Fish Out of Water (13 page)

“Must have made your first sexual experience a
hoot
!” Jackson commiserated in spite of himself. Apparently Norman Rockwell paintings were made of hardcore political movements and inflated expectations.

“Oh, it was,” Ellery said darkly. “For all involved.”

Jackson snorted. “How many was that?”

“Well, me, my sister, our mother and father, and the friend I brought home from college to introduce to my parents.
He
was surprised to find that the Kinsey scale worked in fractions and that my family
would
have him pinned to the nearest tenth of a degree before the first course was over.”

Oh for crap’s sake. Ellery was trying to put up a good front like this didn’t bother him, but Jackson had been a good cop because he could empathize. “I’d never sport wood again.”

“It took me a human sexuality class and a shrink,” Ellery said, and it didn’t sound like he was kidding even a little. “But that’s a perfect life compared to getting shot on duty while you were wearing a wire. I couldn’t figure out how they knew. It wasn’t in any of the papers.”

Jackson closed his eyes. “Yeah, see,
that’s
the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question right there. I was working with two IA rats and two members of the DA’s office to collect data. And… it was a nightmare. For three months I got up, put on my wire, and went into work and hoped I didn’t have to blow my cover to keep Hanover from fucking blowing someone away. He was using by that time. He liked to spin the barrel of his revolver and fake Russian roulette. Me, him, the poor kid in the back of the fucking squad car, it didn’t matter who he pointed that thing at. Anyway, so we had a case—”

“You had hundreds of hours of audio!” Ellery leaned forward, hands clasped, his body language that of a suppliant. “How could you have hundreds of hours and still be going back in there?”

Jackson shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, you said it yourself, I was young and dumb. The lawyers, they had all the goddamned answers. My gods the cops had fallen, but the lawyers were still up on high, you know? So I’d ask every day, can we stop now?” His stomach roiled just thinking about it. “I lost fifty pounds. Hanover kept telling me to lay off the fucking crank, but it was all fucking nerves. And then one day I get out of the car to check out a complaint, and Hanover stays behind the wheel, and suddenly—” He shook his head. “By the time I heard the shots, I was on the ground trying to breathe. And Hanover’s brains were splattered all over the driver’s-side door.”

He paused for a moment, freezing in his eighty-degree kitchen. That was the kicker right there. Not that
he’d
been gunned down but that Patrick Hanover had too. Whoever had done it—

“They were trying to shut him up,” Ellery said, meeting his eyes.

Jackson nodded, still cold. “Mission fucking accomplished.”

“But… but you, you were the message.”

“Don’t rat on your people.” Jackson could say that now, because he had eight years between the hospital and the present.

“Yeah. Hanover was—”

“He wasn’t working all by himself,” Jackson confirmed. “But all departmental resources went toward finding the guy who fired the shots, and I was not in any position to complain that only five people were supposed to know.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “But this—this is old fucking news—”

“No,” Ellery said thoughtfully. He straightened up at the table. “I mean, I wanted to know. Who’s not curious? And the old press releases don’t say what really happened. But… but something weird happened today, and I’ve got….”

He stood up and started to—well, not pace. He wasn’t pacing, because that implied rhythm and urgency. This was more of a meander. He started to
meander
around Jackson’s kitchen, shirtsleeves rolled up, linen suit pants rumpled. His hair was usually slicked back and pristine, but now it was falling down from his brow in straight clumps, and every now and then he’d shove them back from his forehead and more locks would break free.

Jackson liked it. Ellery looked human that way. Vulnerable and approachable. This wasn’t the Ellery who won cases, this was the Ellery who’d lost his first boyfriend because his parents were apparently social nightmares who couldn’t let a boy get laid without an interrogation.

“What?” Jackson asked, shaking himself back to the task on hand. “What do you have?”

Ellery let out a whoosh of breath. “I am
dying.
How hot is it in this kitchen?”

“Eighty. I turned the AC on higher, but it usually takes another minute or two. Do you want to shower?”

“I’ve got some clothes in my gym bag,” Ellery admitted. He sounded distracted. “It’s out in the car.”

He was obviously working something through. Jackson held out his hand. “Give me the keys. I’ll get the gym bag and put it in the guest room. You go take a cool shower and it’ll make the eighty degrees tolerable. Deal?”

Ellery nodded, still in his figuring zone. Jackson knew about this zone—he lived there sometimes when he was working on a puzzle. He forced himself up from the table and walked into Ellery’s space. Ellery didn’t seem to notice as Jackson reached into his left pocket—the man was left-handed; it only made sense. The jingle of the keys startled him out of his trance, and he jerked back.

“What are you—”

Oh yeah. Tactical error. Ellery smelled like sweat and aftershave, and
this
time Jackson wasn’t distracted by pain. In fact, he felt shocked open by the intimacy of the old story, the old life he’d lived, and when Ellery focused on him, mouth softly open, pink tongue darting out to wet his lips, he felt that intimacy pressing on his chest and ribs.

“Getting your keys,” he said gruffly, feeling the flush of arousal wash his body. “So you can go shower and we can get to work.”

“I….” Ellery closed his eyes and tilted his head. Lightly, he inhaled, his nose pointed at the hollow of Jackson’s neck. “You smell really good.”

“Body wash.” Oh no. No, this couldn’t happen. No no no no. Jackson took a step back. “I… we have a plan, Cramer. We need to… we need to save this….” He waved his hand in front of them and between. “This
thing
for after Kaden’s safe.”

Ellery nodded. “Yeah,” he rasped. “After Kaden’s out of jail.” And just like that, all distraction snapped away. “I will hold you to that, Jackson Rivers,” he threatened. “This—if you won’t do it now because it’s a complication, you’d damned well better not walk away, because
that
would make things—”

“Really fucking complicated,” Jackson admitted. Hell, if he and Ellery had been on a date, they would have been fucking already. Jackson would have bent him over the table and taken him and fed him, let him shower, and then… let him sleep in the guest bedroom.

Because Jackson in no way wanted Ellery Cramer to see him any more naked than he’d already been.

A droplet of sweat traveled from under Ellery’s hairline down his temple and along his jaw. For a moment Jackson watched it, fascinated, while he avoided those dark, perceptive eyes.

“It’s hot,” he said at last and whirled away before he could reach out and taste it.

MIKE WAS
still out there, his side of the garage open, the cage lights on and bright. He’d turned the music down but not off completely, and Jackson reminded himself to call Denny when he went back in. Jackson opened the trunk and grabbed Ellery’s neatly packed gym bag, smiling because in
his
car, the gym bag would have been hard to differentiate from the bag of rags he used for the soccer team car wash.

Then he remembered that gym bag, rag bag, and piece-of-shit car were all pretty much destroyed.

He pulled back and slammed the trunk shut, sighing.

“That didn’t sound good,” Mike said, walking around the truck and wiping his fingers fruitlessly on a truly irredeemable grease-stained rag. Shit. He’d been the one to donate most of his rags to the fucking car wash.

“I have to get a new car,” Jackson said, because somehow that was the least awful thing about this day.

“What happened to your old one?” Very carefully, so the rivets in his assless jeans wouldn’t scratch the shiny black paint on his baby, Mike leaned back against the truck.

“It’s in Toyota heaven.” Jackson’s soft nylon basketball shorts would mostly just buff the Lexus, so he leaned slowly back too.

Mike’s eyebrows shot up. “What in the hell is it doing there?”

“I don’t know. Probably giving rides to those little anime girls with the gigantic eyes.” Jackson half laughed and swung Ellery’s black Puma bag a little more comfortably. Anything so he didn’t have to think about the drop of sweat near Ellery’s ear and about how the stuck-up fucker with the stick up his ass was their best hope to keep Kaden out of jail and alive.

“Now see, when I say things like that, you people say I’m sexist,” Mike muttered, and Jackson had to stop and think about it.

“You know, you got me,” he said after a moment. “But I’m pretty sure that’s on the approved list. I think it’s because I didn’t objectify them.”

Mike wrinkled his nose. “You mean all I have to do to stay out of hot water is not talk about
tits
? I mean, I could do it, but I’m saying, it would take some of the fun out of life.”

Hell. Jackson couldn’t process that. He couldn’t even quantify it. “Man, I don’t know what my car is doing in Toyota heaven, but if you can think of it doing something sexy that doesn’t break any rules, be my guest.”

Mike thought about it for a minute. “I got nothin’—but I’m telling you, when this baby finally goes, he’s going to be in Ford country with big, buxom farm girls who’ve got
ginormous
tits. I’m not going to apologize for that either. This truck works its ass off for me—if he wants tits and ass, that’s what he’s gonna get. And if he wants
balls
and ass, there’s gotta be a truck in the lot that’s still got those chrome ones dangling from the tow ball.”

Jackson stared at him, a twisted version of Pixar’s
Cars
playing behind his eyes, with horny trucks humping sexy little Volkswagens and producing midsize sedans in the process.

Would he be humping another truck or a Volkswagen?

And
bam
! There was Ellery, a little sport truck with a brown paint job to match his hair and eyes, and a large set of brass balls.

Jackson’s laugh was a little hysterical, but it was a laugh. “I’m glad nobody can see what’s running behind my eyes right now,” he admitted, chuckling. “They’d have me committed.”

Mike sobered. “You said it was bad.”

“I’ve got no words for how bad it is,” Jackson told him, sobering just as quickly. “But Ellery might have some words to fix it.”

Mike shook his head, pursing his lips consideringly. “He’s not bad. I mean, if I was a truck-humper, I wouldn’t mind jumping his flatbed.”

Jackson couldn’t help it. He collapsed, his elbows resting on his knees, his stomach heaving. “Aw, fuck you,” he managed to wheeze before losing his shit completely.

He was still laughing when he walked back into the house and heard the shower going. He dropped the bag just inside the bathroom and went back into the kitchen for a big glass of ice water.

The AC had finally kicked in. It was livable at the table, and Jackson sat down and gave thanks for air-conditioning and ice cubes and guys who kept trying to be decent when the world was a confusing fucking place to be decent
in
.

TWO HOURS
later he and Ellery were taking turns pacing in Jackson’s tiny kitchen. The tile was old, and every time one of them hit the place three feet from the refrigerator, the crackle of broken tile and a squeaky floorboard could be heard throughout the house. Billy Bob had come back in and kept trying to sneak up onto Jackson’s laptop, and Jackson was so scared he could swear he felt ice crystallizing in his intestines.

What Ellery had put together in his head made a lot of sense, and it was terrifying.

“See, it’s where the e-mails came from,” Ellery had explained as he’d walked out of the shower wearing a black T-shirt and white nylon shorts. Not sexy, no, but it did weird things to Jackson to know they had similar leisure clothes. He would have predicted Ellery Cramer slept in linen pajamas, something flowy and prissy and girly.

This was just so clean, so masculine, that Jackson’s truck-humping engine kicked into gear. He suddenly wanted a crack at Ellery’s tailpipe and his low-hanging chrome balls. It was an insidious thought, funny and hot at the same time, and it took some serious shit to break it loose from Jackson’s cortex.

Unfortunately Ellery was dealing this hand, and it was all business.

“The DA’s e-mails?” Jackson asked, to clarify.

“Yes. Arizona said they were coming from the capitol, but she was afraid to tell me from where. But it got me thinking. You’ve got to be around for a while if you’re working there—you need to form connections, be trusted. You don’t just spring up in the capitol without some backstory. And that shit that went down with you—”

“That was eight years ago,” Jackson said, nodding. “I see where you’re going.”

“Right? So you need to tell me the names of the four other people who knew you were walking in with a wire. You said you went in for three months, but if Hanover was as dirty as you say he was—”

“God, he was worse.” Jackson closed his eyes against the sounds of Hanover banging a prostitute behind a shitty apartment complex in Oak Park while the girl practically sobbed because he was so rough. He’d been told—again and again he’d been told—that if Hanover wasn’t killing anyone or putting them in the hospital, then Jackson was a recording device, and that was all.

But he’d had to stand there, sick and nauseated, and hear that—and feel like the evil of it had seeped through his pores, infecting his bones and marrow with the grotesquerie of corruption.

“A week,” Ellery snarled, his intensity shocking. “A
week—
that’s the longest you should have been there. You were trying to catch one guy, and if they were trying to get someone bigger, they should have
told
you.”