by Amy Lane
“Get captured and follow him,” Jackson said, taking a deep breath. “Joey, go!”
They heard him in the hallway a minute later. It sounded like he was stalling. “Sure, Mr. Sampson. Sorry—just you asked for an extra vacuum because of the new rug, right?”
“Did you get to it?” Sampson asked, a thread of panic in his voice.
“My boys were just moving the desk, right? But we didn’t get to the rug. We got everything else done, almost. We were in the middle of the guest bathroom, I mean, and we haven’t vacuumed the bedrooms, but the kitchen is spotless.”
“I don’t give a shit about the goddamned kitchen. And I changed my mind about the other rug. I want it back. Where did you send it?”
“My cousin’s place. You know. Out in Levee Oaks?”
They set the desk down gently, but Jackson had a moment to smile. Way to sound like an idiot, Joey—keep it up.
“Okay, what now?”
“Ball caps on?” His was tucked in his back pocket, and so was Henry’s. They replaced their ball caps, shucked their gloves, and Henry grabbed his cleaning basket.
Jackson called out in Spanish, “Get in the car and start it. We’ll try to follow!”
“Hurry up. He’s glaring at me as I walk, and I think there’s a gun safe in the living room!”
Jackson kept walking, chatting conversationally with Henry, as though Henry knew what he was saying. “Just say sí,” he muttered. “We might be able to fake our way out of here.” Then, a little louder to Joey, “If he stops us, take off for your cousin’s place and get the rug. Call Dickhead and tell him you have evidence, and have him meet us there!”
“Sí!” Joey called, and then the front door closed.
Jackson rounded the corner out of the study, leading the way, Henry behind him. He was waylaid by a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“You didn’t take anything, did you?” Robert Sampson demanded, and Jackson shook his head, smiling guilelessly.
“Just your murder weapon and a blood drop,” he said in Spanish, watching the suspicion in Sampson’s tanned, handsome, middle-aged face deepen.
“Wait a minute, do I know you?”
Jackson turned to Henry and nodded decisively, relieved when Henry’s military training kicked in and he took off.
“What in the hell—” Sampson had turned toward his left to see where Henry had gone, so Jackson cut to the right, hauling ass after him. The front door slammed, and his heart gave a giant throb in his chest, but he pushed on, thinking if only he could make it to the front door, he’d be clear. He could hop in the van, he could call Kryzynski, and he’d never skip his doctor’s appointment again.
He rounded the hallway corner, Sampson hot on his heels, when the front door opened again, this time in an explosion of light.
“Cormier! Stop him!” Sampson yelled, and Jackson skidded to a halt, trying to sidestep the massive figure who’d just walked in.
Jackson couldn’t make out the guy’s features beyond his general size and build, but as he scrambled backward and into Sampson, Cormier said, “Wait, do I know you?”
And then Sampson clocked him on the back of the head with something, and he crumpled to the floor.
Panic Fish
ELLERY! THIS is Henry! Bad shit happened!
Ellery stared at Jackson’s name on the phone and tried to keep his cool. He was just about to take a Lyft to River Breeze Cleaning, and goddammit if he wouldn’t be early. The cardiologist’s office hadn’t just agreed to make an appointment. They’d asked if Mr. Rivers needed an ambulance. And Ellery was so goddamned done at this point, he almost said yes. To see “Bad shit happened!” coming up on Jackson’s phone was about the last thing he thought he could bear.
“Henry?” he said after hitting Call. “Is he conscious?”
“He’s captured!” Henry told him, sounding pissed off. “Sampson got back early, and Joey and I got out. But as I was getting in the van, this big Navigator pulled up and a guy the size of a mountain got out. Before we left the house, Jackson told us that we were supposed to go get the rug from Joey’s cousin’s place and call the cops and make sure they met us there.”
Oh God. Oh God, oh God. “Well, did you call them?” Ellery demanded. “Where are you now?”
“We’re about a mile from Sampson’s place, heading—fuck. Joey, where the fuck are we going?”
Another voice answered him, and Henry got back on.
“We’re on Fair Oaks,” he said dutifully. “We’re taking Fair Oaks to Watt, then Watt to 80, then we’re getting off at Marysville. I have no idea where any of that is, but here’s the address.”
Henry rattled off the address, and Ellery wrote it down. “I can find it, and I’m pretty sure your buddy in the van can get you there quickly. Don’t do anything until the cops get—”
“Fuck that!” Henry snarled. “They’ve got Jackson, and his lips were almost goddamned blue. Fucking Jesus, if he’s not okay, I’ll kill him myself.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” Ellery muttered, hauling ass through the office and ignoring Jade’s surprised look. “I’ve got to go. Kryzynski’s texting me—fuck!”
“What?” Henry demanded.
“Nothing. I’ll see you there!”
“What’s up?” Jade asked, stopping him at the door.
“They’ve got Jackson. He’s not doing well, and he’s got the fucking car!”
“Oh. Is that all.” Jade turned and grabbed her purse from its perch on the counter and hauled ass past him as he held the door open. “And by the way? You can explain what all of that means as we go. Where the fuck are we going?”
Ellery rattled off directions as they pounded down the stairs and got into her car. The office only had one parking spot. Jackson had told him it would be a problem, and now he knew he was right. Goddammit. It wasn’t until Jade was peeling out of the parking lot that he answered Kryzynski’s insistent buzzing on his phone.
“Stay put,” Kryzynski ordered. “We’ve got this under con—”
Ellery hung up and blocked his call.
“Now,” Jade said, as he threw his head back against the headrest, “you will explain ‘they’ve got him’ and ‘not doing well.’”
“Jackson was searching Robert Sampson’s home with the housekeeping service—someone he knew from the old days—”
“Joey?” Jade said with a twist of the lips, and for the umpteenth time, Ellery cursed the fact that he was late to the party. “Nice guy. He has the maturity of a twelve-year-old.”
“I’m surprised they’re not married, then,” Ellery muttered.
“Jackson didn’t take him seriously. You shouldn’t either. Now what happened?”
“Sampson got home. Joey and Henry managed to get out, but Sampson had seen Jackson before, and before he could just bolt out the door, someone else got there.” Ellery shuddered. “We think it might be Candy Cormier.”
“Oh dear God!” Jade muttered. “And they just left him?”
“The plan was to lure them out to an industrial cleaning place, where the rug is waiting to be repurposed.”
“What rug?”
“The rug with all the bloodstains on it that prove Sampson killed his son,” Ellery said. Which apparently he had, given the financials he’d looked at that morning.
“So that’s why we’re going out past Marysville Boulevard?” she asked, and Ellery nodded.
“It’s halfway to Levee Oaks,” he said. As far as he knew, the only thing off Marysville and Elkhorn in that direction was sparse housing tracts and the occasional warehouse. That close to Watt, the depression caused when McClellan AFB had closed down had hit the area hard.
“So how do they know he wasn’t doing good?” she asked, her voice sinking.
Ellery closed his eyes and then opened them quickly. Jade had taken 80, and they were almost to Watt, but behind them, he saw five police cars, lights flashing, closing in on them fast.
“Jade, I think that’s Kryzynski a
nd the cavalry. Do me a favor and gun it like you own the road?”
Jade’s chuckle reminded him of Jackson, and the Celica practically lifted off the pavement and flew.
“So,” she said, like they weren’t breaking several speed laws with the full fury of SACPD flying, lights blazing, behind them. “Jackson.”
“Remember November, when his heart stopped?” God. He even recognized the breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
“Wasn’t he seeing a doctor for that? Every month?”
“Yeah, but, well, after we got back from down south, he missed one and made one and missed one…. That last one was in May.”
“And…?”
“And he got hurt two days ago, and he sounded out of breath, but we both assumed it was just adrenaline and panic. But today, he called me up, and he sounded breathy again, and he said, ‘Hey, remember that thing that’s wrong with my heart—’”
“He said that?” And for the first time, some of her panic slipped through.
“I know!” His throat was raw with the force of his shout, and she didn’t even blink.
“Oh dear God. Unblock Kryzynski and tell him to have an ambulance ready!”
Ellery stared at her. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that,” he said after a moment.
“Well, that’s why there’s more than one of us looking after him,” she muttered. “That man needs a team effort to keep him alive.”
But Ellery was already calling a reluctant teammate.
“Now you decide to talk to me? Is that you ahead? Because the guys are fifty-fifty on whether to arrest you or pay you to drive for them—”
“It’s Jackson’s sister. He’s got a heart murmur.”
“Sampson?”
“No, idiot. Jackson. He was having trouble catching his breath. I don’t know if Henry told you that. I figured you’d have a quick line to an ambulance and could have one on standby.”
“Fuck. Yeah. I’ll call that in.” There was a tense silence while Jade took the Watt exit so fast, she almost ran into the rail. “You should have her pull back and let us go first,” he said.
“I don’t even know what’s waiting there. For all we know, Robert Sampson is still back at his house carving Jackson into pieces with Candy Cormier,” Ellery said bitterly.
“That occurred to me, but Henry seemed certain Sampson would show—”
“Then maybe you should be the ones to hold back!” Ellery told him. “If I get there, I’m only the freaked-out boyfriend. They’ll still go after the rug—it’s not as if I’m a threat—and we might get Jackson back. But if you go in there with the whole fucking SACPD, he’s going to get his head blown off.”
As if by magic, all of the lights in the rearview went dark, and the sirens cooled too.
“Are we on speaker?” Ellery asked belatedly.
“I’ve got a uniform in the car with me, relaying orders,” Kryzynski confirmed. “Fine. Go in your way. We’re right behind you.”
There was a pause, and Ellery almost pressed the End Call button, when Kryzynski spoke up. “He didn’t look good.”
“When?”
“Two days ago, when he got sliced by Ralph Gordon. He looked clammy and out of breath—and he’s fit. I thought it was panic. I mean, I was there the last time he did one of those apartment places. But his lips were pale. He didn’t….” This was hard, Ellery realized. Sean Kryzynski didn’t like admitting he was wrong. “Didn’t look good.”
“We’ll get him back,” Ellery reassured him, because somebody needed to say it.
“Of course.”
Ellery hung up then so he didn’t have to hear pity over the phone, but he unblocked Kryzynski and then held on to the Jesus bar as Jade cut off a delivery truck in order to jump two spaces ahead on the traffic over the bridge.
He didn’t complain, though. He just closed his eyes and prayed.
THE TRAFFIC on the overpass seemed interminable, and when it thinned out, what was left was an uneven section of stoplights before Watt hit Elkhorn. Jade turned left toward Marysville, and then right toward Levee Oaks. She slowed down through town, but once she passed the railroad tracks, when things stretched out toward cow country, she gunned it until the first set of warehouses appeared.
“What’s your program say?” she muttered. Once the car had stopped jumping around, Ellery had programmed the address into his phone.
“It says we’re here, but it doesn’t say which one.”
The warehouses, painted yellow, were lined up facing the road, with a long, naked paved road leading up to the parking lot. Only two of the businesses appeared to be occupied—a pottery warehouse and Noel’s Industrial Cleaning Solutions, the warehouse on the end.
“I don’t see Joey’s work van,” Jade said thoughtfully as they drove up. “I’m going to swing around the back. Text Bozo the Cop and tell him where we’re going.”
The police had backed off, but Ellery figured the whole line of them would be finding a sly way to approach this naked building in the middle of scorched farmland soon enough. As Jade pulled into the parking lot and around to the back of the warehouses, Ellery spotted a copse of oak trees lining a drainage ditch about a hundred yards away, and suddenly felt better. The copse wasn’t that big—maybe the size of a football field—but it served to break up the scorched straw that landmarked the area and basically surrounded the businesses sitting in the middle of the sweltering blacktop.
Closer to the rug-cleaning service, he saw a big vat of something sitting by a steam hose, both of them powered by what was probably a generator inside the warehouse. There were a series of pallets laid out neatly and a guy with brown hair pulled up in a ponytail, wearing a plastic apron and shoulder-length plastic gloves, holding a rolled rug upright next to him, and arguing with a younger, smaller man wearing a brown service shirt. And then he saw Henry, standing there, watching them. Beyond the pallets sat a big white service van with River Breeze Cleaning on the side.
“Must be the right place,” Ellery said. “Henry’s here, but no Jackson.”
Jade peeled into a parking spot on the driver’s side of the van, and they both hopped out into the blistering heat.
“Cramer!” Henry called. “Get over here and tell this asshole how important this is!”
“I could give a shit about important!” the guy sweating it out in the vinyl overcoat complained. “I’ve got six rugs—six—and it’s already twelve o’clock. By two o’clock, it’s going to be a fucking inferno out here, and I’ll be dying of goddamned heat stroke!”
“Half of SACPD is about to show up to tell you how much they don’t care,” Ellery said. “Is that the rug from Robert Sampson?”
“Uh….”
The smaller man in the brown service shirt grinned up at Ellery. “You must be Jackson’s boy,” he said gleefully. “You don’t look like his type, but that’s probably his type totally, you know?”
Ellery smiled weakly. “Yeah, we make it work.” Then, to the guy with the rug, “So—Sampson’s rug?”
“Yeah, that’s what it says on the tag.”
“So how about you let Joey here take the damned rug before the bad guys get here. Then you’re free to clean whatever the hell you want!”
“Oh!” Joey—it must have been Joey—was looking at Ellery with awe. “That’s way better than my plan! Big brains,” he said, turning to Henry. “Him and Jackson got big brains. Leaves me in the dust.”
“Give them the rug,” Ellery commanded, searching Levee Oaks Boulevard with anxious eyes. “And holy shit, that must be the bad guys.”
“Yeah, that’s the SUV we saw in front of Sampson’s house,” Henry muttered.
“Get Joey and the rug and go!” Ellery snapped, then turned to the guy with the ponytail. “And you just gave them somebody else’s rug. Tell them that. Tell them you gave them Smith’s rug or Kryzynski’s rug or whoever’s!” He turned to Jade and grabbed her hand. “Come on! I’m not sure if they’ve spotted us yet! Henry, ge
t a move on!”
Henry and Joey hustled to the van, shoved the rug in, and slammed the doors, while Ellery pulled Jade into the shade of the stifling warehouse and looked for places to hide.
“Office,” he hissed, nodding in the direction of a small cubicle with a roller chair, a computer, and a lot of loose files.
“That’s the first place they’d look. Back here!” It was her turn to grab his hand and drag him back behind a service van much like Joey’s, but this one was dark brown and less well-maintained. His deck shoes slid on the sealed concrete awkwardly as he tried to find a place to hide in the dim light. In the corner behind the van was a nook and a sink where someone might keep a mop bucket and cleaning supplies, but Ellery had spotted those in the corner by the office. He and Jade squeezed in and then crouched, one on either side of the sink. Jade’s back was to the warehouse door, but Ellery could see a twenty-by-fourteen panorama of what happened next, including Joey’s cousin Raymond still working in the shade of the warehouse, standing another rug on its end.
Joey’s van peeled out, and Ellery swore as another shadow slipped into the warehouse to position itself behind the van.
“Henry!” he growled.
“Sh!” the shadow hissed back. “Joey’s going to the station off Richards Boulevard.”
Ellery pulled out his phone to alert Kryzynski. Hiding. Rug is coming to station on Richards. Don’t arrest Joey—please be nice.
Hiding?
Cormier and Sampson pulling up. Sh!
He hid the phone in his pocket and met Jade’s eyes over their small dark semicloset. The Navigator pulled up to the entrance of the warehouse, blocking the sunlight, and Ellery took another moment to pray.
Gasping for Breath
JACKSON SQUINTED against the pain in his head and tried to focus on breathing, in and out, and trying not to panic.
He was getting shoved in a car. Oh God. Never get in the car. He told people that all the time, but they were shoving him in a car, and he had to go.
Didn’t he?
“Who the hell is this guy?” Robert Sampson—that was who was speaking, right? He was getting in the driver’s seat, and the enormous refrigerator-sized white boy was belting Jackson in the passenger’s seat next to him.
