by Amy Lane
“Oh Jesus. What kind of uniform?”
“Dress blues. Three stripes. Silver oak leaves at the shoulders.”
“Navy? There was a Navy commander in Sacramento? What the fuck?”
Jackson so didn’t want to involve Mack in that part. “We have an idea,” he said reluctantly. “But mostly we just want to get the girl off. She’s a good kid, Mack. If we can make a case saying she didn’t do it without involving the actual perp—”
“But Jackson! That guy deserves to have charges brought up! I know you’re working for a defense attorney, but usually you think bigger than this!”
Augh! Jackson really treasured Mack’s good opinion. Their hookup days were long gone, but he was one of the few people Jackson called a steady friend over the last nine years.
“Can we talk when you get here?” he asked, reluctant to talk on the phone.
“What makes you think I’m coming to check it out?” Mack countered, all suspicion.
“I can hear you getting dressed. I’ll send you the address—but hurry. The owners, the people with the kids, are out, and it’s just me, standing on these nice people’s yard, looking like an asshole.”
“That’s you pretty much every day, you know that, right?”
“Fuck you.” In the background, Jackson heard water running. “ETA?”
“Twenty minutes. Don’t let the car go anywhere.”
Jackson looked at the placement of the Lexus—cattywampus, directly behind the minivan, in case they tried to sneak by on the one-and-three-quarter-lane driveway.
“Way ahead of you,” he said, feeling cocky for the first time in forever. “See you soon.”
He continued to take pictures, keeping an eye on his surroundings. Somebody lived here. There was enough room in the driveway for another car, so either the family was coming back from somewhere, or only one parent had left and everybody else was in the house. Jackson wasn’t going to risk his biggest piece of evidence disappearing.
He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t surprised when, ten minutes after he got off the phone with Mack, a cream-colored Volvo sedan pulled up the driveway, honking impatiently when it became clear Jackson was parked like an asshole.
Jackson nodded to the driver of the car dispassionately and gestured for him to walk over to where Jackson stood, leaning against the Lexus.
“This is my property!”
Jackson eyed the midsized, stocky young father and tried not to judge. He looked pretty successful for someone in his early thirties. This wasn’t the sort of area where the newly rich or the dot com people moved.
“This is my property!” the guy repeated.
Yeah. Not scared. Volvo-driver’s sand-colored hair was thinning a little over a broad forehead, and Jackson would place his bet on family money and being the very middle of his class in business. Not incompetent, maybe, but the man walked like he was used to being given things—money, cars, houses, enough room to park.
This guy thought those things should be his.
“I know it is,” Jackson said, shrugging. “You’re Cedric Evander, the guy who let Janie Isaacson throw herself under the bus for your kids.”
Cedric gaped at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“Where’s your family, Cedric?”
Evander’s fair skin blotched fairly easily. “On a trip,” he said weakly. “I took them to—”
“Don’t tell me,” Jackson interrupted. “Don’t tell me where they are. Believe it or not, it was a good move, but in the meantime poor Janie is swinging in the breeze while you cover your own ass. How’s that fair?”
“She confessed,” he said, looking away.
“And the dent on your front bumper says that’s bullshit,” Jackson shot back. “Any cop could have looked at that and said, ‘Oh hey, some asshole kicked that in,’ but not one cop on site did, which tells me whoever was in charge of the investigation knows more than you do about who kicked it in.”
“Greaves,” Cedric mumbled. “Officer Paul Greaves.”
“Not Ty Spooner?” Hunh. If the officer on scene had changed, that was interesting. Very, very interesting. Something to tell Mack, at any rate.
“I think he was there, but by the time Marilyn and I got there to pick up the car, Janie was being arrested and Greaves was on scene.”
Jackson nodded like this was protocol. “Don’t know him, which is too bad, because Greaves and I are about to become real fuckin’ personal. Now I don’t want to put you on the spot, and I’m not about getting anybody to name names. We got a lock on this asshole for something else. All I’m here about is getting Janie off. Even you have to admit that’s what’s right.”
Evander recoiled. “That’s not fair!” he said unhappily. “Janie’s wonderful. The kids are devastated, and my wife isn’t fuckin’ speaking to me, okay? But… but—”
Jackson held up a hand. “We’re not going to talk about that,” he said brutally. “But I’m working for her, so you need to just let me do my thing.”
Evander’s head drooped on his neck. “Okay, fine. What thing are you doing, anyway?”
“See this bumper here?” Jackson pulled him around to the front. “What do you think caused that bend?”
Evander took a breath “It’s not a body,” he said after a moment. “I saw someone hit a deer on the highway once. The front of their car—way more damaged than this.”
“Exactly. And Janie wasn’t going fast enough as she left to do the sort of damage that would kill someone on impact. There’s what? Twenty feet to accelerate? I mean, yeah—can still hurt someone, but it would be a lot easier to slow down, to stop, from that distance. The person driving the car that struck down that woman—”
“Mindy Alves.” And to his credit, Evander sounded ashamed. “Her name was Mindy Alves, and she had her two children with her. And there’s nobody to care for them—we knew Mindy. She was a parent volunteer.”
Ugh. This just got worse and worse and worse. “Janie doesn’t deserve to go to prison for this,” Jackson said softly.
Evander’s broad forehead creased, and that air of entitlement disappeared. What was left was a very humble, very frightened husband and father.
“We got a phone call,” he whispered, so low Jackson could barely hear him over the leaf blower two blocks down. “Said better Mindy than my own kids, and just to leave things be.”
Jackson swallowed. Oh, he so did not want to know this. “Which part of proving her innocent without naming the guilty did you not understand?” he asked a little desperately. “Mr. Evander, we don’t know who’s listening!”
But Cedric Evander wasn’t hearing him. “I love that girl,” he said, then grimaced. “Not in the bad way. Like she was my little sister. I mean, she’s a sweet kid. And she did what she did for my own children. And I didn’t want that to be in vain.”
He was sweating in the January chill, and watching his face flush reminded Jackson that he was still wearing his sports coat over his dress clothes and he wasn’t that warm either. As he pulled his blue cashmere scarf—a gift from Ellery—closer around his ears and tried to figure how to shut this guy up, he caught a flash of red out of the corner of his eye.
He scowled. “Mr. Evander, I think that’s my friend coming, but why he’d run the cherry lights I have no id—” An unmarked Buick pulled haphazardly up behind Evander’s car, and just as Jackson identified Mack behind the wheel, he realized the red wasn’t an LED light. It was a tiny laser dot, right above Cedric Evander’s heart.
“Gun!” Jackson shouted, throwing himself on top of Evander. They went down just as a big flower vase exploded right behind Cedric Evander’s shoulder.
Evander grunted as they hit the ground, and Jackson was checking to make sure he was okay when something big thunked him on the back of the head and he blacked out.
HE CAME to on a gurney with a bright light in his eyes.
“No,” he mumbled, trying to sit up. “Oh hell no. No ambulances. My boyfriend’s gonna fuckin’ kill me if he
has to pick me up from the hospital. No. There’s two nurses there that’ll finish the job. Let me up—fuckin’ ouch.”
His head. Oh dear Lord, his head was going to blow up on his shoulders, and what would be left would just twitch and drop.
“My head,” he moaned. “Jesus fucking head grenades on a goddamned maypole, what in the hell was that?”
“A fifty-pound planter,” Mack said dryly next to the gurney. “Or part of it. You fell on top of Evander, and it fell on top of you, bounced off, and smashed his face. It was amazing. I mean, getting shot at with a gun with a scope isn’t new to you, but I defy you to say you get your head taken off by a planter every day.”
“You are an evil, awful little man, and I can’t believe we fucked,” Jackson muttered, then remembered Mack really was out to everybody and was relieved. “Do I have to go to the hospital?”
“X-rays, Mr. Rivers.”
Jackson squinted at the EMT and then grimaced. “Didn’t you patch up my shoulder in November?” He looked like a round, jolly fortysomething elf with thinning blond hair and ruddy cheeks, and he was always so enthusiastic about Jackson’s ability to just go into the hospital and take care of whatever ailed him.
“I did. And you wouldn’t remember this, but I was part of the detail that got you to the hospital about three days later. You are quite the frequent flyer, aren’t you?”
Jackson blinked at him and then just shut his eyes. “How’s Cedric Evander?” he asked Mack, and his words sounded a little slurred to his own ears.
“In a coma—but alive. You saved him from the gunshot, and seriously—who saw the planter coming? But he’s alive. Did you learn anything from him?”
Jackson nodded and opened his eyes, wincing when the light hurt his head. “Closer,” he muttered. “We might be bugged.”
Mack’s surprise was almost comical. Almost.
“Ty Spooner wasn’t the officer he dealt with. Paul Greaves was. And they got a phone call to not say anything about Janie—to let her take the fall. He stashed the wife and kids I don’t know where, and I think it’s better for everyone if we don’t look. Did you see where the shot came from?”
“House across the way is vacant,” Mack said, nodding toward it. “I saw you two go down, called it in, and waited. Heard a door slam, possibly from the back, but….” He shrugged. “Would rather you not bleed out from a head wound while I’m chasing the bad guy, you feel me, Jackson?”
Jackson let his eyes drift down. “You’re a good friend,” he said, meaning it. “Now, do you want to call Ellery for me and tell him to come get his car?”
“Augh!” Mack’s freckled face scrunched up in frustration. “You’re killing me! He’ll kill me! Do you have any idea how much it sucks to pick someone up from the hospital?”
Jackson grunted. “I do not,” he admitted. “I’m usually the one getting picked up.”
“Yeah, I know it.” Mack ruffled his hair without touching his scalp at all, which took some doing. “Rivers, I’ll call your boyfriend, but I hope—I sincerely hope—you never find out what you’ve been putting us through for all these years. You’re a decent guy. I think it’ll hit you kind of hard.”
“Your head hurt?” the EMT said nicely.
“More now than before this asshole opened his mouth,” Jackson told him, sourness in his stomach, his voice, his expression.
“I’m going to give you some IV fluids and some painkillers, and you can have your friend meet you at UCD.”
“They’ve probably got a suite in his name,” Mack cracked, and then he sobered and drew close to Jackson again. “I’ll text sixty dozen people with your info,” he said. “And have them tell sixty dozen more. I know you’re used to going it alone, but not this time. Understood?”
Jackson grunted since he couldn’t nod. “Ellery’ll be happier that way,” he mumbled. “Hey, at least the Lexus didn’t get shot!”
“I SWEAR to God, Ellery, I was just standing there.”
Ellery rolled his eyes, but Jackson could tell by the pallor of his face and the way his knuckles clenched whitely around the chrome of Jackson’s hospital gurney that he was not pleased.
“I mean, I didn’t get shot, right?” Jackson smiled winningly—because technically it was a win, and he saw a corner of Ellery’s mouth twist up.
“That’s immaterial,” Ellery said, and Jackson could see his Adam’s apple bob. “Do you have any other evidence you weren’t being cavalier with your life?”
Times like this when Ellery reminded Jackson of Lucy Satan, Ellery’s mother, were the times Jackson felt most like running for the hills.
“Mack was already there when the shot was fired? I, uh, wasn’t alone.”
For the first time, Ellery made eye contact. “That was on purpose?” he asked, and Jackson would have nodded, but… concussion!
“Yeah. I was taking pictures, and I thought Mack could come and clear up that the car hadn’t struck an actual person, like, immediately, and you could get Janie off at the arraignment, and we could, you know, spend our time on Karl Lacey.”
Ellery made that hissing noise, like Jackson had said something unseemly, and Jackson remembered that, hey, the guy might be taping their conversation.
“So, you didn’t call for backup because of the threat to your life—”
“Which I didn’t know was present!” Jackson protested.
“You called for backup to help with the case.” Ellery pinned him with a worried glare, and Jackson covered those white knuckles with his own fingers.
“It escalated fast,” he said gently. “Baby, I’m used to getting knocked around a bit, but you know. After what I put you through this fall, I’m not gonna do that again if I can help it.”
Ellery nodded, and his voice buckled slightly. “I… I want to wrap you in cotton, and then again in bubble wrap and then in packing peanuts and put you in a big shipping container and send it out to sea so nobody can get you.”
It was a beautiful bit of hyperbole from a man who dealt almost exclusively in facts.
“And the container would sink and I’d drown or suffocate, and you’d miss me in the meantime,” Jackson said, smiling slightly. He bit his lip but kept his gaze even. “And I’d die a little inside from not being free.”
“Yeah.” Ellery turned his hand palm up and captured Jackson’s fingers. “How long you in here for?”
Jackson closed his eyes against the flurry of spots that danced in front of them. “Until I can get out of bed without falling down,” he said honestly. “They expect two days.”
“Hunh.” Ellery let go of his hand so he could drag a chair near the gurney and sit down.
“What does that sound mean?” Jackson asked suspiciously. “I know what it means when I make that sound, but what does it mean when you make that sound?”
Ellery grabbed his hand again. “It means Crystal will be able to check the house out for bugs tomorrow. I, uh, may just spend the night here until that happens.”
“Mm.” Jackson closed his eyes again against his swimming vision. He was suddenly tired, which meant the assessment of a pretty serious concussion with the possibility of a subdural hematoma was probably spot-on, and he hadn’t fought to get up and go anywhere when it had been made. He might not have argued a year ago—but then, he might have argued then, and he might have gone out and chased down a perp when his brain exploded and he died.
He seemed to have more to live for these days.
“Mm what?” Ellery’s voice penetrated his fog.
“Mm I’m tired, and the hardest thing I was supposed to do today was go to church. I wouldn’t mind some company, Counselor, but I’m afraid I’m not up for conversation.”
Ellery gave his hand a squeeze. “Fair enough. You nap. I’m going to talk to Mack and Arizona and see if we can get Janie into protective custody ASAP. I think we’re back in the pressure cooker again.”
“Augh!” Jackson couldn’t even scream to make the sound convincing. “That’s excellent.
Do you think you could hand me that emesis bowl? And then you might want to leave the room to celebrate.”
“Oh, baby….”
He didn’t leave the room, which was humiliating enough. But afterward, and after the nurse came in to assist with cleanup, Jackson was lying in the darkened room wishing he was anyone but Jackson Rivers, ex-cop, disposable boy, when Ellery started smoothing his hair back from his forehead.
Such a simple gesture, but Jackson closed his eyes, soothed by Ellery’s touch—and by the painkillers currently dripped into his arm via IV.
“Ellery?”
“Yeah?”
“You make being me not such a bad thing.”
The kiss on Jackson’s temple warmed him, and he fell into a healing sleep.
Sharks in the Water, Fish in the Air
ELLERY WASN’T particularly glad Jackson had gotten hurt again, but he was glad he was still in the hospital at this particular moment in time.
“How many of them?” he asked, feeling sick to his stomach. He’d been fine when he’d watched Jackson lose his lunch—this was a whole new level of queasy.
“I found three,” Crystal said softly. “Kitchen, living room….” She trailed off apologetically.
“Bedroom,” Ellery snarled. “Any way of knowing how long they’ve been there?”
“No.” She shook her head, holding her small feedback machine in one hand and the three offending transmitters in the other. “But you and Jackson took off on vacation during Thanksgiving, right? I’m betting that’s when they were installed.”
“Don’t they need batteries or something?” He’d read that somewhere—couldn’t remember where.
“Yeah—I’d check your maid service. That’s either who was replacing them or how they got in to replace them. Is it the….”
Ellery groaned. “The same one used by the firm? No. I don’t recognize any of the people.”
“Then probably they just came in and changed stuff out. It’s a good scam—pretend to be a repairman and the maid will let you in. And there’s so many people in and out of the offices—”