by Amy Lane
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
You Got the Wrong Guy
Meet the Moon
Learning New Things
The Problem with Homeschooling
Burt and Ernie in the Desert
Waiting for Fish
Listening to Fish
Pain Shield
Christmas Star
In the Shade of the Cliff, Beneath the Sky
Fighting For
Fish and Shark
Broken Fish, Shattered Bowl
Shark in the Tank, Ace in the Hole
Pain of the Shattered Bowl
Boom Fish!
Places You Can’t Go
Meetings and Partings
…And Cats
Amy’s Dark Contemporary Romance
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Copyright
Hiding the Moon
By Amy Lane
Fish Out of Water: Book Four – A Fish Out of Water/Racing for the Sun Crossover
Can a hitman and a psychic negotiate a relationship while all hell breaks loose?
The world might not know who Lee Burton is, but it needs his black ops division and the work they do to keep it safe. Lee’s spent his life following orders—until he sees a kill jacket on Ernie Caulfield. Ernie isn’t a typical target, and something is very wrong with Burton’s chain of command.
Ernie’s life may seem adrift, but his every action helps to shelter his mind from the psychic storm raging within. When Lee Burton shows up to save him from assassins and club bunnies, Ernie seizes his hand and doesn’t look back. Burton is Ernie’s best bet in a tumultuous world, and after one day together, he’s pretty sure Lee knows Ernie is his destiny as well.
But when Burton refused Ernie’s contract, he kicked an entire piranha tank of bad guys, and Burton can’t rest until he takes down the rogue military unit that would try to kill a spacey psychic. Ernie’s in love with Burton and Burton’s confused as hell by Ernie—but Ernie’s not changing his mind and Burton can’t stay away. Psychics, assassins, and bad guys—throw them into the desert with a forbidden love affair and what could possibly go wrong?
Mate gets jealous because Mary is on every dedication, but he is too! When I acknowledge my family, he’s front and center. Mary never gets jealous; she’s always surprised, like her friendship is something that just grows on trees and isn’t one of the most wondrous things to happen to me. The kids don’t really care, but someday they will, so I can’t forget them. The dogs don’t read, so they don’t even get mention. This book is dedicated, as they all are, to the people I love, who allow me to function, who tell me I don’t suck, who give me a reason to get out of bed. Thanks, guys. It’s no small thing.
Acknowledgments
THANKS, KAREN Rose, for all of the professional advice. The failures are mine, but the improvements are almost unilaterally yours.
Author’s Note
THIS STORY is a sequel to two different novels. Racing for the Sun came out five years ago, and it featured a character named Lee Burton, a black ops military genius, the kind of guy who fades into the background but makes big things happen. I wanted to write his character’s story right then—I even had Ernie planned as a psychic, because that seemed incredibly unlikely. Anyway, I moved on to other shiny things, and Burton got left as unfinished business. Then, when I was writing A Few Good Fish, I realized that Jackson and Ellery were in way over their heads. They needed help—and since Sonny wasn’t much of a planner, who better to help than the superhero I’d already planted and the psychic I’d matched him with in my head, even if I hadn’t actually written the book, right?
So I put them in A Few Good Fish. But I couldn’t just do that. Burton had his own story—dammit, it had been floating around in my head for years. So to flesh out the characters, I began writing what I thought was a series of shorts on my blog, which turned into the first 18,000 words of this story here.
I’ve always liked the guys in the background. I’ve always loved the people who had great stories but kept them quiet. Burton and Ernie are two of my favorite kinds of characters—the watchers, the guardians, the quiet people with the giant agenda and positive impact.
I just didn’t want you to think I pulled them out of my ass for A Few Good Fish, that was all.
Oh, also—
The military base in Barstow is completely made up. So is Burton’s fictional and vague black ops division. So is Karl Lacey’s little rogue military operation, and the assassin’s group, Corduroy. I’m not sure why I feel compelled to point this out, but really, I just wanted to write shit-go-boom, then-there’s-pecs-and-peen! This one’s fantasy. Eat popcorn and enjoy.
You Got the Wrong Guy
BURTON DIDN’T like the meet.
He didn’t like the timing, he didn’t like the place, and he didn’t like the way Jason Constance, his handler, was fidgeting with the manila envelope in his hands.
None of it spoke of good things to come.
“I hate fuckin’ Denny’s,” Burton snapped, scowling. He had a degree in computer science and had graduated from Officer Candidate School fifth in a class of two hundred. But the only person he talked to that he liked and knew as a friend had been fighting in alleyways when he should have been taking his SATs, and Burton sounded more like Ace Atchison and his boyfriend, Sonny, every goddamned day.
“Well, they’re disappearing for a reason,” Constance muttered, toying with the envelope again. “Look—”
“What in the hell is wrong?” Burton didn’t believe in fiddlefucking around.
Constance sighed and ran his hand through tightly curled hair that pulled back from a widow’s peak. “I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t like this assignment. I don’t like that they specifically asked for my division. I don’t like the asshole this request came from. I’m putting it out there. I don’t fucking like this. You have the right to say no here. And if you say yes, and this doesn’t look kosher in any fucking way, you have the right to bug out and leave the target pristine, you understand?”
Burton blinked.
He was a military assassin.
He worked primarily on American soil, although he’d been overseas enough to get pulled for some gigs in the Middle East. Mostly he took care of people who couldn’t be legally identified as terrorists—but who had the stacks of guns and the agenda and the covert acts of violence that actually made them terrorists.
A surprising number of his targets had blond hair and blue eyes and had done some heinous fucking shit.
Burton didn’t see innocent a lot. And he certainly hadn’t seen a target that had tempted him to neglect his duty.
Burton palmed the back of his shaved head with a hand the color of burnished dark oak and reached out for the folder.
“At least let me see the op,” he muttered.
Constance handed him the envelope and darted his eyes back and forth like a fucking spy, when the first thing you learned in black ops training was how not to act like a fucking spy. Burton’s curiosity—a thing he thought had been yanked out of his chest along with his conscience—surfaced unexpectedly.
What had Constance spooked?
He opened the folder and blinked.
“This kid?” he asked, staring at the photos.
The kid had an unshorn abundance of curly black hair. It hung around his ears, was being constantly pushed out of his eyes—a full three-quarters of the pictures showed the kid fucking with his hair. It didn’t look like a fashion statement; it just looked like the kid forgot it was there.
/> The rest of his face was sort of pretty—narrow chin, narrow cheekbones, tiny blade of a nose. He had eyes a man could drown in.
Burton blinked and tried to slow-breathe that thought away. He hadn’t had a feeling like that since he told his girlfriend back home he was breaking up with her.
The breakup had hurt—they’d been friends since grade school—but not as much as becoming the man he knew he’d become while he was bedding his pretty high school sweetheart and lying his ass off.
But this kid’s eyes—big, brown, luminous in a pale face…. Burton had to swallow. He usually took care of those urges with a girl for a night, but he’d known they were in there for men as well.
He just kept those to himself.
“There is….” Constance made a frustrated sound and took a long swig of his dank coffee. “There is nothing in that kid’s jacket that looks like he should be in that fucking jacket.”
Burton scanned the details and had to agree.
He saw a lot of half-finished classes and trips to the dance floors. A lot of pretty bedmates, but no man in particular. And a lot of jobs he’d lost for being late or for forgetting something important or for general flakiness. He’s a nice kid, one employer had stated, but he’s as reliable as a rabbit.
Criminals who ended up on the wrong end of Burton’s scope were often very reliable. “Oh, he killed people on a regular basis? But he punched the clock every day and ate lunch with my wife!” That was who Burton was assigned to.
X-blowing disco bunnies?
Not so much.
“Hinky,” Burton muttered, looking Constance in the eyes.
“I’ll say this one more time,” Jason Constance told him, the lines around his mouth seeming particularly deep and bitter today. “If this kid doesn’t smell right, walk away.”
“Who asked you to off this kid?” Burton asked.
“Some fucking commander from a naval base in Las Vegas—”
“Las Vegas?”
“Man, that place is so far off the grid it makes us look like a billboard in Burbank. I’m not sure which favor he pulled to get access to our division, but—”
“This was the kid he pulled the favor for.” Burton’s chest turned icy.
“Yeah.”
“I hate being used as a tool.”
“So do I.”
“I’ll scope out the sitch. If this kid’s bad—”
“Do what you have to.”
“If not—” Burton didn’t sign on to shoot the innocent.
“Walk away.”
Burton studied the pictures again—this one a long-distance shot of the kid waking up in a pile of happy naked limbs, looking around him like he was surprised to be there.
“Ernie James Caulfield,” Burton murmured, reading from the jacket. “Boy, who did you screw?”
One Month Later
GAH! ALBUQUERQUE sucked in July! The day’s temperature had been 113 fucking degrees, and in the city all that heat just sat and baked into the juicy asphalt and the stoic brick and adobe. Yeah, sure, most places had air-conditioning on the inside, but Burton was on a rooftop, covered with a tarp and trying not to hallucinate about Fallujah.
Fallujah had been bad. He’d been with his first Marine unit then, and the guys were the best. Well trained, smart as hell, they goddamned had your back if they had their next breath. But bad intel was bad intel, and when you found yourself facing a preschool through the scope of your gun, that intel was as bad as it got.
One spooked kid, a new recruit, hadn’t held his wad. They’d been told the place was full of chemical weapons, and everybody had their fucking phobias.
Burton would have taken any assignment after that—any goddamned one—to not have to look at another dead four-year-old and know he’d been part of the team responsible.
His CO knew that. So his next assignment had been the guy leaking them the bad intel.
It had been a shot much like this one—covert, from a building rooftop, down into a crowd. Burton hadn’t hesitated. One kill shot, no collateral damage.
It had all felt so neat and simple then.
This was not neat and simple.
Tracking Ernie Caulfield hadn’t been a cakewalk so much as it had been a walk through cake. The kid was working at a bakery at the moment, and he’d get home at ten in the morning, sleep through the hottest part of the day, get up at eight, eat sunbeams and rainbows for all Burton could see, and go dance at his favorite club—appropriately called the Flower Child.
He’d dance his heart out for hours. Fucking hours. Yeah, he’d take a tab of X—Burton could see that—but he wasn’t an addict. Burton had camped out in opium dens. He knew what addicts looked like getting their fixes.
That was not the look on his face by a long shot.
Ernie took that tab—always handed to him by a sweet little girl who worked at the Flower Child wearing a tie-dyed dress—with the expression of someone who suffered from chronic headaches downing their first Motrin of the day. Like the X was soothing him, keeping the pain from making him crazy.
So Burton had sat watch from the building top for three days, sighting Ernie through a sniper’s scope, trying to figure out what this kid’s deal was.
He seemed to do okay at the baker’s. Burton had gone in for a donut on the first day, and Ernie had been happily involved in the back, probably mixing up dough for all Burton could tell.
The bell had tinkled, and he’d called up, “Don’t worry, Max—he’s good.”
“Thanks, Ernie. Gets tetchy at 4:00 a.m.…”
“Yeah—don’t worry about this one. And tell him the crullers are about ten minutes from done, so if he can have a cup of coffee, it’ll be fine.”
Burton had blinked, but Max—paunchy, grizzled, fiftyish—didn’t even look up. “How many crullers would you like, sir?”
“Are they good?” he asked, because that had been a really specific guess and he was a little bit unnerved.
“Donuts fresh out of the fryer. How bad could they be?”
Well, yeah. “Three,” he answered promptly. Sugar and water—it was all a growing boy needed in this temperature. “And cream for the coffee.”
He hadn’t seen Ernie that morning—the kid had stayed back and baked or whatever. But the crullers had been delicious, and the coffee beat Starbucks by a mile.
But Burton had scoped him out that night across from his apartment, when he’d gotten up, opened the window, and let in stray cats from all over the neighborhood and fed them. He’d shooed them out on his way out the front door as he headed for the club, and Burton had trailed him in the shadows. The kid didn’t… move like other people moved.
He swayed; he wandered.
Burton had watched him disappear into alleyways and then pull himself back, looking surprised to find himself in that part of town. The walk was four blocks, and it took him half an hour. Burton was a breath away from grabbing the kid by the back of the neck and steering him toward the club.
And now Burton was up on the roof across from the club, watching as Ernie windmilled his arms harmlessly in a mash of bodies bopping to a song Burton had never heard before.
Just watching them made him feel old, but watching Ernie—that made Burton feel whole other things as well.
“Okay, little hamster boy,” Burton murmured, watching the boy’s gyrations. “Why do you do this every night? I am highly curious.”
But Burton wasn’t the only one.
From his vantage point, Burton saw two distinctly disturbing things.
One was God’s gift to all gay and bi boys, who had latched on to Ernie’s back and was dancing with him with way too much familiarity. Burton couldn’t look at the guy without growling, because even if Ernie returned his interest, it was damned hard to tell when the boy was as wasted as he appeared to be.
No, Smarmy Dance Kid shoving his hand down the front of Ernie’s pants was not even acknowledged, and Burton was a heartbeat away from going down there, grabbing the kid by the ear,
and hauling him away from the fucking club, just because somebody should, dammit!
The other thing was potentially much more dangerous than Smarmy Dance Kid.
“Who are those guys?” he asked himself. They were trained. That was the first thing he could tell. One had point, the other had follow-up, and the one in the middle was scoping out all the angles. They also moved their lips, indicating earpieces and military-esque technology. Burton could spot their weapons—the obvious ones—tucked into shoulder holsters and hidden by sport coats, and he got a lot of bitter satisfaction out of how easy they were to make and how much they must have been suffering in all that gear.
They ranged themselves throughout the club, moving from the bar to the corners and back again but generally forming a net around Burton’s very own sweet-eyed stoner boy.
It made Burton twitchy.
A part of him very dryly noted that how dare they stalk the guy he was supposed to kill—but most of him had given it up from the moment he’d scoped out Max’s Pastries and Coffee.
If this kid was a threat to national security, Lee Burton was President of the United States and a Russian traitor to boot.
“Seriously,” he mumbled. “Who are those fuckin’ guys?”
He studied them again, but when he went to check on their position relative to Ernie, he’d disappeared.
“Fuck!”
The logical thing to do was to remain up top. The club didn’t have a back entrance, but it did have a side entrance that led to an alleyway and the outdoor-access restrooms. Logic—Burton’s friend since his first A in math—dictated that he stay up top on that building and scope out the goings-on with the full weight of his very expensive government-issue personally modified sniper’s rifle at his beck and call.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, Burton relied on that part of his brain. It functioned very well, thank you, and he credited it for keeping him alive in some very hairy shit.
But the one percent of his brain that stayed friends with guys who knew him in the military that nobody knew he knew—that part of his brain was the one running the show.
