. I can’t… fuckin’… breathe….”

  “You broke in here,” Bobby said, his voice obdurate. “You held a knife to my boyfriend’s throat when he went to take a leak, and he broke a perfectly new mirror with your head. You think I’m letting you go?”

  “So turn me over to the cops!” the guy whined. “Something! My shoulders are fucking killing me.”

  Bobby did what looked like a sitting crunch—something that forced his ass to bounce up and down on the guy’s spine. The guy whimpered.

  “I’m sorry!” he cried. “Jesus, I’m sorry! I’ll tell them this was a wash! You weren’t home! Anything! Jesus, man, I’m just trying not to get killed by my boss….” The would-be attacker burst out sobbing then, weak, snuffling sounds against the clean tile.

  Bobby looked at Jackson with a lazy up-and-down motion of his eyes. “Reg said you could help,” he said laconically. “I’m not seeing it.”

  Jackson reached into the pocket of his loaded cargo shorts and pulled out a packet of large zip ties, the ones used as restraints, that Ellery didn’t even know he had.

  “Got these,” Jackson told the young skeptic. “You ready for a break?”

  Bobby brightened. “I’ll be honest. My ass is sort of cramping.” He bounced up and down on the unfortunate housebreaker’s back again, and more sobbing ensued.

  “Then, here.” Jackson crouched down and zip-tied the guy’s wrists together, then gave Bobby a hand up. The housebreaker didn’t move, just stayed on the floor sobbing and sort of flopping around like a fish.

  “So,” Jackson said, prodding the guy’s shoulder with his toe. “You, uh, feel like telling us why this trip’s necessary?”

  “My boss,” the guy snuffled, “is going to kill me.”

  “Is that like, ‘My boyfriend’s gonna kill me if I forget milk’ kind of kill?” Jackson asked, prodding him again. “Or my drug-snorting, psychopathic, criminal, douchebag boss is going to stick a gun in my mouth and twitch?”

  “The second one,” the guy mewled. “He’s an animal. Fucking psycho. His brain’s more meth than brain!”

  “Seriously?” Jackson looked at Ellery, who arched his eyebrows.

  “Now there’s meth?” Ellery was as surprised as he was.

  “What the hell are all these drugs doing in the same fucking case?” Jackson muttered. He prodded their guy with a toe again. “You got any ideas?”

  “All I know,” their soon-to-be-dead guy whined, “is that I was supposed to make the retard change his statement. My boss told me to make sure he told the cops that the video was right. The new one, not the old one.”

  Ellery blinked. “All my faculties are right on point,” he said, coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with Jackson. “And I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Man, all I know is that. Please let me up.”

  “No.” Jackson aimed a kick at the guy’s side, and he howled when it landed. “Watch your mouth around my friends.” He pulled the packet of zip ties out again and linked the guy’s ankles together, then stood and turned to Bobby and Reg.

  Bobby—the tank—had his arm around his smaller, more frightened boyfriend in a gesture of protectiveness that made Ellery like him even more.

  “Reg,” Jackson said softly, “this is Ellery. He’s Henry’s lawyer, like Galen is John’s. He’s my boss, and we’re trying to keep Henry out of jail. He’s going to show you and Bobby a video, and I want you to tell me if you’ve seen any part of it before, okay?”

  Reg nodded, and Ellery pulled his laptop out from the briefcase he’d brought with him out of sheer stinking habit. He had a sudden suspicion where this was going.

  The two guys—apparently comfy and casual in their underwear in front of strangers—watched the film of Henry finding the body in silence, and then Reg looked up. “I guess that’s this morning. Why are we looking at it again?”

  Jackson scowled at the housebreaker. “Because I think what he was trying to convince you to do was verify another tape.” He prodded the guy with his toe. “Am I right?”

  “I replaced it at the apartment building before I came over here,” the guy muttered. “The cops’ll ask for it tomorrow.”

  “Why not today?” Ellery wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. We just got tipped off today that we needed to change it. My boss figured the guy was a junkie. Nobody would look too hard for whoever killed him. But there’s an investigation and shit. How were we supposed to know a doctor’s kid would get that much attention!”

  “I got no idea,” Jackson muttered, and then looked at Bobby and Reg. “Guys, look. I think we’re absolutely going to have to turn this guy over to the cops. But let Ellery call them, okay?”

  Jackson bent down and rolled the guy onto his back and then helped him up and into a chair while Ellery watched. Ellery had pulled out his cell phone and stood staring at the criminal with ill-concealed distaste.

  Their guy was a weasel.

  Small—maybe five feet five inches at the tallest, he probably weighed around one twenty—and most of that was what looked like a beer belly. His nose was lit like a Christmas tree, and he had the broken blood vessels around his face that indicated alcohol was his longtime companion.

  “What’s your name?” Ellery asked, pulling out his legal pad.

  “Herbert,” he said miserably.

  “No, seriously, really?” Jackson asked, pulled from his conversation with Bobby and Reg.

  Ellery’s mouth twitched. “You have a problem with Herberts?”

  They made the mistake of meeting eyes, and both of them burst into inappropriate giggles.

  “Only when they look up my skirt!” Jackson snorted.

  Ellery glared at him and settled into questioning mode. “So, Herbert, what’s your last name, and who’s your boss?”

  “Herbert Dalton,” he said defensively. “And my boss is C
andy. Candy Cormier. And he’s going to kill me. He’s got guys in the prisons, guys in the cop’s office, guys in the DA’s office….” Herbert trailed off, giving Ellery big limpid green eyes and a professional whine, but Ellery had heard guys like this every day of his professional life.

  “I’m not taking any clients right now,” he lied, “but I can refer you to another outfit.” Without any qualms, he rooted through his wallet and pulled out a card from his old firm—he kept a couple of them for just such emergencies. Given that they’d cut him loose after he and Jackson had been wounded solving a national conspiracy because they’d pissed off someone in Washington, it was really the least he could do.

  After he’d tucked the card between the guy’s fingers, he set about calling 911.

  By the time the police arrived, Jackson had convinced the guys to go put on some clothes and Herbert had managed to tell Ellery very, very little.

  “So Candy Cormier—are you sure that’s a guy?” Jackson asked, puzzled.

  “Yes, Jackson. Male pronoun was used.”

  Jackson grunted. “He’s this guy’s boss. He didn’t kill Martin Sampson—”

  “Not that Herbert said,” Ellery told him, just as puzzled. “But you know what we didn’t see on that footage?”

  Jackson grunted. “I was waiting for you to notice that,” Jackson said grimly.

  Ellery smacked his forehead. “Oh my God!” Because what wasn’t on the video was the body dump. The computer had shown a perfectly calm parking lot for at least three hours before Henry found the body. “I was so distracted!” And mortified.

  Jackson’s filthy chuckle didn’t help. Well, yes, they’d just come from sex, so Ellery’s prized sense of observation and reason was a little bit pickled. “Herbert here was told to change out the video and then to intimidate Reg into saying this was the right one.”

  “I don’t understand!” Ellery muttered. He’d been in the top of his law school class, literally Harvard Law. He’d seen his first courtroom as an intern and hadn’t looked back. But this? This game of switch-the-tape and intimidate-the-porn-star was not making any sense.

  Jackson took a breath, frowning like he did when he was trying to break something down.

  “Here’s the thing. This video? This video has been doctored by somebody who didn’t want us to see the body dumped, right?”

  “Right.” Ellery nodded. “AJ said it was easy to get. He asked the apartment manager, who went into the security room and came back with a thumb drive.”

  “So this footage was prepared,” Jackson said. “Now, I would bet—just bet—that tomorrow, when the cops ask for a video, they’re going to find a different section of footage, all prepared like this one. The manager will go back into his security room, grab a thumb drive, and say, ‘I have it all right here, officers!’ Then hand it over.”

  Ellery thought about it. “And it will have Henry throwing Sampson in the dumpster, with Reg and Bobby and the other guys as witnesses.”

  “Yes!” Jackson punched fist to palm. “Exactly! And they were trying to get Reg to say that tape was from yesterday. There would be no question.”

  Reg was standing by the refrigerator, opening and closing it fitfully until Bobby told him to pour everybody some lemonade, probably just to give him something to do.

  “So we need to assume two things,” Ellery said, hoping the cops could wait to arrive just two more minutes. He almost had this.

  “One,” Jackson said, “is that there’s more than one outfit here. Martin Sampson was selling pills—probably procured from the hospital because he had connections. He used to sell coke, and then he went to jail for a little while and lost that connection.”

  “Two outfits,” Ellery said, trying to think like Jackson. “But this guy sells meth, so that’s a whole other subculture.”

  “Manufactured in your own backyard,” Jackson said bitterly. “Oh my God, this is huge.”

  Ellery nodded and resisted whining about “Why us?” because seriously, couldn’t they just get the guy who didn’t do it? No, instead they got the guy who didn’t do it and was framed by three different drug lords.

  But maybe that wasn’t the question he should be asking.

  “Why Martin Sampson?” he asked, at the same time Jackson said, “Why Henry?”

  They looked at each other, and Jackson said slowly, “Martin Sampson was shitting in someone else’s pond. And he was also shitting in his own. He pissed off the coke dealers he used to work for. He got caught by Henry a couple of weeks ago when he was selling pills, so he probably pissed off the outfit he works for now. I’m not sure what he did to Candy Cormier and the Meth Monsters, but somehow he stepped on their toes too.”

  “Henry was an easy scapegoat,” Ellery said, pacing a few steps toward the refrigerator and turning around to pace back. “Henry’s altercation with Sampson was well known. So whoever took him out altered the tape the first time—they just took out the part where somebody dumped the body.”

  “And Candy Cormier wanted Henry pegged for the crime, so they had another tape made by whoever is in the backroom of the manager’s office. And they sent Herbert here to intimidate Reg and make him agree the doctored tape was the real one.”

  “Why not Bobby?” Jackson asked, and then he looked over at Herbert. “Why Reg? Why not Bobby?”

  “We didn’t know they lived together!” Herbert wailed. “We knew the big guy defended the little guy, but we didn’t know they were sleeping together! Jesus, Sampson slept with all of them—we didn’t know they got attached.”

  Jackson frowned thoughtfully. “They did porn scenes with Sampson,” he said, nodding at Reg and Bobby, and they nodded back. “That’s not a relationship. Who told you it was a relationship?”

  Herbert got a crafty look on his face, and Ellery was even more glad he’d given the guy his old firm’s card. “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Somebody told you they were all humping like bunnies, didn’t they? Was it Sampson?”

  Herbert shook his head. “It was general knowledge,” he said firmly. “And that’s exactly what I’ll tell the cops.”

  Who picked that exact moment to pull up.

  THE NEXT hour was a blur. Jackson explained six times what he was doing there, while Ellery stood in front of Bobby and Reg and forced the police to address him and not his new clients. By the time they were done and Herbert Dalton had been taken into custody, Ellery’s brain was buzzing with more questions than answers.

  The cops pulled away, and Ellery raked his fingers through his hair.

  “Why was Martin Sampson the lynchpin of a drug war?” he asked into the sudden silence.

  “Why is it so important that Henry Worrall is blamed for his murder?” Jackson asked in return.

  “We know how Sampson’s old dealer got his supply, and Candy Cormier probably makes his own,” Jackson said. “Where did Sampson get his happy hospital meds?”

  “Who in the hell is in the manager’s office of that apartment making all the goddamned director’s cuts!” Ellery demanded, furious all over again.

  “And how am I gonna sleep here when any idiot can just break in through my front door?” Reg demanded, sounding frightened.

  Jackson and Ellery exchanged a look.

  “You’ll sleep in our guest bedroom tonight,” Ellery said smoothly. “Tomorrow, I’ll have AJ come over if he’s got time and help Bobby install some locks and an alarm system.”

  Bobby grunted. “It was on the list,” he said apologetically. “Jesus, you should have seen this place before I got here!”

  Ellery knew his mouth twisted as he looked at the changes wrought by home improvement. Every time there was new paint or a new appliance or new flooring, it showed up against the old stuff like a bloody wound. Fixing this place up had to be an act of love, because Ellery couldn’t imagine even the most dedicated house flipper doing it for money.

  “I’m going to call Henry,” Jackson said. “He needs a heads-up.”
>
  He wandered into the living room, which had a threadbare rug that looked thin enough to use as a flour sifter, and Ellery was stuck in the kitchen, trying and failing to guess which case was going to take his attention first.

  “Can we really stay at your house?” Reg asked, with a little bit of awe. “’Cause that’s… I mean, he said he’d be my friend, but that’s like something John would do.”

  Ellery nodded. “Well, Jackson’s that kind of guy,” he said, not even wanting to think about these two vulnerable guys alone in the world. The tenor of the police questioning had been decidedly unfriendly, particularly toward Bobby, but that kid—barely twenty-one, judging by his driver’s license—had been as calm as Ellery had seen anybody on the stand.

  If that young man was any more grounded, his toes would be tree roots.

  That impression of Bobby didn’t change after they locked up the house and left, Reg following in a bright orange car that Jackson seemed to approve of, and Bobby following him in a truck that looked like it should have fallen apart before Bobby had been born.

  The kid had apologized about the truck before they’d even left. “I’m sorry, man. I hate to park this anywhere near your house, but it’s got my tools in the back, and we can’t replace that shit.”

  Jackson had chuckled and pointed to his SUV. Once upon a time, it had been an Infiniti QX30. But that was before it had been blown up and reconstituted as an urban assault vehicle with a translucent oyster-gray paint job.

  “What in the fuck is that?” Bobby asked, entranced.

  “That is a tricked-out rich-man’s car,” Jackson told him proudly. “And everything is bulletproof. Ellery’s neighbors have actually filed complaints about it because they think it’s military issue.”

  Ellery sighed. “We usually keep it in the garage,” he confirmed. “But, you know, we didn’t know what we were driving into tonight.”

  “Aw, man,” Reg said, tapping the hood of the Camero he apparently loved. “If I wasn’t afraid for my car here, I’d totally want a ride in that thing.”