Red Fish, Dead Fish

by Amy Lane

  “No, sir, you don’t,” he said, taking a quick swig of coffee. Wow. Way better than the coffee at the law firm—who knew? “So, young Sonny Daye is now a private in the military. What happens now?”

  “Well, see—I want to know who recruited him, because whoever it was, he had to have taken that thing Sonny put on the table that I wasn’t buying. I didn’t want to make waves, but….” He shrugged.

  “You wanted to maybe steer this guy somewhere else?” Ellery said delicately, because that’s what Jackson said about how bureaucracy worked, right? It was hard to get rid of the crooked or the incompetent. One of the reasons people like Scott Bridger or Patrick Hanover could abuse the system for so long was that the DA’s office was terrified of getting rid of them. Once they got rid of a cop, everything that cop had done was suspect. It wasn’t just plucking a poisoned flower. It was digging deep into the bedrock of things and uprooting an entire tree.

  The same would hold for the military. It would be easier—and possibly more efficient—for Buchannan to steer the scumbag to a position where he (or she) held no authority over young men in his (or her) command and couldn’t abuse underlings the way Sonny Daye had begged to be abused.

  “Exactly.” Buchannan nodded, but he still didn’t look comfortable. Well, he’d looked the other way—this shouldn’t be comfortable. “Anyway, the guy who’d inducted Private Daye was actually not a bad guy. As far as I could see, this was his one transgression, and that kid had been so desperate, I was thinking it might have been a kindness. So I tracked where Daye had gone to see what became of him. And he’d been put in the auto bay—which was fine, because as far as I know, a way with cars was the one honest thing he’d put on his entrance forms—but then I ran into a little problem.”

  “And that would be?” Ellery asked delicately.

  “I think you know very well what it would be.” Buchannan’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You even said his name.”

  “Galway.” Ellery’s balls actually tingled, knowing how close they were to something.

  “That guy’s a real motherfucker. So I see his record—kids are offing themselves on his watch, and I shoot off an e-mail to the CO over there. He’s cagey, hostile, like he knows something’s hinky. But instead of telling me he’s going to investigate it, he gives me the number to the ‘Department of Behavioral Engineering’—if you can believe that shit.”

  Ellery blinked. “I really can’t. Is there such a thing in the Army?”

  “Not in any manual I’ve ever seen. So I call this department for the hell of it, and I am put directly, do not stop at the secretary, do not pause at Private Runaround, directly linked to Captain Karl Lacey, and he is reading me the riot act about getting in the way of an official US Army protocol here—but it wasn’t one I’d ever heard of before. The fact was, I’d come to the end of the line. Captain Lacey outranked me, and this was a kid on the other side of the world that I could not help from here.”

  Ellery nodded, unable to get mad at him. From the confines of his job, he’d done his best. “What did you think when you heard Galway was dead?”

  “Galway’s dead?”

  “Apparently he didn’t know.”

  Ellery cast Jade a quick look, and she shrugged. Well, it was only stating a truth.

  “Yes, sir. Galway died in an incident outside of Pakistan. He was….” Ellery shifted uncomfortably. This sounded just so implausible. “Our sources say that Daye was watching a little girl, and Galway wanted to throw her out of the camp in the middle of shelling. She stole Staff Sergeant Jasper Atchison’s gun from his belt and shot Galway right before the auto bay was hit.”

  Buchannan’s eyebrows hit his hairline. “Really?”

  Yeah, Ellery felt exactly that way about the story.

  “Corporal Daye was in the auto bay at the time. He gave testimony, since Atchison was still in surgery because he’d been hit by shrapnel.”

  “Really?” Buchannan asked again.

  “Sir, I only know what my PI’s source told him.” Ellery had actually met the sergeant—and Corporal Daye himself—but he wasn’t sure this was the time to reveal that.

  “Has it occurred to you that Corporal Daye could have shot Galway?”

  “Or Sergeant Atchison, since he was there at the time. Yes, an alternative explanation has occurred to me. The question is, why has it occurred to you?”

  “Because Galway was… was becoming a liability. I mean, maybe it was a coincidence, maybe it wasn’t. But if I was sniffing around Galway, and if he was a part of this ‘Department of Behavioral Design’ or whatever bullshit, maybe someone wanted him dead?”

  “Or maybe he died and they didn’t give that much of a shit.” Jade sniffed, and Ellery gazed at her thoughtfully.

  “I’ve met Daye and Atchison,” he admitted after a pause. “Jackson and I interviewed them for something unrelated in October—”

  “San Diego?” Jade asked, a soft smile on her full lips. “That’s probably the only time he’s ever been on a plane. You know that, right?”

  Yes. Jackson had admitted as much to Ellery as the plane took off, and he’d watched the fields underneath the jet become a big brown-and-green puzzle.

  “He was like a little kid,” Ellery murmured, before pulling himself with an effort to the confused recruiter. “They were… well, they weren’t innocent as children. But Jackson said they were like rattlesnakes. Completely harmless unless you stepped on one of them, and then watch the hell out.”

  Buchannan nodded. “Okay. So, given that the story is crap, who’s thinking that maybe Galway was a problem someone wanted to sweep under the rug?”

  Yes—all three of them nodded.

  “So,” Ellery said, hoping Buchannan was the kind of ally they really, really needed at this point, “who thinks that Tim Owens might have been the same sort of problem?”

  Buchannan raised his graying eyebrows, and Ellery was suddenly struck by how innocent—in his own way—Buchannan really was. Yes, he’d been suspicious, but he hadn’t raised hell. All his actions were still guided by sort of an implicit faith in the system. Buchannan was a small fish who believed that somebody, somewhere, must know of a person with the brass and the resources to fix this problem.

  Except this problem had been nagging at Master Sergeant Buchannan for nearly four years now, and he’d just discovered it was so much worse than he’d imagined.

  Perhaps—just perhaps—he was exactly the sort of ally they needed.

  “I have honestly never heard of Owens,” Buchannan admitted. “But I can ask some questions. I served over there for eight years. I still know some folks.”

  “Thank you,” Ellery said softly. “That’s… that’s so appreciated.”

  Buchannan looked away. “I know I have no right to ask, but about Corporal Daye—”

  “Atchison was cleared of all charges. That incident we investigated… well, we’re pretty sure he and Sonny weren’t guilty of killing anybody. Not that I don’t think they could—just that I don’t think they have. Or,” he amended, remembering the rabbity, feral way Sonny Daye had glared at him and Jackson as Ace had kept up a redneck patter to distract them, “nothing on our radar right now.”

  Buchannan nodded, like he got that. “Okay. Good to hear.”

  “My PI was going to call them up, maybe, and ask them about Owens, but we could just as well leave that nest of rattlesnakes undisturbed if….” He waited for Buchannan to fill in the blank.

  “If I can get my sources to come through.”

  “Excellent,” Ellery said with meaning. “Now, I only have one more question to ask you, and then we can get out of your hair and let you get home for the evening.”

  “My wife will be appreciative.” Buchannan winked, and Ellery thought he seemed like a genuinely good guy. God, he didn’t meet many of those in his business.

  “Captain Karl Lacey—I’m meeting with him tomorrow. Now, given that I don’t know where he’s coming from, I don’t know what department he
’s in charge of, and I just ended up with him on a plane when I said Tim Owens’s name, is there anything you can tell me?”

  Buchannan’s eyes had gone wide—and his face pale. “Lacey’s a snake. Not a sweetheart snake like a rattlesnake, who warns you and nurtures its young and has moments of compassion. No—Lacey’s like a coral snake. He’s good-looking, makes things sound great to the brass, but….” Buchannan glanced around the office like suddenly now he was worried about being overheard.

  “Remember when I said I’d been out in Afghanistan for eight years?”

  Ellery nodded.

  “I almost got sent out again. This post? This is a promotion. I almost got another promotion that put me back in the desert, less than twenty-four hours after I got off the phone with that guy. I do not know whose boots he’s licking, but I can tell you right now, he must be doing a damned good job.”

  “Well, fantastic,” Jade said, dusting her hands off with purpose. “I’ll just sit back and let Ellery talk during that meeting. Good with you, Cramer?”

  And suddenly the little bit of headway, the strategic plan of attack, the camaraderie he’d just built with Jade—it all fell away.

  “Jackson was supposed to make tomorrow’s meeting,” he said softly.

  Jade’s shoulders slumped. “Well. Maybe he will.”

  “What time is your meeting with Lacey?” Buchannan asked, ignoring their byplay.

  “Right before lunch,” Ellery said. He eyed Jade speculatively. “Would you like to pick him up under the guise of being the company go-to guy?”

  Jade’s smile was wide, bright, and pure evil. “You betcha,” she said, nodding without hesitation. “I might even give myself a raise for being indispensable.”

  “You’d be good for it.” He turned back to Buchannan and stood, then extended his hand, gratified when Buchannan shook with him, his grip firm and reassuring.

  Ellery would take what he could get at this moment.

  When he and Jade walked out of the recruiter’s office, the sun had been down for nearly forty-five minutes, and a damp cold was sneaking into Ellery’s bones. He checked his phone out of reflex and saw the usual messages. He scrolled through them with unnecessary haste, almost chucking the phone across the parking lot when he didn’t see the number he was looking for.

  “He didn’t call me either,” Jade muttered glumly, and Ellery managed an encouraging smile.

  “Well, there’s always this evening. Here, I’ll take you home.”

  Jade sighed—and given what her strength could usually yield, it was good to have her on their side.

  “Come inside for dinner,” she ordered. “Mike is cooking chicken something. It’ll be good.”

  Ellery half laughed. “Chicken something? Is that a cordon bleu dish?”

  Three months ago she would have ripped his face off for being a spoiled rich boy, but now she maybe got that he was kidding.

  “Yup. Mike’s chicken something. It’ll be in all the cookbooks next year—but it never comes out the same way twice.”

  THE DUPLEX looked sad at night without the lights on in Jackson’s side. The front of his part of the structure was covered in yellow crime scene tape, as was half the driveway and Jackson’s side of the yard.

  Ellery parked in front of the house, looked at the place, and swallowed. It wasn’t a bad building—working-class, certainly, and there were houses and duplexes along that street that were in better and worse condition. But Jackson had painted his home a cheery blue with white trim, and his yard was well-tended sod. He’d planted a tree—the purple kind, with the little plums—in the corner of the yard a couple of years earlier, and it was getting big enough to shade the guest room on his side.

  It wasn’t sad or lonely—at least not when it was fully occupied—and it wasn’t a place to be rescued from. It had been, in fact, a thing Jackson had been most proud of.

  He’d brought people there—bedmates, mostly, and friends. If his behavior toward Ellery when they’d simply been work partners was any guide, he’d offered them food or beer, a shower, and a place to sleep, even if it was the couch or the guest bed sometimes.

  Ellery felt a stab of shame. Yeah, sure, he wanted Jackson to come to his house and move in. Ellery’s was bigger, it was nicer, it cost more—but what had Ellery done to earn that house?

  Jackson had put his whole heart into making himself a home. It hadn’t been spectacular, but it had been safe. He’d had a friend next door that he’d turned into family. He may not have had a partner there, but he’d felt secure enough to bring lovers there to fight off the darkness that swamped his soul at night.

  It would cost Ellery nothing but a bit of snobbishness, of material pride, to ask if they could both move into the duplex instead.

  Ellery would do that. He’d move his suits out of the walk-in closet and put up with the teeny shower just to be able to hold Jackson at night when the dreams got scary and no amount of strength or courage or good memories could keep them away.

  “He should move in with you permanently,” Jade said, surprising him. They’d both been standing there staring at the dark face of Jackson’s duplex like he’d suddenly turn on the lights and walk out.

  “I could move in here,” he said humbly, and Jade’s snort was actually a relief.

  “Oh my God, why? He’s got some shitty furniture in the garage and some clothes that didn’t make the cut—”

  Ellery frowned. “Wait—were they winter clothes? I think he’s been wearing the same two pairs of jeans and sweatshirts since it started getting colder.”

  Jade groaned and tilted her head back at the stars. They were close enough to the river there that a few were actually peeping out through the light pollution. “God! You forget, you know? He’s just so… so strong. Even when he was in the hospital—both goddamned times. If he was breathing, he was going to be okay. You just don’t think a thing like this is going to….”

  They both looked at that dark half of the house, then waved slightly at the police car parked on the street in front. The officers looked a little bored but mostly alert, and Ellery was glad they were there.

  “Why hasn’t he called?” she asked. They’d both called him on the way over—nothing, not even a recording.

  Suddenly Ellery had a thought. “Hey—I bought his phone.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Well la-de-fuckin’ da.”

  “Don’t be shitty. I bought his phone. I set it up. I have insurance. Jade—it’ll take some calls and, well, some lying, but I think I can have them track it.”

  “Oh!” Jade let out a half laugh. “Well come on in, smart guy. I’ll serve you chicken something, and you track down Jackson.”

  It wasn’t that easy.

  Well, dinner was that easy. Dinner was chicken left in the Crock-Pot with a big jar of salsa. On a tortilla with some lettuce and some sour cream, it was really delicious.

  Ellery ate it while he called his phone provider and asked them to track down the iPhone he’d bought three months ago.

  “It was for a business associate,” he lied smoothly. “And it seems to have gone missing. It might have sensitive data on it. If it’s just in his briefcase or something”—Jade snorted—“I don’t want to deactivate it.”

  “Well, sir, your associate must have had a mishap, because that particular phone seems to be offline.”

  “I’m sorry?” Ellery said, dinner at Mike’s plain wooden table turning to ashes in his mouth. “Explain how he could have deactivated it?”

  “Well, usually being offline like this means the SIM card was taken out and the phone itself destroyed.”

  “So, like, deactivated.” His chest couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think.

  “That’s what I said.”

  Jade snatched the phone from his hand. “Where was it last? Do you have any idea?”

  “According to our records, it was east of Freeport Boulevard.”

  “Okay, thank you. We’ll tell our associate he nee
ds to start shopping for another goddamned phone.”

  Jade hit End Call and handed the phone to Ellery.

  He tried not to let it slip out of his suddenly sweaty fingers.

  “Jade?” he said, keeping his voice as even as he could. “Has the family Jackson got arrested for drug dealing been processed yet?”

  Jade frowned. “No—we have a bail hearing for them tomorrow. Why?”

  “I can’t remember if I put their file in my briefcase or not. I need to….” Deep breath. Deep fucking breath. “I need to talk to the arresting officer to see if he can maybe check that area out for us. It would be… unfortunate if we panicked because Jackson dropped his phone—”

  “And ripped out his SIM card and drove over it with a truck,” Mike said grimly. “You look like death, Ellery. I’m gonna put on some coffee. Jade, can you find that name?”

  But Jade was still standing at the table, looking down at Ellery, her chin trembling as she did what Ellery was trying to do and keep it together.

  “Both of you!” Mike snapped. “Stop acting like he’s dead. He’s shook-up. He’s not suicidal. He’s not an idiot. Now start looking for him. I don’t know a goddamned thing about files or cops or any of that shit, and I certainly don’t know a damned thing about Freeport Boulevard!”

  “Meadowview,” Jade said, shrugging. “Lots of repo’d houses, lots of vacant land behind the housing tracts. Crime’s up, education is down, and there’s not a lot of places for people to work if they don’t have a car.”

  “Worse than Del Paso Heights?” Ellery asked.

  “It’s bigger,” she said frankly. “It’s a bigger stretch of really fucked-up and bad. But, you know. Jackson knows how to survive fucked-up and bad, right?”

  Ellery nodded. So many reasons. So many. For Jackson’s phone not to be functioning and for Jackson not to be home at—he looked at the clock above Mike’s stove—eight o’clock at night.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “I should have asked when it got deactivated. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Yeah, well, neither was I.” She looked up with some relief at Mike, who was puttering around with the coffeemaker. “Once again, Mike was the only one with his brain on. Good job, honey.”