by Amy Lane
Jackson nodded, agonized.
Even the nod was a promise, and he shouldn’t promise anything.
Couldn’t Ellery see he came from a place where his promises were cheap chemicals and sticky ashes?
But Ellery was glaring at him, pissed off and worried and not about to let Jackson out of there without a promise.
Jackson needed to get out of there.
Needed to get out of there.
He couldn’t breathe in that office, surrounded by the ghosts of criminals and the complicated, corrosive task of sifting the fact from the fiction, the real from the fake, the guilty from the maybe this person gets one more shot at life.
“Promise,” Ellery snarled, up in his face, forcing Jackson back until he banged his head on the door.
“Promise,” Jackson wheezed, hating himself. He had to try now. Had to go back to Ellery’s beautiful house with Jackson’s ugly-assed tomcat and his shitty wardrobe pressed and hung up in a section of a walk-in closet bigger than the apartment he grew up in.
“I’ll hold you to that.” Ellery backed up, and Jackson opened the door, avoiding Jade’s pissed-off face so he could dodge out.
Ellery’s fingers brushed the small of his back as he followed, the touch burning like an ember in a smoke-clogged dark.
Jackson could still feel it now, reminding him, none too subtly, that he had promised, and he might feel like his whole life boiled down to the mutilation of a corpse on a slab, but hell, even Celia had once possessed a heart to disfigure.
Jackson had at least that much to put into a promise.
Oh, hello!
The kid on the bicycle—eighteen, nineteen—startled Jackson out of his turmoil. Larry Sherwood’s age, stouter, standing on his kickback brake as he skidded into the driveway with the new candy flag, the kid looked as normal as any other junior-college-ditching junior millennial. He grew his hair long, kept his scraggly beard trimmed short, and wore cargo shorts in November.
He dismounted the bike and walked it toward the small outbuilding—a garage? A toolshed?—that the Impala had parked in front of. As he neared the building, his slumped shoulders straightened, and he perked up a little, right when Larry Sherwood stepped out.
He and Larry did the shake-hands thing—clasp, clasp, fist bump, chest bump, flame out, chill—and then the kid with all the black-line tattoos stepped out, and the ritual was repeated. When they were done, Larry and Line Tattoo looked behind them with their arms extended. Jackson couldn’t see exactly what they were gesturing at, but as he watched, both kids started pulling rolled-up newspapers—the new kind that paperboys rolled themselves—from a container of some kind behind them and putting them in the basket on the front of the boy’s bike.
Line Tattoo held up two different newspapers, and even from where Jackson was sitting, he could see the thick bright-red rubber band of one and the almost invisible green band of the other. He gestured with the bright-pink rubber band and thrust it in an apron for the boy, then waved the other one around and shoved it in the basket.
Jackson raised his eyebrows, thinking of the thousands of times he stepped over little local newspaper bundles on any given street.
If there wasn’t some care involved here, this could be the worst drug distribution idea ever.
He watched some more as the boys finished loading up the basket and then put the apron on the bike rider with the “special” rubber-banded bundles inside.
Hunh.
Jackson very casually got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk of the house next to him—apparently unoccupied for the moment, as he’d scoped it out. He got up to the door and knocked, angling just enough to watch the bike kid push off and start his route.
He threw the bundles with the small rubber bands while Jackson watched. Jackson watched him turn right at the corner and walked to the end of his porch, then back through the tiny alleyway between the houses, cursing when he saw the neighborhood featured eight-foot wooden fences.
Yeah, he could vault one or two—but six houses’ worth?
No. Instead he sprinted back to his car and took off, following the trail of badly thrown newspapers like bread crumbs.
He caught up with the bicycle two blocks over, passing the kid just as he pulled up a driveway and hopped off the thing, leaning it against the porch and in plain sight while he trotted up the steps.
The guy who came out at the boy’s bold knock didn’t look any different from any other suburban dad. A hooded sweatshirt, tattered jeans, gray in the short-cut mess of his hair and his rumpled beard.
But even from the car, Jackson could see the tremble in his hand as he reached for the newspaper.
This guy was jonesing, and the kid took a wad of cash from him that would probably pay for every newspaper on the route.
Interesting.
Jackson pulled away from the curb before either of them noticed he’d been watching.
Okay, then. That was interesting. Not the strangest thing Jackson had seen, but interesting. Because Larry, Robert, and Jael—probably the guy with the line tattoos who had been in the car that picked Larry up—were running a very handy distribution operation here. It looked complete. They had probably rolled up the product in the newspapers, and the red rubber bands were the product, specially sold, and the green bands were the everyday tree pulp that decorated every driveway in America.
But that explanation left some big questions.
Why would they ditch the sweet little setup here to break into Jackson’s house across town? And what were they selling? It wasn’t the toxic not-meth that had stunk up Jackson’s one working appliance, because if it was, that nice-looking fatherly guy would be a wild-eyed dead man by now.
And where did the mom in the little capris come from? And the heroin?
Inquiring minds needed to know.
This time Jackson came in from the other side of the road and parked about three houses down.
He pulled out a couple of candy bars he’d snagged from the vending machines in the courthouse while he’d waited for Ellery to get Larry Sherwood off for stabbing him in the shoulder and began to munch, a corner at a time.
Ah, endorphins. Couldn’t beat chocolate for them—and Jackson didn’t want to.
Of course, chocolate was the same color as Ellery’s eyes, and that gave Jackson some uncomfortable moments of contemplation as he sat and watched the house.
What was he going to do about Ellery?
As though conjured by the thought, his phone buzzed.
Got some intel on Owens—can you talk?
Jackson hit Call. “Talk to me.”
“I got a conference with his CO tomorrow morning. Will you be there?”
Jackson squinted. Oh hey. Someone was coming to visit. A young couple, their clothes just a little shy of clean, with a little girl wearing a pink backpack, all turned down the driveway, went up to the porch, and knocked on the door.
The adults were twitchy as hell, feet and hands tapping randomly on the porch or the porch railing. The little girl looked bored and depressed.
She stood, staring out from the porch with her hands holding tight to the backpack, and studied the neighborhood with desperate interest while tuning out the twitching adults.
Jackson needed a Xanax and a shrink appointment just looking at her. It was one in the afternoon on a weekday, and he wondered if she’d even gone to school, backpack or no. Had these adults in her life pulled her out so she could stand here on a stranger’s porch? Were these her parents? Her babysitters? The aunt nobody talks about?
Where was the girl going to go when these people got their candy?
The candy in Jackson’s mouth turned to ashes as he remembered being that kid on the porch.
Someone should do better for her.
“That depends,” he said, thinking about that kid, and about this case, and about the other things on his plate. “I’ve got some leads on our delinquents, but I haven’t had a chance to call about Billy the granola-bar-de
aling drug daddy, and definitely haven’t had a chance to track Owens from that second lead. If I’m still out and about tomorrow morning, I may have to miss it.”
“You couldn’t even take my damned car, could you?”
“Oh, the bitterness. Ellery, I’m in a decent neighborhood right now, but your car would still stand out. I couldn’t even leave it and expect the hubcaps to still be in place, so maybe just say ‘Thank you, Jackson, for taking that one thing off my plate!’”
“Maybe I don’t want that thing off my plate. Maybe I like things on my plate—”
“Meth cookies,” Jackson muttered. “Do you want meth cookies on your plate?”
“Hell no. What are you talking about?”
“Hush.”
Jackson pulled out his field glasses and watched interestedly as the door opened and Capri-pants Cardigan Mom poked her head out. She smiled chirpily and handed the other mom—a sallow-faced woman with a sullen expression and flyaway brown hair that looked like it hadn’t even visited with a comb in the last month—a small packet.
The little girl, her hair at least in braids, looked up at the woman and waved shyly. In return, the woman pulled out one of those single-serving packages of cookies from her apron pocket. The kid smiled, two teeth missing like they did at this age, took the package and ripped into it with a single-mindedness that told Jackson she’d probably missed lunch too and maybe hadn’t had the extra-special “I’m so glad we’re not dead” meal he and Ellery had shoved down their maws.
“Jackson?” Ellery asked tentatively.
“I’ve got an address for you,” Jackson said, keeping his voice down out of sheer paranoia. “But don’t send the cops for another hour. Me and Mrs. Meth Cleaver here have to have ourselves a conversation.”
“She’s got a cleaver?” Ellery’s voice cracked.
“No, she doesn’t have a cleaver. It’s a television reference. You know, that thing we watch sometimes at night when we don’t have work to do?”
“But not tonight,” Ellery said sullenly.
“No, not tonight. Here, I’m texting the address. Now I need this family to leave and… oh shit.”
“Oh shit what?”
“We’ve got bored college student looking to score. Jesus, this little drug setup in the suburbs is a sweet deal. Who knew?”
The happy drug family left, miserable little girl looking behind her with a forlorn hope, like maybe if she was good enough she could stay with the woman who gave her cookies.
Jackson was a heartbeat away from being the star felon in an Amber Alert just to get her out of there.
But hey, the college student had his cookies now—and real cookies too. The suburban mom in the tight capris had handed them over with a smile and a pat on the shoulder, chatting animatedly like she knew this kid.
How would that conversation go?
“Oh, so you’re gearing up for finals and need a way to stay up? Sure, got the meth for that! And then the heroin for the comedown. Don’t use too much. You know this is for grown-ups, right? Of course you do, sweetheart. Your mother would be proud. Here you go, and some cookies too—don’t drink too much on the weekends!”
Jackson’s stomach churned.
Because the worst part of that was it was still more attention than his own mother gave him.
Oh God. He was going to throw up his candy bar.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
He’d gotten good at compartmentalization. He’d spent three months wearing a wire in a nest of dirty cops, for sweet chrissake! He could do this. He and Ellery were working on making a case so the cops could go after Owens. He could get the lowdown on these scumbags so he could get them out of his neighborhood—and out of his house!
Duplex.
Rental property.
Whatever.
Mike could probably turn that place into a mansion. He and Jade could get married and have beautiful spoiled foul-mouthed brilliant babies.
And where would Jackson live?
Did it matter?
“Jackson, are you still there?”
Ellery’s voice, with that clipped, stuck-up back-East intonation, snapped him to attention.
“Yeah—sorry. Waiting for the college student to leave so I can go talk to drug-dealing mom.”
“You’re going to talk to her?”
When had he decided to do that?
“Yeah. She’s…. Ellery, she’s giving out cookies.”
“Meth cookies?” Baffled.
“No, cookies to the customers. Like little packages of Oreos. She… she fed the kid with the addicted parents. Patted the college student’s cheek. Who is this woman?”
“Claudine Levine?”
Oh yeah. “Right? I’d forgotten. She has a name. And her kid. Jail.”
“Jay-el. If you tell a drug-dealing mom that she named her kid Jail, she’s going to hurt you.”
Jackson’s laugh was cut short by the violent tap of metal on his window. The ugly butt end of a knife descended again with unnecessary force, and Jackson threw himself sideways as the glass shattered.
“Jackson!” Ellery screamed.
“Yeah, gimme a sec!” he shouted back, scrambling across the seats to the passenger side, where young Line Tattoo stood with a gun. Without pausing, Jackson shoved the door open into Line Tattoo’s stomach and he doubled over, fumbling the gun as Jackson scrambled out.
Jackson caught the gun in middrop, because it was apparently that kind of fuckin’ day.
Ugh. His right arm, though. The weight of it tore at his shoulder, and he swore but held it steady, one-armed, pointed at Line Tattoo’s head while he fumbled at his side for the Taser he’d tucked into his belt before going hunting.
A piercing scream stopped him, and he put both hands back on the gun to keep it steady.
“Don’t hurt him! Don’t hurt him! He’s my son!”
Jackson spared a glance for Claudine Levine, hustling from her front porch in the black capri pants and cardigan twinset, complete with a little apron over her front.
She probably smelled like cookies.
“Stay right there, kid,” Jackson snapped. In the background, buzzing like a bee, Ellery was losing his mind over Jackson’s phone. Jackson felt bad about that, but he was a little busy here. “Larry!”
“What!” Oh, there you go, Larry Sherwood, standing like an idiot next to Jackson’s driver’s side door.
“Drop the knife. Right now.”
“Or what are you gonna do—shoot Jael?”
“You think I can’t shoot you both, Larry? Do you really want to try to stab me again? Look how well that turned out.”
“Oh my God—it is you!”
Heh-heh—Jackson sort of wished he could look at Larry’s face. That could be fun. That could be the most fun he would have this month.
Ellery’s body, hard, demanding, inside Jackson, rendering him pliable, mute, and needy….
With hard effort, Jackson kept the gun leveled and tried an appeal to reason.
“Claudine, you’re the grown-up here. You need to call your dogs off, and we need to talk.”
“Give me one good reason—”
“The guy squealing on the cell phone has your address, and he just called the cops. They may not like me much, but they know me, and they’ll listen when I tell them about the two kinds of newspapers, the paper route, the drugs. Ingenious, by the way. I mean, I’ve got a few questions—”
“Why should I tell you sh… shit?”
Claudine had a flowered hot-pad glove on her hand, and she tucked it under her arm defensively while she tried to pretend she said words like “shit.”
“Because Larry here already used his ‘get out of stupid free’ card. Did he tell you that? You don’t just stab people in a home invasion and walk out unless you got connections. Larry, did you tell her who your connection was?”
“You stabbed someone?” Startled, Claudine looked at the boy, who had edged his wa
y to their side of the car. Jackson had to give him credit—either for loyalty or stupidity—because he didn’t run.
“He said he owned the place,” Larry said sullenly. “And then he started beating the hell out of us.”
“I own the place,” Jackson said with relish. “And you weren’t supposed to be there.”
“What happened to Robert?” Claudine asked, her voice throbbing with concern. “Nobody would tell Larry.”
“He’s in the hospital—”
“You animal—”
“Lady, it was not my fault that kid jumped on a broken bicycle and flipped it. He’s got a hell of a concussion, maybe a cracked skull, but he’s going to live. Now can you tell me what he was doing there?”
“Jael!”
It was a near thing.
While Jackson was paying attention to Claudine, Jael took the opportunity to scramble to his feet and rush Jackson like an amateur. On any other day, Jackson would have just kicked him back to the ground, but his shoulder was killing him, and the gun was drooping.
His first instinct was to yank the gun back level, and his finger slipped on the trigger.
The gun went off in a deafening bang, and the sidewalk behind Jael exploded as a pothole opened up in the middle.
For a moment everybody stared at the splinters of concrete, small chunks of cement-covered gravel rocking as they landed. Claudine screamed and burst into tears. With a splatter and the smell of ammonia, Jael lost control of his bladder, and it streamed over his shoes.
Jackson tried to still the trip-hammer of his heart.
“My name is Jackson Rivers. I am a private investigator for Pf—the law firm that got Larry here out of jail on his own recognizance for stabbing me this morning. He was breaking into my house and trying—emphasis on trying—to cook meth.”
He took a deep breath. “There was heroin all over my home. I spent—” His voice cracked, and he reined it in again. The kid was not dead. The kid was standing next to his sobbing mother, looking desperately embarrassed. Jackson did not shoot anybody. That was the thing.
“I spent the better part of my life working my ass off to not be the guy with heroin all over his kitchen. Can you tell me why that happened?”
His arms and shoulders were shaking. Jesus, guns got heavy when you weren’t in the mood. He straightened slowly, pointing the gun at the ground in classic at-rest pose.
