Fish on a Bicycle

by Amy Lane

  It was the shitty little Toyotas that got Jackson. Those were young people’s cars. Young like late teens, early twenties—the age of most of the guys Jackson saw in porn.

  “This is it, indeed,” Galen said, and Jackson could hear the pride in his voice. “Office sweet office. Please don’t go beyond the reception area and the front office. Once you get back into the corridors, you’re headed for the scene rooms and the lockers. And believe it or not, that’s a comfort zone for the models. They expect the people in the room to be there. If a stranger suddenly shows up, well….”

  “You get shitty porn,” Jackson said. “I understand.”

  Henry turned off the ignition and sighed. Jackson and Galen—both conscious of the sun beating down on them—had their doors open and were out in the sweltering parking lot before Jackson even thought to ask.

  “You coming?” Jackson asked.

  Henry groaned and tilted his head back. “God.”

  “Ain’t here,” Jackson muttered. “C’mon, kid. Sex isn’t evil unless you make it evil. I know you must have had some, at some point in your life, or you wouldn’t be so hung up on it! Now get out of the car, and let’s go interview John, and maybe a few more people, with Galen’s permission.”

  “It’s yours,” Galen said. “John can take me home. Henry, just bring the car by tomorrow, and I’ll drive it from here.”

  “Thank you, Galen,” Henry said grudgingly. Then he got out of the car, looking like Jackson had made him do it and he’d never forgive him.

  Jackson didn’t see what the big deal was.

  The offices were very professional, and the receptionist behind the counter—a middle-aged woman with blond-streaked hair, a worn face, and a warm smile—told them to make themselves at home and then offered them cookies. She was kind to Henry, respectful of Galen, and welcoming to Jackson. If Jade wouldn’t have roasted Jackson’s ass slowly on a bed of hot coals, Jackson might have asked her to come work for Ellery. Galen went into an adjacent office and brought out a guy a little older than Jackson, with shaggy red hair, green eyes, and a tan that had probably been made possible by a lot of running wearing SPF 3000. Right behind him was a sandy-haired man in his late twenties, average height, with solid stringy muscles, who looked like he worked out a lot but his frame just wasn’t going to go gargantuan. He had friendly blue eyes and the sweet, puzzled smile of a Labrador retriever.

  “Reg, John, this is Jackson Rivers. Jackson, this is John Carey, owner of Johnnies, and Reg Williams, our promotions director. Reg, Jackson wants to talk to you about what happened when you and Bobby ran into Scott a couple weeks ago.”

  Reg—the guy with the sweet blue eyes—swallowed and rubbed his stomach. “I hate that guy,” he mumbled.

  “Yeah,” John said soberly. “You should. Not a nice guy. But….” He looked up at Galen for confirmation, and Galen nodded. “But Scott was killed last night, and they’re worried that Henry might have done it. We need you to tell us what happened so we know before the cops ask.”

  Reg looked at Jackson, temporarily confused. “But isn’t he a cop?”

  “No, Reggie,” Galen said. “He’s a friend.”

  Reg’s face lit up a little. “That’s good. He looks like a cop—scared me a little. Henry scared me a little too, but that’s ’cause he was a soldier.” Reg gave Henry a shining look. “But he’s the good kind. What do you want to know?”

  Jackson looked up at Mrs. Roberts in reception and shrugged apologetically. “Is there any way we can go into one of the offices and talk?” he asked Galen.

  Moments later, he was ushered into what was apparently John’s private office, and it wasn’t bad. Wood paneling and a cream-colored carpet made the place neutral and restful, but brightly colored photos on the wall kept it from being bland. Surprisingly enough, the pictures weren’t porn—although some of them were shots of the guys who worked there, but with their clothes on. Mostly they were just cityscapes, pops of color—a flag against a heartbreak blue sky, Raley Field on a cloudy day, the construction above the Golden 1 Center, promising commerce and events.

  It was a good place—one that saw the beauty of this city and not the crappy parts Jackson usually saw. He approved.

  “So, Scott’s dead,” Reg repeated as they closed the door. He looked to John apologetically. “I’m not sad?”

  John nodded like that was okay. “I’m not even sure his parents were sad,” he said grimly.

  Jackson cut a quick look to him, and John didn’t make him wait.

  “Scott’s father is rich—he’s a doctor, one of the ones who’s on the board of everything and on every committee. It always makes you wonder who’s taking care of his patients, right?”

  Jackson nodded, and John looked away and sighed.

  “Or who was looking after Martin Sampson when he was a kid,” John added.

  Galen rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you fell for the ‘poor little rich boy’ routine!”

  John cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. Galen narrowed his eyes back.

  “You didn’t become a blackmailing scumbag—”

  “Just a drug addict,” John said levelly. “Let’s just say he used it as bait. We’d sit in this office and do lines and complain about our shitty childhoods until I almost lost my company.” He looked Jackson in the eye. “He was very manipulative. That’s not to say there wasn’t a poor little lost boy in there. It’s just that he knew how to get his way, and then how to fuck you for it.”

  “He’d fuck your earhole,” Reg confirmed. “He had a nine-inch dick, and he’d put that thing anywhere he thought it would get him off.” His expression grew sullen. “He didn’t much care about us getting off, which was sort of stupid, right? ’Cause that was part of his job.”

  Jackson nodded—that would be part of the job—and tried hard not to imagine a guy with a nine-inch dick fucking Reg in the ear.

  “So tell me about the day you saw him near the dumpster.”

  Reg nodded. “You should probably ask Bobby about this. He’s way smarter, and he’s got a better memory. He’s at a job site across town, though. He works construction most of the time ’cause he’s real good.”

  “Well, if we need any more details, I will. But how about you tell me first.” Jackson smiled his most winning smile and got sunshine back in return.

  “Bobby and I were there to get Lance—he’s our friend. Anyway, we were going out on the river. Bobby worked on a houseboat for his boss, and his boss wanted us to come ride down river with him, ’cause it was a sunny day and everything.”

  “Did you make it to the boat?” Jackson asked, and more sunshine. Gah! Someone should try to bottle that smile. Reg was probably the plainest of the Johnnies models—his hair was receding a little, his almond-shaped eyes a little lost, his cheekbones a little low—but if he could have smiled like that in every scene, Jackson was pretty sure the world wouldn’t need porn.

  “It was a real good day, after Henry threw Scott in the dumpster,” he said, then clapped his hand over his mouth.

  Jackson shook his head. “It’s okay, Reg. I already knew that part. Just tell me, what led up to it?”

  Reg took a couple of deep breaths and tried to calm down. “Well, we’d pulled in—we were driving my shitty Camaro that day. It’s orange, but it has AC—and Bobby threw his arm around my shoulders as we were walking and told me I had to remember sunblock ’cause otherwise I burn really bad.” He nodded seriously at John. “Not like you do, Johnny, but my nose’ll peel, and I’m not good with pain.”

  “You shouldn’t have to be,” John said, and Jackson heard it then. Love, like for a brother or a friend or a nephew. John loved this guy, and had probably watched over him for a lot of years. This was why John wanted to help the guys find life beyond porn, to help guys like Reg who couldn’t always think with their words.

  Reg smiled shyly and kept going. “So Scott calls my name from behind the dumpster. At the flophouse, they got those ones behind the walls, right? S
o you usually gotta have a key to open them. And I didn’t know Scott was a real bad guy then. I guess there was lots John didn’t tell me about ’cause I’m not bright, but I didn’t really like Scott anyway. So he calls my name, and I sort of pull back so Bobby can protect me and say ‘Hiya, Scott,’ sort of quiet-like, and he laughs super mean. Then he asks me if I’m still screwin’ for a living, which is sort of a shitty way to put it, you know?” He paused for a second. “You know I was a porn star, right?”

  Jackson nodded. “You made real pretty porn,” he said, hoping that wasn’t going to get him kicked out but sensing Reg needed some approval.

  Reg lit right up then, like someone had just told him he’d won a prize for being a nice guy. “Thank you! I thought so! So it wasn’t like that was a real nice thing to say. Anyway, Bobby said, ‘What’re you doing here, Scott?’ And I wondered that myself, and Scott gets this sort of nasty look on his face and says he’s got the cure to all John’s ills right there. He wanted to know if me or the other guys at the flophouse would buy from him, and I said no, ’cause John runs a clean house.”

  “What’d he say back?” Jackson prompted.

  “He said that was John’s problem, it wasn’t necessarily the guys’ problem. Then Bobby said he needed to leave, because nobody there wanted what he was selling.” Reg swallowed and looked at John unhappily. “And then he got in my face and started yelling, saying he knew I needed to get high because my sister was crazy and anyone with my problems had probably done buckets full of drugs—which isn’t true. I couldna taken care of my sister for as long as I did if I took drugs. She almost killed me, like, three times, and all I was doing was trying to sleep and live my life!”

  Reg’s voice pitched unevenly, and John wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

  “We know that, Reg. You did real good with Veronica. That’s not your fault. That was just Scott trying to fuck your earhole, right?”

  Reg nodded. “Yeah, ’cause that was Scott, right? Anyway, so what he said upset me, and Bobby got between me and Scott, and he looked like he was gonna fight him. And he can’t ’cause he went to jail for fighting once already. I know he said jail was fine, but I don’t want him to go, even for a short time, right? So I started hollering, and then Henry came out of the apartment—we were real close. And he goes charging down the stairs, and the rest of the guys come out, except for Lance, who wasn’t ready yet, which isn’t like Lance. But Henry comes charging down the stairs, and he sort of… you know. Sizes up the situation, like a cop!” Reg beamed at Jackson. “Like you, really. And then before Bobby can even tell everybody to calm down, Henry just sort of runs across the parking lot and decks him.”

  Jackson looked at Henry with his eyebrows up. “Just decked him.”

  Henry swallowed. “Yessir.”

  “You didn’t stop to ask any questions, did you?”

  “He had packets of pills in his hand, and Reg was crying!”

  Reg stared at his feet in tennis shoes. He was dressed casual—cargo shorts and a shirt with a collar—but Jackson got the impression of Reg taking this job seriously—and taking these questions seriously as well.

  “I was crying,” he confessed. “That’s not wrong. But Henry yelled at him, called him Sampson, which was weird ’cause I knew his name was Scott, and then Henry decked him.”

  “He did, did he?” Jackson said, eyes on Henry.

  Henry looked away. “I did.”

  “And he threw him in the dumpster after that. Was the dumpster open?”

  “No, but Henry had the key in his pocket. He had to drop some trash as he ran down the stairs. Bobby told me later that he was probably on his way out anyway.”

  “That’s true,” Henry said hurriedly, as though to make up for the blatant lie hanging between them.

  “What happened after that?” Jackson asked.

  “Well, Lance came running down the stairs then. He was all dressed and ready to go out on the boat. It looked like he’d showered, so I figured that’s where he was.”

  Jackson’s eyes didn’t leave Henry’s. “Well, you’re probably right,” he said, a suspicion forming in his stomach. A couple of them, really, all vying for attention. “So Lance got in your car, and you took off?”

  Reg nodded. “Yeah. Henry told us to go, and the rest of the Johnnies guys are sort of buff, and Scott’s gotten a little thin. Henry said go, and Bobby said he thought everybody could take care of themselves. I guess none of us is real fond of cops, not after last summer.”

  Jackson nodded, curious, but needing some time in the car with Henry. “Someday, Reg, you and me can have a beer and you can tell me about last summer—how’s that?”

  Reg lit up again, and Jackson thought he would make that a promise. “Really? Like a friend? ’Cause Bobby’s getting friends from construction, and I got friends in Johnnies, but I don’t get a chance to make friends who don’t work here, and….” He looked embarrassed. “That’s a little weird.”

  Jackson made sure his smile was as close to radiant as he could make it. “Nothing weird about liking the people you work with. Here.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the plain business card Jade had made him. It had the not-yet-installed business line on it, but Jackson took a pen from John’s desk and wrote his cell phone number. “You call me any time you want a friend. I can’t promise I’ll be able to come over, but it’s never wrong to ask.”

  It was like he’d given the guy a Christmas present. “Really?”

  “Sure. My boyfriend’s got a big house with a pool. I’ll try to have you over someday.”

  “Did you hear that, John? Someone’s got a pool besides you!”

  “That’s pretty awesome, Reg,” John said, eyeing Jackson with speculation. “Do you mind if I walk Mr. Rivers out? Assuming he’s done, of course.”

  “No, that’s fine. I got to put his number in my phone.”

  “Ellery has my numbers,” Galen said, easing himself down into what looked like an orthopedic chair as they left.

  “Good to meet you, Galen. Remember, let us know if anything goes down.”

  John practically had his hand on the small of Jackson’s back, he was so hot to get out of there. As soon as they cleared the office, he said, voice hard, “You had better mean that.”

  “Be his friend? Of course. He’s a sweet guy.” Jackson shrugged. “He… he just seems like he could use as many people as possible on his side.”

  John nodded and swallowed. “As long as you’re on his side.”

  “Reg’s side? Absolutely.” He gave Henry a dirty look. “Lying liars that lie? Not so fucking much.”

  Henry had the grace to look away, and John caught the byplay.

  “What’d Henry lie about?”

  “How’d you know him?” Jackson asked, voice hard. “Sampson. Scott.”

  Henry gave John a surreptitious look tinged in shame. “Can we talk about this somewhere else?”

  “Nope.” Jackson got out his phone. “And I’m not getting in the car again with you until you tell me what’s doing.”

  “But my case!” Henry cried, sounding genuinely panicked. “Man, Rivers, I will tell you anything you want—just don’t….” He gave John a look that was half shame and half defiance. “Not here.”

  Jackson got sort of a sick feeling in his stomach. “Outside,” he muttered. “In the car. Goddammit!”

  Jackson gave John a nod, said a sweet goodbye to Mrs. Roberts, and stalked toward the car in the blistering heat. He got halfway there when his cell phone rang, and he swore under his breath and answered it because he’d promised Ellery he would.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, I called Toe-Tag so you can get a look at the body. Do you need me down there?”

  Jackson swallowed and tried not to throw up his lunch and frozen yogurt. “Naw. Fine. How’s your end of things?”

  “I got AJ to go bother the office of the apartment complex for the video from last night. He says the cops haven’t gotten to it yet, and the manag
er is cooperating. He has it on a thumb drive and is running it back.”

  Oh. Smart. “The cops haven’t asked for it?” That did not bode well. “Why in the hell not?”

  “I have no idea, Jackson! Do you need me at the morgue or not?”

  “Wait—they took him to the morgue? Wouldn’t that mean they’d tried to resuscitate him?”

  “Well, I guess the body was pretty fresh when Henry found it. He called 911, so an ambulance got the body, not the coroner’s bus. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s at Toe-Tag’s. He called me—”

  “Why’d he call you?” Jackson asked suspiciously.

  “Why do you think he called me? Because you haven’t been down there to see him since….” Ellery’s voice dropped. “November. His house, yes, but he knows. He wanted to give me a heads-up.”

  “I’m fine,” Jackson said tightly. “I’ll catch a Lyft.”

  What he really wanted to do was work off some energy, but he figured a Lyft would be fine.

  “Okay, if you’re sure—”

  Jackson hung up on him, painfully aware it was a childish move and Ellery didn’t deserve that, but he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He looked up at Henry and glowered.

  “Go back to your apartment building or go visit your brother or whatever. I’m catching a Lyft to Med Center—”

  “I thought you wanted to know the truth?”

  Jackson scowled at the kid. “Of course I want to know the truth. But I’m in a shitty-assed mood right now, and it’s not going to get better—”

  “But what are the cops going to think if they talk to Reg?” Henry asked plaintively.

  “They’re going to think you’re guilty as balls! But I gave you all fucking afternoon to talk, and you didn’t because you thought Reg wasn’t going to remember that you knew who Sampson was—by name—before you decked him. But he did. Which means his boyfriend will too. And that means you’re fucked. And now you want to play nice?”