by Amy Lane
He was sitting in a bar, eyeballing a pair of twos and a pair of jacks over a poker table. The guys he was playing with were… bad. They glared at Burton, angry because he was winning, angry because he was harder and smarter than they were, angry because he was black. But Burton sipped his beer and gave them zero fucks, because after he won this hand, he was going to best them in a fight and get introduced to their commander, some guy with a name like a hamster, and then he’d see if maybe he could find the people who’d been paid to take Ernie’s contract.
The thought of Ernie constricted his heart, and he fought off a wave of loneliness that made Ernie himself want to cry—but not so much that he missed the guy on Burton’s right, slipping an ace out of his sleeve.
Ernie yanked himself away from the vision and pulled out his phone.
Burton, the guy with the scar is cheating and has a pair of aces.
He sent the text immediately and tried to slip back into the vision. He couldn’t—the phone was his anchor to the here and now, and he had no idea how to reach out and find Burton in the vast infinity of space again.
Then the phone buzzed.
Thanks. Good call. I don’t want to know how you knew.
Ernie clutched the phone to his chest. Burton.
For a moment he wondered if he should text back and, for that matter, what he should text back.
And he remembered his resolution to become his own haven.
He needed to be Burton’s haven too.
I was walking under the stars and they were just so beautiful. So I looked up into them and lost myself in infinity and my heart found you. And you were in the middle of a poker game and needed help. I hope that was okay.
He turned around and picked his way back, wary of the creosote brush, the succulents, the saguaro as he placed his Target waffle stompers very carefully on ground he could see. He had maybe a mile to go when the phone buzzed again.
I like hearing from you. You talk poetry.
Would you like me to write a limerick about your body? Ernie giggled to himself.
No. But I like poetry.
Ah. So he was going to pretend it hadn’t happened. Sort of. But the poetry thing was promising.
You brought me to a shelter thinking it was earth and wood, drywall, siding, straight pine beams, fresh paint. But two souls live here, a lion and a rabbit, both of them protecting anyone in their environs. And I became folded in their strength and would like to grow strength of my own.
He caught his breath as he hit Send. Poetry was naked and raw, and he wondered if this was how Burton had felt in that hotel room.
You’re stronger than you think, kid. Gotta go. Stay safe and strong. Makes me happy to think of you there.
And then he was gone—Ernie even felt Burton’s attention turn away from the phone to something more pressing.
Listening to Fish
THE COM room was like any com room Burton had been in during his career—people in various capacities, communicating with different places, monitoring different operations, generally a nest of spiders keeping track of what was going on in the outlying places of the web.
Except this web wasn’t supposed to exist.
“Hey—Oscar! They at it yet?”
Burton looked up, answering to his cover name without hesitation. Calvin Oscar, ex-Navy SEAL, at your service, sir. The fake ID was already established with Jason’s unit—Burton knew that activating it would serve as a tacit flag to Jason that he was active and had found something important. He’d kept both phones—the one he was turning on again in four months and the one he’d called Jason from when he’d made that decision—and he was fully aware that Jason Constance could find him at any moment.
The thought gave him comfort in this nest of snakes.
“No,” Burton answered, sounding bored. “One of ’em’s still gone.”
He’d been working in this abandoned military base outside of Barstow for the last few weeks—ever since Ernie had given him the unexpected tip that had helped him win the game, the fight, and the initiation into Corduroy, the assassin’s guild he’d held in such contempt when they’d tried to kill Ernie.
Ernie had texted him once a night ever since. Sometimes Burton could respond—Ernie never asked important questions, like where was he or who was he working for. He asked things like Is it getting cold there yet? or I had a teddy bear as a kid, and it gave me a lot of comfort. Would it be totally dumb if I had Ace get me a teddy bear? Burton had told him not to bother Ace about that last one—and had sent Ernie a bear from his own account, something huge that was supposed to be the softest stuffed animal on the planet. Ace would have gotten him something small and spare and necessary.
Burton wanted the kid to be spoiled a little.
He’d saved Burton’s ass at least three times in the last two weeks.
The first time that phone had buzzed, he’d been a little bit annoyed, had checked it on sufferance, wondering what sort of terrors the kid had imagined. But the directions had been so specific, and Burton had grabbed his fellow player’s wrist immediately—and shaken out the card.
And then snapped his wrist.
After that night he’d kept the phone next to his heart, almost like a talisman.
There’s a man a mile from you under a sign of a giant bird. He’s waiting for you with a gun.
Well, the guy wasn’t waiting for anyone anymore.
This isn’t a test. The man with the scar plans to kill you and say it was accidental.
Yeah, well, accidents happen.
Burton, after the “accidental” crushing of his fellow Corduroy employee’s windpipe, programmed that particular phone with a buzz pattern of three sharp bursts, because he didn’t want to be too obvious about checking his phone, dammit, but that kid hadn’t steered him wrong yet.
Burton had no idea where he got his information—and he hadn’t asked either. He’d just taken it on the same faith that he’d taken “There’s a good donut shop in this town,” or “Ace and Sonny are good.”
Twenty hours in a hotel room didn’t sound like grounds for throwing away a lifetime of stone-cold reason, but it had saved Burton’s life a lot of times so far, and it was only logical Burton respect the holy shit out of that.
And it didn’t hurt that Ernie kept texting poetry.
I see you, lines and shadows, dramatic blacks and browns, glowing like the night. Your heart’s a brilliant diamond pulsing beneath your skin. Will it soften?
Yes. Oh God, kid, yes, his heart was soft, tender and quivering, just one more word of sweetness, black shapes on a white screen.
He stayed sharp for the warnings from Ernie—but the poetry made him tremble. He’d had no idea it was a vice until those random words, usually a comment on Ernie’s day, his feelings, what was growing inside him, pranced across Burton’s screen, and Burton was back in that hotel room, merging, becoming one and holy with a man he’d met less than a day before.
Maybe that’s why the poetry.
Poetry was magic, and Ernie was magic, and as far as Burton could tell, it was the magic that had gotten his heart into the mess it was in.
On the nights he couldn’t respond, Burton felt lost. Bereft. Like a child who’d forgotten how to call out for his parent.
And this undercover assignment was killing him.
He’d made it into Corduroy, had even made it onto the military base—but that’s where he hit a wall. Corduroy was working with Karl Lacey—who had managed to pull off the one and only successful Bob’s-in-the-bathroom scam Burton had ever seen. One day he and Jason were going to get very drunk figuring out how Lacey had managed to convince the Navy that Lacey was in San Diego while he was running his own little fiefdom a hundred and fifty miles away.
Right now what mattered was that Lacey had done it—but he hadn’t done it alone.
Burton had won that fight after the poker game and had been taken to Rufus Hamblin, a dapper little man who showed up in a goatee and a really pricey suit and s
hoes worth more than what Burton’s father made in a month. And his father was an engineer.
Hamblin had put Burton on provisionary status—Burton was good enough to monitor coms and to help with general day-to-day, but he wasn’t getting any assignments, no matter how good Calvin Oscar’s fake jacket looked or how many off-campus kills he was supposed to have. (Burton had credited Oscar with some of his own kills, the ones out of country, because that way he could tell believable stories and have them pan out if researched.)
So Burton was in the compound—but the compound was a joint Corduroy/Karl Lacey venture.
Karl Lacey’s guys either thought they were still in the US Navy—or didn’t give a shit. But most of them still thought they were US military, and it bothered Burton. Bothered him a lot.
Because the things Commander Lacey was having his guys do were not part of the country Burton had been fighting for during his nearly nine-year career.
Lacey had organized a “conformation squad” of some of his worst bullies, some of the people who were the cruelest to their peers, and put them in charge of keeping the rest of the Navy guys in line. Everything from sleep deprivation to KP to physical assault was used to take the few guys who asked questions and put them in their place.
Repeatedly.
Until they shaped up or died.
Being put on coms and forced to spend days on end in a room listening to two guys Lacey wanted monitored would have ordinarily driven Burton batshit crazy. But God, Jackson Rivers and Ellery Cramer were a welcome relief from the pressure cooker of one monster with two masters.
It was supposed to be some sort of punishment—Lacey’s “unit” was almost uniformly white, and Burton knew military demographics, and that was not the way it should be. Lacey had shaped his unit just like he’d shaped his “conformation squad,” in his own image, and Burton was given a garbage assignment because Lacey thought of him as a garbage human.
Burton took a great deal of joy fucking with the information he gleaned from Jackson and Ellery and passing it on to Lacey in filtered, predigested form.
Lacey had met Ellery Cramer—and hadn’t liked him. Referred to him by unflattering references to his religion, his sexuality, and his profession. Burton had started out the job thinking at best he’d be bored out of his skull. A lawyer and his lover, working together and fucking—worst thing that could happen was an inconvenient hard-on or a very public nap.
Wrong. So very wrong. If Burton had been as wrong about anything else in his profession as he’d been about being a fly on Ellery Cramer’s wall, he’d be dead.
For starters, Ellery Cramer was a defense attorney—and while Burton had never thought particularly hard about the law, listening to Ellery reason through his cases, try to figure out if his defendants were guilty or not and if they would be better served by a guilty plea if they were or by a courtroom battle if they weren’t, proved a healthy instruction in the gray areas of life.
Yes, some people were just evil, and those folks deserved to be punished.
But that was only a percentage of the folks who broke the law.
Ellery seemed to know that, and Burton listened to the goings-on in his office like he was watching the courtroom channel or, hey, first-run episodes of Law & Order.
And his boyfriend? The PI?
That guy was a trip.
Snarky, sharp, cocky, and wounded—Burton had never met a man so in need of… well, someone. Someone to organize his life, someone to boss him around, someone to fight so he did the right thing, and someone to make sure he took care of himself while he did it.
Burton had gotten the assignment right after Thanksgiving, and Jackson was still on medical leave from what Burton gathered to be something that had nearly killed him.
Listening to Ellery badger the guy about his health was like a window into a mother’s soul.
“Jackson, what are you doing?” Ellery’s voice ran through his phone, so Burton pulled up that feed. Ellery’s work phone was tapped, and his home in general, but apparently Lacey could only spring for so much tech, and listening to Hamblin’s guys grumble about spending what they had on these two made Burton wonder why they hadn’t killed Lacey outright yet.
“Sleeping,” Jackson said, but he sounded out of breath.
“Bullshit. My neighbor buzzed me and said you were running around the neighborhood looking like death. What did we agree on?”
The solid silence on the other end of the line told Burton that fireworks were coming.
“Jackson?”
“We didn’t agree on shit,” he snapped back. “The doctor said wait until I felt better—”
“And how do we feel now?” Ellery asked sweetly.
Burton had looked up pictures of the guys. Ellery had a plain, sharp-featured face with big brown eyes, a pronounced nose, and heavily gelled dark brown hair—and he didn’t look sweet, not in the least. He looked, if anything, sharklike.
Lacey knew what Ellery looked like and despised him.
But Rivers?
Burton had found pictures of Rivers online—and doctored them so nobody in Lacey’s company could spot him in a lineup.
It was like Ellery’s concern was catching, and Burton wanted to be in on the conspiracy to protect the guy.
Because Lord knew he wasn’t up to the job himself.
“Peachy,” Jackson wheezed, and Burton could hear him fighting for breath. His heart—apparently it had stopped during whatever had happened before Thanksgiving. Burton almost wanted to shout Go to the doctor, dumbass! through the phone lines.
“Are you by the machine?” Ellery asked, and Burton could see from his station that Cramer was pulling up client files and studying them while he nagged his boyfriend. This guy was nothing if not efficient.
“No.”
“You lie, because I called you on the house line. Are you by the machine?”
“Yes.” There was a note of resignation in his voice.
“And your heart rate is….”
“Five hundred beats per minute. I’m dead. Make sure you only get takeout for one.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Jackson,” Ellery muttered. “Not today. I’m bringing takeout for two, so if you don’t eat it, remember we have to watch it rot in the fridge.”
“I cleaned the fridge. Will never happen.”
“We have a cleaning service!” Burton couldn’t actually hear Ellery banging his head against his desk, but he was pretty sure it was happening.
“Well, yeah. But she kept nagging. The fridge was too full to wipe down, so I just chucked all the bad stuff and put it in the trash and—”
“So I didn’t have to see you hadn’t been eating, and then to make yourself feel better about not eating and lying to me—”
“It’s not lying technically when you can look in the fridge too—”
“You went for a run, when you’re not okayed to run yet, and now you’re probably light-headed and clammy and sitting at the table wishing you were prone. Am I even close?”
Silence.
“I’m totally right, aren’t I?”
“I was trying to get hungry,” Jackson mumbled. “So I could eat and you don’t have to nag.”
Burton heard the pleading whimper in Ellery’s voice, and he was suddenly beset with the terrible, terrible sense of wrongness. He should not be here listening to these two men have this argument. Whatever was going on with Rivers—and it was bad—this was not a thing for strangers to hear.
“Baby… could you just… maybe you could just talk to someone?”
“I miss running,” Rivers said plaintively.
“I know you do. Maybe have someone over for company?”
“That’s entertaining. Come watch me rot? No. I’m taking an online course in electronic locks. I’ll just finish that and find another one.”
“Not every course you take has to relate to work. You know that, right?”
“Like what?”
“Like poetry? Literature? History? Compu
ter engineering? Law?”
“Ellery, I work for a law office.”
“I know, asshole. I’m just saying—take a literature class. They’re entertaining, if nothing else. You’re stuck at home for another month, if not two. Maybe do something that doesn’t… I don’t know. Hurt. Think of that?”
“Maybe.” But it sounded like Rivers was thinking about it, and Burton was relieved for both of them.
It would suck to be Rivers, home, obviously worrying himself sick about something, and restless. But it would suck even worse to be Cramer, losing his shit about his boyfriend without a damned thing he could do to fix it.
Cramer let out a relieved sigh. “I’ll be home in an hour—”
“That’s early.”
“Wow. You sound so excited. Gee, Ellery, isn’t it great that you get a chance to get out early—”
“Don’t dick with me, Ellery. And don’t shortchange your job for me either. I’ll be fine.”
“Maybe I miss you. You ever think of that?”
“Hunh.”
Burton grimaced. This was not a good word in their relationship.
“I’ll take that as a no.” Ellery’s dry humor came out in full force. “Well, I do. I’ll be there in an hour. Maybe we can drive to Old Town and look at the Christmas lights. It’s Friday—I mean, don’t you want to go out and do something fun?”
For half a second, Burton expected another “Hunh,” but Jackson surprised him.
“God, yeah. I’ll shower.”
“Excellent. I’ll join you.”
Rivers’s laughter, low and dirty, effectively signed him off, and Burton breathed a sigh of relief as he heard Ellery start packing shit up. He switched the feed to the office, not surprised when he heard the door to Cramer’s office open.
“So—was he running?”
Burton kept his face bored and his breathing even, but this here was one of the biggest lies he’d told Lacey so far. Rivers, it seemed, had an extensive support network around him—a woman he called his sister but whose relationship seemed more complicated than that; her boyfriend, who was also renting out some property Jackson owned; the woman’s twin brother, who lived up in the hills; and a group of young kids getting out of jail for drug offenses—all turned their gaze to Jackson Rivers like he was the light in their sky. Burton had looked the guy up, and his jacket was impressive—hunting down killers, saving policemen, turning state’s evidence. But listening to the way people talked to Jackson made Burton wonder if there wasn’t more to the story.
