School of Fish

by Amy Lane

  “More.”

  “Excellent.”

  Jackson snapped his hips forward, burying himself to the hilt, luxuriating in Ellery’s full-throated cry of welcome.

  He’d planned to go slow, to take Ellery apart inch by inch, to put his lover first in every moment, but Ellery dug his nails into Jackson’s biceps and begged.

  “God, Jackson, fuck me hard. I need….”

  And so did Jackson. He needed it hard, needed it fast, needed it now. He lunged, hips pumping, chest heaving, suddenly needing Ellery’s sex more than he needed to breathe. He pounded hard, relentlessly, chasing his own orgasm in the haven of Ellery’s body, drunk on Ellery’s cries of want, of pleasure, of joy.

  “Oh God, Jackson. Right there—yes! Please. Oh God. So close!”

  Jackson sat back and threw Ellery’s knees over his shoulders, giving Ellery room to grab his own cock as Jackson thrust. He did, beautiful, abandoned, eyes squeezed shut as his body clenched around Jackson. All at once Ellery gave a cry, and his ass squeezed so tight around Jackson’s cock that Jackson couldn’t move.

  That and the sight of come shooting across Ellery’s pale abdomen, his chest, was all Jackson needed to send him over.

  “Jackson!” Ellery cried and Jackson pumped come into his body, spending everything, heart and soul, as his vision washed black and then white and his molecules came undone.

  Ellery spread his legs and allowed Jackson to fall forward, sliding out of his body in a gush of spend. Jackson paused and licked up Ellery’s stomach, tasting Ellery’s own spend, pausing at his nipples to suck, making his way along the tender line of his throat.

  Their kiss was warmth and comfort and the intoxication of knowing they were both replete.

  Ellery gave a satisfied sigh, and Jackson rolled to the side a little, kissing Ellery’s shoulder.

  “You good?” he asked, needing more than the sigh tonight.

  “Much better,” Ellery said, meeting his eyes in the scant light. They’d left the bedroom door open, and the light from the dining room spilled in. “You?”

  Jackson kissed his shoulder again. “As long as you are,” he said. That moment when he’d ducked and Ellery had taken the blow replayed itself behind his eyes. “Next time I won’t duck.”

  “No,” Ellery corrected. “You go ahead and duck. But next time I will too.”

  Jackson regarded him affectionately. “You, Counselor, take every blow on the chin. You are constitutionally incapable of ducking. I just need to factor that in.”

  Ellery chuckled, and the air around them lightened, dispelled by the lovemaking, by their playfulness, by their joy at being together. “I can too duck,” he said. “I just need to duck faster.”

  Jackson chuckled too and then kissed him again. “Stay here,” he murmured. “I’ll be back.” He rolled out of bed and slid his basketball shorts on commando.

  “Where are you going?” Ellery asked, rolling to his side.

  “I’m gonna do the dishes and bring you ice cream in bed,” Jackson told him, flashing a smile over his shoulder. “Do you mind?”

  Ellery’s lips parted softly, reminding Jackson of how often Ellery was the one doing the considerate-lover things.

  “No,” he said, smiling a little. “Not at all.”

  Jackson made short work of their dinner dishes and then grabbed a carton of rocky road ice cream, along with two spoons and a towel to hold it with. He made his way back to the bedroom, pausing to make sure all the doors were locked and the alarm was set and scooping Billy Bob up in his free hand before hitting the light with his shoulder and returning to the bedroom.

  Ellery had turned the lamp on by the time he returned and was sitting up in bed, bare-chested, reading his phone.

  “Anything interesting?” Jackson asked.

  “Yes. I texted Jennifer Probst earlier, while you were in the shower.”

  “About the leak?” Clever Ellery—that had been on Jackson’s to-do list the next morning.

  “Yes. She gave us some names of people who would have known she was turning the file over to us.”

  “Ooh, more people to call. I like it.”

  Ellery glanced up from the phone and laughed. “No bowls?” he asked, setting down the phone.

  “I set the dishwasher,” Jackson protested. “And who eats our ice cream besides us?”

  “Jade, Mike, Henry….” Ellery ticked the names off on his fingers and Jackson realized he was right.

  “Come to think of it, Jade used to steal my coffee and ice cream when I lived alone too. And Mike always made himself sandwiches.”

  “Henry is new,” Ellery said, reaching out for the carton.

  “Well, yes. But he’s damned competent.”

  “This surprises you?”

  Jackson thought about it. “No. We knew he would be when we worked his own case in June. And you’ve been dealing with him for the last two months. If he’d really pissed you off, you would have said something.”

  Ellery took a bite and laughed. “This is true. And Henry’s good. He’ll do anything you ask him.”

  Jackson frowned. He heard the “but” in there. “And….”

  “No, he’s just not you. You have a way of reading my mind, that’s all.”

  Jackson couldn’t help it. He preened. “That’s because you’re mine,” he said, puffing his chest out a little. “That’s not Henry’s fault. If he could read your mind like I do, I’d have to kill him.”

  Ellery rolled his eyes. “You would not.”

  “No, no. I definitely would kill him.” Jackson nodded. “I work for the best criminal defense attorney in the world. He’d totally get me off.”

  Ellery laughed at his foolishness and retorted, “I think he just did!”

  Jackson slid into bed next to him, only a little surprised to find Ellery had put his boxer briefs back on while Jackson had been doing dishes.

  “I texted you the list of people,” Ellery said, taking a bite of ice cream. “You might be surprised at two of the names.”

  Jackson looked at his phone and frowned. “Siren Herrera. Well, that makes sense.”

  “Yes,” Ellery confirmed. “She’s the ADA. She’d need to know she was working with me.”

  “So I need to find out who she told, who her paralegal is, who kicked the case up in the evaluations department. Yeah, we need to know who knew.”

  “Yes, and do you see that other name?”

  Jackson scanned his phone and raised his eyebrows. “S. Mayer, Bailiff.”

  “Yup,” Ellery said. “Think that’s any relation?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Jackson murmured. Ellery offered him a bite of ice cream, which he took absently, eyes widening in surprise as the whole cold mass made its way down his throat. “That is a very coincidental name right there.”

  “Your nipples just got hard,” Ellery said clinically.

  Jackson looked up from his phone. “What? Augh!” Ellery used the spoon to put a tiny dollop of cold ice cream on one of his exposed nipples. “What are you doing?”

  Ellery bent his head to Jackson’s chest and looked at him wickedly. “Eating ice cream,” he said before sucking the ice cream off.

  “Nungh—”

  Thirty minutes earlier, Jackson would have said he was all sexed out and guessed that he and Ellery would have done a little case work and then turned off the light, spooned a little, and gone to sleep.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ellery slid out of bed to put the ice cream back in the freezer—a little depleted and a little meltier—and Jackson was a sloppy, gooey puddle on the sheets, with a pleasantly sore backside and the happy realization that he was never so glad to be wrong.

  IT WOULD have been great if the good sex meant he slept until morning, but even after a doubleheader and a long day, Jackson’s nightmares were still bound to come.

  This one started as a memory of that afternoon. Of Ellery recoiling from the sloppy blow to the chin, but also of the blows not stopping. Jackson stood, p
aralyzed in the way of dreams, helpless as that monster of a man sat on Ellery’s chest and beat him and beat him and beat him; not like a movie beating, but a real beating, with blood pooling from the skin and the sound of crushing bone as his nose gave and—

  “Jackson!” Ellery snapped, his voice irritated, calling to him in a way that nothing else could have, penetrating through layers of the dream until Jackson was abruptly lucid.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, rolling over and engulfing Ellery in his arms, pulling him tight while he shivered, keeping Ellery safe and himself warm with Ellery’s whole, healthy body in the night.

  “Bad one?” Ellery murmured.

  “Paralyzed by love,” Jackson said, shaking, burying his face in Ellery’s neck. “Terrifying.”

  “Shh… it’s okay, baby. You can move. I’m okay. Everyone’s okay.”

  Jackson nodded, allowing himself to be comforted, but as he closed his eyes, sliding back under, he wasn’t thinking about Ellery or any of the people who made up his family.

  He was thinking about Tage Dobrevk, in jail because he couldn’t speak for himself for fear of harm befalling his brother and sister.

  Paralyzed by love. A nightmare of the first order.

  They had to find a way to fix it.

  THE NEXT morning Jackson and Henry met up at the office at 8:00 a.m. and went over their list again. Helped by the info the PD had sent the night before, they refined their goals.

  “Okay, new plan,” Jackson said. “I take the DA, and you take the public defender’s office. And this time forge some relationships and try not to piss anybody off.”

  “You’re the one who got into the fight yesterday,” Henry said mildly.

  “Well, that was old business,” Jackson said, trying for dignity and achieving only satisfaction. “Some fuckers want to hold on to the past even though it was crooked. You’re the future. Keep it straight and narrow, Junior, that’s all I ask.”

  “I am maybe four years younger than you. And that doesn’t even count your emotional constipation.”

  Jackson was privy to a lot of Henry’s past, and he knew all the signs of a fellow sufferer straining to outrun his demons. He arched a single eyebrow at Henry, who turned a healthy shade of pink.

  “I’m still doing better than you,” he mumbled.

  Jackson cocked his head, staring at Henry in scientific fascination, like a new bug.

  “Shut up! Fine. I’ll hit the PD’s office, you hit the DA’s, we’ll meet back here in the middle and go interview the parents. Are we good? Are you going to let me out of your sight? Do I need to take a weapon, Dad?”

  “Shut up,” Jackson muttered. “And be careful, dammit.”

  Henry rolled his eyes. “Oh my God. Listen to yourself. Try not to get shot, asshole.” And with that, Henry stalked out of the conference room, flipping a salute behind his back and leaving Galen, Ellery, and Jade looking at Jackson in amusement.

  “What?” Jackson glared at all of them, crossing his arms.

  “Nothing,” Jade said, her full mouth quirking. “Nothing at all. Not a damned thing. De nada. Zilch. Zero.”

  Jackson rolled his eyes. “Ellery, can we go now?”

  “No,” Ellery said. “I want Galen to repeat that thing he said yesterday about the larger pattern. It was important.”

  Galen smiled thinly. “I do believe I’m being patronized,” he said, and it was Ellery’s turn to roll his eyes.

  “No, it was important.” Ellery paused and gave Jackson a bored look. “And it will give Henry a chance to clear out of the parking lot so he doesn’t run Jackson over with the car.”

  Galen’s laughter—dry as lint—scuffed through the room. “That’s the honesty I treasure. I told him to look out for patterns. There is something here we’re not seeing. This is like a pattern of sabotage, a random trail of things that go wrong that shouldn’t. Be on the lookout for things that don’t fit, stuff that doesn’t jibe with what you know. A guy in a nice suit with crappy shoes, a small-time thug with too much cash—”

  “A guy who looks like a high school student who smells like a grown businessman and can vault over a fence and down a story while holding a knife?” Jackson said, eyes flicking to Ellery.

  Ellery sat up a little straighter. “Yes. Sean did say he smelled like aftershave and mint. A businessman, like you said. The street hood and the high school student—those are disguises.”

  “Yeah,” Jackson murmured. “And we’ve got a guard who’s either taking payoffs or being coerced into beating down poor Tage. So a prison guard who’s assaulting prisoners, a kid who didn’t do it letting himself be arrested instead of fingering the grown man dressed as a kid who did. A house party that was probably held to get Ty out of commission and ruin his whole future.”

  “Where was that kid going to college?” Galen asked suddenly.

  “USC,” Ellery said, with that prompt recall of details that Jackson so admired.

  “Hm….” Galen fingered his goatee.

  “What?” Jade asked. “What is that sound?”

  Galen cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  “That sound. That just wasn’t right, was it, Jackson?”

  “No,” Jackson agreed. “But he’s from Georgia. It’s not his fault.”

  Galen shot Ellery a puzzled look. “What are they talking about?”

  “You’ll hear it eventually,” Ellery reassured him. “Why does it matter where Ty plans to go to school?”

  “We’re talking big business here. The working theory was that they wanted to get the cops away from what they were really doing, but it was so elaborate. It’s another thing that made me think corporate sabotage. So many moving pieces. Let me check with some sources. I have a theory.”

  Still pondering, Galen used the chair back to shove himself up to his feet, and without his cane, he walked steadily out the door and across the way to his office. Jackson knew he worked really hard to go without support as much as he could, and he admired a man who could stretch his limits, who could try to overcome his flaws.

  Story of Jackson’s goddamned life.

  “Okay,” Ellery said, looking at the clock on the wall. “While he does that, let’s see if we can get Tage out of jail, talk to the DA’s office, and maybe question Tage’s parents while we’re at it. Are you ready, Detective?”

  “Always for you, Counselor,” Jackson returned smartly. But on the way out the door, he paused. “Jade?”

  “Yes?”

  “I need you to do a couple of things for me. You got time?”

  “Never. What do you need anyway?”

  “I need you to have AJ run financials—a deep dive, Crystal has been showing him how—on a guard at the jail named J. Mayer. I’m sorry, I don’t know his first name, but I’d check John or James or something common. He’s crooked, and guys like that usually have something in their closets. A soft spot for someone to lean on.”

  “I can do that,” Jade said, writing it down on a legal pad. “Or have AJ do it. What’s the other thing?”

  “When Galen gets out of his office, tell him that the crappy cops have a CI with a heavy German accent. Whatever angle he’s looking up, that might figure, and right now, that piece doesn’t fit anywhere else.”

  “German,” she muttered as she wrote it down. “That’s… well, interesting.”

  “Right? Apparently he sounds like a real bastard, gave the two decent flatfoots the fucking willies. I’m gonna take their word for it that we should look down that rabbit hole.”

  Jade gave a short laugh and wrote it down. “I’ll tell him,” she said, underlining it. Then she looked up at Jackson. “Baby?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Be careful.”

  “I’ve done my time in the hospital. Don’t want to go back,” Jackson reassured her.

  “Thank God.” Jade made a little shooing motion. “Now go. We’ve got shit to do.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  SIREN, GOOD to her word, had gotten
her boss’s signature to drop the charges. She called Ellery on the way to the jail, and Ellery called the Dobrevk family, so they were waiting as Ellery and Siren Herrera escorted Tage out of the jail.

  They’d brought fresh clothes because the ones he’d been arrested in were still in evidence, and nobody wanted to wander around in a onesie.

  Mr. and Mrs. Dobrevk were both small. Boris stood around five foot six, and his wife, Olga, was maybe two inches shorter. They dressed plainly, Mr. Dobrevk in corduroy pants and a button-down shirt, Mrs. Dobrevk in a serviceable skirt with tights and a blouse; traditional clothes from a country they both remembered.

  The expressions on their faces when their son emerged were both agonized and relieved.

  “You’re okay?” Olga said, touching Tage’s face lightly with her fingertips.

  “Yeah, Mom,” Tage said, capturing her hand. “It’s fine.” He smiled gamely at his father, who looked like the kind of man who was uncomfortable with emotion.

  “That is good,” Boris said, swallowing hard. He sent Ellery a surreptitious look. “You told them nothing?”

  Tage looked at Jackson, and a grim smile lit his eyes as he said, “My lawyers were shitty and I’m going to be in jail forever.”

  Jackson nodded. “Good boy.” He looked around them and said, “So, we need you to meet us at our office. Tage, you’re going to want to shower, probably, get some food, reassure your folks, but we need to talk. Two hours enough time?”

  He was thinking that if Henry was there to hear their story, the two of them could go question Ty and his friends with a little more knowledge under their belt.

  Tage nodded but glanced at his father, who grimaced.

  “Going back to our building with you,” Boris said apologetically. “It is not safe. If they know you are out, not just your brother and sister, but your mother and I—none of us are safe.”

  Jackson’s heart hurt at the crushed expression on Tage Dobrevk’s face.

  He and Ellery exchanged looks, but fortunately Jackson had a contingency plan.

  “Okay then, we’re going to try to get Tage into protective custody. Would you like to come with—”