by Amy Lane
Resizing the Fish Bowl
KRYZYNSKI, JADE, and Henry were waiting for them when they got home that evening, standing in front of the house with a pink pastry box of donuts that had apparently been sitting on the porch in a cooler. Kryzynski was on the clock with a tape recorder for Jackson’s statement, and Jade was there to make sure Jackson was okay.
Henry was there because, Jackson honestly believed, he was excited to be a part of the gang.
Kryzynski took Jackson’s statement about six times before he finally told them what had happened.
“Your friend Joey showed up with a rug in his van,” Kryzynski said. He grimaced. “He hit on half my department, by the way. He hit on guys who’d never thought of being bi before, and I think he got some numbers. Color me impressed.”
Jackson grinned. “I taught him everything I know.”
“I’m relieved to know you passed the torch to someone worthy,” Ellery muttered.
“Well, it’s a skill,” Jackson returned modestly. “You guys didn’t give him shit, did you?”
“No, I just said we gave him numbers.” Kryzynski smirked, making his already boyish face regress back to the teen years. “And seriously, who gives that guy shit? It rolls off his back, right?”
“Like water off a duck,” Jackson confirmed. It was good to know Joey could still make friends—and potential lovers—at the drop of a hat. Still, Jackson had hopes for poor Callum. He wanted Joey’s world to settle down, as his had. “So you have the rug. Was there enough blood left for evidence?”
“Oh yeah. A master criminal Sampson was not. He confessed to being there for his son’s death, by the way, and giving him the sedative before Cormier bashed his head in. It was….” Kryzynski looked behind him, like he was tempting the gods when he said this. “It was creepy. Like… like he was grieving for a girlfriend or a lover or something, not a kid. A kid is… different. Deeper somehow. I….”
Jackson tilted his head back, his stomach roiling all over again. “He was a pedophile,” Jackson said bluntly. “If you want to amuse yourself—and nail him for everything he’s done—go interview the surviving kids of his business partners. Ash Carver’s son was killed in a wreck—”
“He confessed to killing Carver, by the way,” Kryzynski added. “I thought you’d want to know. He stashed the body in a vacant field by the levee. They’ve got cadaver dogs there now.”
“Awesome.” Because it wasn’t. Nothing about Robert Sampson’s damage path had been awesome. “Well, he might as well have killed the guy’s son too. I’m pretty sure he fucked the kid up for life and pretty much put him on that road.” Jackson sighed. “Just like he did to his own kid.”
“Yeah,” Henry muttered. “I… you don’t ever think about what makes someone like Martin Sampson. It’s… it’s hard, knowing that a shitty world made a shitty person.”
“But not at the end, though,” Jackson said, hoping this was important. “I… I think seeing you defending the Johnnies guys, knowing you were David’s brother—I think that meant something to him. That’s why Cormier killed him. Not because he was a bad guy, but because he wanted to be a better one.”
Henry looked stricken, and he blinked hard and swallowed rapidly, in succession. “I…. Dude. He wasn’t supposed to be important to me. It’s like… the more I learn about him, the more I feel like he was… like, a lost opportunity. Someone who could have been better.”
“We can all be better.” Jackson looked at Ellery hopefully. “We just have to, you know, keep at it. Don’t backslide. Find something we don’t want to lose.”
Ellery nodded and looked away. He’d been quiet since he’d lost it in the hospital. “You don’t need to be better,” he said softly. “Just stay alive.”
Jackson grabbed his hand. “Low standards,” he replied. “Who knew?”
Ellery smiled a little, but his mouth quivered, and he didn’t say anything.
“What did the doctor say?” Jade asked, sensing the tension.
Jackson grimaced. “She said the damage to my heart from last time is extensive enough to need surgery. The medication I was taking isn’t enough, so she gave me nitro. Said she’ll see me every two days until my weight’s up enough to operate, and I can’t eat crap anymore.”
“She also said I should be here when he swims, and no more running in the heat,” Ellery added, and Jackson grimaced, because that had been rough. A gentle swim, yes. Running in the heat, no. But he couldn’t swim alone in case he felt distress.
Jade grunted, like she’d been hit. “I’ll call Kaden,” she said. “He can come down in a couple of weeks when you’re ready for surgery. I’m sure Rhonda and the kids will want to visit too.”
“There’s no need to bother your broth—”
“Shut the fuck up,” she said. “We’re not having that discussion.”
Okay, fine. “Well, make sure you tell them to come down next weekend instead,” he told her. “We’re still having the party to celebrate Ellery’s business.”
Ellery jerked his head. “We’re what?”
“Have you or have you not been inviting the whole fucking world here to celebrate the new office?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Are you going to not work there if I’m dead?”
The chorus of “Oh Jesus!” “Rivers!” and “Jackson, fucking really!” told him he might have gone too far.
“Okay, let’s put that differently. I’m proud of you and your business. Keep inviting people. Make a list for us to do whatever we do. I can still run background checks and financials and shit. Henry and AJ can help with the physical stuff until I’m back on my feet. Man, we just wrapped up our first case, Ellery. Don’t you want to celebrate?”
Ellery nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”
“Party?” Kryzynski said wistfully, and Jackson caught Ellery’s small smile.
“You’re invited,” Ellery said. “Next Saturday.”
“Bring your boyfriend,” Jackson said hurriedly. He darted his eyes to Ellery, heartened when he smiled a little wider.
“He’ll be happy,” Kryzynski said. “We never meet new people.”
Jackson looked at Henry and winked. “Bring your boyfriend too,” he said, and Henry scowled.
“I’ll invite my friend,” he corrected, and it was Jackson’s turn to smirk. “And my brother and his husband,” Henry added. And then he stopped, looking surprised.
“What?” Jackson asked.
“That doesn’t sound weird to say anymore.”
Ellery’s hand fumbled for his under the table. “Yeah,” Jackson said, glancing at him. “You never know when your heart will change for the better.”
EVERYONE STAYED, surprisingly enough, and Ellery snapped out of his melancholy long enough to steam some vegetables and sauté some chicken for dinner. He made Jackson go outside, since the heat had broken and the air was cool, and they ate on the patio, talking about anything but what Kryzynski brought up at the end when they were eating donuts for dessert.
“So, uh, about Cormier.”
Jackson put down his chocolate sprinkle. “What about him?”
“We have four eyewitnesses—all sitting here—who say he was shot by a random shooter that nobody saw.”
“Yes?” Ellery said, eyebrow raised.
“I call bullshit.”
“The deceased was a well-known criminal,” Ellery persisted. “With many enemies. The possibilities are endless.”
“And yet only one person did it,” Kryzynski maintained. “And you guys smell like fish.”
“Can you prove any other possibility?” Jackson asked with a feline smile. “Because I was busy having a heart attack, and you were driving up as he died.”
Kryzynski rolled his eyes. “Look. We have two choices here. The first one is, I don’t believe you and I investigate further and find the round that killed him. I know that it came from a big gun—bigger than something standard, so I’m looking for someone with a sniper rifle
case. This will help when I look into all sorts of things like traffic cameras and phone records and such that might help determine what happened.”
Jackson swallowed. Burton had done him a solid. That would be a shitty way to pay back a friend. “And your other choice?”
“You guys give me one good reason not to do that.”
Jackson nodded at Ellery. He was the one who could do this.
“Because you’d run into a brick wall,” Ellery said. “A military brick wall. And then you’d probe deeper, and you’d end up pissing someone off and maybe losing your job.”
“And even though you could get one as a PI in a law firm,” Jackson said, “we’ve already got two, and our other firm was a douche factory. You wouldn’t want to go there.”
“Nope,” Kryzynski said, looking from Jackson to Ellery and back. “Military?”
“Yeah,” Jackson told him.
“Like what got you guys into trouble in January?”
Jackson and Ellery met eyes, and Jackson shrugged. “Word gets around?”
“Jade shot a guy in her backyard,” Kryzynski said dryly. “And there were military people there to cover it up. You guys show up a few weeks later looking like death—and yes, I was watching the house, sue me. I’m a cop. I’m asking if this is the same X-level shit.”
“Yes,” Jackson said. “And you don’t want any part of it.”
“Understood.” He frowned for a moment, like this was hard to put behind him, but finally he looked up at them and smiled faintly. “And now do we have another chocolate sprinkle, or did Jackson eat them all?”
“We have two more,” said Ellery. He looked at Jackson philosophically. “But we’ll save one for you.”
Finally, hours later, everyone went home, and they crawled into bed, skin on skin.
“Mm….” Jackson bucked up against him. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That you need to give your heart a rest tonight?” Ellery asked, and Jackson subsided glumly.
“I am actually quite tired,” he admitted, as defeated as he’d ever been.
“Tomorrow,” Ellery murmured. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. No work, no nothing. Your appointment is Monday, and tomorrow is all about sleeping in—”
“No,” Jackson murmured. “I’m not the only one who’s been backsliding.”
Ellery stiffened. “I’m sorry, I don’t know—”
“Temple. You made a big deal about it, Ellery, and about the same time I started fucking up, you stopped going.”
“But—”
“You liked going.”
Ellery sighed. “I did.”
“Because even if you don’t believe all of it, some of it gives you comfort.” Jackson wanted to live—God, he really did. But he was a realist, and he’d gone through a lot of lives as it was. If Ellery had a source of comfort, Jackson wanted it waiting to catch him. Just in case.
“I felt guilty because you kept dodging Rabbi Watson.” And now Jackson felt guiltier. Aces.
“Well, you go tomorrow, and tell him I’ll meet him next week.”
“Why don’t you come with me?”
He sounded so hopeful—Jackson hated to burst his bubble. He kissed Ellery’s cheek and snuggled. “I have something to do tomorrow,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’s along the same lines. It’ll be fine.”
Ellery didn’t ask what the thing was—but Jackson figured he knew.
HENRY HAD been the one who’d asked. They’d been standing over Martin Sampson’s body, the wound in his head cleaned but not stitched, the flap peeled back onto his skull, the Y-incision in his torso wide open and exposing him, naked and cold, to the world.
“What happens to him now?” Henry asked.
“Well, he’s not an organ donor,” Toe-Tag had said, “and most of his organs are shot anyway. His father needs to contact a funeral parlor to have the body claimed for cremation, which he can do as soon as we release it.”
Robert Sampson was in jail—probably getting ready to call a really expensive lawyer. And he’d never deserved a son anyway. Jackson had no idea about Hadley Sampson—but he knew the notification had been made, and she hadn’t claimed the body.
The next day, Jackson made some calls, and then some more calls, and then the one hard call.
Monday morning, before Jackson’s doctor’s appointment, he stood holding a small vase of ashes with a surprising number of people gathered around him, at the local cemetery.
“So,” Jackson said uneasily, looking at the attendant ready to bury the small pot of ashes in the open site. “We’re here because the deceased was a douchebag. But that’s not all he was. He was good enough to make David Worrall love him, to make John think he was a friend, and to welcome Henry to a new town. He did a lot of shitty things, because he was not just broken inside, he was so smashed he probably never could have been put back together. But in the end—the very end—he didn’t want to be that guy anymore. And that’s why it was the end, really. He was a person—he tried to be one, anyway—and he doesn’t deserve to be just forgotten. So we’re having a burial for him, and we’re putting a marker down, and we’re the few people in the world who are sad that this person was never allowed to be the man he could have been.”
He looked around at the faces—David, Carlos, Henry, John, Galen, and Ellery. And one person, a thin, composed-looking young man with aging track marks on his arm and a sobriety chip clenched hard in his hand.
“Anybody else have anything to say?”
“Uh, yeah,” Teddy Warburton said. “Me and Martin, we got high together when we were in high school. We fucked around when nobody knew we were gay. And I know that’s not the beginning of a good relationship, but he was the best friend—and the first lover—I ever had. And you’re right. He could be a shitty human being. But he could also be a really good one. And in the back of my head, I kept hoping me and Martin would find our way back to each other.” He gave a faded smile. “It wasn’t to be. But I’m glad in the end he found his inner hero, you know? Because he kept hoping one would save him, and that guy never showed up.”
Jackson closed his eyes. There was so much to do. So much more to do. They’d missed Martin Sampson. Then again, maybe nobody could have caught him.
Jackson looked around at the other people in that part of the graveyard, all of them about to boil alive in their best suits.
“We were going to bury the ashes here,” Jackson said. “Do you want to keep them instead?”
Teddy appeared to think about it, his hazel eyes getting a little shiny. “No,” he said after a moment. “Maybe my best step in recovery will be by finding a way to say goodbye.”
John let out a little laugh. “I chucked my best step into recovery by throwing his cookie jar into the sea. It was cathartic, but I don’t think we’ll do that here.”
Galen eyed his boyfriend with undisguised affection. “My best step in recovery was following this redheaded goofball to Sacramento to watch him film porn. Recovery works in mysterious ways.”
There was some strained and sad laughter then, and Jackson set the urn into the burial space.
“Bye, Martin,” he said softly. “We’ll try to do better.”
Ellery’s hand spanned the small of his back, and the two of them left to go to Jackson’s appointment, while the people who’d known Sampson when he’d been alive settled their accounts.
THE NEWS from the cardiologist was mixed. Yes, his heart seemed to be behaving right now. No, the murmur hadn’t gone, and yes, she advocated surgery once he’d gained eight more pounds.
But at the end, she gave him a kind smile. “Look, I get it. You have been hurt a lot, and I know you hate it here, and you cannot fathom a reason to come in here voluntarily and let us shoot a laser into your heart, am I right?”
Jackson shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Well, you seem like someone who can appreciate a tough old bird who takes no bullshit. And this tough old bird is telling you that you will walk out of here a
fter surgery, spend six weeks in recovery like a normal person, and then you’ll be mostly free to go running around stirring shit up. Does that make you feel better?”
Jackson thought about it. “Marginally. I have to admit, though—I’ve been in recovery since February—”
“November,” Ellery muttered.
“November,” Jackson corrected, “and I thought I’d be done by now.”
Dr. Keller tilted her head. “You thought… honey, haven’t you figured life out yet?”
Jackson glared back. “I have seen enough of it!”
“Well, if you’ve seen enough of it, go ahead and die before I go to the trouble of fixing your heart. Otherwise, take this one lesson in your teeth and don’t let go.”
“Hit me with it,” he told her, kind of liking the way she lectured him. It was nice to have a doctor who cared.
“We are all in recovery. All of us. I could bore you with my life story, but let’s just say when you’re doing your residency at forty when people think a black woman shouldn’t be a doctor at all, you have taken more than a few hits and gotten back up again. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jackson said respectfully, thinking wistfully of Jade and Kaden’s mother, who would have liked this woman. “Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“It’s taken me twenty-five years to recover from that, and in the meantime, I’ve won a lot, lost a few, and gotten kicked around some too. And I will always be in recovery from the things that hurt me. You can either deal with that and keep recovering, or you can give up on recovering and curl up and die. You ready to curl up and die yet?”
Jackson stared hungrily at Ellery. “No, ma’am. No, ma’am, I’m not.”
She nodded decisively. “I will see you on Thursday, then, only because I think you are seeing sense right now. If you keep seeing sense, you can plan on surgery in two weeks. You may do everything you normally do, as long as you don’t get out of breath—the bad kind of out of breath. I still recommend swimming over running in this heat, but again, make sure someone is with you. Have you been taking your medicine and vitamins?”
