Red Fish, Dead Fish

by Amy Lane

  Jackson ran like someone else’s life depended on it.

  He rounded the strip of oleander brush and almost ran dead into a fence. For a moment he geared himself up to climb it, using the faint hope he’d pass out when he got to the top.

  Then Ellery tapped his good shoulder and pointed, and he saw the break in the fence.

  Slipping through was easy, but in the breathless silence after Dakin’s scream, even the slight clink of the wrought iron sounded loud.

  They cleared the wrought iron and ducked under the overhang of the upstairs balcony, trying to still their breathing. Jackson took stock of his surroundings.

  The complex itself was a big capital E. The long bar at the back of the E faced Watt Avenue. The bars at the top and the bottom of the E framed the quads of the complex, with a double row of apartments making up the middle bar. In better times residents could look over the balcony to the pool on this side or, Jackson imagined, a grassy lawn on the other.

  Right now, on this gray November day, the ideal of apartment denizens sharing space peacefully seemed as far away as a warm, comfortable bed and the remote.

  Instead the pool in front of him was full of chilly water with some leaves, looking brackish and cold.

  But oddly clear.

  Jackson squinted at it and then looked at Ellery.

  “Does that look clean to you?”

  Ellery widened his eyes. “He likes to swim?”

  No steam came off the surface, so it wasn’t heated, and Jackson was almost afraid to look closer, in case there were bodies weighted to the bottom. Holding the gun out and down, he ventured a little from the protection of the balcony, peered into the water, and came back.

  “Only a few leaves—and the filter’s on.”

  Ellery’s eyes popped open, and he grimaced. “He washes up.”

  Oh, gross.

  Probably jumped in fully clothed too.

  Somehow the macabre image of Owens rinsing off his sins in a giant baptismal pool of dead dreams was almost as disturbing as the blood he was soaking from his skin.

  They both shuddered and then held absolutely still.

  They could hear it, in the top corner of the complex. “No. No, no, no, no, no….”

  A sobbing, whimpering sort of sound, and Jackson wondered if Owens was going to deliver the death blow.

  Shit.

  “Get her!” he ordered. The pool was oddly shaped—sort of like a big kidney bean, but it didn’t run lengthwise to match the shape of the quad. Instead parts of the pool were shaded by the balcony. He had to run to the center of the quad, trapped and in the open, to fire two shots in the air.

  The whimpers stopped, and Jackson could hear one of the doors slam against the back wall, but he couldn’t see from his position.

  “Rivers!”

  “Right here, asshole!” Jackson called, projecting past the phlegm and the pain. “You wanna come pick on someone not stoned?”

  Overhead, Owens’s face appeared suddenly as the man himself bent at the waist at the shaky wrought iron rail.

  “Jackson!” he said dreamily, that sweet choirboy face lighting up like a supermodel’s on carb day. “Jackson—you came to visit!” His knuckles dripped blood—both his and his victim’s, Jackson would wager.

  “Sure!” Jackson called. “Come on down. We’ll have a party!”

  “You don’t look so good, Jackson. I brought some medicine with me. You want some more?” He winked conspiratorially. “Your mother couldn’t get enough.”

  “Until the end, though, right? You dosed her plenty good at the end!” Jackson had no temper spikes, no painful emotion at the thought of his mother. When everything else in the world felt so fucking dire, it was almost a relief to know that wound was closing, edges meshing together, surface scar not nearly as bad as the divot Jackson would always feel in his soul. But the divot was invisible—only a few people got to see it.

  This ass-clown was not one of those people.

  “Well, yeah,” Owens said, nodding his head like a puppy. “Needed to take my time. You needed to see her, Jackson. Your guy was in your phone—the one I stole. I knew he’d see her, if only she looked alive.”

  “Mission accomplished.” Even better than Owens knew. Heroin family had made themselves obvious because Owens had stepped in and taken over Billy’s operation. Jackson might not have been able to track him down if it hadn’t been for them. “So, uh, here I am. No need to go back in there, right? Just you and me. Hide and seek. Good times!”

  “You’ll try to run away, won’t you?” Owens said rakishly.

  Jackson gave him a death rictus back. “Only if you try to catch me!”

  Without warning, Owens bolted, spinning on his heel and heading for the set of stairs that led from his corner of the building down to ground level. Jackson went sprinting for the far corner of the quad, thinking about the fence—and thinking Ellery would go up the stairs as Owens came down, the better to get Tess Dakin.

  Ellery was already up the stairs as Jackson passed them, and he spun around for a moment to make sure Owens was following.

  He was there, right at Jackson’s heels, and instead of heading for the break in the fence, Jackson went for the set of stairs on the other quad of the complex. Ellery would go up to the pool side, getting Dakin. Jackson would run around on this side like a hamster in a Habitrail, hoping Owens didn’t notice his victim’s escape.

  He got to the balcony and heard Owens start the stairs below him. Jackson was blowing like a manatee in a land race, and he hoped Owens was almost as bad. He used the time it took to make the stairs to sprint to the short hallway—the long bar of the E had a gap between it and the short middle bar—and Jackson had hopes for a laundry room.

  As he lined up to kick the door in, he got a good look at Ellery, emerging from Owens’s apartment, Tess Dakin hanging on to him.

  For a moment they locked eyes, and then Jackson heard Owens hit the landing, and it was time to kick the door in and hope for a miracle.

  Oh God. Even better than a miracle.

  An in-house stair!

  It was like the Winchester Mystery House, a gift to people locked in a life or death chase!

  He hit the stairs running, emerging in a downstairs laundry room, small, white, unadorned as the last one—and tiny as the last one too.

  It took a few kicks to get the door open here, and by the time he did, Jackson saw Owens’s pant leg, crusted with crap at the bottom, emerging from the stairwell.

  Time to get a move on.

  Jackson emerged into the lower hall, sweating and exhausted, just in time to see Ellery and Dakin running across the balcony and heading for the stairs.

  In some desperation, Jackson threw his weight against the door. Anything to keep Owens pinned there, stuck, until Ellery and Dakin slid outside the gate.

  Owens’s first sally against the door almost threw him back into the wall. He gritted his teeth and held on.

  “Give it up, Jackson!” Owens taunted, kicking at the door again. “You’ll never escape this place! That’s why I chose it!”

  “Hell was too warm?” Jackson shouted back. God, Owens was strong. He might have been losing his mental parts, but the rest of him—not degrading yet.

  “It’s got places to hide. You liked to hide, right? ’Cause I knew all the best places to hide to see the best things!”

  “Nothing good to see at my place,” Jackson grunted. The door flew back and hit his shoulder, and he let out a bark of pain before running back toward the empty quad. Ellery and Tess were disappearing through the fence as he ran, and he glanced behind him, making sure Owens was following one more time as he sprinted down the hallway.

  He got to the end of the hall and realized Owens had stopped at some point and gone back the other way.

  Fuck.

  Jackson kept going, checking the end with his gun first as he turned the corner, and then again.

  What he saw made him freeze.

  Ellery had gotten Da
kin out, and she was limping down toward the end of the oleander bushes, beyond the fence.

  But Owens had grabbed him by the collar as he’d tried to get through.

  And now they were face-to-face, a knife in Owens’s hand held at gut level as Ellery stared him down.

  “Rivers!” Owens called out. “Rivers! You’re going to want to face me now! No more rat in a maze, you hear me!”

  Jackson raised the gun and aimed, a clear shot at Owens right in front of him.

  But his hands were shaking. Every throb of his heart pulled the gun out of alignment. And sweat ran too freely into his eyes, making the shot impossible.

  Ellery stood right in his sights at every other heartbeat.

  “Put the knife down!” Jackson called out, lowering the gun slowly, grateful he didn’t drop it. “Put the knife down and come face me!”

  “I did face you,” Owens said sweetly. “I looked at your face, dripping with come, and thought you were beautiful.”

  Jackson’s gorge rose. “Well, you know—if you want to see me that way again, you can maybe start by not making me blow your brains out.”

  “You like this one.” Owens cocked his head and peered at Ellery like a cat analyzing a beetle. Using the tip of the knife, he prodded Ellery’s chin up, then sideways, checking out his jaw, his ears. Prime horseflesh, ready for market. Do we eat it or do we race it? What suits it better?

  “I like all of them.” Jackson wasn’t sure which would be better or worse for Ellery. Would Owens leave him alone, thinking to please Jackson, or kill him to hurt the most? The image of his mother’s body danced in front of his eyes like a macabre puppet. “Let him go.”

  The knife slid a liquid red line just under Ellery’s jaw, and Jackson swallowed his moan. Ellery’s teeth were clenched so hard a vein throbbed in his temple, and Jackson wasn’t sure what sort of mess he would have made of Owens’s body if he had his bare hands on Owens’s face.

  “You like this one best.” Owens looked from Ellery’s taut mask to Jackson, smiling luminously. “That’s a mistake. They teach you, you know. Don’t get attached. Kill your toys, your pets—don’t get attached. I looked through your phone, and I thought, ‘This one—this one knows. You don’t get attached.’”

  “But I did,” Jackson rasped. Fuck it—he couldn’t read Owens. If that knife went deeper, if Owens decided death instead of life, he needed Ellery to hear the truth. “I got attached. That one. That one’s mine.”

  Ellery closed his eyes like he was savoring something bitter, and Owens’s smile went wide, turned into a grin. Too quick for Jackson to follow, he whirled, holding Ellery in front of him, walking them both backward to the stairs. “He won’t be for long. I’ll make him mine. My pet. My toy.”

  Jackson followed slowly, keeping the weapon midway down, ready but not aiming. He was going to have to walk those stairs without a hand on the rail, and he wouldn’t aim at Ellery, not when every muscle in his body shook.

  “You don’t want him,” Jackson said, trying not to pant. The interminable minutes of playing rat bait to Tim Owens’s cat had drained his last. “You like young and dirty and pretty. He’s not young or dirty—you don’t want him.”

  Owens’s eyes lit up, and he caressed Ellery’s cheek with the knife again. Another nick, another thin red line. “But you think he’s pretty. Nobody else does, but you do.”

  “He’s got a line of fucking cops who want his weenie ass,” Jackson muttered with feeling. “And a judge. Don’t even fool yourself. He’s plenty pretty.”

  “Awesome,” Ellery rasped, rolling his eyes and speaking for the first time. “I’m going to die, and that’s the last thing I’m going to hear.”

  “Shut up and don’t argue,” Jackson hissed. “I’m working here.”

  “You’re so sweet!” Owens crowed, delighted. “Will you be as sweet to him when I’ve been inside him with a bowie knife?”

  “You just said you don’t want him,” Jackson baited, sweat breaking out all over his body, running down his wrists, making the gun hard to hold. “Don’t you want inside me? Don’t you want to fuck every hole in my body? You were getting ready for it, remember? If you’d just been able to hold your wad for another minute, you coulda had my pants around my ankles. Go you.”

  Owens took a deep, shuddering breath and almost dropped the knife. “I wanted you so bad,” he breathed. “Would you really give yourself like that?”

  “Sure,” Jackson tossed, like the thought didn’t make him want to run shrieking. “Bend over, blood for lube, go to it. All yours.”

  Owens cleared the landing and—good soldier that he was—turned his back to the wall, Ellery in front as a shield.

  “You are giving him a boner,” Ellery muttered, disgust dripping from his voice.

  “Yeah,” Jackson conceded. “Figured. I mean it.” He made it to the landing too and turned his back to the wrought iron—but not before he sighted the pool. Very slowly he began to edge to his left, watching as an enraptured Owens did the same, keeping Ellery between them.

  “You do,” Owens acknowledged. “See? That’s why you don’t get attached. If you weren’t attached, I’d be dead already.”

  One more step. One more. There they were. Lined up to where the pool sat under the balcony. Good.

  Jackson thought about the day before, how he’d been planning to take his cat and disappear in a corner to die. “If I wasn’t attached, I’d be dead already,” he said, the truth and the irony and the pain all blending into one big ache of body, heart, and soul. He started to crouch, and Owens sliced the knife along Ellery’s upper arm. Ellery let out a gasp, and Jackson froze.

  “Slowly,” Owens ordered, and the dreamy heroin addict disappeared, replaced by the hard-eyed military man. “I can kill him at any time.”

  Jackson clenched the gun so hard his knuckles turned white. “Let him go,” he said, straightening. “And don’t hurt him again.”

  “No, no—put it down. Now.” He slid the knife under Ellery’s jaw again, red-stained from the wound that saturated his shirt. Ellery’s breathing came fast and hard as he tried not to sob.

  Jackson would kill Owens for this if he had to gouge his thumbs into Owens’s eyes and squish through his rancid brains.

  “On three,” Jackson ordered, praying for control. He squatted down. “One.” Owens took the knife from Ellery’s throat. Jackson set the gun on the worn Astroturf that coated the landing. “Two.” Owens dropped the arm holding Ellery around the shoulders. Jackson stared at him for a moment, and just as he was relaxing his fingers from around the trigger, he shouted, “Run, Ellery, run!”

  Ellery, who never obeyed a fucking order ever, sank to one knee and grabbed Owens around one leg as he charged forward. Jackson stood, dropping the gun as he took the brunt of Owens’s stumbling tackle. He felt the knife shoving at gut level, slicing through the Kevlar, his clothing, and the top layer of skin and fat on his stomach as Owens threw his weight into the stab. With a terrible creak and a busted rusting bolt, the iron behind Jackson’s ass started to give way. Jackson used one foot to pivot while Owens dug for his vitals, trying to find the bottom edge of the vest with the knife.

  “You lied!” Owens screamed, pretty face revealed in madness, teeth rotting toward the back, pores black and grimy from malnutrition and abuse.

  “I want to live, asshole!” Jackson screamed back and with the last of his strength swung them both around, crashing into the wrought iron again. The extra force broke the section off, dumping them both one story below, into the icy water of the kidney-shaped pool.

  The freezing assault on his feverish body shocked him. He managed a hard gasp of air before the cold blue closed overhead, and then he tried to relax, let momentum carry him down so he could push off the bottom.

  A terrible pain ripped through his chest just as his feet touched down. His vision blacked, the pain radiating throughout his extremities, and he fought to push off, just a little push and he could inhale, God, take a breath, one burn
ing, searing breath, but it hurt, his shoulders hurt, razor wire carving through his bloodstream with air-deprived red cells. No! As he pitched off the cliff into unconsciousness, the last thing he saw was blood clouding the water and Owens’s face, eyes wide and stunned, as his floating body blocked Jackson’s escape.

  Red Fish

  THE RAILING broke, and the two men tumbled down into the pool.

  And Ellery’s heart stopped.

  Cold. Dead. No heartbeat for Ellery.

  If I hadn’t been attached, I’d be dead.

  Jackson had meant that. Ellery was his life.

  Ellery watched, frozen, as Jackson kicked at Owens in midair, just hard enough for Owens to clip the cement edge of the pool with the back of his head when he landed. Jackson plunged into the water, Owens flopped on top of him, and Ellery didn’t remember taking the stairs after that.

  Oh God, let Jackson not be dead.

  He got to the side of the pool and tried hard not to gag at the spray of gray matter on the far edge. Blood clouded the water, fresh and fountaining from the missing chunk of Tim Owens’s skull, but Ellery couldn’t see any movement.

  Why wasn’t Jackson moving?

  Ellery stripped off his coat, jacket, shoes, and slacks and dove in.

  The cold slammed into his chest, stole his breath, stopped his pulse. Owens’s body floated toward him, eyes open and staring, and Ellery shoved at it, not caring, not even repelled by the blood and the brains souping the water.

  Jackson!

  He was floating toward the bottom, thin ribbons of scarlet flowing from his stomach, arms drawn together to protect his chest.

  Oh God, Jackson—so sick, a raging fever, the race through the complex—his body temperature must have been so high when he hit the water.

  Ellery swam to a crouch behind him, clasped him around the chest, and shoved up with all the strength he had. He cleared the surface and dragged in air—but Jackson remained terribly still, the Kevlar vest making his weight almost actively leaden.