Red Fish, Dead Fish

by Amy Lane

  “Got your own murder board?” Kryzynski cracked.

  Ellery gazed at him, the same level look his mother used to employ to get him to admit he hadn’t done his homework.

  “Uh, yeah.” Golden Boy looked away uncomfortably. “Why should you have a murder board when we should be doing our job? Hear you.”

  “I am so very glad,” Ellery said, smiling. From the corner of his eye, he saw Jackson walking to the playground that stood at the highest point in the park. The playground itself used recycled tires as a thick safety mat under the toys, but it was surrounded by lush grass and soft earth. Jackson was heading for the swings. “Now if you will excuse me—”

  “Wait!” Kryzynski looked embarrassed when Ellery turned back around. “How… uh, I mean, how is he? You know when that sort of hospital time happens on the job you have to talk to six shrinks and a shaman to get back on duty. How’s he doing?”

  How was he? “He’s fine.” Sure he was. “Wiseass is still a wiseass. He’s like a cat—nine lives.”

  Kryzynski grunted. “That bad?”

  Ellery closed his eyes, thinking about the car Jackson had wrecked overdoing it too soon and the way he worked, daily, to prove that he could too pull his own weight in the firm, in Ellery’s house.

  Ellery’s life.

  He kept talking about moving to the duplex when it was finished in two months.

  Ellery figured he had until mid-December to convince Jackson that there were no shadows in the corners of Ellery’s house, no scary monsters, no hidden emotional traps.

  “If I liked easy, I would have done corporate law,” Ellery said, hoping his mother never heard him.

  His mother the corporate lawyer could skin a fish as it swam and eat it raw as she smiled at you. People who thought cast-iron balls were tough had never met Taylor Cramer when she had her hair coifed and her no-nonsense low-heeled pumps ready to roll.

  But Kryzynski bled true-blue. As far as he was concerned, criminal law was the only kind that counted.

  “Well, you know, if shit gets too hard….” He smiled prettily.

  “I’d like a copy of your report on my desk.” Personal time over. “And with your permission, we’ll ask Roberta for her report as well.”

  Kryzynski backpedaled, looking confused. “Who in the hell is Roberta?”

  “Your forensics officer,” Ellery said smugly. “You really should work on your people skills.”

  And with that he turned to get Jackson, who had gone from rocking moodily on the swing to working up quite a head of steam.

  Jackson saw him coming and hollered, “Stay there!”

  And then, when the swing was at its highest arc, he jumped.

  Ellery’s heart caught in his throat as he watched Jackson arch his body impossibly, like one of those kids at the skateboard parks who did stupid shit for kicks. He flew high, then, oh my God, tucked his knees to his chest and flipped.

  He extended his arms and would probably have done a creditable roll in the thick grass and spongy ground of the field, but his shoulder gave, collapsed, and he went tumbling down the hill.

  Ellery had to dodge out of his way or end up in the free-for-all sprawl Jackson was heading for—and unlike Jackson, if Ellery did that sort of thing, he’d end up with broken bones or worse.

  Jackson ended his roll, coming to a stop on his back, arms flung out on either side. He had his eyes closed, like he was trying to figure out if he was in pain or not, and if so, how bad.

  Ellery could have answered him.

  Jackson Rivers had been in pain since the day he was born.

  But he’d go to his grave saying he didn’t feel a thing.

  “You going to live?” Ellery asked, keeping the panic out of his voice.

  “Did you see that, ma? I went high!”

  “How’s your shoulder, asshole? Do we need the brace again?”

  Jackson took a deep breath and winced. “Goddammit.”

  “Yeah. Here—let me give you a hand up. I’ve got the spare in the back.”

  “Fine.”

  Jackson took his offered hand but stopped short as Ellery pulled him up. They stood facing each other for a moment, Jackson’s expression hauntingly naked.

  “Talk to who you have to,” he said soberly. “The DA, our bosses. This isn’t a pride thing. These kids….” He looked away, probably remembering he’d been two good friends and their mom away from ending up just like these street kids, these young, troubled, beautiful kids who would never live to see if they could turn themselves around.

  “Yeah,” Ellery said softly. “Yeah.” He leaned forward then, just barely grazing Jackson’s temple with his lips.

  Jackson didn’t flinch, didn’t recoil or pull away. He just gave Ellery a flirty wink and a grin, like that was his payment for affection.

  Ellery let him get away with that, and together they trudged to the car.

  TWO HOURS later, Ellery briefed Carlyle Langdon, second chair of Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson & Cooper, about the work he and Jackson had been doing.

  “I thought Rivers was on medical leave?” Langdon said, looking sleek and regal, a silver fox in an amazing gray pinstripe.

  “We’ve been working the case together, sir. To keep him from going stir-crazy.”

  Would Langdon care about Ellery and Jackson? Probably not. Did Ellery want the whole world knowing his personal life? Definitely, absolutely not.

  Langdon smiled sunnily. “You’re a good friend, and I’ll sound out the DA’s office to see if I can get a nibble. But you know how this goes, Ellery….”

  Ellery gave a sigh. “Leave the investigation to the pros,” he muttered. Except the pros were usually drowning in legit bad guys, or bureaucracy, or sometimes their own incompetence and/or corruption.

  And sometimes people just needed an outside eye to show them where the monsters were.

  Ellery and Jackson had done their bit to get rid of the corruption, and neither of them suffered incompetence well. It was the other stuff they were having problems with, and the horrible, godawful fact of the matter was…

  More people were going to have to die before somebody besides Kryzynski looked up and saw the monster.

  An hour later, after Ellery’s own frustrating call with Arizona Brooks, his contact with the ADA’s office, he wanted to throw the whole of law enforcement in the hole to get eaten.

  “Arizona, we’ve got an MO, we’ve got a profile—if you’ll give us a profiler—and we’ve got DNA—”

  “But we don’t have it matching a suspect,” Arizona said patiently. Arizona—buzz-cut, gruff Arizona, who was the only woman Ellery had ever seen wear a white power suit to court and make it work—was never this patient.

  “Are you getting pressure to ignore this?” he asked point-blank.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” she said grimly. “Everybody here thinks the Bridger/Chisolm thing is all gone bye-bye now, and the triggerman on your boy’s house just doesn’t matter.”

  Ellery growled. “I will inundate your office,” he threatened. “I will send you every scrap of evidence we have, twice, in triplicate, until somebody has to claw their way up from the bottom of the paperwork graveyard just to call the cops and authorize the investigation.”

  She sighed. “That was a beautiful threat, Ellery. But until you have the name of the perp, we’re just going to buy some flippers and a snorkel and keep swimming.”

  “We have the name of the perp!” Ellery snarled. Oh dear Lord, he was becoming feral, like Jackson. Awesome. “Tim Owens!”

  “Well, prove it,” she said patiently.

  Patiently.

  “I will keep you apprized,” he told her spitefully. “And someday, someday soon, when he kills again, or maybe twice, we’ll find a break in the case. And then we won’t go to the fucking DA or the police department or the sheriff. We’ll go to the press, and you can have the whole almighty world asking you why you didn’t do a damned thing.”

  “And we’ll deal with that whe
n it happens.”

  She sounded smug, smug and superior, like ignoring dead kids put her on the moral high ground.

  Ellery hung up on her.

  Jackson, tapping desultorily at the small table in the corner of Ellery’s plain beige-carpeted office, jerked upright.

  He’d probably been that close to dozing.

  “How’d that go?” He yawned and stretched carefully.

  “Like ass. How’s the shoulder?”

  Jackson gave a one-armed shrug. “You know—the wound that wouldn’t go away.”

  “Well, it needs to. You’re still not okayed for work, and it’s time for you to go home.”

  Jackson held up his hands in front of him, puppy-dog style. “Oh, come on, Ellery. Please let me stay!”

  Ellery shook his head, feeling like his mother. “Home. Nap. Run. You heard the doctor.”

  “Three miles,” Jackson said, his voice assuming a terrifying determination. “And a full range of motion.”

  “Amen,” Ellery said brusquely. But Jackson looked so dispirited. “We’ll keep looking,” he said. “Don’t worry, Jackson. You know, this summer, having that all fall out in two days, that was an anomaly—”

  “Like us?” Jackson asked, so seriously Ellery’s chest ached.

  “We would have happened,” he promised. He had to believe it. “The circumstances—they helped. But we would have happened. This other thing? This is just going to have to rely on the resources we have. They’re not great. But we’re not giving up.”

  Jackson managed a bleak smile. Then he straightened his back and raised his eyebrows. “So, Counselor, since you don’t have to be back until court at two, how about a quickie when you take me home?”

  Pure bravado, propositioned because Jackson didn’t want to be left alone with his own thoughts.

  Well, Ellery would take what he could get.

  Fish on the Run

  Six weeks later

  NOW THAT Jackson was back at work, Ellery finally set up Jackson’s new phone to charge on the expensive mahogany end table next to the bed.

  He was mostly healed—hadn’t worn the brace in four weeks after his foolhardy attempt at gymnastics in the playground. Getting the phone was a simple matter of rolling just enough to grab it off the table, which he tried not to take for granted. The bed was pretty big, but he clung to the edges even in sleep, in spite of Ellery’s frequent attempts to pull him to the middle bodily, so it wasn’t even a big roll. More like a yawn and a stretch and a reach.

  “Mike?” Jackson’s neighbor, the guy who rented the other half of Jackson’s duplex, was also his friend. As such, calling at four in the morning was not something he did often.

  “Jackson, man, I didn’t want to bother you, but those assholes are here again.”

  Jackson sat up in bed abruptly, not even bothering to cringe at the pain in his shoulder. “You’re sure?”

  “I think they’re asleep right now, but the dog’s been barking, and the outside trash can is full of chemicals and shit. Industrial drain cleaner, cold medicine—someone’s going to start baking any second, and it’s not cookies.”

  Oh hell. “Call the cops,” Jackson muttered, keeping his voice low enough that he didn’t disturb Ellery. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “You should tell him about this,” Mike cautioned, because dammit, the guy knew what Jackson was doing, and Ellery wouldn’t like it.

  “My place, my problem.”

  The place had gotten shot up when Jackson did. It still was not up to code—and shouldn’t have been livable, even a little. But for the last week these yo-yos had been trying to move in and use the place as a little nest of illegal chemical entrepreneurship, through a combination of squatters’ rights and avoiding Mike like the plague.

  Mike didn’t have a problem waving his .45 around or walking his German shepherd, Albert, back and forth across the driveway for an hour every night, so he did have some fear factors keeping them at bay.

  It didn’t hurt that his girlfriend, Jade—Jackson’s ex and his forever friend—was afraid of no man and only one woman. The first time she’d seen these guys trying to take over the vacant half of the duplex, she’d chased them off with a baseball bat.

  The last time, she’d clotheslined one of them as he’d ridden past the house on his bicycle, taunting her about catching up. According to Mike, the guy had stayed down for a good ten minutes, gagging and twitching, before he’d pulled in enough air to get back up and wobble away.

  The fact that they were back indicated two things—one was a high degree of stupidity.

  The other was an active agenda they refused to give up.

  “Jackson,” Mike growled. “The police alone are going to try to kill you.”

  Jackson hung up.

  “Who wazzat?” Ellery mumbled, reaching behind him for Jackson’s hip. Ellery spent most of the night snuggled up against Jackson’s back, waiting, it seemed, for the nightmares to jerk him out of a sound sleep.

  Just having him there, breath echoing in the foreign darkness of his vast and stately hardwood-appointed room, was enough, sometimes, to keep Jackson grounded. He would wake up with a gasp and feel it, the warmth at his back, the random touch of an ankle or a hairy shin, sometimes even that absent hand on his hip, and the dream would tatter like a cobweb and float into the night.

  Sometimes Jackson bolted upright, screaming, and Ellery would have to tackle him bodily, shoving him against the mattress and holding him while he came apart. The dreams were a grim reminder that you didn’t live the life Jackson had without some scars.

  The scars on Jackson’s body, his torso, his back, his chest, his shoulder, stood like twisted markers to the real horror show in Jackson’s head, and the monsters did so love to come out and play at night.

  Jackson didn’t trust anyone who promised to help keep the monsters back.

  “My alarm,” Jackson whispered roughly. “I’m going running.”

  He found his running shorts and sweats in the clean pile of his clothes on top of Ellery’s elegant mahogany dresser and pulled them on, hoping Ellery wasn’t, right then, squinting at his clock.

  “It’s four in the morning?” Ellery sat up in bed, and Jackson had a chance to sneak a wistful little peek at the only person to actually keep him for longer than three months since he’d gone steady with Jade back in high school.

  Ellery was worth looking at, his brown eyes squinting blearily in the chilly dark, his hair—usually gelled back—falling softly across his forehead. He had a surprisingly wide chest with enough dark, silky hair in the middle for Jackson to feel like he was groping a man and not a Ken doll when they were (shudder) making love. There was something… something about him. Something strong and compelling. He had a long bony jaw and a sharp nose. There must have been some magic to those features, because as far as Jackson could remember, he was the only lover ever to use the specific term “making love,” as opposed to basic, human animal sex.

  Jackson resented him for it most days, right up until Ellery touched him as they were sleeping or kissed his cheek when he got home or even petted Jackson’s beatass tomcat, Billy Bob. That quickly the resentment faded, melted away, became vapor—often steam.

  But Jackson couldn’t lose his edge—not this morning. “I’m going the extra mile,” he said dryly. Then, with reluctant steps, he neared the edge of the bed and gave Ellery an awkward kiss on the temple. “Go to sleep,” he ordered. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. We can go in to work together.”

  “Sure,” Ellery mumbled. “I’ll drop you at home during lunch.”

  He turned on his side and cuddled deep into the generous comforter, while Billy Bob—the tattered, three-legged, snaggletoothed, blue-eyed Siamese traitor—curled up in the hollow behind his neck. Ellery didn’t hear Jackson’s huff of exasperation, but then he didn’t need to.

  Jackson was ready for full-time duty—he was. The running wasn’t bullshit. He was up to three miles a day and would be back to
five to ten miles in the next month or so. But no, Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson & Cooper was taking the doctor’s suggestion that Jackson be kept on part-time duty for another four weeks.

  If Jackson hadn’t taken it upon himself to protect his damned shot-to-shit house, he might have killed the best domestic living situation he’d ever had out of sheer frustration.

  He put on his running shoes and an old SCPD sweatshirt, grabbed his phone and his keys, and was—

  “Whaddya need yer keys for?” Ellery slurred.

  “Driving to the river to run the trail,” Jackson lied and slid out of the bedroom. He’d gotten as far as the front door when his phone rang again.

  By the time he’d finished piloting his brand-new—and comfortably crumpled—Honda SUV through the darkened streets of the American River Drive suburb and hung a left on J Street, his breathing had returned to normal.

  By the time he’d turned right on Elvas and followed the curve of the river around its gentle dogleg, his mind was focused exclusively on the thing he was planning to do when he got to his duplex and started kicking ass.

  He passed the house, swung a uie, and parked the car, going the wrong way, in front. It was easy to spot the pink-and-black premium bicycle parked on the front porch—a sign for an open druggie mart if he’d ever seen one. Sure enough, trudging up the sidewalk of the shabby but not dangerous neighborhood was an individual out of a profiler’s textbook.

  Sand-brown hair matted around his filthy face, his clothes were tattered, and his tennis shoes were brand-new and cheap. He turned up Jackson’s driveway and looked furtively left and right, letting out a little start when he saw Jackson stalking up the clean concrete.

  “Not here,” Jackson growled. “Cops are on their way.”

  The addict slunk toward the road, looking at the bicycle wistfully, but Jackson glared, scaring him away for the moment.

  Jackson’s fury flooded back, and if it hadn’t been his own damned house—and a new damned door—he would have kicked that fucker in. His house. His house. He’d bought this place, claimed it as his own. It hadn’t been a palace, not like Ellery’s place, but it had been homey. He’d had pictures on the walls and furniture that didn’t break you, and his goddamned cat. The salvageable stuff was at Ellery’s now, but there wasn’t much of it.