by Amy Lane
“That’s fuckin’ stretchin’ it. See you at two. Maybe keep your lawyer friend in the phone section while we’re buying food and Sonny won’t lose his shit. And, uh, let Sonny push the cart and stay back with me. Last time he was pissed at me, he gave me a flat tire with the cart that bled for a week. Hurts like a sumbitch. I don’t recommend it.”
Well, maybe not friends. “See you at two,” Jackson said and then hung up with a shudder. He liked Ace just fine, but Sonny…. Five sentences, maybe less, exchanged with Sonny Daye had left Jackson wondering exactly how fine the line between sanity and psychosis really was.
THE TRIP to Barstow was… well, bleak. A couple of strip-mall suburbs surrounded by desert. Of course in January the desert showed the consequences of a little rainfall, namely a thin layer of green that could be grass or algae or just land mange. But Jackson got to drive the new Infiniti, and damn. He’d finally conceded to the idea that the Honda CR-V was the shit, and now he might actually have to admit that the Infiniti was the orgasm of SUVs. He spent the first fifteen minutes of the two-hour drive having a big messy climax over the damned car, and when he’d subsided in embarrassment, he caught the utterly charmed way Ellery was looking at him and decided it was worth it to get a little excited about things.
After that they discussed the case, mostly, and Ellery spent time on his burner phone, texting Arizona and Jade and generally meddling in the case he’d claimed to have let go.
“And the state’s attorney says…,” Ellery muttered to himself. “Oh. Oh Lord. It’s the need more evidence thing.”
Jackson snorted. “It’s the doesn’t want to rock the boat thing. Janie is off the hook, though, right?”
“Yeah. And pending investigation she’s in protective custody. Evander’s out of the coma, which is nice, and apparently his family came home and they’re in protective custody now too.”
“Giving the cops lots of babysitting gigs,” Jackson remarked. “They’re gonna love us!”
Ellery rolled his eyes. “Because we’re so well-liked already.” Mm… yeah. The vote was still out about Jackson and Ellery. On the one hand, Jackson had worn a wire in an IA sting when he’d been on the force—that was bad. On the other, he’d almost been killed for wearing it, and that stung, because the cop he’d been after had been well and truly dirty. On the one hand, Ellery had defended someone suspected of killing a cop—and that was bad. On the other, the dirty cop who’d done it had brought down someone in politics, and that was actually a mark in their favor. The roster sheet of plusses and minuses went on and on, but the upshot was that they had a few staunch supporters in the system who would follow them into hell.
But the general consensus was that following them would lead you there anyway.
“Who needs the cops?” Jackson said, trying to pull Ellery out of the funk he’d been in since he’d admitted the cell phone mistake. “We’ve got each other.”
Ellery laughed shortly and reached over to brush Jackson’s hand as it rested on his knee while he drove with his left. “All true,” he admitted gravely, and Jackson felt a little buzz for being the guy who gave comfort for once instead of needing it.
Jackson had always had a strange fascination with Walmart. There hadn’t been one in his area until he was about fifteen, and even then, it was two buses away. As an adult who liked the odd and the eclectic, the personal, he was sort of appalled.
But then, peanut butter, jelly, and bread to last for a month for under ten dollars.
You just couldn’t shit on a place that let people eat when they made diddly over squat.
“So you know the drill,” he warned.
“Yes, once we get to the entrance I take off and pretend not to know you,” Ellery filled in blandly. “I get it. Come get me when it’s safe to talk.”
Jackson smiled, and a hint of the intimacy they’d shared in the last two days returned. He grabbed Ellery’s hand and leaned in to kiss his cheek, but Ellery turned his head instead and their lips met, clung for a moment, parted.
“Get the biggest, newest phone you can find,” he said fondly. “It’ll make you feel better.”
Ellery grinned. “I’ll take your permission and double down on the data plan,” he said and swanned out of the car with panache.
Jackson waited a few minutes and walked up to the entrance, trying not to look like a creepy guy scoping out Walmart. He and Ellery had arrived about two minutes early. At exactly two o’clock, the roar of a souped-up racing engine in a wasp-yellow Ford SHO lit up the air with nitrous and danger. Jackson watched as Ace skidded into a seemingly unreachable parking spot like his car was the last piece of the puzzle. The quiet when the car shut off left the busy Walmart parking lot sounding deserted.
Back in Jackson’s tomcatting days, he would have hit that in a hot second and then used fantasies of the encounter to fuel his spank bank for years to come.
Ace Atchison wasn’t that tall—maybe about five ten—but he was built. Muscles the size of cannonballs strained at his worn sweatshirt, and his hard-eyed face was dominated by a square jaw and a lush mouth. He had a way of curling his lip when he spoke that told a potential lover it would be hard and it would be rough and it would be unmerciful. Until Ellery, Jackson had only topped. He’d changed because Ellery just demanded the intimacy of being vulnerable on both sides. Watching that hard-eyed, rough-bodied man stride toward the store entrance, Jackson was forced to admit that before Ellery he would have freely bent over and let himself be plundered by Ace Atchison.
There would be no intimacy unless Ace willed it to be, and getting his asshole destroyed by the crisp-moving, slow-talking military man would have simply been a way for Jackson to be all he could be.
But that was Ace all by his lonesome.
Watching Ace stride up to where Jackson stood with Sonny by his side was a revelation.
The hard brown eyes softened, for one, and the mouth, with that curling upper lip, relaxed thoughtfully. The posture didn’t change, but there was an intimation that any violence from Ace would be aimed elsewhere. Anywhere but at the small, twitchy man at his side.
“Ace!” Jackson stepped forward with his hand extended, hoping to do things civil-like. Ace stepped forward and shook his hand briefly, nodding with firm purpose.
“Rivers, nice to see you.” That was obviously a lie. “You’re looking….” That lip curl came and went. “Scrawny. You’re looking scrawny. You looked scrawny in September, but brother, you are looking sickly now. You get shot again?”
Jackson swallowed. That was… frank. “How’d you know I got shot the first time?” he asked, curious. Their first encounter had been short, because if Ellery had stayed in the garage any longer, Sonny might have driven a screwdriver through his eye socket.
“We got a laptop,” Ace said mildly. “We looked you up. So that’s a yes on the shot again.”
“Mm… more like stabbed a couple times and a little bit sick. Getting better, though. Nice of you to be concerned.”
“He ain’t concerned,” Sonny snapped. “He’s sayin’ you look like hell. Ace, can we go inside?”
“Nice to see you again too,” Jackson said, his mouth twitching at the corners. “And let’s go. I’ve got some stuff I need to get too.” Ellery had packed fairly thoroughly, but Jackson was as incapable as the next person of getting through Walmart without buying something he hadn’t planned on and had no use for.
They took a few steps in, and true to his word, Ace stepped back and let Sonny grab the cart. Sonny, five-foot-five inches of wiry, pissed-off redneck kid, shoved the cart along the tile floor fast and hopped up on the back of it and coasted along as they passed through clothes.
“Ace!” he called.
“Yeah, Sonny.”
“Need T-shirts?”
“Yeah. Something fun.”
“Okay. Need underwear?”
“Yup. Socks too.”
“’Kay. You two talk. Right there. Stand right there and talk. I’ll be back.”
The clothes were situated on a carpeted area, and Sonny indicated the tile with an imperious nod of his pointed little chin. His gray eyes could have frozen chili.
But Jackson got it. Hey, bub, that’s my patch. He stays in my sight because he’s mine.
Sonny went for T-shirts, going for the XL rack and clucking over the things written on the fronts, and Jackson felt a sudden kinship.
“You can get funny ones on Amazon,” he said mildly, thinking about the one he’d ordered from the hotel room and wondering if it would be home when he and Ellery returned.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ace said, smiling a little. “Our friend Ernie likes that site. Clothes shopping is still new to Sonny, you know? Two years out of the Army and he’s still excited not to be wearing OD green.”
Jackson breathed out through his nose. There was more to it than that—Jackson could tell—but he wasn’t there to exorcise Sonny’s demons any more than necessary, and Ace apparently remembered that fact at the same time.
“So what is it you need to know?”
“Master Sergeant Thomas Galway—”
Ace’s face closed down like a prison gate. “Sonny—”
“No,” Jackson ordered, voice low, grateful when Sonny didn’t look up. “I don’t care how he died.” Ellery had told Jackson there was something hinky about the death report, and just looking at Atchison’s grim expression told Jackson there was a whole lot there nobody asked about. “I don’t give a shit—”
“Everybody cares when an officer dies,” Ace hissed. “Don’t feed me that bullshit—”
“I’m not the cops. I’m not the military—”
“Then why you gotta know so bad? Girl shot him, then she got killed in a mortar blast. I took shrapnel. All done.”
Girl shot him? Jackson had heard that too—a nine-year-old had stolen Ace’s pistol and killed the guy who was trying to kick her out of a military bunker during a shelling. Deserved? Yes. Probable that a terrified kid would steal this man’s military issue?
Not bloody likely.
“Look,” Jackson hissed. “Listen for thirty seconds. You say he ended up dead. Good. Because if he was anything like the guy who lost the back of his head in November, the planet is a better fucking place. But my guy was trained somewhere, do you understand? And Galway was trained somewhere. And they both ended up in the desert at the same time, but my guy went walkabout and your guy stayed wherever the hell you were to piss you off. Now my guy came back from the desert, changed his name, changed his face, and pretended to be a cop for two years while he systematically killed off young street people and got hard watching his buddy beat little girls to death.”
Ace gasped, the look of revulsion on his face a clear indication of where his moral compass truly sat.
“Yeah—he was a real fuckin’ charmer. But here’s what I’m saying. He and Galway were trained together. Do you understand me? And they shipped out together, after having been part of a secret fucking unit. Now Owens served under Galway for a couple of months and vamoosed, but I want to know who trained them. Because it’s one thing if you go out to war and come back crazy, or if you just started out crazy in the first place, but the last thing we need on this green earth is someone cooking up crazy in a big crazy cauldron and feeding it to us with a goddamned shiv!”
Ace’s eyes got really big, and he took a few steps back. “Trained?” he said, voice cracking. His fair skin seemed perpetually sunburned most days, but as Jackson watched, the color drained right out of him. “That motherfucker was trained?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said, keeping his voice low. “And I need to know where and how. Any light you can shed—”
“Sonny….” Ace squeezed his eyes shut, and Jackson had been shot a few times, but he’d never been to war with the man he loved. Whatever horrors were going on in Ace Atchison’s head were not for the weak and not ever going to go away. “Sonny might know,” Ace muttered. “Hell, Ernie and….” He stopped then and shot Jackson a hard look, like he was remembering himself. “Never mind. Galway worked in the auto bay, and Sonny worked under him. I… I was an officer, but Galway ranked me. I just… I tried to keep Sonny out of trouble, you know?” His voice pitched dangerously, and Jackson suddenly wished he could pull Ace out of Walmart and let him have this moment somewhere private.
Men like Ace and Jackson didn’t like people to see this part of their hearts.
“You got him back okay,” Jackson said, feeling inadequate.
“Almost didn’t,” Ace rasped. “You don’t understand. That piece of puke….” He swallowed hard. “He was going to throw the girl out,” he said after a rough moment. “He was going to throw her out into the shelling. First time I ever saw Sonny stand up to someone, trying to keep that girl alive. Then the shells hit and she was dead, and Sonny, he lost his shit. And Galway just… just advanced on him, and… and it was war, you see? Shit going sideways. And I drew on him. My superior officer. I drew on him and….”
For a moment the noise and fury of Walmart disappeared. Someone shoved past Jackson, knocking him forward, but he regained his footing and kept his eyes on the train wreck of Ace Atchison’s soul.
“I shot him,” Ace whispered. “I tried to tell myself the shell hit first and the gun went off, but I know what a trigger feels like under my finger. I shot him, and the shell went off, and I took shrapnel, and Sonny told that weak-assed story, and… they bought it. I kept expecting a court martial. I lived in fear for my entire month in the infirmary, but nobody ever came.”
There was a brief moment of deep breaths, and then Ace’s eyes focused on Jackson.
“Was that why?” he asked. “Was that why there wasn’t ever a court martial? Because that motherfucker was too fucking damaged to survive and they were just as glad he was gone?”
Jackson nodded, sweat trickling down his spine. He had the irrelevant thought to buy extra deodorant and then brought his attention to where it was needed.
“That’s what we think,” he said quietly. “Because a Tim Owens isn’t just born—he used prosthetics to change his appearance, hid a drug problem, and killed”—Jackson shuddered—“too many people.” The last count had been over thirty, but Jackson and Ellery had investigated twenty of those deaths on their own.
Ace shook his head and took another deep breath. “I… I don’t know how much Sonny knows,” he said after a moment. “I… I protected him best I could, but I mustered recruits, gave out assignments—he….”
“This is not your fault,” Jackson said softly. “Ace—these guys, they were trained and they were nurtured, and their meanness was fostered and fermented. You go into the military and you trust in the orders you’re given—you don’t think someone’s going to be giving orders when they’re not worth the shit in the crapper.”
Ace visibly drew himself together. “Was that why you wore the wire?” he asked brutally, and it was Jackson’s turn to gasp.
He got it—he’d hurt Ace, and Ace needed to lash back. Didn’t mean it didn’t sting.
“You do know your Google,” he said after his own deep breath.
Ace turned away. “That was a shitty fuckin’ thing to do. I’m sorry,” he said woodenly. “But yeah. It was why I agreed to come, frankly. I told you, I been waiting. I ain’t been a saint. I figured whatever you were here for, I wanted to know more about who you are.”
Jackson filed the “whatever you were here for” part away for later. Frankly he knew too much about Ace now.
“Anything,” Jackson said. “We came down here because the guy’s super-secret military base or whatever is an hour away.”
“It’s where?”
Jackson looked at him sharply—it sounded like this had more relevance than just the boogeyman in his backyard. “That’s drawn from the area code he keeps using to call our office,” he said. “Does it mean something to you, that he’s that close?”
Ace screwed up his face, and for a moment Jackson thought he was just going to blurt out Bibles full of
truth. But apparently it was as hard for Ace Atchison as it would have been for Jackson himself. “It might,” he hedged. “I’ll let you know when I know. Were you thinking of finding it and poking around?”
Jackson shrugged. Yeah, it was the next step. “I don’t have a plan yet—I’ll be honest. But if we can get anything useful to go at this guy with, anything that will make him vulnerable…. God, if we even knew a project name or a program. I mean, if Galway and Owens were both parts of unit Fuck-You-Hard-Sir, we could subpoena other guys in the unit and see how they’re doing. If they were in a behavioral study, we could ask for those records. But right now all we have is two dead assholes and a theory about how they got that way.”
Ace blinked, and a little color seeped back into his face as his lips twitched. “No offense, Rivers, but I know how my guy got dead. And yours?”
“Clipped the back of his head on the edge of a concrete pool ledge after falling from the second floor.”
Ace nodded. “And you….”
“Landed in the pool.”
Ace expelled a harsh breath in what might have been a chuckle. “Your way was better.”
Jackson’s way had given him a literal heart attack and a permanent murmur. Still, “Can’t argue that.”
Ace nodded, and they both looked to where Sonny was happily picking out bags of boxer briefs.
“I used to wear the plain white kind,” Ace said randomly. “Boxers, right? But he gets so excited about colors. I’m, like, whatever. Make them rainbow. As long as he smiles.”
Jackson had a memory of the way Ellery swanned—neck arched, chest forward, chin out—as he got some small, silly concession from Jackson just to make him happy.
“Yeah.”
They stood quietly, apparently done with emotion, until Sonny toodled up with the cart, looking pleased with himself. “They had double-X, so I got Jai something. He likes camo.”
As Jackson remembered, Jai was nearly seven feet tall, for real. Becoming invisible was not bloody likely, no matter how much camo he wore.
