by Amy Lane
The effect he had on Ace was electric.
“Burton?” Ace breathed, and their new friend’s tense, wild-eyed expression melted in pure relief.
“Ace? What the hell—”
In a heartbeat the two were embracing tightly—that muscular, violent kind of hug Ellery had seen Jackson give to Kaden or Mike—men he considered his brothers.
Ace pulled back, mind obviously in a whirl. “Holy fucking God, Burton—is this where the fuck you’ve been all this time?”
Burton shook his head and nodded briefly at Ellery. “Ace? Mr. Cramer?”
“Yes?” Ellery’s curiosity was going to burn a hole through his chest. “Can we help you?”
Burton rolled his eyes. “I’m the one who needs to get you the fuck out of here—and I need to do it quick, because your guys are on their way, and there’s not a goddamned thing I could say to stop them.”
But Ace wasn’t buying the urgency. His own eyes narrowed, and he pinned Burton with a no-bullshit glare that had his friend avoiding his gaze restlessly.
“Sure there was,” Ace said, his voice taking on the flinty tones of an older brother. “You could have talked to Ernie and calmed him down and told him what you were doing here, but that’s not what you did, was it?”
Burton scrubbed at his face with his hand. “Now is not the time—”
“When is the time? When they get here and start setting off land mines?”
“I warned them about those,” Burton said, and Ellery’s bladder relaxed with such startling immediacy he almost wet himself with relief.
“Yeah, whatever. Tell us what you’re doing here, and then tell yourself more lies about your love life.”
Burton swallowed like he’d seen the lecture coming. “Fair enough. Lacey’s crazier than a shithouse rat. That thing I got Ernie out of?”
Ace nodded, and Ellery hoped he’d have time to get the entire story.
“Well, I came back to see what was doing—and I stumbled across this bullshit.”
“I thought Ernie was being targeted by the military—these guys ain’t—”
“They were,” Burton said, voice laced with disgust. “They were military, and Lacey was apparently building a better monster, if you know what I mean.”
“We killed one of those,” Ellery told him. “How many of them are there out there?” It was the question that had been plaguing him and Jackson since Owens had escaped custody in August.
“You so don’t want to know.” Burton shivered. “But what you have to know is that Lacey lost most of his funding about a year ago. He’s still on the military payroll, but they think he’s operating from San Diego, like a good little drone. Fact is, most of the time he’s AWOL with a couple of flunkies covering for him—and when you called him up last year, Mr. Cramer, you poked a hornet’s nest with a cattle prod, if you feel me.”
Ellery nodded. “We got that impression when he started pressuring my mother’s firm. We were not impressed.”
Burton’s face split with a delighted smile. “Son, I’ve been monitoring this asshole’s coms since October, and I’ve got to tell you, your mother is a delight.” A new expression crossed Burton’s face. “And you and Mr. Rivers need to fuckin’ slow down—nobody should have that much sex, that’s all I’m saying. I mean, it worked for you—nobody else wanted to take surveillance on you two, but dude. Dude.”
Ellery refused to blush. “It should have been in the privacy of my own home, thank you very much! And how long before they figure that this isn’t Jackson?”
“Well, it’ll sure tip them off when he gets here, won’t it?” Burton snapped. He took a deep breath and obviously remembered himself. “All I’m saying is you two have to get out of here, and I think I can help you. How’s that?”
“Sounds awesome,” Ellery said. “Do you have time to break down a plan, or are we just going to have to trust you? Oh!” Because he could never be too careful, and he’d just dropped a big piece of info. “Are we being bugged?”
“Yes,” Burton told him, “but since I’m the one in charge of monitoring, you’re safe for the moment. I don’t have a plan just yet, but give me an hour—”
“What happens in an hour?” Ace asked, but he sounded like he knew.
“Dark falls, our guys get here, and all hell breaks loose,” Burton said grimly.
Ace hmmed. “You know, if they brought Jai, there’s almost more of us than them. We could probably take this unit—you know that, right?”
“With Ernie?” Burton’s voice squeaked, and he caught Ellery’s eyes as he tried to get himself back together. “And civilians. No civilians—we need to avoid that. No, you two sit tight.” He pulled out a small transmitter, a green light flickering fitfully in the center. “Here—when this is green, you’re free to talk. When it flashes red, it means someone besides me is listening. If it starts going back and forth, remember your Morse code.” He paused. “You do know Morse code, right, Ace?”
Ace looked disgusted. “No, Burton, they only teach you jarheads that because us Army boys are too fuckin’ stupid to know our dots from our dashes.”
Burton had the grace to look embarrassed. “Sorry, Ace. Red’s a dot, green’s a dash, hear me?”
Ellery and Ace nodded, and Burton checked the door. “I’ve got to get back—they’ll be missing me. Watch the damned transmitter, and be ready!”
And with that Burton slid back through the door, leaving Ellery and Ace alone and baffled. Help was coming—but at what cost?
A Gang of Fish
JACKSON WAS two deep breaths from banging Sonny Daye on the back of the head, throwing him over his shoulder, and forcing him to follow the little flashing light that represented Ellery on the map on his phone.
But Sonny had other ideas.
“We gotta talk to Ernie,” he muttered, climbing in next to Jackson in the SUV. He didn’t even make a move toward the SHO, which told Jackson all he needed to know about who drove the car and who kept the car running. Sonny might keep that thing purring like a kitten, but that kitten didn’t take a dump without Ace.
“I don’t know who Ernie is,” Jackson muttered, starting up the SUV. “Seat belt.”
“Ernie’s fuckin’ Ernie, but he can get Burton on the phone, and that’s who we need. Fuckin’ Burton—that’s his job, right? He bails us out of the shit, right? He fuckin’ backed me up with Galway, he told Ace how to do that other thing—”
“What other thing?”
“None of your fuckin’ business!” Sonny yelled so shrilly Jackson jammed the brakes as he was backing out. They both thumped against their seat belts, and Jackson turned to him slowly, with his first deep breath.
“Scream in my ear one more time and I’ll push you out of my moving vehicle,” he said, meaning every word. “Now I’m going to back out and start for the freeway. You have until the on-ramp to tell me why we need to worry about the two gay guys on Sesame Street, okay?”
He’d managed to get the car in drive before Sonny pulled himself together enough to talk again.
“I thought of Sesame Street too,” he said, voice shaking. “When Burton brought Ernie home. You reckon everybody thinks that?”
“Burt and Ernie are really popular,” Jackson said neutrally. Ellery was traveling southeast—a little toward Vegas, a little toward someplace Jackson didn’t know. He figured he could find the roads, as long as he had a direction, and the one thing—the only thing that kept him from losing his mind, losing it completely, was that they could have killed Ellery but they hadn’t, and they’d apparently taken Ace with them. “Why do we need to talk to them?”
Very carefully, because his first instinct was to stand on the gas pedal, he turned right out of the parking lot and merged into traffic.
“Burton’s a superhero,” Sonny said, so simply and with such faith Jackson wondered if he’d taken his meds today.
“He can fly?” Right lane, pass the guy in front of him, left lane, pass the guy on the other side… his mouth was enga
ged, but his brain was threading the needle, not too fast, not too fast, smooth like butter until they hit the freeway.
“No, asshole! Not like that! Like he was a Marine, but he sort of went off-road, like black ops and shit! Can he fly—Jesus, how stupid you gotta be to drive a car like this?”
“Stupid enough to let you in here with me!” Jackson snarled. He jerked his finger at his phone, which he’d set up on the dash. “See that? They’re heading toward Victoriana, but the minute they turn off, I’m following them unless you stop talking about how stupid I am, got it? What do you mean, black ops?”
“Like black ops!” Sonny snapped back. “He fuckin’ kills people for a living—and if he doesn’t kill them, he covers it up.”
Whoa. “How do you know that?” Jackson demanded. “He sounds like a great guy to have on our team, but how in the hell—” Suddenly the name hit him—it had been in the jacket Ellery had shown him on Sonny Daye. “Lee Burton,” he said, feeling stupid. “He testified in the Galway shooting.”
Sonny nodded, like it would just be natural that Jackson would know that. “Ace knew him. Then, when we got out, Burton… well, he was going off the grid, and he wanted a place. A safe house. People who knew his name. So he gave Ace some money he won betting on Ace in a street race, and Ace built an addition on the house. And it just sat there. Two years. Every now and then, Christmas and such, Burton shows up, looking like hell, and stays in his room for a week or two. Just normal. A roommate. Ace even built him a shower. He’d get his shit together and go back out in the field. Anyway, come November, he shows up with Ernie.”
“Boyfriend?” Jackson asked.
“Vote’s out. Ernie seems to think so. Burton gets this look on his face like he’s suddenly stupid whenever Ernie talks, but as soon as he’s out of the room, it’s like he’s wondering what he drank the night before. Anyway, Ernie’s got a phone. He and Burton text and shit, and Ace has another phone, and they don’t say squat ’cause Ace says that’s not his place. But Ernie can get hold of Burton, and Burton—”
“Knows what to do,” Jackson said. Sonny’s on-ramp appeared and he took it.
“This looks like the way to our house,” Sonny said, hope a fragile thread in his voice.
“Can you call Ernie?” Jackson asked shortly. “Does he need to come with us?”
“He’s got the witching,” Sonny said, just like someone would say “He’s got fallen arches,” and for a minute Jackson was going to kick him out of the car and tell him to take his witchy friend and go to hell.
But… but Crystal.
His friend. The one who’d asked for help just as simply and just as sweetly as a little girl asking for a kitten.
She frequently read his aura—and she was always right.
“How strong?” Jackson asked instead. “Useful if we’re going in after two guys surrounded by guns?”
“He can tell if you’re good,” Sonny told him seriously. “And he can tell if there’s good people or bad people somewheres. Like, last month, Ernie wakes up early, ’cause he sleeps in the day, and tells Alba she didn’t work that day. She takes off and this SUV pulls up, right? Ernie says, ‘They’re bad guys,’ so Ernie and I hide in the house, and Ace and Jai go out and deal with the bad guys. Jai’s a badass, and he was packing, and Ace brought his service pistol and they fixed the car together, but with one of ’em under the car and one of ’em watchin’ the other guy’s back. Ernie and I stayed outta sight until the SUV was gone. Like, Ace got paid and shit, but he and Jai had to power hose the bathroom ’cause there was drugs all over the toilet and he didn’t want no one touching ’em. We waited until Ernie said they were in San Diego and then called the cops. Ace seen guns and shit in the back, and drugs and shit taped to the quarter panels. They got pulled over at a stoplight and there was a shootout and shit—we saw it on the news. They never knew it was us.”
Jackson swallowed hard, feeling the near miss in his bones. “Ace and Jai were pretty smart,” he said, feeling Sonny’s need to hear it.
“He takes care of me,” Sonny said forlornly. “We gotta get him back. Like when he was in a car wreck couple years ago, I damned near lost my mind. Like Burton had to hold me down ’cause I was gonna storm the operating room and shit, and I’m… I mean, you ain’t had to hold me down, Rivers, but I ain’t doin’ real good without Ace.”
Jackson nodded and took a breath and realized the bulk of calming Sonny down was on him. “Okay. Okay. I get it. You need him. I need Ellery—”
“You do okay,” Sonny said nastily. “Boss me around sure enough!”
“Yeah, well, we all got our baggage, Sonny. I can’t take another hospital. I was in there for a year once, while they put me back together. Went back three times in the last six months, and every time feels like I can’t breathe. Like I’m going to lose it—they’re going to have to drug me and knock me out until it’s time to go home. And the only thing that keeps me from just screaming until they do that is that Ellery’s been there. He’s bitching and nagging and making sure I was doing everything I could to stay out of the fucking hospital, and if he wasn’t doing that, I’d never get out, you hear me? They’d have to lock me up in one. So we’ve got to keep calm, think clear. You were thinking clear when you told me we should call Burton. I put up a fuss at the beginning, but I was thinking clear enough to listen. So we’re going to keep our heads on our shoulders and talk to your witchy friend and call your superhero guy, and we’re going to get them back, understand?”
Sonny nodded tensely, and for a moment the only sound was the wheels on the road. “Why you hate the hospital so bad?” he asked after a minute.
“I’m okay with dying,” Jackson said, because it was the truth and he didn’t think it would freak Sonny out like it would Ellery. “But hospitals—on the street you can duck, you fight, you can run. In a hospital all you can do is hope. Lay there and hope. And since Ellery, it’s like that’s it. That’s as good as my life is going to get. Hoping feels wrong somehow, like asking for too much. But you’re lying there and your head or your body hurts or whatever, and this person who drags you out of hell every goddamned night is there, and all you want to do is hope you get one more minute with him. Just a little bit of peace. But you know just having him there is violating something in the world, right? And it piles up on your chest, all the reasons you don’t deserve to get out of there, until hope is just one more thing that’s crushing your lungs in your body.”
“I never thought of it like that,” Sonny said, voice low and reverent.
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t deserve Ace. He’s the only thing I ever wanted. As long as I have him, I’m not gonna stop wanting him. How you go and think that much? It would make me crazy.”
Jackson laughed shortly and looked at his phone. They were heading for the part where they had to get off the freeway and take a frontage road if they wanted to hug Ellery’s heels, or where they took another half an hour and drove toward Victoriana to talk to the mysterious witchy Ernie and his superhero not-quite-boyfriend.
In the end, what did it was the look on Sonny’s face. Jackson looked at the phone, then looked at the off-ramp and looked at the phone.
“I’m sure you’re good at your job,” Sonny whispered, tears shining in his wide gray eyes. “But Burton…. Burton’s who I trust.”
Hell. Jackson wasn’t thinking square himself. “Man, I expect a guy in tights who can fucking fly,” he muttered, blowing past the off-ramp.
“Burton won’t let you down,” Sonny said, voice catching. “God, please, don’t fuckin’ let us down.” He pulled out his phone and started texting. “I gotta wake Ernie up, though. His brain is wired to sleep in the hot part of the day. He does our books and stocks the shelves at night when it’s cool and keeps an eye on things, but if we gotta wake him up early, it helps to give him a warning.”
Jackson nodded. “Okay. Fine. I gotta make a phone call of my own before we get there.”
“Not the polic
e?” Sonny asked, and Jackson snorted.
“As if. No. Ellery’s mother. She’s… well, she’s fucking terrifying, but if I go after Ellery without her blessing, I’ll regret it to the pit of my balls.”
Sonny grunted. “I don’t get women. You do that. I’ll talk to Ernie. He makes sense.”
If Jackson hadn’t been doing ninety, he would have done a spit take at that. As it was, he hit the button on the phone. “Siri, call Lucy Satan.”
The phone went to speaker, and Jackson took a deep breath. “Taylor Cramer, attorney at law. May I ask who’s calling—”
“Taylor?” Jackson hated himself because his voice shook.
“Jackson, is he okay?”
God love Ellery’s mother for knowing nothing on the planet could make Jackson call her that wasn’t dire.
“Lacey’s got him. Couple of minions snagged him in the middle of Walmart. I’m sorry, Mrs. Cramer—”
“Do you have backup?” she asked sharply.
“Getting some now,” he said. “Guy who got taken with him has a friend in special ops. Going to contact him, make a plan—”
“Not alone,” she snapped. “You are not to go in alone—”
“Mrs. Cramer….” And to his horror, in front of Sonny, his voice broke. “I gotta get him back. You know that—”
“Not alone, Jackson. Is that understood?”
“We’ll get him back, ma’am,” he rasped. “I promise.”
“Jackson?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Unless my son is dead, you are to call me Lucy fucking Satan, do you understand? And even then, calling me Mrs. Cramer is right out. Now you wait for backup, and I’ll be down in as few hours as possible. I’ll be making phone calls before then, so be prepared for more backup than you can handle. Are we clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Keep your head, boy,” she said crisply. “Did they gag him?”