by Amy Lane
“Yeah, yeah—I’ll treat him like a helpless fuzzy bunny. I hear you.”
Well, yeah. Wearily, Jackson turned back to his car, promising the buzzing in his pocket that he’d get to it in a second.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” The upholstery—the stain-resistant velour kind—was covered with broken glass. With a grunt, he reached around the back for a towel and his gym bag. First he dumped out the gym bag. Then, carefully, using the towel over his fingers, he began brushing the little glass pebbles into the pocket of the bag. Well, it was an old bag anyway, wasn’t it? Fuck. No. It was new. The bag was new. Because his old bag had been in the old car that’d been shot up when Kaden was falsely arrested.
Well, shit.
With a snarl, he kept brushing the glass into the bag, then cleared it from the floor mats, then got it out of the center console. He finished and put the bag on the floor of the passenger seat and looked around for progress.
The DEA hadn’t arrived yet, the happy heroin family were all cuffed and sitting, numb and dazed, each in his or her own cop car, and the police not guarding the dangerous drug dealers had begun marking the entire house off with crime scene tape so when the forensics team arrived they had a clean scene.
Jackson grunted and pulled out his phone. They had until the end of this phone conversation to come question him. Otherwise he was the fuck out of here.
He had the head of the snake to cut off.
In the Wrong Bowl
ELLERY’S PHONE rang, and he almost fumbled it in the middle of his conversation with Langdon.
“Are you okay?” he hissed.
He looked apologetically at his boss, who waved him outside into the hallway, while he listened with desperate care for the slightest hitch in Jackson’s breathing, the carefulness.
The hum that indicated he might be very close to losing his shit and falling completely apart.
“I told you—I’m fine. I’ve got a locale for Billy, I’ve got his number—I’m going to check it out.”
“Wait. I’ll come with—”
“No.” Jackson’s voice rang brittle into the phone. “No. You don’t get to come with me. You need to stay there and do important things in a suit. I need to go swim through the pond scum. It’s a deal.”
“Then why did you call?”
“Because you were buzzing my phone. You need to stop that. I’ll check in after I visit Billy. It’ll be fine.”
“Check in? Why can’t you come home?”
“’Cause gotta go. Bye!”
Ellery had to fight not to throw his damned phone. He kicked the wall instead, and Langdon stuck his distinguished head out of his office. “Is anything wrong?”
“Your PI is a stubborn, intractable, irritating fucker with no sense of self-preservation and the ability to find trouble just opening a ketchup bottle.”
“Sounds like he needs a keeper,” Langdon said, voice mild. “I thought you were volunteering for the job.”
“He slipped his leash. Do you know what happens to cats who run away? Do you?”
“They end up in the shel—”
“They get hit by trucks. They turn into road waffles. Assholes shoot them with pellet guns. They get attacked by dogs. But do they think about that when they take off? No. They just think ‘Hey, I want to see what’s behind this trash can!’ and then they fall in and get hurt or killed or covered in crap.” Ellery fought the urge to slide down the wall and hold his phone to his head, willing Jackson to get back on the line, admit he’d had a fucking day already and needed to come in, and maybe, actually see sense.
“Sometimes they find their way home.” Langdon’s voice was so gentle Ellery had to look up to see if he was being mocked.
“Sure,” he said without conviction. “About the military—”
“Do you really want to pursue this investigation now?” Crap. He looked concerned, but Ellery had been around long enough to know a question like that, in this stage of the game, could roughly be translated to “We can replace you with someone sane in a hot minute.”
He worked hard to school his features so he could give his boss a green smile.
“I’m fine, sir. Jackson is working this same case from a different angle. In fact, although I’m not exactly happy about how he’s doing it, this lead he’s following sort of serves a double role.”
Langdon raised his silver eyebrows. He apparently believed in minimalist self-expression.
Ellery told him about the card with Billy’s number on it and how the drug dealers he was about to defend had been buying from the same guy. Langdon’s reaction was… well, Ellery’s, actually.
“So why doesn’t he just give the location and the number to the police?”
“That is exactly what I’d like to know,” Ellery snarled. “Why does he have to go see this guy for himself?”
Jade walked around the corner at that moment, but apparently she’d been standing around the corner long enough to have heard everything.
“Billy the drug dealer?” she clarified, eyebrows raised.
“That’s the one.”
“He’s gone missing too?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he hung with Jackson’s mom a lot—pimped her out, got her drugs. He was sort of the closest thing Jackson had to a male role model, really, until he and my brother started hanging out. Maybe, you know, he wants to see Daddy?”
“I’m going to throw up,” Ellery muttered.
“You and Rivers knew each other in school?” Langdon asked with polite curiosity.
Ellery and Jade locked gazes, and she laughed bitterly. “He’s like my other twin,” she said, her voice dry as dust. Then she sobered. “Seriously—he means a lot to my family. Ellery, I called my brother. He’s leaving as soon as Rhonda gets home from—”
“No.” Ellery’s heart stalled in his chest. “Jade, you can’t. We’ve got marshals going up there to watch his family. You can’t take Kaden away from them.”
Jackson wouldn’t want it. Not even a little.
But that didn’t mean Jade was excited about leaving their boy in the cold.
“Look, Cramer, you cannot tell me that he doesn’t need his family around him. Do you understand that? My brother has been the one person on the planet who could keep that man safe, sane, and stable since they were in the fifth grade, and now he’s….” She shook her head and glared at him. “I thought you could keep him under control. How could you let him out into the world when he’s got all—” She made vague gestures around her chest with scarlet-tipped nails. “—all of… this going on?”
“Have you ever known anyone who could tell him what to do?” Ellery demanded. “It’s like telling a cat to sit and stay. Has that ever worked?”
Jade hmphed and turned away, making that same shake-the-ass-and-kick-the-sand motion with her hips that Jackson did.
“Jade!” Ellery snapped, and she barely deigned to look over her shoulder at him. “Please—I can call Kaden too, but he’ll listen to you. We just want him safe. You get that, right? Jackson almost killed himself to keep your brother safe this summer. Why would he want anything different now?”
“You being right is all that’s wrong with the fuckin’ world.” She sniffed and stalked off, while Ellery let out a breath of fear and leaned against the wall.
“Well handled,” Langdon said with a little awe.
“I hope so. I think I just sweated through my shirt.” The thought of Kaden Cameron driving from the relative safety of his small town in the foothills down to the mess Jackson was swimming in right now was enough to send rivers of perspiration running under his arms. Jackson would kill him if anything happened to Kaden.
Or worse.
“Do you have a new one in your office?” Langdon asked, sounding serious.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Because I’ve got you a contact at the recruiter’s office. He’s a good guy. My son was thinking about joining up, but Sergeant Buchannan steered him to the Marines instea
d, after two years in junior college. He didn’t have to do that. Barrett was a good find for a recruiter, but Buchannan was looking out for him.”
Ellery nodded. He had a conference with Captain Karl Lacey the next day—maybe. They’d tracked down Owens’s CO during his last reported stint in the Army, and the guy had agreed to fly out from somewhere in Vegas the next morning.
Which actually made Ellery suspicious. His query to Langdon of “Why is he coming to us?” was met with “I have no idea. Why don’t you ask him?”
But Ellery had wanted to ask somebody else.
And Langdon had come through.
“Thank you,” he said now. But he was thinking Oh thank God. I have something to do. “I have an appointment in fifteen minutes, but I can go do that interview afterward.”
Langdon nodded. “Take Jade with you.”
“I’m sorry?” Ellery tried not to sputter. Heinous waste of manpower, sending their most experienced paralegal to go ask some questions in the field.
“Look.” Langdon uncharacteristically fiddled with the end of his tie. “Ellery—the two of you are doing a good job of being professional and not freaking out. Well, sort of. I just think you’ll worry less about him if you can actually complain about how much he’s worrying you.”
Oh. “How do you know we won’t kill each other?” Because he and Jade had reached a rapport in recent days, but—obviously—she was not ever going to be simple, easy company.
“Because if you did, you’d never see Jackson again.”
Ellery’s stomach cramped hard. “Thanks. Thanks a hell of a lot.”
Langdon laughed heartily, probably because he couldn’t see the sweat that sprang up on Ellery’s back again. “He’s going to be fine. Tell me how the interview goes!”
Langdon went back into his office, leaving Ellery to lean his head against the wall, careful not to displace the framed watercolor of the capitol building as he did so.
“He is not going to be fine,” he muttered. “He’s never been fine. He was functional. But I let him walk out of here barely even that. I should have bribed the damned doctor to sedate him until he saw sense.”
“Are you talking to yourself?” Jade had rounded the corner again, looking meaningfully at Langdon’s office door.
“Yes,” Ellery said shortly. “I am talking to myself because….” He thunked his head backward again.
“You should have bribed the doctor to sedate Jackson until he saw sense,” Jade said wearily. Apparently her earlier irritation was forgotten. Holy cats, the woman was as mercurial as… Jackson.
“Yeah.” He closed his eyes and swallowed. “It seemed like such a good idea. He’d follow the guys. He’d tell the cops where to look. But there was a shot, and he was talking crazy, and now he’s going on to the next thing….”
“And the next thing and the next thing,” Jade confirmed. “Yeah. Like how he dealt when he got out of the hospital. The first time. Banged everything that moved and some things that didn’t, I’m sure.”
He let out a humorless laugh. “That’s gross.”
“Hey, some people you bring home and they just lay there. It’s weird. We’ve all gotten some of those, right?”
Ellery shrugged, remembering the guy who had made Ellery rock back and forth while on his knees. “Yeah.”
“But it’s different if you care for someone, if you want to see them happy. Then you have to move and make it real. Even if you’re just moving out of the way.”
He looked at her in earnest then, saw her usually scowling face set into the lines of a tired woman, weary with worrying. “Did you move out of his way?” he asked, not sure how that breakup had happened, only that it had happened a very short time before Ellery had arrived on the scene.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “We weren’t going anywhere, so maybe I moved out of mine too.”
He was not aware how badly he needed comfort until he felt her tentative fumble with his hand.
“I was sort of glad, finally, that he had you,” she said, like they weren’t holding hands like children. “But… this thing with his mom—Ellery, this is going to fuck him up so bad.”
“Yeah.”
They didn’t say anything for a moment. Then Ellery squeezed her hand and let go. “You and me, interviewing an Army recruiter to get some background on the guy who might have fucked up Owens. Game?”
“’Course,” she said.
“I’ll take you home afterward, maybe. Maybe Jackson will be there.” He didn’t believe it. Not if they hadn’t heard from him first.
“Maybe he’ll be at your house,” she said, like she was trying to believe it too. “We’ll see.”
STAFF SERGEANT Buchannan looked like he’d been born a father—or at least a big brother. Or maybe even a shop teacher. In his midfifties, with iron-gray hair in his buzz cut, he had the sort of broad, patient face and no-nonsense manner that a good nurturer might have, someone who believed in baseball, Mom, and apple pie.
Or he’d looked that pure when they’d walked in and introduced themselves.
The man had pulled them to his desk, offered them snacks and coffee, and served it on little napkins.
Once Ellery started asking questions about Galway, though, he suddenly turned into everybody’s favorite bookie uncle who only brought Christmas gifts when the long shot came home—but jeepers, mister, they were some good gifts!
“Look, Staff Sergeant,” Ellery said at last, keeping a rein on his temper. “I’m not saying you’ve done any wrong—”
“I never said you—”
“I’m just asking some basic questions about this guy we’re going to meet tomorrow. Captain Karl Lacey is coming up from Nevada—and he’s on duty—but I can’t find where he’d be stationed. Now, he was in charge of a couple of people we’re interested in—Master Sergeant Galway—”
“He’s not stationed here,” Buchannan said briefly.
“I am aware. He was stationed outside of Pakistan and in charge of the auto bay, apparently a decent soldier—”
Buchannan snorted. “Sure.”
Ellery and Jade both regarded him steadily. “You could explain that?” Jade said with extreme politeness after a frozen moment.
“Augh!” Buchannan lost his poise completely and stood up. “I can’t—I just really—”
Ellery used to be a by-the-book interrogator. Everything on record, every advantage given.
But he and Jackson had worked together for three months, and Jackson had a different set of rules than Ellery did. There was no doubt about it.
Sometimes Ellery just liked those rules better.
“Staff Sergeant?” he said, smiling prettily. Buchannan leaned backward. Dammit—Jackson was so much better at this. “Look.” He dropped the flirting—he did it poorly. “None of this is on record, you understand? None of this will be used to build our case.”
“Ellery!” Jade hissed.
“No. Seriously—this guy is doing his job. He’s giving us the time of day. We don’t want to arrest you, or start a scandal, or hurt your career. But Tim Owens—Corporal Tim Owens—is suspected of killing street people for over two years. He was posing as a police officer—”
“Not posing,” Jade corrected quietly.
“Crap. Yeah. He went through academy, had a social security number, but he used his position to… well, be a sadistic bastard. Do you understand me?”
“More than you probably know,” Buchannan said quietly. “Why are you here and not somebody from the ADA or the police department?”
“We’re building a case,” Ellery admitted. “This summer, my… our PI stumbled on a ring of dirty cops led by a guy at the capitol. It wasn’t pretty. But one of the things that came out in the trial is that this guy’s buddy was….” He had no words for the abomination he’d seen that morning.
“A fucking psychopath,” Buchannan snarled. “Yeah. I know. Well, not this psychopath—but….”
He took a deep breath.
“Off record
. No recording, no signing shit. No names. I am two months away from retirement. You understand me? My wife has been planning our trip around the world for thirty-five years.”
Ellery nodded. “I can understand that.”
“Okay—so here’s the thing. It’s all… spots. None of it is a whole story, but if you read enough books, you can connect the spots—”
“Dots,” Jade corrected.
“Measles—I don’t give a crap. You can connect the dots. So I’ll tell you what I know and see if you get the same picture, deal?”
Ellery nodded, excitement building in the pit of his stomach. He and Jackson had put together a pretty spectacular picture themselves. He wanted to see if Buchannan had some details they’d missed.
“Okay, so about four years ago, a kid comes into my office. I was stationed down in Barstow, right? Because God, what else is there to do when you graduate but join the military. But this kid doesn’t wander in from a school. He looks like he’s been on the street for a month, and the way he acted, he looked like he’d spent the first part of his life locked in a box, right?”
Ellery nodded. “I hear you.”
“So I tell him he can’t sign up without… everything. Social security number, birth certificate, proof of graduation—the works. And he looks like he’s going to cry. And he says he’ll do anything to get into the Army. Well, I felt bad for him—but not that bad. Besides not swinging that way, you can get into a shitload of trouble falsifying documents. So I give him some money for clothes and a hotel room to clean up and some suggestions for shelters or places to work, and the kid disappears. I wouldn’t have thought anything about him, except, about two months later, I’m promoted in charge of my district, and I’m looking through names of new recruits—and I see his.”
“You recognized it?” Ellery asked, impressed.
“The kid’s name—or at least the name he was claiming was his—is Sonny Daye. You don’t forget that name.”
Ellery sucked in a breath, hearing Jackson’s voice in his head just as clear as, well, a sunny day.
