School of Fish

by Amy Lane

  “Nyet.” Boris put his arm around Olga’s waist. “No. No, this is our community. If we can’t be part of our community, we have no lives. Tage, come with us. No one will see you. You can stay in the apartment.”

  “But what about Sophie?” Tage cried. “Maxim? Dad, they’re going to—”

  Boris’s face was screwed up tight. “I have one son,” he rasped. “One child. I cannot think otherwise.”

  “But no!” Tage turned to Jackson and Ellery. “If I go with you, if I tell people what I know, can they help my brother and sister?”

  “Tage…,” Olga whispered.

  “We can’t promise anything,” Ellery said quietly. “We can’t. But we can try. Jackson and I would take you to the DA’s office and try to find someone who would listen.”

  Tage looked at his parents and swallowed, and Jackson would always think that in spite of everything that had gone on before, this was the moment the young man grew up.

  “You two go home and be safe,” he said, and the lack of irony was admirable. “I’ll go and try to help Sophie and Maxim.”

  “Tage,” Jackson murmured, just so he knew. “If you come with us to be put in protective custody, you might not see your parents for a long time, even if we recover your brother and sister.”

  Tage’s jaw tightened. “Then Dad can say he has no children. It’s fine.”

  Boris recoiled, and Olga cried quietly in his arms. “These are our people,” he whispered.

  “And I was your son,” Tage told him, wiping his face on his clean shirt. He turned to Jackson. “Can we go?”

  Jackson looked at Tage’s parents, trying not to be angry. He didn’t understand. They were abandoning their son, as far as he could see, abandoning their children so they could live with the comfort of their old life. But he hadn’t walked a mile in their shoes. He hadn’t left behind the familiar for the strange, only to find that the same people were in charge. “We’ll keep him safe,” he said, hoping he was being honest.

  “Thank you,” Boris said, looking wretched. Jackson felt a wave of what could only be described as relief wash off the boy. “We… we would like to know how they are, if you find out.”

  “Sure,” Jackson said. He sighed. “Maybe. Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?”

  “We have other family,” Boris whispered. “Not here, but in Carmichael, Citrus Heights. I’m the head of the house. If I betray….”

  Got it. If the children left the family, the family couldn’t be held responsible, but if the father followed the children, everybody was at risk.

  “Great,” Jackson muttered. He and Ellery looked at each other grimly.

  “Then we’ll go,” Ellery said, his voice icy because he obviously didn’t understand. “Please let us know if you change your mind.”

  They nodded miserably, and Mrs. Dobrevk darted out to kiss Tage on the cheek. “You’re a good boy,” she told him, voice breaking, before her husband pulled her way.

  They escorted Tage to the car in tense silence, Tage’s thin, battered face taut, his expression brittle.

  “You hungry?” Jackson asked after a few moments. Ellery started the car to begin the short drive to the DA’s office. Normally, they would have walked—it was barely half a mile—but something about having Tage exposed like that didn’t sit well with either of them.

  “Yes,” Tage said promptly. “Like you said, I didn’t eat in there. I couldn’t sleep.”

  Jackson had figured this might be the case. He reached into the console and pulled out a breakfast burrito from one of his favorite places; he’d had Ellery get it on the way to pick Tage up. He’d thought he and Ellery would have more time to question Officer Codromac about Mayer, but Codromac had been unavailable, they’d been told. Apparently he was locked in a room with Mayer, watching training videos and reading him the riot act, so Jackson had left his business card and promised to come back later. Disappointing, but the burrito was still warm, and Tage took it eagerly.

  Jackson handed him back some napkins and a soda, which the boy put in the holder by the armrest, and let him eat as Ellery pulled into another miracle parking space in front of the office.

  “This whole area looks like it was built with those big Duplo blocks little kids play with,” Jackson said musingly. None of the buildings were that tall, all of them were square, and most of them looked like you could stack them, one on top of the other, and build something taller but no more interesting.

  “The seventies,” Ellery said with a shrug.

  “Hunh.” Jackson turned around and saw Tage was still eating. “Ellery, you go on ahead. I’m going to wait until the kid’s finished, okay?” He paused. “I’m going to take a detour to Sodhi and Pasternak’s office.”

  Eleanor Sodhi and Ethan Pasternak were in charge of prosecuting human trafficking cases, and Ellery’s eyebrows lifted.

  “Just like that?” he asked. “Without me?”

  Jackson shrugged. “I’ll ask questions, that’s all. You need to meet with Herrera. You can tell her what I’m doing. I just….” He knew that human trafficking got a decent budget; they might have the resources to protect Tage. “Call it a hunch, maybe, that we can get someone to take care of him there.”

  Ellery nodded and gave him a brief smile. “Your instincts are pretty good,” he said, taking a deep breath of the morning air. “Don’t stay too long in the car.” The day promised to be hot, but the late-summer morning was surprisingly mild. Jackson figured they had about ten minutes before the car became a convection oven.

  “Deal.” Jackson watched him walk away and then waited until the kid took a breath while devouring the breakfast burrito.

  “Tage, I’m going to ask you some questions. There’s no one here to listen, and nobody has to know where I got the information, but we need something to go on here before I walk into that building and start looking for our bad guy information highway. Can you help me here?”

  Tage nodded. “The boy who was killed—No Neck?”

  “James Cosgrove?”

  “Yes, that is his name. He has cousins who live in my building. There was another boy there. He… he hangs out with the high school students, but he is not one of us.” Tage grimaced and took another bite, chewed and swallowed it quickly. “He is Russian, though. He visits the cousins in the building all the time.”

  “Cosgrove isn’t a Russian name,” Jackson remarked, but Tage shrugged.

  “People emigrate, they change names, they get married. My name is Norwegian because my mother saw a movie. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Jackson grinned. “Hunh. That’s good to know. Someone was asking me about that. So No Neck has cousins who live in the building. Does Ziggy know them?

  Tage looked uncomfortable. “Yeah—No Neck didn’t particularly like Ziggy, but I got the feeling his cousins did. How’d you guess?”

  Jackson shrugged. “We try not to be super shitty lawyers,” he said. “So Ziggy used No Neck as an in?”

  “I guess so,” Tage said, chewing thoughtfully. “Just before school let out, everyone was getting all excited about graduation, about summer, and suddenly Ziggy is everywhere, asking people to parties, gossiping about who was hooking up with who. But always after school. I watched once as one of the teachers actually threw him off campus after school. I think the teacher told all the security guards to look out for him, because he started hanging out by the little store on the corner by the school. He’d catch up with people there.”

  “But you saw him in and out of your building?”

  Tage nodded and, finally slowing down, took another reluctant bite. “No Neck’s cousins aren’t good people. Americans make a lot of movies about the Russian mob, but they never get how everywhere a thing can be when it’s in your community—even in little bits. You drive down certain streets in our neighborhood and there are Russian and Ukrainian businesses everywhere. Maybe only one is mob, but if your parents use any of those businesses, go to those churches, they kno
w the mobsters. They may be afraid of them, they may tell you to stay away from them, but they never defy them. It’s too ingrained. It’s like….” He chewed more thoughtfully. “Like one of my friends at school is Black, and he’s so used to racist shit happening that sometimes I’m the one who’s shocked, you know? Like certain teachers who say ‘those kids,’ and they don’t mean me, they mean my friend, even though we get the same crappy grades and spend the same amount of time playing video games, you know?”

  Jackson nodded. He’d grown up thinking of Jade and Kaden as his family, and the same thing still happened to him. He could never understand why people would be afraid of Kaden, the gentlest man he’d ever known, or would underestimate Jade’s wicked intelligence because they were African American. And every time it happened, it left a wound in all of them—the kind of wound that made Jackson and Jade more determined to work for justice in the legal system. The kind of wound that had sent Kaden out of the big city. The injustice was still there where he and his family lived now, but it wasn’t systemic. Ugly, but not built into the legal system and, as Tage had noticed, the education system too.

  “So you’re saying it’s systemic. Everybody expects it to be there because it always has been.”

  Tage nodded. “So when my parents realize my brother and sister have been taken, and they’re threatened with their safety, they wouldn’t think of going to the police. For one thing, these men would kill them.” He swallowed. “Sophie in particular—she’s disposable to them. And Max could be sold, or he could be turned into a mobster. We just don’t know. But—” He grimaced and took another bite. “—I don’t think my parents are going to get them back, whether I go to jail or not.”

  “Why not?” Jackson asked, horrified.

  “Because….” Tage’s voice broke. “Things the guard said to me, about making it easier on my parents and letting the jail take me. He was telling me to let myself get killed. But he didn’t… use them as a threat. He used them as an example.”

  Jackson took a deep breath and realized he had to work hard to keep his cold hands from shaking. “Do you think they’re already dead?”

  Tage breathed shakily and put the last bite of his burrito down. “No,” he said gruffly. “I think—what were his words?—‘You can be on the road to becoming pretty meat, just like them.’” He looked at Jackson bleakly. “They have been taken somewhere not here,” he said, his eyes red. “I… I don’t know how to find them.”

  Jackson nodded and gave Tage a look he hoped inspired confidence. “Well, lucky you, while I really would make a shitty lawyer, I’m not a half-bad investigator. I’ve got some ideas. But first, I need a name. It can be an obvious name or a whispered name. The name of a person or the name of a group. You gave me Siderov, but I don’t know who that is.”

  Tage nodded his head and leaned back against the seat rest, closing his eyes briefly. “Dima Siderov. He runs—or owns or whatever—the apartment in my parents’ building. You can’t go there, though.” He sat up. “He’ll know. They’ll all know, and they’ll kill my folks.”

  Jackson nodded. “The name is the thing, kid.”

  Tage yawned, and Jackson almost took pity on him, but the idea of the kid asleep in the car, defenseless and vulnerable, did not sit well either.

  He almost wished he’d driven the Tank.

  “You ready? The sooner we move, the sooner we can get you someplace you can get some sleep.”

  Tage nodded and shook himself, and then grabbed the soda and took a hit, saluting with it before he dragged it with him out of the car. “Away we go,” he said gamely.

  “Good kid.”

  Jackson pulled out his phone and texted Ellery as they walked into the building. Talk to Herrera about the leak—Tage and I are going to the HT department.

  A few years ago, before he’d hooked up with Ellery, Jackson had worked a case for their old firm in which someone who’d flown from Mexico to the United States on a work visa was then imprisoned and made to work in a factory with no pay and no option to leave. He’d killed his supervisor in an attempt to get away.

  Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson and Cooper hadn’t been all bad. Lyle Langdon, Jackson’s immediate supervisor at the time, had taken the case pro bono, and Jackson had gotten a chance to meet Eleanor Sodhi and Ethan Pasternak, the two DAs in charge of human trafficking offenses.

  Eleanor was thin as a whisper, her long black hair elegantly coifed, only a few grays to indicate she had grandchildren. Certainly her snapping black eyes didn’t give her away. Ethan was a stout, fortyish family man with the kind of fair skin that got ruddy if he so much as thought of a pretty day, and hair that was both blond and thinning.

  Together, they looked at some of the worst evil the pits of hell could spit out and tried hard to set the world to rights again. Jackson figured they were aware that they couldn’t do it by themselves, but the fact that they kept trying garnered his everlasting respect.

  With Tage at his heels, Jackson made his way through the twists and turns of the DA’s office, finding their underfunded, overwhelmed corner of the building from memory. He stepped up to the receptionist’s desk and gave a game smile.

  “Hey, I was hoping I could—”

  “Jackson?”

  Jackson stared at the tiny woman with the short-cropped black hair and the many freckles across her upturned nose. “Mira? Oh my God, is that you?”

  Jackson stepped around the desk to give Mira Charleston a tight hug. She squealed and kissed his cheek. “Oh my God! How you doing? I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. You still banging everything that moves?”

  Jackson cast a half-guilty smirk at Tage, who smirked back.

  “Uhm, no,” he said, feeling his face burn. “Actually living with someone for a year now. He sort of won’t let me leave.”

  Mira cackled. “Well, that was never our problem. I always had one foot out the door, and so did you. But God, it’s good to see you.” She held up her hand, and he saw a rock almost as big as her ring finger and an intricate wedding set.

  “You too. And it looks like you’re doing okay too. Congratulations!”

  She beamed. “We have kids, if you can believe that shit. My cooter made two other complete human beings. I am boggled!” She held up a picture from her desk where two elfin children, maybe two and four, frolicked naked in a wading pool while a thin man wearing swim trunks, a beard, and a besotted smile sprayed them lightly with a hose.

  Jackson had to laugh; happy families were a good thing. “Well, I am boggled too. I’d heard lady parts could do that, but you know, my brother’s kids are like my only example.”

  “Oh, honey, you’re born to be a dad. You and Mr. Right will figure it out.” She batted her eyes at him. “So what favor do you need, and which kid am I going to have to sell to get it for you.”

  Jackson opened his mouth in true shock. “Mira!”

  She blew out a breath and rolled her eyes. “Honey, we see shit so awful here that if we don’t fucking laugh at it, it’ll make us batshit insane. Besides, my kid daughter, the four-year-old, can take apart the toaster, the blender, and her bicycle if we so much as sleep in on a Saturday. Nobody’s going to buy her. She’s trouble.”

  Jackson nodded, understanding. Sometimes dark humor was the only kind life gave you.

  “Well, I was hoping to talk to Eleanor or Ethan, but maybe you can help me. I’ve got a name of someone who is probably in the biz. He seems to have snatched our client’s brother and sister. They’re twelve and fourteen—” He looked over his shoulder. “—right, Tage?”

  “Maxim turns fifteen next week,” he said, his eyes going big and liquid.

  “So yeah, they’re a good age for….” He swallowed, not able to say it with Tage right there.

  “Sex work,” Mira said, dropping her voice. “I hear you. Were they snatched as part of a net? Were they just close? What happened?”

  “Well, the same group of people who tried to frame Tage here for murder kidnapped the kids as
insurance that Tage wouldn’t talk. And then they tried to kill him in prison, and the assumption is they’ve been shipped off regardless of whether he talks or not. We’re pretty sure they’re counting on him to be dead.”

  Mira pursed her lips. “Oh, Jackson. That’s some bad news right there. I mean, we’ve got a couple of bloodless gangs out there, but that sounds like one of our trifecta of scumbags. We’ve got MSTK, some outfit that seems to be run by American businessmen that we want really fuckin’ bad, and a group from Russia that’s kicking our ass. What’s your name?”

  Jackson looked at Tage who squared his shoulders resolutely and nodded. “Dima Siderov.”

  Mira’s eyes got huge, her lips parted, and she actually gasped as though she’d been hit. “Oh Jesus. We have our scumbag. That’s a case for Eleanor. This guy is her meat, and we want to make sure he’s tender and sweet before we go after him.”

  Aha! A name—and a plan. “I’ll be honest, honey, we don’t even need to take the scumbag down. If we could recover the kids and get all the kids the fuck out of Dodge, I will take that as a win.”

  She made a face. The kind that Jade used when she was trying to say, “That’s a beautiful dream, sweetheart, but it is just not going to happen.”

  Jackson girded himself for some bad news and some red tape and a need for an alternate plan. He’d meant what he told Siren Herrera. He could deal with the fact that chaos went on and on and on and he and Ellery could only do so much about it. But the people they could save he was by God going to save, because that’s the only way he could sleep at night knowing the chaos was working overtime to grind people’s lives into dust.

  “Honey, I… with the way these guys function, the odds of them still being in Sacramento isn’t great.”

  Tage gasped, and Jackson chewed his lower lip. “Where do they usually do business?” he asked.

  “Well, Dima’s a branch manager. There’s human trafficking everywhere, and we’ve got all the vices here in Sacramento, right? Casinos, wineries, drugs? But LA and Vegas are bigger, and it’s easier to lose the victims in the crowd. As best as we can figure, Dima’s a lieutenant. He supplies the buyers down in Sin City and LA. In fact….” She frowned.