by Amy Lane
Nate had even left an envelope full of coupons for sandwiches, 20 percent off.
And Ellery, forced into immobility so soon after Jackson returned to work, was given a whole new perspective on how hard Jackson must have worked to stay home for seven weeks.
God, he thought fondly, that man really did love him.
Loved him enough to get him crutches so they could help Andre Christie escort Sean Kryzynski home.
Jackson had—without any prompting from Ellery—made a bunch of small microwavable meals and packed them in plasticware so they could stock Kryzynski’s refrigerator. The two of them arrived at the hospital in time for checkout, and followed Christie to Kryzynski’s apartment, blissfully downstairs, so they could make sure he was settled in.
The place looked like it had been hit by a tornado.
“Uhm,” Jackson said, looking at the piles of DVDs on the floor and the clothes all over the bedroom. “Is… I mean you look like a fully functioning adult.”
“Goddammit, Jesse,” Kryzynski muttered. “Jesus. He broke up with me. In the hospital.”
“I thought firemen were the good guys,” Christie said, upending the DVD shelf and starting to put them back.
“Well, he was, mostly,” Sean grumbled, allowing Jackson to settle him on the couch and prop up his arms with pillows to make breathing easier. “All except that ‘I’m not out of the closet, and I’m not prepared to deal with heavy emotional shit when I can’t tell anybody all my feels’ part.”
“Asshole,” Jackson said succinctly. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“Andre, is my Baby Driver DVD in there?”
Andre grunted. “Nope. Neither is Inception or Fight Club.”
“Fuck,” Sean muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Ellery was the one to say it. “Sean, do you have anybody to stay with you this week? You’re going to need some help, you know.”
Sean looked away. “I… I called my sister in Turlock, but her boss wouldn’t let her go.”
“Fuck,” Ellery muttered just as Christie said, “I can stay a couple nights until you’re back on your feet.”
“I’m on it,” Jackson said. He grabbed his new cell phone and ducked out of the room, coming back in about ten minutes with a really pleased expression on his face.
“What?” Sean asked, eyes closing as Jackson got busy helping Christie clean up. “What is that look?”
“It’s no worries,” Jackson told him. “I got you sort of a live-in helper. You have a guest room, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Got a bed?”
Sean grunted. “It has a bed, yes.”
“Good. Because we, uh, made this kid’s living situation a little crowded with an unexpected roommate earlier this week, and this way he can have his own bed.”
Sean narrowed his eyes like he was trying to put two and two together. “Wait a minute….”
“Henry will be driving him over in the next two hours. As soon as he gets here, we can leave you to get some rest, and Ellery and I are going to go see another patient.”
“What other patient?” Christie asked with interest.
“Avi Kovacs just woke up in intensive care at Mercy San Juan,” Jackson said smugly.
“Who in the fuck is Avi Kovacs?” Sean asked, confused.
“Well,” Christie began, “remember how, right before you got skewered like a piece of meat, some asshole tried to steal a file from the goddamned public defender’s office?”
Sean gave a long blink. “Oh my God. He’s been in a coma for a week?”
Jackson nodded. “Yup. And I’m betting he’ll be so surprised at how much the world has changed.”
“Gonna tell him about Ziggy?” Christie asked. “And Baldwin Schroeder?”
Ziggy had died in surgery. Ace’s knife had been pretty close to his heart, and his collision with Ellery’s door had driven it home. By the time the surgeon realized he’d been bleeding into his chest cavity, his heart had stopped, and the world was short one more bad guy and up a couple of questions about the whereabouts of Dima Siderov and what remained of his organization. The apartment complex had been eerily vacant over the past week. Only the innocent and bewildered were left to call the place home. Some of the vacated rooms had been full of drugs and guns, but no cash, leaving the police to speculate that Dima might have gone somewhere else to start over.
Ellery and Jackson weren’t so sure.
Baldwin Schroeder and his little brother—a member of the Capitol Valley High swim team, which had been practicing the day Jackson and Henry had been shot at—had both been in the SUV Ziggy had been riding in, the one that Burton had taken out with his first shot.
Baldwin had been the driver shot, but his brother, Klaus, had been left alive. There was nothing to charge him with besides suspicion of gang activity, but once his hospital stay was over, he would be spending a good year at the California Youth Authority Boys Ranch. Out in the boondocks, it was like juvenile hall except with a focus on rehabilitation. Police were still looking for the gun he’d used to shoot at the school with, but Ellery and Jackson suspected it was long gone.
But Ellery had put in a request to Boys Ranch to let them know if Klaus was released early—or escaped—so he and Jackson would know to watch their backs.
Baldwin’s cousin Kurt, the SRO at Capitol Valley, had simply failed to come in to work the first day of school and disappeared. At first they’d thought maybe he’d gone into hiding with Dima, but the more they thought things through, the less sure they were of that. It was possible that the Schroeder family had a different set of loyalties.
“What about Alexei Kovacs?” Jackson added. “Because Ziggy and Baldwin are actually small potatoes if he’s wearing the family name. But yeah, we would really love it if some of this rampant speculation was confirmed.”
Although some of it had been. Some of the surviving gang members in the SUVs had told them that Ziggy had aligned with Kovacs, and that some of them were Kovacs’s men that Ziggy had co-opted, and some were Siderov’s men who had been either lured or coerced to turn on their boss.
But one last interview, to tie up loose ends, to get a feel, maybe, for where Dima Siderov would go, where he could come from next. And who the mysterious confidential informant had been, the one who had called Lindstrom and Craft to tell them where their small busts would be but kept them away from the real action.
Christie had told Ellery and Jackson privately that the two policemen’d had their financials thoroughly investigated. They were too poor to be dirty, just not smart enough to get promoted. It wasn’t going to make them any friendlier, but knowing they weren’t on the take had made Jackson, at least, feel a little better about the last ten years since he’d been on the force.
“I hear you,” Christie said now about the interview with Kovacs. “I’d love to be in on that, but me and Sean have some shit to do here.”
Jackson nodded, and Ellery felt better for poor Kryzynski. No, Andre Christie wasn’t a lover, but he was a brother, and sometimes that was what a person needed.
Jackson and Christie cleaned up the rest of Sean’s breakup mess, and Jackson ordered pizza for lunch. The moment the delivery person left, Henry knocked on the door.
Standing behind him was one of the most beautiful—and haunted-looking—young men Ellery had ever seen.
“Heya!” Henry barged his way in, the young man coming in on his heels with a backpack over his shoulder. “I understand you’ve got a job for Billy?”
“Billy?” Kryzynski said, brows furrowing. “Why do I know that na—”
And then he saw the young man—dark haired, sloe-eyed, with a blocky build and muscles that could have been chiseled from marble. Billy had a lean mouth and thick, dark lashes that most women would kill for.
He also had a square jaw and a chiseled chin, and altogether, as a package, he looked like a model for one of those military magazines that seemed to fetishize guns as much as they fetishized muscles.
&
nbsp; Ellery’s eyes grew wide, and he glared at Jackson over the couch while Jackson looked blandly back.
“Hi, Billy,” Jackson said, reaching out to shake the kid’s hand. “Pleased to meet you. Did Henry tell you what you’d signed on for?”
“A little bit of nursing, some light housecleaning, and basically making sure Detective Kryzynski here is okay before we leave him to his own devices.” Billy gave a brief smile then, the kind that indicated he was as competent as he was good-looking and valued the competence more. “I’m getting my degree in engineering, but I’ve been in sports all my life so I’ve got some basic first aid knowledge, and I’ll be good at giving baths and helping with physical stuff.” His smile changed, became kind and professional. “And not much shocks me, so you don’t have to worry. Your secrets are safe with me.”
Sean gazed at the young man with a slightly opened mouth and blue eyes that had gone as round as a cartoon character’s.
“Uhm….”
Jackson grinned, so full of himself that Ellery wanted to smack him. “Well, our job here is done. Ellery and I need to go question a scumbag, but you all feel free to stay here and have pizza and welcome K-Ski home.”
“Hold up,” Henry said. “I’ll follow you out. Let me make sure Billy here is settled.”
They waited, Jackson making small talk to fill in the rather awkward silence as Christie tried to draw Billy into conversation and Sean just stared at him like a man slaking his thirst after a long dry spell. By the time they’d left, Sean was managing entire words but no complete sentences, and as soon as the door closed behind them, Ellery smacked him in the arm.
“Ouch!” Jackson complained. “What was that for?”
“That,” Ellery growled, “was for hiring a porn model as your friend’s live-in nurse and not warning him!”
“Heh heh heh heh….” Jackson was practically dancing on his toes he was so proud of himself.
“That was pretty sweet,” Henry added. “Oh my God, I thought he was going to swallow his tongue!”
“And you!” Ellery continued, leaning heavily on his crutches. “You just sort of threw that poor kid in like a lamb to the slaughter. You know Sean’s going to find out what he does for a living and—”
“Oh no,” Jackson said, shaking his head. “I’ve seen that look. Sean knows. Believe me, Sean knows.”
Henry started to laugh too. “Heh heh heh heh….”
If Ellery could have managed it without falling over, he would have whapped them both with a crutch. “You two are supposed to be Sean’s friends!”
Jackson took a deep breath and rolled his eyes. “Look, Ellery, Sean has had a positively miserable week in the hospital and getting dumped by a boyfriend he thought was one of the good guys. I knew some of Henry’s boys are mostly trying to get through school, so I thought, you know. A pretty nurse. And I’ve met the guys. They’re all sweet as hell. A pretty nurse who’s not an asshole and who knows how to be kind to someone having a shitty month. What’s so bad about that?”
“And Billy is so ready to get out of the flophouse,” Henry added. “Jason was touch and go for a little while. One of the other guys has sort of taken on his care and feeding full-time, but it’s crowded in there. Billy’s one of the guys who’s been there the longest, and he’s so ready to get his degree and an apartment of his own. And probably to get out of the business too. But first—”
“Graduation and a job,” Jackson said, and Henry nodded.
“Yeah. So this is sort of like a rent-free vacation for Billy: one fairly reasonable guy to take care of and his own room with his own bed. It’s win-win.”
Henry’s boyfriend, Lance, had worked as a porn model for a couple of years during his residency. He’d roomed with a revolving roster of other models, and the place had been—according to Henry—every bit as sexually charged as one might imagine. Lance had pretty much left that life behind when Henry had been forced to room in the flophouse for financial reasons and they’d fallen in love, but Henry had gotten to know the guys pretty well and had sort of taken on the role of big brother, along with Lance. The two of them had since moved out of the flophouse, but only to the downstairs apartment. Jackson had sent Jason Constance to the flophouse to heal because, in his words, the last place anybody would expect to see a special ops officer was in a two-room apartment that was balls-to-the-walls sex workers and starving students.
Also, he’d added, all the guys were incredibly muscular. They wouldn’t be easy targets.
Ellery let out a sigh. “Fine. Whatever. If this ends badly, I’m blaming you two. Both of you. Because apparently you’ve corrupted Henry beyond all redemption.”
This time they both laughed. “Heh heh heh heh heh….”
“Where you guys off to?” Henry asked when they caught their breath.
Jackson narrowed his eyes. “You know where we’re off to. We’re going to the hospital to interview coma boy.” They’d called into the office that morning; Henry would have been briefed.
“Well, yes,” Henry admitted. They were drawing near the parking lot, and Ellery saw the town car parked next to his Lexus. “I was sort of angling for an invite. I, you know, want to see how this ends.”
“Yeah, sure,” Jackson said with a shrug. “Climb in. We’ll drop you off back here.”
Henry grinned. “No worries. I left the keys with Billy. Drop me off at the office and play musical cars later.”
Ellery regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Awfully damned sure of yourself, weren’t you?”
Henry’s grin didn’t dim one iota. “Yup. Face it, you guys cut me out of the fun last time. Maybe I wanted to get into a car wreck and shot. Did you ever think of that?”
Ellery’s knee was down to a low-level throb, and his back and shoulders were flexible enough to not hinder movement, but his wrist was going to be in that cast for another seven weeks.
“Frankly, no,” he said shortly as Jackson opened the car door for him. He slid inside and waited for Henry to hop in the back. “I think you and Jackson are insane, and if you didn’t have keepers, you’d pretty much be self-extinct by now.”
“Word,” Henry said, holding his fist up over the front seat for Jackson to bump.
Jackson didn’t leave him hanging.
HENRY AND Jackson kept up the shits and giggles on the trip to the hospital. Ellery let them because Jackson’s fear of hospitals would have been hanging over their heads otherwise, and they managed to contain themselves as they gained entry to Avi Kovacs’s room.
Kovacs was probably a good-looking man when he was well. He had high cheekbones and a full mouth. Today, pale and grief ridden, he looked like a wraith, a tragic ghost, and Ellery had a moment to pity him. Not the best of men, no, but his entire world had been turned upside down in the space of a week, and he’d been asleep for the whole thing.
“Mr. Kovacs?” Ellery asked while Jackson brought him a chair. Ellery sat, conscious that Jackson and Henry were both standing behind him like twin blond bodyguards.
“Da,” Kovacs said, but he had no accent. Maybe he used the word as habit—or irony.
“How are you doing today?”
It was a courtesy, really, but Kovacs jiggled his wrist against the handcuffs that held him to his hospital bed and looked dourly at the two armed officers who stood guard at the room’s entrance.
“I’m champagne and fucking roses,” he said sullenly, closing his eyes. He opened them, though, and sighed. “And that was rude. I’m not normally such an asshole.”
“You threatened to shoot up the public defender’s office,” Ellery pointed out.
Avi groaned. “God, yeah. Not my finest hour.”
Ellery and Jackson exchanged glances. A self-aware bad guy—apparently they existed.
“Then why’d you do it?” Jackson asked.
Avi looked at him, frowning. “Do I know you guys?”
“We’re the guys who stopped you,” Henry told him. “Last time you and me saw each other, I was barrin
g a door against you with a fireman’s axe.”
Avi groaned again. “Bathtub meth is bad,” he said seriously. “So bad. Stay away from drugs, kids. They will make you stupid.”
“You don’t look like a habitual user,” Jackson observed. “The doctors didn’t say anything about withdrawal symptoms. What happened?”
“My fuckin’ cousin,” Avi muttered. “Ziggy Ivanov. Sacramento happened, because God, Vegas was such a clusterfuck.”
“So…?” Ellery led, because apparently the jig was up for Avi. He didn’t see any reason to be discreet. Well, that worked for them.
“So,” Avi said with a sigh. “About Vegas being a clusterfuck. So a year ago strange shit started to happen.”
Ellery and Jackson met eyes. “Strange shit?” Jackson asked cagily.
“Yeah. Like small cells just taking each other out. Cars getting busted for no apparent reason. Guys dying in what looks like accidents but we know are actually hits. Anyway, weird shit. Vegas and the surrounding areas are toxic as hell. So Alexei starts looking for ways to get the fuck out of Vegas. We’ve got rumors of Batman in a yellow car with an eight-foot-tall Robin and assassins who can literally predict where we’re going to be when we don’t know ourselves. Life ain’t fun in Vegas. Alexei starts fishing around for somewhere else. LA’s too big, and their mob life is covered. So he looks up in Sacramento. Now, Dima’s got a decent operation, really. Smooth, doesn’t draw attention to itself, lots of respectable Russian community going on to cover our bullshit. But he hasn’t done anything to us, and we got no reason to move in on him.”
“You guys don’t just take each other out for kicks?” Henry asked, and Ellery winced.
Avi, however, didn’t take offense. “Not if we can help it. Man, every man in your organization is a fucking investment. They’re either raised in the life or trained in the military. Russian, American, it doesn’t matter. You think we’ve got a Bad Guys ’R’ Us outlet where you can lay down cash and get some brothers to have your back? We wish!”
