Red Fish, Dead Fish

by Amy Lane

  “Only in court.” Ellery made good on his threat to put on his pajamas—warm flannel, soft as a kitten’s ass. Jackson had actually gotten to sleep a couple of nights by petting those damned pajamas. “When did you get home?”

  Jackson tried to remember. “I don’t… well, after eight, because you were gone. I must have left Jade’s house at six thirty, seven—the sun wasn’t quite up. Nine or ten?”

  His shoulder felt better after the ibuprofen, but it was still stiff enough for him to cradle his arm by his ribs as he stood up and shuffled through the dresser Ellery had given him when he’d moved in.

  “Here,” Ellery ordered, coming over to his side of the bed. “Let me.”

  “I can do it!”

  “Shut up and let me do it. You didn’t let me help you get home. You didn’t let me help you through yesterday. You didn’t even let me know you were at the serial killer’s house of doom—”

  “I was about to text you,” Jackson said, embarrassed.

  “About to?” Clear disbelief.

  “I’d written the text. But then I heard a noise, and I thought I was going to get caught and then I had to climb over a fence.”

  Ellery shook his head like he was torn between irritation and self-blame. “You know,” he said, voice cracking, “I almost wish you’d gone and gotten blown by Officer McDreamy Voice.”

  “Who?”

  “Piers Morgan or whatever—”

  “Pierpont?” It wasn’t like Ellery to get names wrong—or to figuratively whore Jackson out to random strangers. “Why would you even say that?”

  Ellery glared at him, eyes red rimmed. “I would have hated you. I would have broken up with you. But at least—at least this… this monster would not have put hands on you. Would not have fucked with your head. God, Jackson—I know you were raised to make it your last priority, but you have no idea how much I would rather see you safe.”

  “See,” Jackson said, thinking about it carefully—hard to do in a muddled head, “I think, as long as I survived and got back here….” Could he say it? “Home, then I did the best thing, right?”

  Ellery closed his eyes tightly. “You… you….”

  Jackson didn’t recognize giving comfort. But Ellery was shaking and strangely undone. He wrapped his good arm around him and held him tight. “I’m fine. I’m here.”

  “I want your life to be easier,” Ellery confessed against his good shoulder.

  Jackson chuckled. “Yours isn’t. And it could be.”

  Ellery shook his head. “I can’t argue about it now,” he whispered.

  “Then what—”

  “This is good. Just do this.”

  Jackson held him until he started to shiver in the shadowed room. Ellery stepped back and wiped under his eyes with his hand, then bent and helped Jackson into his ratty sweats and a T-shirt. He sat Jackson down for a minute while he went to his side of the room and got Jackson a zip-up hoodie instead of a pullover one.

  “Thanks,” Jackson said gruffly.

  “There’s a price, you know,” Ellery told him. He hadn’t turned on a light, and the atmosphere of his vast bedroom—bigger than most of the places Jackson had lived, period—was still unbearably intimate.

  “I have to bottom again?” He was only partially joking.

  “Sure. Whatever. But we’re going to Thanksgiving with my family.” Ellery turned and stalked out of the room, and Jackson stood and followed him, stuttering in disbelief.

  “You expect me to get on a plane for two hours—”

  “Six, Jackson—it’s Boston.”

  “For ten hours so I can live in Lucy Satan’s house—”

  “My mother’s name is Taylor!”

  “And meet your happy rich family—”

  “Don’t forget Jewish if you’re going to get all freaked-out about it.”

  “And have them talk to me and know I’m a white-trash cum-dump!”

  Ellery whirled on one foot and slapped his face.

  Jackson gaped at him.

  “You’re the man I love,” Ellery said thickly into the silence. “You can call my mother Lucy Satan all you want. I think she likes it. But you be careful when you talk about yourself. And my family doesn’t know anything you don’t want them to. That’s what being repressed white people is all about.”

  “You slapped me,” Jackson muttered, although there hadn’t been a lot of sting to it.

  “You hurt me,” Ellery snarled. “Don’t do it again.”

  Absurdly, Jackson’s lower lip began to wobble. God, he was still on such an uneven keel—like walking the safety rail of a ship in a stormy sea. One minute he was gripping the rope and he was pretty sure he was going to make it, and the next…. Ellery was glowering at him with wet eyes, and he felt like he was the one who’d smacked Ellery out of the blue.

  “I never want to hurt you,” Jackson confessed. “That was not… not my intention.”

  Ellery nodded. “I know it’s not. Just like I know you’d never cheat on me. And I know you’re always trying to make your way home.”

  Jackson tried a crooked half smile, but Ellery didn’t smile back. “I have to get your mother a present,” he remembered. “She told me that, in the hospital.”

  Ellery nodded. “We can go Internet shopping if you want.”

  “Hunh.”

  Ellery turned back toward the kitchen. “Clarify.”

  “I just assumed I’d have to go to the real thing. Macy’s or something, where there’s silk scarves and smells I’m not really fond of. Internet shopping—that’s a good idea.”

  Ellery chuckled weakly and went to the stove. Jackson was going to follow him to help, but Ellery shook him off. “Sit at the counter and talk to me. Who taught you about Macy’s?”

  “Jade’s mom. She couldn’t afford anything there, really, but she would take us shopping and make us pretend we belonged sometimes.” He smiled at the memory—he and Kaden and Jade on their best behavior, smiling pleasantly at the salespeople like Toni did, saving their money for an Icee at the food court. “She’d wear the clothes she’d made for work. We’d put on our best clothes, clean up nice, and take the bus to Arden Fair. She and Jade would try on perfume and outfits, and Kaden and me would look at suits and talk about when we’d dress up fine. I figured out later that Toni would go home and buy fabric from the bargain bin and make her and Jade the clothes she saw in the store, if she could. She could sew really nice.”

  “Not Rhonda?”

  He forgot sometimes that Ellery knew they’d all been friends since the fifth grade. “Rhonda’s family was, well, better off than us,” Jackson said, trying not to squirm in his seat. Economic shame was such an amorphous thing, something that crossed racial boundaries but showed itself in different ways. “Rhonda, you know, wore clothes from Target. Her mom didn’t have to sew her church clothes. I guess Toni’s grandma taught Toni. It’s a good thing, right, but… I don’t know. She used to tell us kids she didn’t want Rhonda’s folks to know we were country. I think it’s because her grandmother was from the South.”

  Ellery had pulled the lasagna from the oven while Jackson was talking, and Jackson closed his eyes for a minute and took a deep breath. It smelled warm and homey. He was always surprised when Ellery cooked things. They were always so… so elegant. He knew recipes, even though they subsisted on takeout half the week.

  Had Ellery cooked this for him as comfort?

  The thought made him squirm too.

  “My mom—Lucy Satan—” Ellery gave him a dry—if distracted—smile. “—used to take us to Macy’s to get measured for formal clothes. Bar Mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs, formal dinners, plays, occasions. We went once a year. I’d get two suits, and Rebecca would get four dresses. People would come measure us—my tailor was a total pervert. I swear he was feeling me up from the minute I got hair on my balls.”

  “Oh my God!” Jackson laughed, horrified.

  “Yeah, I got over it. Remember, it was the most action I got until college.�
��

  “Was he cute?” Jackson asked, trying to decide if Ellery was scarred for life or not.

  “Very—it was part of the fun. Anyway, we always went out to somewhere not formal afterward. Chili’s or Applebee’s or someplace like that. Mother would ask us where we’d want to wear our best clothes this year, and we always came up with good stuff. The presidential inauguration, the meeting of the United Nations, a surgeon’s conference for people who helped cure cancer—the sky was the limit.”

  While he spoke, Ellery put together the bags of fixings for salad in a glass bowl. He crumpled up the wrappers and threw them in the recycler, before setting the bowl to the side. When that was done, he pulled a loaf of sourdough from the top of the refrigerator and sliced it down the middle. Jackson watched, entranced. Ellery liked to mix real garlic in real butter and then broil the bread until the mixture was melted and the bread was just getting golden brown. It was Jackson’s favorite part.

  “That’s a real nice time,” he said, eyes still on the food. “I mean… your mom is scary, but she took care of you guys. She was….” Suddenly—because he was stupid—he figured out that he’d been very gently steered to this conversation right here.

  “She was a good mom,” he said, his voice breaking.

  “And yours wasn’t,” Ellery said gently. “And you know what you didn’t have. But you’re still going to miss what you wished you could have. You can’t tell me you didn’t see just enough to wish Celia had been half the mom Toni Cameron was.”

  Oh hell. “I hate you for this,” Jackson muttered thickly, because grief he didn’t want suddenly washed up, blocking his throat, blocking his chest.

  “Sure,” Ellery said, and Jackson couldn’t see the expression on his face because his eyes were swimming. Not with the picture of Celia as she’d been in the morgue, or even the last time he’d seen her—asking for money, chain smoking, worn to leather, and, absurdly, worried about him, which he didn’t think she could be.

  He saw her as she’d been when he was little—before the drugs had taken over, when she sang to him sometimes, when she cooked him spaghetti with butter on food stamp night. She’d had curly blonde hair and blue eyes like an angel and a sweet mouth—Jackson had thought she was beautiful.

  He saw her singing about Jolene in a shitty apartment kitchen while she cut up his spaghetti.

  He wasn’t sure if the memory was real or not—if it had ever happened. But he’d wanted it to happen. He’d wanted that mom, and now any chance of that mom was gone. Any chance he would go shopping for a silk scarf or perfume for a mother who was proud of him was gone, and he was left mourning the dream of her.

  He was left forever with the image from the morgue and the merciless judgment of a monster who knew too much about Jackson, who could paint his dearest dreams in body parts and threaten his sanity with a vial of heroin and a jerkoff that still stung Jackson’s skin.

  “Oh fuck,” he managed before he buried his head in his arms and sobbed.

  Ellery set the food aside and came around the counter to rub his back, whispering in his ear that it would be all right. In his entire life, Jackson couldn’t remember having that. Not once. Not when Toni Cameron had died, not when he’d been stuck wearing a wire into a snake pit, not even when he’d woken up from a coma and realized the life he’d worked for had swirled down the drain with the blood he’d shed.

  But Ellery was there, crying—oh God, crying with him—and for once in his life, Jackson was going to have to believe it was true.

  It was going to be okay.

  The storm passed, and for a breath he was surrounded by Ellery’s warmth, his smell, the evergreen body wash he used, and the food smells of butter and garlic. He fought off the urge to bolt in claustrophobia and relaxed into Ellery’s body pressed against his.

  He wiped under his eyes with his sleeve, scraping along the washcloth-burned side of his face, and sighed. “I’ve got to go….” He made random gestures to his head-swollen, snot-dripping self, and Ellery dropped a kiss on the top of his head.

  “Sure. Go.”

  He went to brush his teeth—and pull himself together and wash his face and think about kittens and puppies and fucking daisy-burping bunnies because he was tired of emotion. He looked in the mirror after rinsing his face, wincing at the washcloth burns on his forehead, cheek, and neck. He stared into the mirror for a moment, remembering when he’d been a disaster of acne, glad he’d never been able to afford class pictures.

  Ellery would never see him like that.

  But Ellery had seen him today—lost, sad, sick, and scared. Grieving.

  For a moment he tried to juxtapose two images of himself—stoned and terrified, on the floor of hell, looking up into a madman’s face, and five minutes ago, sobbing in a good man’s arms.

  How can he stand to touch me?

  But he’d known. And he’d held Jackson anyway.

  It was a lot to think about.

  Ellery seemed to get that, because when Jackson got back, dinner was on the table and they sat down to eat, talking quietly about the case, about “heroin family,” about Ellery’s Thanksgiving plans, of which Jackson had been unaware.

  “You have the plane tickets and everything?” Stunning.

  “Yes.” Ellery took a bite of lasagna and closed his eyes, shuddering in happiness. He would run a mile on the treadmill just to have a bite of something bad for him—Jackson knew that about him now. What sort of penance was he doing to have Jackson in his life?

  “How can you think that far into the future?” Jackson asked suspiciously.

  “Hm… well, I figured next Thanksgiving we could take a pass and go to Cabo or rent a cabin in Tahoe or something that involves lots of sex and some alcohol. But this year we’re trying to make a good impression, so I waited for a sale on airfare and—”

  “I wasn’t asking for a demonstration!” Jackson burst out, torn between laughter and panic. “I was just wondering how… why would you even think… you know. I’d be here?”

  Ellery sat back and wiped his mouth, taking the question seriously. “Well, I didn’t know for certain,” he said. “Just like I didn’t know for certain if Billy Bob and I were going to get along. But I drew some conclusions based on the evidence on hand and decided it was an acceptable risk to….” He faltered. “To bet my heart that you’d be here.”

  Jackson’s smile could not be contained. “Holy shit, that’s romantic. Ellery! You covered it in lawyer bullshit, but holy fucking God, you might as well have delivered chocolates and flowers.”

  He watched, fascinated, as a flush patterned Ellery’s face in a perfect crescent, one on either cheek.

  “Don’t tell my mother,” Ellery said softly. “My family doesn’t do romance. I think she’d be disappointed.”

  Jackson bit his lip, feeling like a teenager on his first date. “I think your mother is damned proud of you,” he said. “I would be… if, you know, you were part of my family.”

  “I’d be proud if you became part of my family too,” Ellery said, a slight twist to the corner of his mouth his only indication that he had used Jackson’s own words to back him into a corner.

  “You’re pretty impressed with yourself, aren’t you?” Jackson asked, but he couldn’t be mad. Not after the last two days.

  Ellery nodded as though thinking about it, and Jackson wanted to laugh. Little shit. Sure—he thought he was Superlawyer. Well, so did Jackson. What of it?

  “I think Mike should come stay with you tomorrow,” Ellery said when the moment had faded.

  “Why won’t I be at work? I mean, those weren’t the only two cases on my roster!” Jackson’s head felt heavy on his neck, and he’d stayed away from the wine Ellery had served because he was having trouble keeping awake as it was. One night’s sleep should make it better, right?

  “Because I’m asking you,” Ellery said soberly. “I’m asking you nicely—with all the love in my heart. It’s Tuesday, Jackson. If I tell Langdon you’re out until Mo
nday, he won’t bat an eyelash. You can go running every day if you want. You can run searches from home. But please, after the doctor’s tomorrow, let that be the end for a few days. You never let yourself—”

  “What, slack off?” Helpless. He hated feeling helpless.

  “Heal.”

  Ellery let the word hang between them in the quiet of the dining room. Jackson had just taken a deep breath to answer when Ellery’s phone started buzzing urgently on the counter behind him.

  Their eyes met and Jackson nodded. Ellery picked up.

  Fish in a Waterfall

  “IT’S GOING down,” Kryzynski said without preamble. “Tomorrow, sunrise. We’ve got the house staked out. There seems to be some movement in but no movement out. We’re going to have SWAT out here, the DEA—a whole detail. Do you guys want in?”

  “I heard that!” Jackson snapped from his spot across the table. “Do you guys want to lose him? Fuck waiting for the detail—go in now!”

  Ellery tried to shush him, holding his hand up to the phone. “Do you want them to know you’re my informant?” he mouthed, and Jackson scowled.

  “Don’t give a shit,” he snarled.

  “I thought you wanted out of it!”

  “I did until they fucked it up! Give me the damned phone.”

  “Get your own phone!”

  Jackson flipped him off, and Ellery practically crowed.

  “Cramer?” Kryzynski prompted. “You there?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go in tonight?” Ellery asked, giving Jackson a significant look.

  “We’re not sure what we’re facing—”

  “One man, armed with a bowie knife and possibly police issue,” Jackson said in an undertone. “A sniper could get him—two guys in gear could get him. Sending the whole force in is ridiculous.”

  “One man with a bowie knife and a pistol,” Ellery relayed. “He’s operated so far with stealth. We think he had a substance abuse problem before Bridger got arrested, and it’s gotten out of control in the past couple of weeks.”

  “Probably because he’s surrounded by heroin,” Jackson muttered.