Fish on a Bicycle

by Amy Lane

  Lucy nodded and disappeared inside with the children, and Rhonda gave a sigh of relief.

  “Oh good, they’re gone now and I can tell you we are losing our fucking minds. Jesus, Jackson, where in the hell could that kid go?” Her eyes got bright again, like they had when they’d pulled up. “He was so happy until about a week ago. Then he started slinking around like he was afraid we were going to drop the hammer on him at any moment. I caught him crying when I went to tuck him in, and he just said he was sad. But it’s got to be something.”

  Jackson nodded. “I, uh… look. I’ve got an idea.” He pulled out his phone and punched some buttons. “And better yet, I’ve got a tracker on him.”

  Kaden’s mouth fell open. “You’ve got a what?”

  Jackson shrugged. “Remember? I bought him that phone when I brought him up here. He took it with him, right?”

  They both nodded. “He doesn’t go anywhere without it,” Rhonda said. “Those games you let him buy are like his favorite things.”

  Jackson smiled a little. “Does he have a charger?” he asked, and Kaden clapped his hand over his eyes.

  “He’s got my charger! It disappeared last night!”

  “I bet he packed a lunch too,” Jackson said.

  Rhonda—who was Kaden’s smarter half—looked at Jackson compassionately. “What is this about?”

  “You guys, report cards are coming out. This kid hasn’t had you for parents very long. How good do you think his grades are going to be?”

  Kaden groaned and pinned Jackson with a frustrated glare. “Oh Jesus—I should have known.”

  “Kaden,” Rhonda said kindly, “it’s not your fault. How would you—”

  “Oh, trust me,” Kaden muttered. “I’d know. Well, Jackson, where is he?”

  “Let me go find him,” Jackson said. “I… you know. I’ve got a little experience with this.”

  “Text us when you see him. I need to go have a heart attack.”

  “Yeah, he’s somewhere in the backyard.”

  “We’ve been back there. We spent the morning with the dogs going through the area. There’s nothing there but trees.” Kaden looked at the dogs. “By the way, you two were a terrible disappointment in the search and rescue department. I thought you liked that kid.”

  The dogs looked up at him, tongues lolling, and waited for more attention.

  “Morons,” Kaden muttered.

  “Anubis, Orion, door!” Rhonda commanded crisply, and the dogs ran to the front porch and turned around, ruffs bristling, eyes alert for any danger.

  “Yeah, honey. They’re the dumb ones,” she said sweetly. Then, to Jackson, she said, “You can find him?”

  “I promise,” he said. “But maybe let me go alone.”

  Ellery grabbed his hand. “Alone?”

  Jackson winked at him. “Trust me. We’ll be fine.”

  There wasn’t a hit on Anthony anymore, but the more people around Ellery’s mother, the better.

  Ellery kissed his cheek and let him go, and Jackson kept his eye on his phone and sauntered around to the backyard.

  Kaden wasn’t kidding about there being a lot of fucking trees, but some trees are more memorable to an agile twelve-year-old than others. Jackson spotted the appropriate tree immediately, then went to stand near the bottom.

  “Anthony,” he called, looking up, “would you care to explain?”

  He wanted to yell—he really did. The kid had dragged him and Ellery out of bed, had scared his entire family, had caused all sorts of trouble, and dammit, over a report card?

  But Jackson looked into the kid’s tear-ravaged face as he peered down from about twenty feet and couldn’t be mad. He’d been that kid before, so surprised that anybody would give a shit about his grades that he couldn’t figure out how to fix them before he let that person down.

  “You can’t tell them,” he said, hiccupping. “You can’t.”

  “Yeah, kid. Sure. Here, I’m coming up.” It wasn’t a bad climb, really. Jackson was wearing a sweatshirt in deference to the coolness of the hills near Truckee, and his jeans were relatively hole free. With a jump and a pull and some scrambling, he managed to make it as high as the kid was, and he stood, holding on to the trunk of the pine tree, wondering if he was going to have to cut his hair to get all the sap out.

  Anthony had curly brown hair that framed his pale face, and a lot of that was matted together with pine tar. Poor kid was probably going to miss that hair when Rhonda had to shave his scalp.

  “So,” Jackson said conversationally when he’d caught his breath, “what class are you flunking?”

  Anthony looked at him with red-rimmed eyes and a wobbling lip. “All… all of them!” He burst into sobs, leaning against the trunk of the tree by Jackson’s knees, and Jackson reached down and stroked his sap-sticky hair.

  “Oh, kid,” he said softly. “Why wouldn’t you tell them? Rhonda’s a teacher—”

  “She’s a teacher,” Anthony wailed, “and I’m stupid! How could they ever want me if I’m stupid?”

  Jackson sighed and scrambled down to a sitting position on a limb about two feet lower than Anthony’s. “You’re not stupid,” he said softly. “You’ve just had other things on your mind these last few years. Which home you were going to, whether you’d have clothes or food, whether your next set of parents would be dicks…. Man, you’ve had a full plate.”

  “But everything’s perfect now,” Anthony hiccupped. “And I’m a loser who can’t pass math! Or English! Or history! Or science!”

  “You passing PE?” Jackson asked, hoping for a win.

  “I keep forgetting my shoes,” Anthony said glumly, and Jackson held back a smile.

  “Well, yeah, some years are like that. Look. Anthony?”

  Anthony stared at his tennis shoe as it dangled over the ground. “Yeah?”

  “You had a raw deal. And you lost out on a lot of school. It’s March, and you didn’t start school until December. Back then, your life was so damned up in the air. You missed out on stuff. That’s not your fault. But Kaden and Rhonda can’t help you if you don’t tell them what’s wrong. I bet you had progress reports, didn’t you?”

  Anthony nodded. “They’re the old-fashioned ones that come in the mail,” he muttered.

  “And that’s why computer grades were invented. Believe me, nobody’s going to make that mistake again. And that’s fine.”

  “But I’ll have to repeat seventh grade! River and I will have to graduate at the same time, and that’s embarrassing!” he said. “I mean, she’s my sister, and I don’t have anything to teach her. She knows everything, and I’m so fucking stupid—”

  “Okay, we’re done with that word,” Jackson said firmly. “You’re not stupid. You needed help. And of course you were afraid to ask for it. Nobody’s ever stepped up to help you before. But man, I’ve got to tell you that those people I just met in front of the house weren’t worried about your grades. They were worried about you. River told Mrs. Cramer she couldn’t call you her foster brother—she had to call you her brother. Because they love you, kid. And loving someone means forgiving them when they screw up. Screwing up is what people do. But if you’re afraid to admit it to the people you love, you’ll never see how much they love you, you understand?”

  Anthony nodded. “You think they love me?” he asked sadly.

  “You love them, don’t you?” Jackson stroked his head again, heartily wishing he could get out of the damned tree.

  “Yeah.” Anthony actually looked at him and then wiped his nose on the sleeve of his T-shirt. “How did you know?”

  “Because, kid, you couldn’t even run that far. You just climbed a tree where you could see the house. Did you even have a plan here?”

  Anthony’s stomach grumbled. “I was going to sneak back in after dinner and come back out to the tree,” he confessed.

  Jackson started to laugh. “That, son, is the shittiest plan in the world.”

  After a moment, Anthony snorted, like
he hadn’t been planning to laugh but it had just snuck out anyway. “It really is. See, I told you I was stu—”

  “Shut up, kid. Not stupid. New. I was new once. Kaden’s mom taught me how to be loved. I’m not great at it, but she taught Kaden everything he knows. You’re smarter than I was at your age. I’m sure you’ll catch on faster than I did, okay?”

  Anthony nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Jackson.”

  Jackson’s pocket phone buzzed, and off in the distance, up in another tree, he saw the flash of what could have been the scope of a rifle. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and read the text.

  Get out of the fucking tree, Rivers. You are giving my boss the heebie-jeebies just watching over you.

  Jackson rolled his eyes. Fucking Burton.

  I am talking the kid down, here. Are there any hit men nearby?

  No. Apparently hit men don’t know how to react to a fucking tank. They followed you until Roseville, then buggered out. But we’re here, and you need to get out of the fucking tree.

  Jackson snorted and put the phone back in his pocket. “Anthony?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How’s about we get out of the fucking tree?”

  Anthony took a breath that was mostly snot. “Jackson?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  Jackson let out a cackle. “Okay. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to lower myself down to the next branch, and you are going to follow my lead. Think you can do that?”

  “Yeah. What about my backpack?”

  “Put it on your back, kid. Let’s get down.”

  It took them twenty minutes of breathless swearing and a bunch of scrapes on their hands and one on Jackson’s cheek, but they eventually got down. By the time they landed, they’d alerted the people in the house, and there was a crowd around the base of the tree, ready to help Anthony into the house and get him warmed up—and cleaned up—and to discuss a shit-ton of summer school. Jackson only guessed at that last part, but he figured Rhonda and Kaden would have a contingency plan for a kid who hadn’t taken the time to learn how to be a kid.

  Jackson finally dropped to the ground, and only Ellery was there, but he had a warm washcloth for Jackson’s scrapes and the promise of coffee in the house.

  “What was the problem?” he asked quietly as everybody went inside, the babble ensuring that Anthony would be king for the day.

  “He’s failing all his classes,” Jackson said. “Poor kid. I was him once.”

  Ellery nodded. Jackson had told him how Jade and Kaden’s mother had made him make up a semester’s worth of work in a week so Jackson could graduate and go on to high school. “Did you tell him that story?” he asked curiously.

  “No. I needed to listen to his story. I mean, we’re grown-ups. It feels like the same story to us, but to him, it was brand-new.”

  Ellery nodded quietly, and then, before they could get to the porch, he stopped and pulled Jackson down for a kiss. It was tender and carnal at once, and it reminded Jackson of all the lessons he still had to learn about accepting love. It also brought home the fact that he and Ellery hadn’t had time alone in their own house for three days.

  But mostly it told Jackson that he was loved, and he was grateful for it.

  “That was a good kiss, Counselor.”

  “You’re a good man, Detective.”

  They both felt Jackson’s pocket buzz, and Jackson grimaced.

  “Who is it?” Ellery asked curiously.

  Nice. Now get the fuck inside so I can get my boss out of his damned tree and give him a sedative. You people are driving him batshit crazy.

  “Burton says hi,” Jackson told him without inflection.

  “Really? He followed us up here?”

  “He’d really like us to go inside now and stop climbing trees,” Jackson added.

  Ellery’s eyes grew big. “Anything else?”

  “We owe Sonny and Ace big for the tank.”

  “Fantastic. Are you driving back?”

  “Yes,” Jackson told him. Ellery didn’t even want to touch the tank. “Why?”

  “Think Kaden and Rhonda have any alcohol?”

  Jackson laughed as they hit the porch. “You don’t day drink!” he protested.

  “Oh, I am about to start.”

  Jackson kept laughing. Yeah, sure, Ellery threatened a lot, but Jackson was pretty sure he wouldn’t have missed that morning for the world.

  Done, So Done, and Really Done

  “OH, DEAR God,” Jason muttered, struggling to sit up in the bed of the house they’d co-opted for the operation. “What now?”

  “Craft fair,” Burton told him from the computer console that tapped into all the cameras they’d placed around Ellery Cramer’s house in the past week. “Jackson texted last night after we got in.”

  “He what?”

  Burton grimaced. Technically he never should have contacted Rivers at all, but after things like, say, an emergency trip to the Sierras to rescue a kid out of a tree, he figured maybe Jackson’s pithy advanced notice comments did more good than harm.

  “He wanted us to know. They’re going to a craft fair during the day and a Republic game at night. I already got us tickets.”

  “A Republic game? Is that like a politics thing?” Jason blinked hard, trying to wake up, and Burton let out a sigh.

  “It’s soccer. And boss?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You need a break.”

  And maybe because they’d been working the op together for four days and Jackson had almost given Constance a heart attack when he’d climbed that fucking tree, Jason actually said something real.

  “I am having nightmares.”

  Well, of course. The things they’d seen, the things they’d known had happened, and, worse, the things they were anticipating but hadn’t happened yet. Burton had Ernie to go home to, but Constance, he watched over the whole lot of Psycho Unit USA (as some asshole—whom Burton would never forgive—had dubbed their detail).

  “I…. Ernie helps,” Burton admitted, because hearing his CO and boss and friend admit that he wasn’t handling shit was a big admission. Nobody took advantage of the free psych program in their detail.

  Nobody.

  “Burton, can I ask you something?”

  “Sir, yessir.”

  Constance rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and scowled. “Very funny. How did you know? About being… gay?”

  “Bi?” Burton protested but then took pity on his boss. “I knew. Girls were easier. And since, you know, in this job, relationships are not a thing, I went for easy.”

  “Then why Ernie?”

  Ernie hadn’t been easy at all. Ernie had been a spacy, bitter, kind mass of contradictions—who had known deep in his witchy bones that they were destined to be lovers from the moment he’d first heard Burton’s voice.

  Which was about three days before he’d seen his face.

  Burton blew out a breath and smiled. “He, uh, wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  Constance’s look of surprise made him laugh. “Really.”

  Well, Burton had cultivated his silence, his body, his entire demeanor, to be the guy people didn’t mess with. But then, Ernie had cultivated his spaciness, his flexibility, his quiet yielding to the brutal winds of the world to be the guy people didn’t notice.

  And yet Ernie had kept bending Burton to his will. Burton had just looked at him and melted. And every time he tried to put up a barrier or put the brakes on, he’d thought about living without Ernie and….

  Couldn’t.

  “I can’t explain it,” he said humbly.

  Constance let out a bark of laughter. “And I came to you for advice?”

  Burton rolled his eyes. “About what?”

  Constance shook his head. “Nothing. It’s unimportant.”

  Burton let out a sigh. “Jason, do you see those screens?”

  “Yeah?”

  “To the left of screen four, we’ve
got a bad guy waiting in a follow car. At nine o’clock, our three targets are going to leave the house in that ridiculous SUV of theirs and drive through this weird-ass city to go to a craft fair in the Rainbow District. Which means that in forty-five minutes, one of us is going to go first and set up, and the other one is going to follow, and we’re going to be kind of busy for the next couple of hours. But until then, you and me got nothing but time. Now what? We’ve worked together for five years, and you are one of maybe seven people—including my parents—who know about me and Ernie. So what is it you can’t tell me?”

  “Fine.” Jason blew out a breath. “I’m not bi, Lee. Gay. Me. Gay. And I haven’t hooked up since I became your CO. Because I’m ten years older than you, and ten years ago, that sort of thing could have gotten me fucking killed.”

  Burton was conscious that he had to close his mouth. He did that and swallowed to get rid of the dryness. “Really?”

  “Would I fucking lie—”

  “No. Not about this.” Burton held up his hands. “But you heard me calling out for Ernie….” Neither of them liked to talk about the early days in Psycho Unit USA. Knowing who was out there, knowing what they’d been trained to do, knowing that someone from their military had basically set monsters loose on the world—nobody in their unit was okay.

  “I guessed. I was right. And so I can talk to you.”

  Burton grimaced. “Look. You know that place I don’t talk about?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s home. I… I made myself a home, even before I had myself an Ernie. Do you still live at the base?”

  Constance scrubbed his face. “Yeah. God yeah.”

  “Make yourself a home. Take your own advice. Get the fuck off the base and find a thing that’s human and real. You don’t need to hook up—you need to connect. And that’s a whole different thing.”

  Constance gave half a laugh and nodded. “Those are… those are some wise words,” he said softly. “I’ll remember that.”

  “My pleasure, sir,” Burton said dryly. “You want to shower before we have to get to it? This house we’re borrowing has a shower with a steam setting. It makes me feel like all my dangly parts are clean, you know?”