Fish on a Bicycle

by Amy Lane

  Wasn’t that nice.

  “You care,” Jackson said woozily as the guy snapped the seat belt.

  “You’re awake,” came the gruff reply. “Are you awake enough to remember me?”

  Jackson squeezed his eyes tight. “Lacey’s compound.” Wait, this didn’t make sense. “You weren’t Lacey’s guy. You were… what’s his face. The German guy who just wanted mercs, not monsters. Hamblin. You were Hamblin’s guy.”

  “Yeah, well, Hamblin took off, and we were left in the wind.”

  But not too long in the wind, if Burton knew Candy Cormier’s name.

  “Sorry he left you,” Jackson said sincerely. Because if Hamblin, the mercenary king, had grabbed this guy, he wouldn’t be there turning drug-dealing-pedophile doctors into murderers and ordinary bad guys into hamburger. “So you came to Sacramento to sell drugs?”

  Cormier shrugged. “Bear market, what can I say?”

  “Well, fancy meeting you here,” Jackson mumbled. “Can I roll down the window? I’m gonna throw up.”

  Sampson and Cormier shouted, but Jackson would have rather they shot him than just let him puke on himself. Instead, he hung his head out of the side of the car in the slow suburban traffic and let loose. And again. And… oh… there we go. All done.

  “Jesus God,” Sampson muttered. “Could you roll up the window? The stench!”

  “If you had some water, I could wash it off,” Jackson said, spots still in front of his eyes. “You know, maybe next time think twice about how you incapacitate someone. Head blows make me woozy, ask me how I know.”

  Cormier shoved a water bottle into his hand that he must have gotten from the little amenities island in the middle of the back seat. A nicely stocked bad guy—Jackson approved. He rinsed and spat and drank a few swallows, then used the rest of it to wash the side of the car before partially rolling up the window.

  When he was done, he leaned back against his seat, exhausted.

  “So tell me when we get to the rug place,” he mumbled. “I should gather my strength.”

  “You’re not even curious?” Cormier asked. “Why I’m involved? I mean, last time we met, you couldn’t help sticking your nose into everything.” He grimaced. “That’s why you and me met. I have screws in my arm, you know, from that fight. Can’t wait to return the favor.”

  Well, with any luck, Jackson would have a heart attack and die before he got to do that. The tightness in his chest hadn’t lessened one bit.

  “You moved up to Sacramento, set up base, and you took over all the in-home meth operations with stupid ease. I hate to burst your bubble, but I met a bunch of those guys—they’re not that bright. Anyway, well done.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Wasn’t a compliment.”

  “I’ll break your arm twice,” Cormier ground out.

  “Looking forward to dying first.” He wasn’t really, though. He really wanted to live. He and Ellery had things to do—wasn’t that what Ellery had said? They’d always have things to do? Jackson wanted to work in the little office with the shitty parking. He wanted to see Jade and Mike reproduce and have bossy and tactless children. He wanted to see Kaden’s kids grow up.

  He wanted to touch Ellery Cramer every day for the rest of his life.

  “You should be so lucky.”

  Jackson barely refrained from chuckling as his heart pounded threadily in his throat. Nuh-nuh—no one was torturing Jackson to death. He had an ace up his sleeve.

  “Good luck with that. Anyway, so you take over operations and realize—surprise! That meth isn’t the only cottage industry in town. Poppies and coca plants are imports, but you’re a domestic kind of criminal, and Sampson here has a corner on the opioid-crisis platform, and you want in. How’m I doing?”

  “I should have made you my lieutenant,” Cormier said, sounding impressed. “Tell me what happened next!”

  “Mm…. How about I tell you what happened first, since I think you might have missed out on it. What do you think, Sampson? Should I tell him all the ways you made this happen?”

  “Shut him up!” Sampson snarled, and Jackson gave Cormier the side-eye.

  Cormier was listening very carefully. “You know, if you tell me something worthwhile, I might just make it quick,” he said, thoughtful-like.

  “I’ll go you one better. I’ll give you a reason to get rid of your competition,” Jackson said. “On account of general assholery.”

  “Is that a word?” Cormier pondered. “Or did you just make that up?”

  “I think you need to hear the story first,” Jackson told him, closing his eyes and fighting nausea again. Deep breath. Relax. Open the chest and pretend his head didn’t feel like an exploding water balloon. “Once upon a time, a man had a son.”

  “You leave my son out of this!” Yeah, he sounded mean, but the Navigator wasn’t driving off the road, so Jackson was going to assume it was for fun.

  “If only you had,” Jackson said. “I bet he told you his son would get you a distribution network, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” Cormier said, voice uninflected. “Only his son seemed… uncooperative.”

  “Well, let’s look at that, shall we? Because little Martin Eugene Sampson spent his life being uncooperative—pretty much from… when was it, Robert? When did he start telling you no?”

  “He never told me no.” There was a nasty edge to Sampson’s voice that said he was probably telling the truth.

  “So how long did you molest your son? How old was he? From ten, I’d bet, maybe a little younger, looking at the family photos. If I looked back at his school history, is that when he started acting out? Did you stop when he got arrested? Or did you just pick up when he came back? Because by then, you knew about his history. You stopped treating him like Daddy’s precious little angel—started treating him like a whore, right?”

  “He’s going to have a heart attack,” Cormier said in detached wonder. “You’re telling the truth.”

  Sampson just kept sputtering, choking sounds coming from his throat, spittle flying from his lips—but he kept his hands on the wheel, so Jackson kept going.

  “So here’s the thing. Sampson told you his son could bring you distributors—but he lied. Because until Martin got popped for coke eighteen months ago, he had no idea his son was into drugs and porn. Sure, he’d seduce his friends’ kids into the business—and maybe even into his bed. He had no problem doing that. But see, that source of distribution was drying up. I mean, I only know of the three—but I’m betting you gave talks at college, talked to Martin’s RA when he was at school, internships, graduation parties—I’m betting he had a whole little network, didn’t he?”

  “My guess there was twenty kids working for him,” Cormier confirmed, like a businessman used to dealing with numbers.

  “But his son—his precious only offspring—was never part of his network until he got out of prison, isn’t that right?”

  Jackson heard the click of the safety lock of a 9mm Beretta and gave thanks that it was aimed at Sampson’s head and not his own.

  Suddenly Robert Scott Sampson sounded very, very lucid indeed.

  “No,” he said. “I tried to keep him out of it.”

  “You failed,” Jackson said cruelly. He felt cruel. God—Martin Sampson had been the bad guy—a piece of fucking work, and that was the truth. But he’d had help getting there. He’d had the best help that drug money could buy. “And in the meantime, Ash Carver’s son was killed in a wreck, and suddenly people are bailing from your network left and right, because dumb drug-dealing college kids grow up, don’t they?”

  “I loved that kid!”

  “Biblically, like you loved your own?” Jackson shouted back.

  “Whoa!” Cormier murmured. “Getting heated here, Rivers. You jealous of that kid?”

  “I feel bad for him,” Jackson snapped. “Because his father was getting desperate. He still had drugs coming in—more, in fact, after he killed Ash Carver. What happened there, by
the way? I’m curious. Because Cormier wasn’t there to help you move the desk or hide the murder weapon. How did Ash Carver rate the full-course-dead-monty?”

  “He panicked,” Sampson said gruffly. “Twenty years of getting his money the same way I was getting mine, and he started freaking out. We… we wrestled, I pushed him backwards—”

  “And he cracked his head open on that massive marble desk of yours, and you had to get another rug.”

  “My wife… suspected. I got rid of the rug, and she moved out. She’d… she’d been hit pretty bad by Marty going to jail.”

  “So what’d she say when she found out you killed him?” Jackson taunted.

  “Oh, we both did that,” Cormier said casually. “He was freaking out. Big Sampson promised me his boy would deliver on more distributors, and suddenly Little Sampson’s sobbing and telling his dad that he can’t hit them up to be drug dealers, that he’s not going to drag Davy’s little brother down the same shitty road the Carver brat died on, and he’d rather go to rehab and live poor than get one more fucking day of allowance from someone who made their money like his old man.”

  “Why frame Henry Worrall?” Jackson asked, curious.

  “He was there,” Cormier said, with no passion whatsoever.

  Then Sampson yelled, “Because it was his fucking fault. My kid had his flaws, but goddammit, he did what I told him. Then he sees… what? Some fucking grunt come out of the woodwork and tell him no, and he can’t help his old man out? He talked about the guy like he was Captain America, and dammit, I wanted that guy to fucking pay.”

  A part of Jackson wept. He’d suspected that. Suspected that seeing Henry as a hero and himself as a pathetic dealer, feared by the guys he used to fuck, would do a number on Martin Sampson. Suspected that there was still that kid—the happy one, before Daddy started paying special attention to him—who thought that the world was safe and he had a special place in it.

  He just hadn’t realized that his special place was dead in a dumpster, which was apparently Jackson’s special place too.

  “So your son finally gets an attack of conscience, and your new business partner kills him,” Jackson said.

  “I said we both did it.” Oddly enough, Cormier sounded wounded. “The kid was losing his shit, and Daddy gave him a sedative, to put him under. I said, ‘What’s going to happen when he wakes up?’ Then this asshole goes, ‘I’ll figure it out later.’ So I grabbed a big block thing and figured it out right then.”

  Jackson was tempted to throw up again. “Is that right?” he asked Sampson. “Wow. You must be so proud. Is this how you imagined your life turning out?”

  “Is this how you imagined yours?” Sampson sneered.

  “Believe it or not, this is better than I ever planned,” Jackson told him, nodding. “I mean, people are going to miss me. I’m going to leave behind a pissed-off boyfriend and a psychotic cat and a brother and sister who might figure out how to bring me back from the dead so they can kill me themselves. I’ve got a partner in the business and friends who like donuts. Honestly—” He pulled in a deep breath and tried not to wheeze. “—that’s way better than I ever thought I’d have it. And so much better than what you’ve got going on right now. Hey!”

  Sampson jerked the wheel, and the Navigator almost spun off the road as they neared the big crossing sculpture that marked Levee Oaks.

  “What!” Sampson shouted, just as Cormier yelled, “So help me, I will blow your brains out in this fucking car. And I like this fucking car!”

  “Is that the rug place?” Jackson said, like he hadn’t shouted loudly on purpose to distract them. Joey had been peeling out of the long road to the warehouses as they’d neared, and Jackson didn’t want them to mark Joey, or his van, as they approached.

  It worked—it must have, because Cormier tapped Jackson’s delicate skull with the end of his pistol, and Jackson had to work not to throw up again.

  “I just didn’t want you to miss it,” he mumbled, sagging into the seat. God, two concussions in a year. Ellery was going to make him wear a helmet to go to the bathroom, and Jackson would totally deserve it.

  “You want to know who I’m not going to fucking miss!” Cormier yelled. “Oh my God—can we just kill him here?”

  “The rug guy hasn’t done anything,” Jackson said. “Besides, you may need him to get rid of evidence for you someday. His cousin says he’s the best at his job. I don’t know why you’re even trying to get the rug back now!”

  “He’s got a point,” Sampson muttered. “I mean, if he just cleans it like they cleaned the old one—”

  “I don’t like loose ends!” Cormier snarled.

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t trust me to take care of the video either!” Sampson was pouting. Oh my God—he was having a big-dick throwdown to see who was the best criminal. “My idea was simple, elegant, and Henry Worrall would be in jail right now if you’d just left one doctored copy out there for the police to find.”

  “I do have to give it to him there,” Jackson said, like he was weighing scumbag pros and cons. “It was the extra tape that got Henry off. You know, so you can live and learn.”

  “I just don’t trust him.”

  “Well, Sampson has been running drugs for twenty years. I mean, let’s hear it for experience. He’s managed to hide the fact that he killed his partner off for more than a year—he does have some skills there.” Jackson was getting some of his breath back. Maybe it was because he quit fighting, and maybe it was because talking the crimes out, even with the bad guys, relaxed him enough to breathe a little. “But then, he’s a guy who would fuck his own son—and then fuck him over—so I can see your point.”

  “You’re disgusting.” Sampson curled his lip at Jackson, and Jackson’s temper spilled over.

  “He was a baby, and you betrayed him. You betrayed your own goddamned son!” Jackson didn’t care if they did shoot him. “He could have been anything—he was beautiful, he was smart. Man, he could have gotten a boyfriend, gotten married, been happy. But you had to touch him with all your filth and think, ‘Hey, I’m not having him sell drugs, so he’s going to be okay!’ You’re like this… this fucking juggernaut of destroyed lives, and you’re looking down on me because I figured it out? You’re the one who deserves to be dead in a fucking dumpster, man. You should have held the funeral for your kid the first day you touched him.”

  “Wow,” Cormier said. “Like, seriously. When you put it that way, I might do the world a favor and kill him after all. It’s not like we’ve solved the distribution problem yet. He’s got all this high-end oxy product sitting on his shelves, and I’ve had to kill two goons in the last week because they disappointed me!”

  Jackson closed his eyes as Sampson gunned the motor in anger, taking the right-hand turn down the side road to the warehouse businesses at top speed.

  “Maybe you want to wait until after he’s gotten us there alive, brother,” Jackson murmured to Cormier. “That would be great, you think?”

  “This is why you beat me when we fought,” Cormier said glumly. “You’re fuckin’ smart. Man, are you sure you won’t work for me? I could really use someone fuckin’ smart. This guy’s a doctor—you’d think he wouldn’t be this stupid.”

  The car hit a pothole at top speed, and Jackson was grateful his window was still down a little, the hot wind blasting his face. At least he didn’t rattle his sore head off the glass. Cormier shut up, and Sampson spun the Navigator around the back of the warehouses and gunned it, then slammed on the brakes just in time to slide to a halt in front of the open back dock of the rug cleaner’s unit.

  Sampson slid out first and then Cormier, who muttered, “Stay here,” to Jackson as they went to talk to a guy wearing a brown ponytail, plastic coveralls, and a really shocked expression.

  Jackson watched as they approached and started to engage with the guy—who appeared to be stalling, his eyes flickering left, then right, then forward again.

  Oh shit. This must be Joey’s cou
sin, Raymond—and he looked terrified.

  Jackson put his hand on the door latch and slowly opened the door, slid down under the window line, and hugged the side of the Navigator.

  “Uh, yeah,” Cousin Raymond was saying. “Here’s your rug—see? It’s got your name on it. Sampson, right?”

  “That’s not my rug!” Sampson snapped. “Jesus, how stoned are you?”

  “Whoa, dude. I may have to go see if it’s in the warehouse. Hang out here a sec!”

  “I’m coming back there with you,” Cormier said, and as they walked into the dark, Jackson peered into the warehouse and saw a brown service van parked a little back from the entrance. And, very badly hidden in a little alcove, he spotted movement—a flash of magenta, and beyond that, a pale face and big brown eyes squinting into the sunlight behind him.

  Oh Jesus. Ellery and Jade were in the warehouse.

  Jackson had nowhere to run. The warehouses stood isolated in the middle of the blacktop in the middle of a field that had been cleared for more development—development that had never materialized.

  Cormier had the guns, and Sampson was pacing outside the warehouse. Jackson needed to go somewhere that wasn’t the warehouse to get their attention, and he couldn’t run.

  Fast.

  Couldn’t run fast.

  Restlessly he peered over the hood of the Navigator again, and saw—oh, thank God—six SACPD cruisers, no lights or sirens, pulling up the long road. But Sampson was peering into the warehouse, and inside, he heard Cormier say, “Hey, did you see that? You got rats or something?” And suddenly, he knew Jade and Ellery would be dead by the time those placidly moving cruisers got there.

  Deep breath—the outside corner of the warehouse was what? Forty feet? Who couldn’t sprint forty feet? He and Ellery ran miles every morning, and shit, if his heart gave out before he got there, Cormier and Sampson would at least be distracted, right?

  He stood up straight and banged twice on the hood of the Navigator, loud enough to wake the dead. He looked Robert Scott Sampson right in the eyes. “Come and get me, fucker.”