by Amy Lane
“Perhaps not,” Taylor said at last. “So you are going to help your friend deliver the children?”
“That was the plan, ma’am,” Jackson said, and Ellery arched an eyebrow at him. “I was going to tell you later,” he murmured.
Well, fine. For once they’d put the relationship first. Sue them.
“Good, then. After he’s done that, perhaps you’d offer to find him a place, an isolated sort of place, where nobody would possibly look for him. Some place out of the way. Low key. Give it a month, at least. Treat it like a vacation.”
Jackson’s eyebrows shot upward. “You want us to send Jason Constance to a cabin in the woods for a month?”
“That would be best, yes,” Ellery’s mother said. “I’m sure you can think of the particulars. By the time he comes back, I would imagine this entire situation would have blown over.”
“Okay, sure,” Jackson said, holding up his hands. “I, uh… well, we’ll think of something.”
“I’m sure you will, dear boy.”
Ellery rolled his eyes. His mother really did adore Jackson. Apparently he’d almost upended the whole of the Washington, DC, military complex, and he got pat on the head.
“Ellery, you’ll help him?” Taylor confirmed.
“Of course, Mother,” Ellery said on a sigh.
“Good. Well, it’s really very late here. I’ll leave you two boys to hash things out on your end. You’re doing well, I trust?”
And suddenly Ellery’s earlier glow was back. He smiled at Jackson, who looked away with a crescent of color on his cheeks. “Yes. We’re doing very well.”
“Jackson’s not overdoing it?”
“Of course he is,” Ellery said, still smiling at him. “But he also really did come home to rest. I don’t think he meant to cause quite so much havoc on the phone while he was here.”
Jackson looked up and nodded enthusiastically, and Ellery brushed his lower lip with a careful thumb. The man just couldn’t sit still—but he’d try.
“Well, good,” his mother said softly. “Jackson?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Remember you’re loved. Don’t roll your eyes at me, young man. It’s a true thing. We look forward to seeing you two over winter break. Jackson, you still have to bring a Hanukkah gift. You know that happens every year.”
Jackson snickered into Ellery’s shoulder. “I do know that.”
“And don’t think I’ve forgotten your birthday. There will be a card and a gift in the mail.”
Ellery actually heard him swallow. “That’s kind, uhm, Lucy.”
“That’s my boy.” Ellery had seen the card she’d sent him last year, right when he’d gotten out of the hospital. It had been a week or two late, but then, he and Jackson had really just gotten together. She’d signed it “Lucy Satan,” Jackson’s personal name for her. It may not have been flattering, but she had apparently claimed it as hers.
“Bye, boys. Try not to get into too much trouble. We love you.”
“Love you, Mother!”
“Bye, Lucy Satan!”
Ellery hung up and looked at him grimly. “So, what was the part you didn’t want to tell her over the phone.”
Jackson’s face screwed up in a grimace. “It involved Burton, Ace, Jai, a few sniper rounds, and some C-4.”
Ellery’s eyes widened. He’d been there the last time those particular people had been involved with sniper rounds and C-4. “May God have mercy on all involved,” he said, totally and completely serious. “What about Constance?”
Jackson’s grimace turned deadly grim. “I think he’s being chased by mobsters and the US military. He’s planning to arrive at the courthouse tomorrow with the kids. I think you should be there to help the human trafficking division take custody of the victims, and me and Henry should maybe….” Jackson made vague motions with his hands.
“Spirit Constance away,” Ellery said. “Yes, I think that’s a plan. I’ll reserve a cabin up near Tahoe, literally a cabin in the woods. There’s a couple of small lakes up by Donner Pass. A friend of mine had a fishing cabin up there. I’m pretty sure I can find one for rent. Was there anything else you got done by phone? Because I did a bit while I was waiting for the damned auto dealership too.”
Jackson laughed with only a little bitterness and sighed. “Here.” He stood and offered Ellery a hand up off the bed. “Let’s go sit over some ice cream and compare notes.” He hid part of a yawn behind his hand. “We need to be up early tomorrow. Constance is going to be there around six in the morning, and you and I need to debrief.”
Ellery took his hand and allowed Jackson to haul him up into a half-naked, chest-to-chest kiss. Jackson nuzzled his neck for a moment, bringing them both back to those few breathless moments in bed, and then gave him one last brief press of lips before pulling him to the kitchen table and back to work.
“Hey, did you ever get that pork chop back from your cat?” Ellery asked.
Jackson grunted. “I got him to eat it in the kitchen. Does that count?”
Ellery groaned. “No. No, it does not count. What are we bringing a new kitten into? Have you thought of that?”
Jackson stilled and looked at him soberly. “A better life here than in a cage,” he said.
Well, couldn’t argue with that. “Let’s make sure it’s a tough kitty,” Ellery decided.
“The battles will be epic.”
Of course they would be.
HALF AN hour later they’d basically killed a small container of lemon-raspberry gelato, and Ellery was still in awe.
“You got all that done on the phone?”
Jackson shrugged. “Well, yes. K-Ski has protection, we’re going to meet Constance tomorrow, and we may have Tage Dobrevk’s siblings recovered before this thing is done. Wasn’t much. Now you tell me yours.”
Ellery grinned. “Oh boy, did Jade and AJ dig up some information for you.”
Mostly Ellery’s discussions had consisted of downloads of files from Jade on Ziggy Ivanov and bookmaker’s odds, but it was still a wealth of information.
Jackson grinned. “I knew they would. Shoot!”
“Okay, so, Ziggy Ivanov is actually nearly thirty years old.”
Jackson’s jaw dropped. “No, really?”
“Yessir. He spent his youth in a gymnasium”—he pronounced it the Eastern European way, in which he drew out the A and made it “ah”—“as a competitive gymnast and tumbler. He didn’t make it to the Olympics, but that was fine. He was recruited by the Siderov family in his teens. It’s estimated he was their grease man or thief from the time he was fifteen. When he washed out of the gymnasium, he went to work for them full-time. When Siderov moved his operations to California via the influx of Russian emigres here, his skill as a thief and pretty face made him a natural to infiltrate the high school. Siderov’s organization has a couple of businesses—”
“Let me guess,” Jackson said. “Drugs, gambling, and sex trade.”
“You cheated,” Ellery said, taking a modest bite of ice cream.
“Cheated?” Jackson rolled his eyes. “I got that information the hard way!”
Well, couldn’t argue that.
“So,” Ellery said, “about the gambling….”
Jackson banged his head gently on the kitchen table. “I was going to text Fetzer and Hardison.”
“No need,” Ellery said smugly. “Turns out AJ’s delinquent boyfriend—”
Jackson gave him a hard look. The gentle AJ had managed—quite without guile, they were both sure of it—to snag the attention of a kid a little younger than he was who’d just finished a six-month sentence for distribution and was now doing his best to go clean. Their courtship had been a little down, a lot of up, and now AJ’s roommate was happy to report there had been actual sleepovers.
Ellery took a deep breath and tried again. “AJ’s reformed and much-improved boyfriend,” he said virtuously, “knows some guys.”
“Doesn’t every ex-con ‘know some guys’?�
� Jackson asked.
“You’re the one who runs the little transition condo,” Ellery told him, although in fact Ellery was very proud of the fact that Jackson used his half of his old duplex to help transition nonviolent offenders back into the real world. “You’d know.”
Jackson shrugged. “Okay, okay, AJ’s boyfriend knows some guys. What do these guys know?”
Ellery took the spoon and blopped a little bit of ice cream on the end of Jackson’s nose. “You’re so impertinent,” he said grandly, while Jackson giggled like a kid and tried to wipe the ice cream off and then licked it from the back of his hand.
“Oh my God. We have to be up in, like, five hours. You know that right?”
Ellery let out a breath. Well, yes. And Jackson was looking tired, although he didn’t want to point that out. He may have been champing at the bit these last weeks, but he was supposed to ease into his workload, not hit the ground at full speed.
“Okay,” Ellery conceded, setting the pint down and watching as Jackson picked it up and took a bite. Oh, nice. Jackson’s constant struggle against what was very probably an eating disorder was never going to go away in spite of his resolution to live healthily. It was nice to see him eat something unforced, with joy, because it was a human thing to do. “So Ty Townsend apparently had the bookies in a real spin this year. You know that I know very little about football, but he was, in AJ’s words, ‘the shit.’”
Jackson snickered. “Yes, the kids are calling it that these days.”
“Whatever. So, Ty’s ‘the shit,’ and he’s going to a Pac-12 school, and people are really excited about him. Now, we’ve worked really hard to keep Ty’s arrest out of the papers, and Ty is still, as far as anyone knows, scheduled to start training camp at the end of this week.”
“Yes,” Jackson mumbled over another mouthful of sweet.
“Anyway, somebody in the gambling community let something slip because betting just went up considerably against Ty’s school this year. All of the longshot bettors just changed their odds, and I have no idea how that works, but AJ’s roommate seemed to think it was very exciting.”
“Yeah. That’s what Henry suspected.”
“He was very humble about that when I told him,” Ellery said with a completely straight face.
“How many fist-pumps?” Jackson asked dryly.
“A complete lap around the car dealership,” Ellery said, although he suspected part of that had been to let off steam. Ellery and Jackson weren’t the only ones to be a little stressed over the last two days.
“What car did John and Galen get?” he asked idly, because in spite of the fact that they really did need to catch up, the fact was, they were used to exchanging parts of their day at the end of it. Small conversations about the people they cared for had become part of their routine, and Ellery’s heart gave an extra special throb when he realized how important it was to both of them.
“Galen apparently let him pick,” Ellery said with a snort, and then he sobered. “And Henry asked first about the amenities for the back seat. I was thinking he’d go SUV, but he made it a luxury sedan because it would be harder for Galen to get in and out of an SUV.”
Jackson held a hand to his chest and blinked rapidly. “Our little redneck is all grown up and emotionally available in three short months. It happens so fast!”
“Of course, right after he told me that, I confirmed the hunch about the gambling, and he did the lap around the dealership.”
Jackson pretended to wipe a tear. “But still a good ol’ boy at heart. Does a body good.”
“God, you’re obnoxious.”
Jackson grinned with all his teeth. “It’s an art.” Then he sobered. “Okay, so Ty was not a random target, and it wasn’t just because he’s of color. They wanted him out of commission to make money on the gambling front, but I’m still betting they were trying to get those cops somewhere else. Have we checked out those empty buildings that Fetzer said were left unpatrolled?”
Ellery rolled his eyes. “Yes, Jackson, because there’s an army of us and we can all split ourselves up into clones and multitask like that.”
Jackson snorted. “Okay, okay. It’s on the to-do list after we get Jason to safety. Have you—”
Ellery held up his tablet, which had been open on the table as they’d debriefed. “I’ve got a couple of places scoped out,” he said. “One local, one in Tahoe like you suggested, and one down on the coast.”
“Monterey?” Jackson asked, his voice rising eagerly.
“Yes. You liked it there?” Ellery asked.
“So much.” His voice dropped, and Ellery smirked as he seemed to remember that reality bites. “But maybe next summer.”
“Or did you want to do San Diego again?”
Jackson blinked. “Hm, I’ll have to think,” he said. “Balboa Park versus the aquarium….” Then he paused. “You know, we’re planning for next year.”
Ellery bit his lip. “Yeah. I know. We planned for winter holidays too.”
Jackson nodded. “This planning for the future thing—gotta tell you. Used to freak me out, but I’m starting to get into it.”
Ellery leaned in to kiss him, and Jackson opened his mouth to let the kiss linger. The mix of cold ice cream and warm man was practically irresistible, and they necked at the table for an embarrassingly long time before Jackson pulled away and covered his mouth with his hand. “Night,” he mumbled. “Getting on.”
He took what was left of the ice cream, put the lid on, and threw it in the freezer, moving with just enough stiffness to let Ellery know his stitches were hurting. Ellery stood to join him in the kitchen, fetching the ibuprofen while he was there and setting the bottle down in front of Jackson at the counter.
“Fine,” Jackson muttered, but he downed the painkillers with a quick swallow of water. “Okay. Have we covered everything?”
“Dima Siderov’s organization,” Ellery said promptly. “I was getting to that. You know Tage’s address?”
Jackson screwed up his eyes. “Mob central?”
“Yes. And James Cosgrove was Dima Siderov’s nephew.”
Jackson gasped as the implications hit him. “Wait—no, that’s not right.”
“I assure you it is. That’s what AJ pulled up. Why?”
Jackson flailed. “Because… because you do not order a hit on your eighteen-year-old nephew because he asked for mercy! I know we’ve all seen the John Wick movies, but usually there has to be some action involved before somebody takes another person out. A betrayal or something. All James Cosgrove did was ask his uncle if it was necessary to set Ty up. That’s it. That’s the end. I mean, worst-case scenario, Dima says, ‘You are a sweet adorable little summer child. Now, don’t talk to me again or I backhand you.’ But he doesn’t order Ziggy to make a hit on his nephew.”
Jackson suddenly rocked back on his heels. “Oh my God,” he said.
Ellery did the same thing. “Oh my God,” he echoed.
They both looked at each other and said it almost at the same time.
“Ziggy acted alone.”
“Dima really thinks Tage did it!”
Jackson scrubbed at his scalp with his fingertips. “That explains the kids. They kidnap the kids and then ship them off. Arrest Tage and then have him killed in prison. Don’t give the family a chance to even so much as hint that Tage didn’t do it. Ziggy did it—we’ve always assumed that. But Dima Siderov has not!”
“But why?” Ellery asked. “Why would Sergio Ivanov kill his boss’s nephew? What practical purpose would that serve?”
Jackson started to prowl the kitchen, stiff movements and sore ass notwithstanding. “Pink pills,” he muttered. “Pink pills. They’ve been bothering me. Pink pills with butterflies on them.” He paused. “What sort of drugs does Siderov deal?”
“Kitchen meth,” Ellery said promptly.
“No opioids? No shipments of anything from anywhere?”
“No. Remember the case that put you in the hospital in June?�
��
Jackson grunted. “Robert Sampson and Candy Cormier, yes. They held a corner on the pill and opioid trade. I’m sure that void’s been filled.”
“Well, yes, but according to Jade’s intel, Siderov only deals kitchen meth to his own community. It’s a side gig for him, not his bread and butter.”
“So what in the fuck is Ziggy doing with pretty pink tablets of X with little butterflies on them?”
Ellery sucked in a breath. He remembered that detail too. “That’s not Siderov’s MO,” he said slowly. “Ziggy is working for somebody else.”
Jackson nodded. “And Ziggy killed James to keep him from going to his uncle about Ty Townsend because that would give Ziggy away. That’s why the attempt at the entire family. He flat out didn’t want Dima Siderov to know….” Jackson trailed off, then, “Uh-oh.”
Ellery stared at him. “What?”
“When Mira called, she said Maxim and Sophie were a shipment to the big boss. Dima’s superior.”
Ellery nodded. “Yes, and…?”
“And, uhm, remember how I talked to Burton?”
Ellery’s nod was slower this time. The last time Jackson had “called Burton,” Burton had taken out a psychotic drug dealer with one impossible sniper shot. They’d had a tough time explaining how one of their main bad guys had come to be missing half his head, but Jackson’s heart had been giving out at the time, so Sean Kryzynski—and through him, the department—had given them a pass. Ellery wasn’t so sure how another Burton save was going to go over.
“Yes.”
Jackson swallowed. “Well, like I said, there were some shots fired and a big explosion, and Burton said he’d get here tomorrow to help watch Constance’s back.”
“Which is good,” Ellery said, because Burton did have a way of managing things.
“Well, if Burton’s explosion did what I think it did—”
“Kill off the big boss Siderov reported to,” Ellery said, seeing the horizon Jackson was waving from, waiting for Ellery to catch up.
“Yes. Exactly. If Burton’s explosion killed off Siderov’s superior, then Ziggy is running out of options. Siderov is either growing suspicious or about to start, and Ziggy just killed his nephew and used his supply train to cover it up. He’s too hot on the street right now to so much as stir a whisker outside whatever rat hole he’s hanging out in. If Siderov’s superior was the guy he’s sucking up to, Ziggy doesn’t have any cover whatsoever, and if he wasn’t the guy Ziggy was sucking up to….” Jackson frowned.