Red Fish, Dead Fish

by Amy Lane

  There were a surprising number of green markers for such a still mass of bodies.

  “The smell is something special,” Ellery said tightly as they walked in.

  “I’ve never been so grateful for a head cold in my life,” Jackson said truthfully. “It was amazing when I was here before—and even better stoned.”

  “Well, let’s hear it for mucus,” Ellery muttered, and Jackson heard the natural sarcasm defense system kicking in. Good.

  “Okay—this table wasn’t kicked over,” Jackson told him, wanting to make the trip brief. He could see Ellery’s eyes starting to linger on some of the red-marked bodies, including Jackson’s black-tongued friend in the corner. “See the wreckage?” The buckets full of chicken bones had been hurled over the room and all the product that had been slithering off the table scattered with it. The table itself—a cheap laminated wooden one—had shattered up against the wall, and pieces of it still decorated some of the stoned junkies in the corner.

  One of whom was looking at Jackson with semilucid eyes.

  Jackson walked carefully, disturbing as little as possible. He glanced at the empty spot by the wall across from the couch, the place he’d sprawled, back against the wall, and stared at the dead man in the hall entrance while Owens had defiled him.

  Jackson wasn’t there anymore.

  He wasn’t that man, stoned and helpless.

  He was sick as a fucking dog, maybe, but he was ambulatory, and he had shit to do.

  The guy in the corner was Owens’s type, actually—dirty and pretty—his tightly curled hair only slightly grown out from a scalp trim and the soft, faded brown of his skin paled by drugs and malnutrition. He still had a sweet twist to his full lips when he smiled, but the look he sent Jackson from pale brown eyes was frightened.

  “Think I’ll clean up in jail?” he asked wistfully.

  “If you want to,” Jackson told him truthfully. “But they’ve got bigger fish to fry. They may catch and release you after a trip to the doc.”

  The kid swallowed, and his chin wobbled. He sent a hunted look around the house and shuddered. “This is hell,” he whispered. “I don’t want to come back.”

  “Then you need to not use,” Jackson said, keeping his voice gentle. “It’s as simple as that, buddy. But I know it’s not easy.”

  The kid shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of a grimy hand. “The guy in here, giving out drugs… he was crazy.” He picked at something dried and white on his shirt. “He… he….”

  Jackson shuddered. “You’re lucky he didn’t do more,” he said. “If he’d had time, it would have been worse.”

  Kid nodded. “I saw him do worse. He… he was pissed. Got back from somewhere, had a chick by the arm. Slammed her into the wall and broke up the table. Then….” The kid started to cry harder. “He tore her clothes. Pretty blouse, ripped it. Boobs hanging out. Ripped her pants down.” He started to sob. “Was just so glad he left me alone.”

  Jackson cupped the back of his head tenderly. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “Can’t be a hero when you’re stoned.”

  “I don’t want to be stoned no more.”

  Jackson nodded. “Here—Ellery, give me a card.” He reached out, knowing Ellery wouldn’t ask. “Hold on to this,” he said sternly, and the kid nodded. “They’ll take you to the hospital. Feed you, wash you, clean you out. Ask you questions. When you’re done, call this number. We’ll get you into a program. Give you a job or a place to live when you get out. You got help. Okay, kid?”

  “You don’t even know my name,” the kid whispered.

  “What’s your name?”

  “AJ. AJ Collier.”

  “That’s okay, AJ…. Everyone needs a little caring for when they’re down. Call that number. Ellery’ll answer. He sounds like an asshole, but he’s all right.”

  The kid smiled a little. “Anything I gotta do for this help?” He looked Jackson up and down suggestively, and Jackson rolled his eyes.

  “Kid, I’m at frickin’ death’s door. If I was feeling better, I’d have him pinned to the wall. So no. Not that kind of deal. Just call. Ask for help. Sometimes it’s that easy.”

  “Oh.” The fact that he looked disappointed was actually sort of good for Jackson’s ego. “Anything I can do for you?” he asked wistfully.

  “Did he say anything? After he was done with the girl?” Girl. Full-grown woman, rendered helpless, made an object. Jackson wished he could make her day better with a business card and some soft conversation. A rescue and vengeance would have to do.

  “Said she’d better not throw up in the car,” the kid said, shivering. “Said he was hungry and wanted some fucking chicken.”

  Jackson grunted. “That’s not ordinary chicken,” he said softly, catching Ellery’s eye. The chain wasn’t widespread—only a couple of them existed in the area. “We’ll use that when we look at Bridger’s map.”

  Ellery nodded, looking a little green around the gills.

  “Kid, you ready to stand up yet?”

  AJ shook his head. “No. Sorry, man. Just… just gonna hafta be wheeled out with the other vegetables.”

  Jackson closed his fingers tightly over the card. “Call us. You get done giving your statement, going to the hospital, call us.”

  He smiled and wiped his face again. “Fucking comedown,” he explained. “Wrecks me every time.”

  “Make it your last one,” Jackson begged, and Ellery’s hand under his arm was maybe the only thing that got him to his feet, pulled him out of that stinking house, saved him from trying to save one last soul.

  “There were blond hairs on the corner of the wall,” Ellery said as they hit daylight and fresh air. Jackson breathed shallowly through his mouth, trying to get the taint of the house out of his lungs and mucus membranes. “A little bit of blood. Backs up the kid’s story.”

  “You’ll be nice to him if he calls?” Jackson knew Ellery was a good person, but you couldn’t always hear it in his voice.

  “You think he will?” Idle curiosity—nothing more.

  “I hope so. Is that wrong?”

  Ellery squeezed the back of his arm and let go. “One of the reasons I love you,” he said, almost too softly for Jackson to hear.

  But Jackson did hear, and a corner of his heart warmed, because he was starting to believe it.

  “What time is it?” Jackson asked, not able to deal with emotion now.

  “Almost eight—Jade should be at the office by the time we get there.”

  Jackson grunted and spotted the thermos of—ugh—tea left on the hood of the cop car they’d stood behind. “Can we stop for coffee?” he asked pathetically.

  “Did you drink all your Theraflu?” Ellery asked, all sweetness.

  “Absolutely.” Was a blatant lie. You might as well ask Billy Bob if he’d taken his vitamin.

  Ellery got to the car first and shook the thermos, then handed it to Jackson. “It’s full.”

  “Some random person stopped and filled it with muck,” Jackson said with a straight face. “For all you know, there’s more heroin in here than Owens pumped into me two days ago. This could be a trap. I could die.”

  Ellery’s scowl was a thing of epic beauty. “So help me, Jackson, if you end up in the hospital because of your own damned stubbornness, I won’t visit you. I won’t even text you on the phone. I’ll call Kaden and he’ll come visit you, and Jade will come visit you, and my mother will come visit you, and you’ll be eyeballs-deep in relatives who want to scream in your face and nobody to give you a blow job.”

  Jackson grinned at him, knowing his eyes were running and his nose was swollen and not caring. “You’ll always want to give me a blow job. Now stop complaining and let’s go. We need to search out Popeyes fried chicken. As far as I know, there’s only six in Sacramento, and one’s damned close to the med center, which could give us a clue.”

  “One’s near Florin Road too,” Ellery cautioned, and Jackson cursed his muzzy head. Florin Road was probably
where Owens had stopped on his way to the Meadowview house—and there were plenty of places in between.

  “We need to check those transcripts,” Jackson mumbled. “We’ve got Popeyes and Bridger’s beat—”

  “District Three,” Ellery supplied.

  “Which takes us back to Stockton Boulevard. There’s something in there—God, I hope so. He needs someplace private, ’cause if she’s still kicking, she’s going to be making a helluva lot of noise.”

  “Lots of those houses have basements,” Ellery cautioned. “Easy to muffle a basement.”

  Jackson groaned, and his head throbbed some more. He couldn’t fuckin’ think. Dammit.

  “Do you think someone tampered with the Theraflu?” he asked, hating himself.

  “No,” Ellery snapped. “It was as untouched when we got back to it as it was when you were supposed to be drinking it. There was even an undisturbed ring in the dust on the car.”

  Jackson reached for the untouched thermos, opened the top, and glugged it down.

  Tepid, the shit tasted vile.

  “Now get me coffee and an ibuprofen,” he bitched, knowing he was bitching and not caring. “I need to fucking think.”

  Ellery, bless him, just nodded and headed for a Starbucks drive-through, while Jackson leaned his head against the window and tried to keep his mouth closed while breathing.

  He fell asleep while Ellery was in the drive-through line and didn’t wake up until they pulled into the parking lot near the office.

  In the cup holder near Jackson’s elbow steamed a to-go mug of slippery elm tea.

  Jackson took a gulp of it anyway, trying to wake up. Unlike the Theraflu, the mix of anise and grape wasn’t vile, but it wasn’t coffee either. He took another gulp, trying to decide if the anise flavor was pleasant or not, and decided that not having a flaming headache was a bonus.

  “Are we going to live?” Ellery asked, acid in his voice.

  “Probably not—but I may like you more than anyone else I’ve ever killed.”

  Ellery rewarded him with a cackle, and together they managed to get out of the car and walk to the office.

  Jade greeted them both with flat, unhappy eyes. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Jackson grimaced. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you—”

  “And you’re sick.” She dismissed him with a sniff and turned her glare on Ellery. “You said he was home and okay. You did not mention the looking like ass and sick as hell. You’re fired.”

  Ellery scowled. “I said he wasn’t dead. That in no way implies ‘okay.’ That was all you.”

  Jackson watched her eyes widen, and she shot him a furtive glance. Her voice softened, and her lower lip trembled, and Jackson felt like a complete and total asshole because she was hurt.

  “What happened?”

  Jackson pulled up a corner of his mouth and tried to not be pathetic and sad. “I’m fine,” he said, touching her cheek with a battered knuckle. “There’s a cop out there who’s not so lucky. We need to find her, Jade. Did you pull out the transcripts Ellery asked for?”

  She bit her lip and nodded. “Yeah. In his office.”

  Jackson reached out his hand, and she smacked his laptop into his grasp just as she said, “Mr. Cramer, can we speak?” without breaking eye contact with Jackson.

  He grimaced. They were going to “speak” about him, and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop that from happening. Ellery with his functional little psyche and openly communicating family was going to tell Jade all about his night, and Jackson was in no position to argue.

  Fine. He rolled his eyes at her and stalked down the hallway without giving Ellery a backward glance.

  By the time Ellery walked in, looking almost as tired as Jackson felt, Jackson had the file spread out on his tiny table and a copy of a travel atlas page, heavily red marked, in front of him.

  Jackson glanced up from the puzzle he was building with hints from Bridger and his own knowledge of the area and leveled a flat look at him as he nonchalantly hung his coat up and set his briefcase on his desk. Jackson was still wearing the scarf Ellery had draped over his neck, and the gloves were stuffed in his pockets, and knowing that Ellery had given up his own comfort to see to Jackson’s ameliorated some of his irritation.

  “And…?”

  Ellery glanced at him, obviously fighting a look of sheepish apology. “And what?” he asked primly.

  “Jade said….”

  “She cried,” Ellery said shortly.

  Jackson grimaced, sucking air in through his teeth. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know you are,” Ellery muttered, looking away. “That’s why I took the meeting.”

  Jackson blinked, not sure he would have phrased it that way, and Ellery took the conversation out of his hands. “What do you have so far?”

  Jackson looked at his map and Post-it Notes and tried to focus his thoughts. “Okay, so here’s what we know. Popeyes—so, Stockton Boulevard or Florin Road or off of Auburn. Now, my first thought would be Stockton Boulevard, because Luanne Chisholm was found near here.” He circled a vacant field not far from the Shriners Hospital. “But the thing is, that was Bridger and Owens’s beat. Bridger only suspected Owens was a scary fuck—he didn’t see him actually kill anybody. So wherever Owens is killing, it’s not necessarily where he was working. I went back into your files on Owens and realized that a lot of the people we thought fit the profile were found here.” He circled the area between the I-80 split, much of which was occupied with Arcade Creek recreational area and the Haggin Oaks golf course. Many of the bodies had been found in vacant lots, known druggie haunts, tiny parks in the vicinity. They were all close enough to District Three for Luanne Chisholm to throw them off track—but taken on their own, they had a whole different center.

  “Okay,” Ellery said, pondering. “I get it. He’s in a different place, and here’s our epicenter.” He took a pencil and drew a circle. “Now we know his apartment was not in this place—”

  “But that wasn’t lived in anyway,” Jackson reminded him.

  “Yeah—so this place, it’s got to have some amenities,” Ellery mused, running his finger unconsciously around the lines of the map.

  “A place to shower, a place to shit—he probably has furniture here, something personal,” Jackson agreed. “But bigger than that. A place to… to work too.”

  Ellery frowned. “A studio.”

  “Of course!” Jackson smiled at him and stood up excitedly before the pounding in his head sent him back down. “So, there are warehouses here—” He indicated a section of Watt Avenue near what used to be McClellan Air Force Base. “It’s a little bit outside our target area, but if you look here—”

  “Lots of thoroughfares,” Ellery said, nodding. “And some real prime real estate in that strip.” The place had been dodgy when McClellan had been active—lots of X-rated theaters and shoestring businesses. But once the base had been decommissioned, parts of it had been refurbished to create McClellan Aerospace museum, and parts of it had continued to fall apart. Prime real estate for a drug dealer or a serial killer, most definitely. “He could grab a victim, take him to his studio—”

  “And work,” Jackson said grimly. “He could work.”

  Ellery met his eyes, and they both shuddered.

  “Was that what he was going to do to you?” Ellery asked quietly.

  Jackson nodded. “Yeah.” Out of nowhere he made a connection, a terrible one that he couldn’t escape.

  “I bet,” he said gruffly, “if we ran him by a profiler, we’d find out that he was raised by a Celia, one who died young.”

  Ellery sucked in a breath—as well he might. “It could explain his fascination with you,” he said, voice raspy.

  Jackson frowned at him through bleary eyes. “You’re not getting a cold too, are you?”

  Ellery shook his head—and then rested a trembling hand in Jackson’s hair.

  Oh.

  “I’m fine,” he said, hi
s voice mostly a wish and a prayer.

  “No,” Ellery stated with simple dignity. “You’re not.”

  Jackson closed his eyes. “I’ll be fine,” he said after a moment, hoping it was honesty and not bullshit. “I have to be fine.”

  “Why?”

  “Because first we need to have Crystal go over his financials again.” He yawned. “Not just see if he’s got any outgoing payments to a warehouse space—and I think that’s pretty cheap real estate, so it might just be cash withdrawals.”

  “What else can we look for?” Ellery asked. “And why do you have to do it?”

  “We can look for things like gas station receipts and grocery receipts,” Jackson said promptly. His voice seemed to come from far away, and he took an experimental sip of his half-empty tea. He’d never had slippery elm before—the anise was okay, but the grape was chemical and gross. Still, he couldn’t taste anything that would make the room get smaller, wrapping around him comfortingly. “So, have Crystal run the financials and plot them on this map.” He waved generally. “And I need to do it because Dakin was following me into my own personal hell, and she didn’t need to get sucked into this—”

  “This isn’t your fau—”

  “And because Crystal likes me and responds to me better than you,” he finished grumpily. She didn’t dislike Ellery, but she had a hard time trusting him—said his aura colors were too locked up.

  “But you’re not okay!”

  He pulled some energy out of his socks. “I have to be okay!” he snapped. “Because you and me are all Dakin has, for one—”

  “We have the police looking for her too.” Ellery folded his arms, looking adamant and unconvinced.

  “And because I’ve apparently moved in with you, for another.”

  “Jackson.” Ellery let out the word on a sigh. “That doesn’t make everything better all at once. You know that, right?”

  Jackson grabbed Kleenex out of the box on the bookshelf and used it briefly before rolling it into a teeny, tiny, perfectly formed ball. He stared at the ball for a moment, lost in the hypnotic beauty of its roundness.

  Ellery called this habit “psychotic,” but Jackson had always preferred “antichaotic.” The world was a crapshoot, and at any moment, you could get shot all to crap. The one thing Jackson could control at any given time was the teeny-tiny rolled balls of garbage he generated.