by Amy Lane
He still had the bruise on his cheek, his shoulder, and the torn knuckles from the day before. “Like you got dusty yesterday?” Ellery inquired sweetly.
“Yesterday was sort of getting to know you.” Jackson cast a hard grin over the seat to where Henry was getting out. “Right? Don’t you feel like we know each other better?”
“It’s a friendship bound in cement,” Henry replied, that flatness in his voice telling Ellery everything he needed to know about how soft and squishy Henry Worrall was not going to get around Jackson.
“Don’t go swimming,” Ellery snapped, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “You need to come in and see everything,” he said, feeling plaintive. Jackson had helped choose the furniture, design the layout. It only seemed fair that he got to see it before the inevitable wear and tear.
“I’ll come in later today,” he promised, and Ellery saw his eyes softening. “I’m just as excited as you are.”
Ellery leaned forward, half expecting Jackson to pull back, but he didn’t. He met halfway for a quick kiss on the lips.
“I’ll text you when we’re done at the clinic,” Jackson promised. “Let you know where it leads. I’d like to see who’s playing film school at Henry’s apartment complex while we’re there getting his costume.”
Ellery nodded. “I’ll be in the office all day, so feel free. Be careful!” he admonished again.
“Always!” Jackson winked, and there was nothing else Ellery could do. He backed out of the car and let Henry take his place. As Jackson pulled away from the curb and Ellery took his briefcase to the office, he had to admit he felt a lot better knowing there was somebody with Jackson this time out, somebody who could hold his own in a fight, by the looks of things.
He remembered Henry’s voice from the back of the car—wobbly, broken, the anger and the bravado washed out of him by the very real possibility of going to jail.
Whatever had damaged that kid—and Ellery would put money on there being damage—the person left behind was still sound, still a good soul.
Ellery hoped he was good enough to have Jackson’s back.
To Hell, With a Shovel
THE SILENCE in the car was stifling, and at first, Jackson wasn’t sure how to break it.
“So, did you meet Arizona Brooks?” he asked. Ellery’s usual opponent at the DA’s office rubbed Jackson the wrong way, but Ellery insisted she was a decent person with a mostly functioning moral compass.
Jackson would believe that when they got some help for the good-faith work they did to make sure justice was done.
“No. She passed us off to someone new,” Henry said, staring off into space. “Siren Herrera.” He made a noise. “If I swung that way, I’d say she was smoking hot.”
Jackson chuckled. “I do swing that way. Sorry I missed the show.”
Henry grunted, and Jackson felt Henry’s cold blue eyes searching his face. “I thought you and… I mean, you and Mr. Cramer seem to be…. Don’t you live together?”
“Well, I didn’t say I’d hit on her now!” Jackson snorted. “I just said I appreciate a pretty girl.”
“Oh, yeah.” Henry’s voice sank again. “Bi. You said it yesterday. I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, buddy, you’re bi. That’s an excuse for being gay.’ But it’s not. Not for you. Weird how you never think of that as an option.”
“You may not!” Jackson somehow managed to keep the scorn out of his voice. Homeboy was obviously going through something. “I would wager there are more bi people than strictly straight people or strictly gay people. I mean… pretty people are pretty. It just seems… odd to not be attracted to the person who turns your key.” Of course, Jackson had spent eight years being as responsibly promiscuous as humanly possible—he’d been exercising his sexuality more than most.
“So like good and bad,” Henry mused. “Not always black or white.”
“Nope.”
Henry nodded for a moment, and the silence grew oppressive.
“So your brother was okay?”
“He was just so happy,” Henry said. “He wanted his family. Sure, he’s sort of built his own—but I realized he really hadn’t wanted to leave us behind. Dad just wanted him to choose between Kane and us.”
“That usually doesn’t end the way people think it will,” Jackson said. He wasn’t sure when people would learn that, actually.
“And watching them together, raising that little girl, with fifty-dozen creatures in their house—like, they have a six-foot iguana, man!”
Jackson was enchanted. “That is totally cool. I must meet them!”
Henry’s laugh had a strained edge to it, but it was still a laugh. “They have turtles too. They built an outdoor terrarium for the summer, with a little swimming pool and running water and shade and a rock in the sun. It’s… I mean, it’s like the perfect place to grow up. If I could have picked a house as a kid, I would have picked theirs. Except I wouldn’t have. I was too brainwashed, trying too hard to be Daddy’s little soldier.” His snort held all the bitterness, and Jackson hurt for him.
“Kids want so badly to please you,” Jackson said. “My brother—Jade’s twin—has a wife, and they have three kids and a house. One of the kids, the oldest, a girl, is named after me. I was in the hospital when she was born. They didn’t know if I was going to live or die, and they wanted a piece of me to carry on. But River, she’s her own person. She’s as girly as they come—Jade was never like that. Her mom was never like that. But River is all pink and purple and sparkles, and it drives Kaden batshit, you know? But he will buy her bright rainbow skirts and a thousand rainbow Barbies and those weird dolls with the detachable feet that look like baby Frankenstein and shit, because that’s his baby, and he loves her. And they took in a foster kid. This kid, his life was one long blur of home after home after home. For the last six months, he’s been the perfect kid, because he was afraid if he screwed up even a little—like forgetting to brush his teeth—he’d be sent back to another house. His first report card was a mess, too much time wondering where he was going to live to pay attention in school, right? And he was so scared they’d kick him out, he ran away for a day.”
“Poor kid,” Henry said softly.
“Yeah. Freaked us all out. Ellery and I had to drive up to Foresthill to try to find him. He was up in a tree—he’d never climbed a tree in his life. He just wanted to be near the house. It was the only real family he’d known.”
“Aw, man, you really gonna tell me this story now?” Henry complained.
“All I’m saying is kids want a family. I’m saying a good family needs to understand that kids are going to be themselves. None of that changes when you grow up. You are not going to stop wanting the family you grew up with—that was safe for you. And they are going to need to accept you as you are, good and bad, gay or straight, if they’re going to claim they’ve done their jobs.”
Henry let out a shaky breath. “I’ve done some really shitty things,” he whispered. “In the name of hiding who I am from my family.”
“How’d they take it when you came out?”
“Same way they took it with Davy. Cracked me across the face and told me to get off their property.” Henry let out a little laugh. “My oldest brother, Travis, said Kane only let Dad hit Davy once, ’cause it took him by surprise.”
“And you?”
“More than once,” Henry said softly. “I don’t know why I just let him keep hitting me.”
“Because you thought you deserved it,” Jackson said, pulling into the guest parking lot of the flophouse complex.
“Maybe I did.”
“No. Nobody deserves that from their father, Henry.”
Henry let out a half-hysterical laugh. “You know why I got kicked out of the military?”
“Nope.” Oh God, Jackson was dying to know.
“Because I got a promotion.”
Jackson widened his eyes. “Ooookay….”
“I got a promotion, and my brother-in-law didn’t. We’d kept ourselve
s at the same rank our entire careers. I’d passed up promotion three times, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. Because if I outranked him, that meant the affair we’d been having for nine goddamned years was suddenly coercion. I tried to break it off with him, but he wouldn’t let go. That’s why I took the promotion finally. He… he’s married to my sister, and she just had a baby, and I just couldn’t… couldn’t do that to her family anymore. But he got… got furious. So he told our CO he’d been coerced, just for spite. I’d spent nine years in the military, and suddenly it was all gone.”
“Dayum, son.” Jackson let the engine idle, because Henry wasn’t done, and he didn’t want to kill the air-conditioning.
“And I could take the dishonorable discharge or me and Malachi could pull out all the bullshit during the court-martial. But that… that would kill my sister. That would kill her little boy. So I took it. I lost my career. Because I fucking deserved it!”
Henry’s shriek rent the air inside the car, and Jackson watched him with compassionate eyes.
“What?” Henry mumbled, obviously embarrassed.
“How old were you when you started the affair?” he asked.
“We started sneaking around in high school.” Henry closed his eyes.
“That must have hurt like a sonuvabitch.”
Henry dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, like he was trying to stop the burning. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
Right.
“That’s a hard thing to stop once it gets going,” Jackson said softly.
“I was fucking my sister’s husband!” Henry snarled. “Don’t you get it? I’m the bad guy!”
“You made some shitty decisions,” Jackson said. “I won’t lie. But so did he. Did he give you excuses? For keeping it up?”
“What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her,” Henry mumbled. “What me and Mal had was different. Just guys fucking around. It didn’t matter, so why quit?”
“You’ve got a pretty solid moral center, Henry Worrall. I bet keeping that shit up hurt you more every fucking day.”
Henry leaned his head against the window and nodded. “I didn’t know how bad, though, until this week. It’s like I’ve been flailing, looking for something to hold me down. Because that weight on my heart—that used to be the only thing that kept me here on earth.”
Jackson turned off the car. Henry needed to back away, to regroup, and he needed to do it without Jackson there. “So think of this as a chance to find your purpose,” Jackson told him. “I spent a year in the hospital thinking about mine.”
“And you came up with private investigator?” And there was the judgy snarky bastard Jackson had wanted to put in the ground all yesterday.
“For the innocent, Henry. Think about that. I spent the first part of my life as a street kid, until Jade and Kaden’s mom took me in. Then I wanted to become a cop—because I thought that meant having power. Then cops tried to kill me, and I didn’t want any part of that. So I became the guy who helps stand up for the guys who didn’t do it. Yeah, sometimes they did—I won’t lie. Me and Ellery have defended some dirtbags in our time. But we’ve also taken some dirtbags down, because we didn’t just stop looking when the system said ‘They did it.’ So you may not think much of me, but you damned well better think something of Ellery. Because his job is what keeps assholes like you out of jail.”
Jackson opened the door and stepped out into the inferno, and Henry followed suit. The heat rolled off the newly laid blacktop, hitting their lungs in a palpable blow.
“You go inside and grab your scrubs,” Jackson said. “There’s some decent gas stations around the corner from the clinic. We can change there.”
“What are you going to do?”
Jackson had picked guest parking for a reason. In an apartment warren like this, the spots marked guest were usually by the office.
“I’m going to go check out the film school,” he murmured. Then he made eye contact. “Seriously, I’ll be right back.”
“Me too,” Henry said, and he started trotting down the sidewalk. From what Jackson could tell from the video, the flophouse was about four buildings in, on the second floor, so he didn’t have far to go.
Jackson made his way to the manager’s office, purposefully not knocking as he burst in.
The guy standing behind the counter jerked upright as Jackson walked in, and a thump echoed in the chamber underneath the counter itself.
“Jesus, buddy,” the guy choked. “Could you knock?”
Sallow, as if he’d replaced sunlight with nicotine, and in his fifties, with washed-out hazel eyes and sandy-gray receding hair, the guy looked like a favorite uncle. Then the tension on his face suddenly increased, his eyes closed, and he shuddered.
A favorite uncle on the john.
He let out a breath that whimpered down his throat and rested his head on the countertop in front of him. Underneath the counter, Jackson heard a muffled grunt.
Nope. Not on the john.
Jackson’s eyes got really wide, but he knew an advantage when he had one. “Look, buddy, your audiovisual room is in the back, right? I’m just going to run back there and give you a second to pull yourself together.”
Jackson started moving before the guy could object, pushing past the lift-up of the counter with only a sideways glance at the guy pulling up his pants and someone crawling out from underneath the counter.
Then he saw the someone.
The kid was young—maybe nineteen, but definitely eighteen, because the Johnnies website said so—and cute, African American with a gentle brown complexion and a military haircut. He climbed out of the recess under the counter with no attempt at subtlety. He was wearing high-end cargo shorts and a Steven Universe T-shirt, and Jackson’s heart hurt a little. Babies. All of the Johnnies guys were babies—even Henry, who was old enough to know better.
“So that’s the last time, right? You said you’d keep the rent down for three blowjobs—that’s the last one.”
“It was interrupted!” the manager whined, and a look of profound distaste crossed the kid’s face.
“That is not my fault! Look, we’re all saving money until our FAFSA kicks in, and some of us don’t have cars! You told me you were upping the rent, and I told you I’d take a couple for the team, but buddy, I usually get paid a lot more for a blowjob, and my other guys wash!”
Oh Jesus. With Reg and Bobby fresh in his mind, Jackson felt compelled to intervene.
“You might want to ask him how many of your other roommates are giving him blowies for rent,” Jackson said, raking the apartment manager with unfriendly eyes.
Sure enough, everybody’s least favorite uncle shifted from foot to foot. “Well, you know, there’s, like, six of them living in there, and it’s only a two bedroom—”
“How much are you charging them—without the blowjobs?”
The look on the guy’s face went crafty, and the kid—Curtis? That had been his name on the website—had the freshly enlightened look of someone who realized he’d been had.
The manager named a rent price that almost popped Jackson’s eyes out of his head. “In what fucking city?” he asked, and Curtis rounded on the manager.
“I knew it! You’re overcharging us for rent and blackmailing us for blowjobs. And Jesus, asshole, would it kill you to fucking wash?”
The apartment supervisor twisted his mouth derisively. “I thought your profession liked to dine on cock cheese!”
The kid might have been able to give a champion blowjob, but he could also telegraph a punch. Jackson grabbed his arm gently. “Hey, hey, hey—look. If you hit him, the cops side with him. You go tell Henry and have him tell Galen. We’ll get a lawyer on this guy’s ass so quick, he won’t have time to wipe.”
Curtis stopped struggling—and in spite of his muscles, it was clear he’d never been in a fight in his life—and looked at Jackson with a little bit of worship.
“You know Henry, John, and Galen?” he asked, and from the tremble
in his voice, it was clear he’d been feeling a little bit out of his league.
“Yeah. Galen and John are great.”
“Henry’s a bit of an asshole,” Curtis said, nodding. “But he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us. Are you sure he’ll help us out?” He frowned. “Is he back?”
“Yeah, he’s up in the apartment right now. Go talk to him.” Jackson narrowed his eyes. “What’s Cock Cheese’s name?”
“Mr. Sternberg.” Curtis spat it like a curse, and then he brightened. “But I may just call him Mr. Cock Cheese for the rest of his life.”
Jackson dug into his pocket for some gum and handed it over. “Here. Knock yourself out. Go talk to Henry. Tell him I’ll be up in five.” Curtis took off, and Jackson turned to Sternberg Cock Cheese. “And I’m going back to the audio-visual room.”
“Hey, man, no, you don’t want to do tha—”
But Jackson had spotted the little door—a one-inch gap indicating either it wasn’t locked or that somebody was in there—and went barreling toward it, his gut telling him that he was close to something big.
“No—no, man, don’t go back there! I’m telling you, there’s nothing interesting in there, just some monitors and—”
Jackson hit the door hard and was ready for it to rebound back in his face. He dodged out of the way as the room’s previous inhabitant launched himself forward, waving a two-inch fixed blade like he knew how to use it.
The small knife flashed down, and Jackson jerked back and then charged before the guy had a chance to reset. Jackson wrapped his arms around his assailant’s shoulders and threw him against the doorframe, where his head cracked with a thud. The guy didn’t let it slow him down, raising his hands around Jackson’s back, and Jackson felt a rip and a burn as the fixed blade sliced the skin over his shoulder blade, glancing off the bone.
“Sonuva—”
Jackson broke out of the hold and kicked forward, his foot rebounding off his attacker’s thigh and coming damned close to his balls. With a yelp the guy rushed out, barreling into Cock Cheese Sternberg and knocking him on his ass before darting out from behind the counter and out the door.
