by Amy Lane
“Sonny,” Ace rasped, and Sonny’s head jerked sharply.
He wheeled on Jackson, eyes spitting fire. “What did you do?” he demanded, and Jackson took a step back.
“Nothin’,” Ace said, voice still in a bad way. “But…. Sonny, he’s not going to hurt us, he’s not going to bring us in. But he needs information.”
“I’m crazy,” Sonny said stubbornly. “Everybody knows that. I wouldn’t have any information anyway.”
Jackson regarded him impassively. “Of course you wouldn’t,” he said with no inflection at all.
Ace rolled his eyes. “Sonny, stop it. This is important. You remember….” Ace took a big breath and turned to Jackson. “Look, I’m going to go talk to him in the dressing rooms. It’s gonna sound like we’re murdering each other for a minute, but I can’t do this in front of you, deal?”
Jackson nodded. “I’ll be in electronics. See if I can get something obnoxious and purple for Ellery’s phone.”
Sonny laughed like the evil little troll he was, and Jackson sauntered off, thanking God that Walmart was big and public.
He did not want to be anywhere near the two of them when Ace said the magic word “Galway” to the guy Galway’d almost killed.
Ellery glanced at him as he walked up. “Done?” he asked, surprised.
“No. Ace needed to talk to Sonny alone a minute. There’s something there—something Sonny might know—but the two of them, they’ve got….” He thought of the way Sonny picked out T-shirts for their friend and got excited about colored boxer briefs. Jackson hadn’t seen anyone get that excited about something simple since he’d picked out his own furniture for his duplex from the discount place.
And colored sheets for his bed.
“Hunh.” The thought hit him, inescapable, that as crazy as Sonny might be, they might be like two crazy birds of a feather.
“What? What was that sound? What are you thinking?” Ellery’s too perceptive gaze raked his face.
“I’m thinking that Sonny and I got the same damage and that Ace is gonna have his hands full,” Jackson muttered. “But I’m also wondering if you’re done with the phone.”
Ellery sighed and gestured to the guy in the red vest who had a line of customers behind him as he stammered his way through the presentation on the basic data plan.
“That would be no,” he said drily, and Jackson grunted back. He pulled out his burner phone and looked up an actual cell phone store nearby, wincing when he heard raised voices—mostly Sonny’s—coming from the changing rooms.
“Well, we might have time to get it done as it is.” Jackson scanned the store restlessly. Something churned in his gut, unsatisfied. Ellery had given away his phone’s position. They were in a public place, yes, but in an anonymous place. What if they were tracked here? How many people had bumped into Jackson while he and Ace were having their uncomfortable tête-à-tête in the middle of Walmart? Had all of those been accidental?
He was just about to call the whole thing, move it to another venue, when Ace appeared, pushing the cart, a bedraggled kitten of a man behind him. Ace looked miserable, and Sonny looked whipped, and Jackson hated himself for kicking this little nest of snakes and disturbing them. It was so damned hard to achieve peace of any sort when you had demons—of all people, Jackson knew that.
“Ace is gonna help you pick out a case,” Jackson muttered. “Don’t shake him and don’t piss him off. I am suddenly freaking out about our location, so the two of you stay right here.”
He strolled up to Ace and shook his hand firmly. “This won’t take long,” he promised. “I don’t want to hurt nobody.”
Ace nodded, and then his shoulders twitched suddenly, like Billy Bob’s did when the cat had fleas.
“Keep your eyes out,” Jackson said soberly. “I’m… itchy.”
They both nodded, faces grim. The only thing that reassured Jackson was how accepting Ace was of a basic hunch that things were not okay.
“Sonny, Ace said you liked ice cream,” Jackson said, trying for a smile.
He got a flat-eyed glare in return. “I’m not a kid.”
“Neither am I, but I do like my sweets. If you’re not going to get ice cream, I’ll get chocolate, and we can share. How’s that?”
Sonny brightened a little. “KitKats are my favorite,” he said proudly. “But Ace likes the Dove chocolates. He doesn’t like to admit it, though, ’cause they’re expensive.”
“My treat,” Jackson said, nodding at Ace. Ace swallowed like he was trying to tamp down on his worry, and Jackson and Sonny headed for groceries.
“I don’t want to talk about him, but Ace said I have to,” Sonny said bluntly as they started off.
“Fair enough. What reasons did he give?”
“Said a girl’s life was at stake because the bad guy threatened her, and the bad guy might be a really bad guy responsible for some of that shit that happened in Iraq.” Sonny grunted. “I didn’t get how it fit together, but Ace did.” His voice dropped to tones of complete faith. “I’d trust Ace to do anything.”
Well, yeah. Jackson got that—Ace did look like an extremely capable man.
“So, the guy in the desert, Galway—”
Sonny shuddered. “I hate hearing that fuckin’ name.”
“Understood.” They approached cookies, and Jackson snagged a package of Oreos for Ellery and put one in Sonny’s cart. Sonny hmmed, and Jackson felt marginally better. “Here’s the thing—he was in a unit with another guy we brought down. The two of them were trained, we think, how to be sadistic fuckheaded bastards. What do you think?”
Sonny grunted. “I think he wanted some of us dead. And the guys he didn’t want dead—he wanted them to kill us. Like… like gave extra luxury rations to some guys if they’d bump me on the way to mess. That sort of thing.”
Jackson grunted back. “Was he methodical about it? Was there bumping at mess on one day and—”
“Stealing my tools the next,” Sonny confirmed. “Are those Reese’s? If you’re bribing me with chocolate, some of those with my KitKats, please.”
Jackson smiled marginally and put them in his basket.
“Was that the limit of the torment?” he asked, pretty sure it wasn’t.
Sonny shrugged. “Was constant. Petty shit, sometimes. I didn’t tell Ace about it ’cause Ace already watched out for me with the big stuff. I needed to man up and deal with the fuckin’ scorpion in my sheets, you know?”
Jackson shuddered. “That’s special. How many times did that happen?”
Sonny looked thoughtful. “Three. Which is exactly as many pets as Galway had. Think he was making them take turns?”
Jackson grunted. “I think he was training them. Probably how he got trained.”
“That’s fuckin’ awful. Plenty of fuckers out there that take to that shit natural—why we gotta make it a school?”
That was a fair question. “Got nothin’,” Jackson apologized. “Except more questions. Did Galway report to anyone? Anyone he shouldn’t have? I mean, you guys should have all reported to the same COs, right? Your base camp COs?”
“Depended on our unit, but yeah. All the officers hung together, and units reported to them. But now that you mention it, Galway got all… all squealy, like a girl on a date, for one guy when he came out once. Tall motherfucker with white hair. Galway practically creamed his shorts when the guy showed up in the auto bay. I almost felt bad for him—he goes all squealy and the big motherfucking guy in the weird uniform, like, shits all over him. Tells him he’s a failure, tells him he needs to improve, his numbers were bad. Thought Galway was gonna cry. Anyway, white-hair guy leaves, Galway and his goons go after me, and Ace saves my life. Shortly after that, Galway gets himself killed for being an asshole. Hershey’s Kisses?”
“Course.” Sonny’s voice was shaking, and his hands were white-knuckled on the grocery cart. Jackson had a prepaid credit card for $1000 in his pocket, and he’d use the whole damned thing on chocolate if it would
make this squirrely kid feel a tiny bit better to talk about hell.
“Thanks,” Sonny rasped. “I should get more noodles. Ace likes the sauce on them, and so do I. Ernie puts meat in it when he cooks for us. I always thought you could only eat noodles in butter, but sauce is real good.”
Jackson took a deep breath, memories of noodles in butter with salt as a luxury food swamping his senses. He remembered the night before, and Ellery debating the risotto or new potatoes with his salmon, and swallowed.
“What’s wrong?” Sonny asked. “You think noodles in butter is gross?”
“No,” Jackson said, trying hard to find his footing. “I used to eat them all the time as a kid.”
Sonny stopped abruptly, the stuff in the cart shifting as he did so. “Canned soup and crackers,” he said suspiciously.
“You get the free crackers from the restaurants, and you can make the soup last two days.”
Sonny nodded. “Jackson Rivers your real name? It sounds made up.”
“Yeah. I was lucky she wasn’t stoned when she named me.”
“That shit came later for my mom. The guy I was….” Sonny turned his head and closed his eyes, probably so they wouldn’t dart out of his head. “That name died when I joined the Army.”
And Jackson got it. “That’s why you didn’t report your unit,” he said, understanding suddenly.
“Ace was the only one who knew,” Sonny said, voice low. “You can’t get Ace in trouble for that—”
“Not if someone put a knife to my nads,” Jackson vowed fiercely. “Sonny, me and Ellery…. Ellery and I just want to find out who’s trying to create superkillers instead of good soldiers.”
“What’re you gonna do when you find him?” Sonny asked, rabbit eyes suddenly rock steady.
“Call the press, call the JAG corps, call the DOJ—Ellery’s mom’s got connections. I’ve met one of his superkillers. More than one of those guys is way worse than bad.”
“I don’t know who any of those people are,” Sonny said dispiritedly, but then he perked up a little. “But you do. And you were like me. And people like us, we fuckin’ hold grudges, right?”
Jackson smiled a little and tried to keep the churning in his stomach from getting worse. “Damned straight.”
“Good. You go get ’em. Any other questions?”
Jackson paused, trying to get his brain on straight as they rounded the next corner. Instinctively he took advantage of the line of sight to check for Ellery and Ace and was surprised to find them not in electronics where he and Sonny had left them.
“Wait. Where’d they go?”
Sonny ground to a halt too, both of them suddenly poised on the balls of their feet, scanning the store.
“Can you guys move?” said a stressed-out grandmother behind them.
“No,” Sonny snapped absently. “Do you see—”
“There, by the door,” Jackson shouted. “Leave the shit—go!”
Because it wasn’t just Ace and Ellery heading up toward the self-checkout registers, it was two guys behind them, generically dressed in sweats and hoodies but built like tanks with hot pokers shoved up their ass all the way to connect their heads to their shoulders.
Sonny and Jackson took off at a sprint just as the guy bringing up the rear gave Ace a shove and a shout, and all of them broke into a run. Jackson could just make out the outline of the gun in the pocket of his hoodie before he and Sonny were moving too fast for the details to penetrate.
Ace and Ellery burst outside with their captors tight to their shoulders, and even as Jackson cleared the checkout area, he could see the SUV at the curb.
“No no no no no no no!” he shouted as they skidded outside and the SUV took off, leaving Jackson to memorize the plate while he was pulling out his phone.
“Hey! Hey! Mister! Do you know those guys?”
Jackson paused in the act of calling Crystal to run the plates. “What in the fuck—”
The kid in the Walmart vest was maybe twenty and very near tears. “Man, that guy just took off with a new phone—I just activated it and everything!”
“Who gives a—” Jackson held out his arm to block Sonny’s next word.
“New? Activated?”
Oh Jesus—could it be?
“Yeah—he was pulling out his credit card when those other two guys just sort of hustled them away—”
“Can you track that new phone that’s been activated?” Jackson asked, trying to control his breathing.
“I don’t know if it’s legal to—”
“It’s legal if I’m the guy buying the phone,” Jackson told him, silently apologizing to Sonny. Who gave a shit about Oreos—that was their lives in that SUV, and Jackson had a way to track where they went.
“That’s good,” Sonny said, bouncing on his toes. “That’s real fuckin’ good. We gotta find out where they’re going. We gotta… I gotta call Burton. Fuck, I gotta call Ernie and he’ll call Burton. I gotta—”
Jackson took his life in both hands and dropped his hand onto Sonny’s shoulder. “Hold it together, Sonny Daye. Hold it the fuck together. Let’s get my phone hooked up to Ellery’s new GPS, and then we’ll call whoever the fuck you want, understood?”
Sonny nodded about sixty thousand times, but Jackson couldn’t feel it because he was already vibrating at the speed of sound.
Ellery.
His Ellery.
Fussy risotto and white wine and salmon Ellery.
Ellery, the guy who had stitched Jackson back together piece by fucking piece in November. Who had promised him normal since.
He was in the hands of a guy with a really big forehead, broad enough to fit a whole other face, a guy with beige hair and military posture, a guy who had yanked the fingernails out of a liquor store clerk for not rolling over on a twelve-year-old kid just trying to earn money for candy.
Jackson had to get him back.
Fish in the Dark
“THERE A reason you put a gun in our backs and made us take off like that?” Ace drawled, and Ellery let him. Ace could sound pleasantly curious, and Ellery knew he’d sound like an uptight prick, and right now Ace’s approach was less likely to get them shot.
“Shut up, Rivers,” growled the guy from Anthony’s police sketch.
Ace and Ellery met eyes, and Ellery shook his head. For one thing, if they thought Ace was just some random guy Ellery had met in Walmart, they might not be so eager to kidnap him and might kill him instead.
For another, if they knew Jackson was out there trying to find Ellery, they’d be ready for him. Ellery was pretty sure Jackson could surprise the hell out of them if only he and Ace kept quiet.
But that raised the question…. “What—you’re mad because you missed the shot?” Ellery asked. “You killed a planter instead?”
“I didn’t miss the fuckin’ shot,” Forehead muttered. “That was the rookie here.” He gestured at the guy next to him, who looked like a ferret in a turtleneck sweater. “Told me Rivers here moves like a cat, but I ain’t seen it yet.”
“I save it for special occasions,” Ace quipped, with a wink at Ellery.
Ellery rolled his eyes back. “Indeed you do,” he said dryly, thinking about Jackson’s real cat. From what Jackson said, Ace kept a little dog. Ellery wondered if he moved as fast as a Chihuahua, and then took a deep breath so he could concentrate on where he was going.
The desert, mostly, seemed to be where they were. That same mange of green on the rolling hills of what was occasionally farmstead stubble but mostly creosote bushes and juniper trees. They’d taken the main highway for a bit, but after ten minutes—which Ellery and Ace had spent staring at the rearview mirror tensely to see if Jackson was going to try to catch up with them—they’d turned off onto a little-used frontage road riddled with potholes.
The SUV had the worst suspension ever—and a slight gas leak—and Ellery wondered if throwing up on Forehead and Chinless in the middle seat of the SUV would get him shot.
The driv
er was the truly frightening one.
Generically dressed like Chinless and Forehead, the driver had black hair, ruthlessly buzz-cut, and a granite jaw.
And the coldest eyes—hazel, but God, fucking emotionless—that Ellery had seen since Tim Owens held a knife to his throat.
That blankness, that complete void of any feeling—that was familiar.
Hooray? They were on the right track?
“We didn’t expect you to drag Rivers down here with you,” Forehead was saying dismissively. “I mean, muscle is one thing, but Rivers is a dime-a-dozen punk. Unless you cake boys just get superattached to your toys, that is.”
Next to him, Ace rolled his eyes as though bored.
“Wow. A gay joke. I am in fear for my life because these boys think we’re gay. Aren’t you, Ellery?”
Ellery tried not to glare at him. He was maintaining the façade and doing a damned good job of it. Ellery just hoped Ace wouldn’t wisecrack himself into a concussion or a knife in the throat, which was Jackson’s worst risk on any given day.
“Yeah. Being gay’s the problem,” Ellery said blandly. “That’s why you get kidnapped out of Walmart by the military. My mother told me this might happen.” That thought made him brighten. “Have you guys met my mother? She handles all sorts of military contracts. You guys are getting short funds these days, aren’t you? That’s too bad. I do hope you don’t find a way to piss her off, because she does know an awful lot of military people who hold the purse strings.”
“Leavins,” hissed Forehead. “Did you hear that? He’s got connections—this could be—”
“Shut up!” the driver snarled back. “The commander’s got it covered. He wouldn’t order an op on these clowns if we didn’t have a plan.”
Ellery and Ace met eyes again. So they knew the name of their driver, and it was a good bet Lacey was behind it.
Excellent.
Not excellent that they’d been kidnapped at gunpoint.
And definitely not excellent that Jackson and Sonny had been left frantic and alone.
But the more they knew, the more leverage they had.
Ellery took a deep breath against the next pothole and looked determinedly outside as the desert rolled by.
