Fish Out of Water (17 page)

“I’ll have copies made and send one to your office. But do me a favor—let me talk to Chisholm first.” Ellery still had no idea who Bill Chisholm was, but he had a feeling he knew where he worked.

“You’re welcome to,” she said sourly. “If you want to commit career suicide, you have to do it alone.”

She turned and stalked away, and Ellery looked around the mostly cleared courtroom. The audience members had been escorted out, most of them grumbling loudly but so far nobody threatening to get violent. Ellery was very aware that could change at any moment.

He made his way into the hallway and to the antechamber, and saw that Jackson was still there, but Kaden and his family had been taken away already.

Jackson startled when Ellery walked in, and then he looked relieved.

“Did the marshals get them away okay?”

Jackson nodded. “Jade’s gone to get their stuff out of the car. They have their neighbor’s kid watching the animals. I promised I’d check every day until I knew they were going to be okay.” His expression softened then, wavered, before he shored it up. “You’ll need to make appointments to see him—me too.”

He swallowed, and Ellery quickly realized what was wrong.

“That’s your family,” Ellery said, thinking that if his mother’s voice disappeared from the other end of the phone for an unspecified amount of time, it would freak him out. Yeah, she was overbearing, manipulative, and obnoxious in the extreme… but she was his mother.

“You’ll see them,” Ellery consoled, and for the first time, he actually saw the impact of what Jackson was losing. Jackson was a grown man, but those people he was fighting for, they were all he had.

Well, them and the cat.

“I’d rather make it safe for them.” Jackson’s voice grew crisp and active, and he paused for a moment and checked his phone, then texted. “I’m telling Jade to go into the office—”

“Tell her to find out where Bill Chisholm works in the capitol while you’re at it,” Ellery said, not minding the smug bastard in his voice when he said it.

Jackson’s sardonic look was worth it. “Proud of yourself?”

“Ellery can play too,” he said with dignity, and the tenseness, the defeated set to Jackson’s shoulders, relaxed.

“Ellery likes to play top,” Jackson said dryly.

Oh God—he was referring to that morning. Ellery flushed. “I top,” he said, because he couldn’t help himself.

There was a knock at the door, and Jackson sauntered past him to answer it. “Ellery?” he whispered when he drew even. “I always top.”

Jackson opened the door, and Jade rushed into his arms for an uncomfortably long hug. Ellery cleared his throat and glared over Jade’s head, and Jackson raised an eyebrow and hugged her for just a heartbeat more.

Jade pulled back and gave them both a watery smile. “Okay, boys, we’ve seen them to safety. Now we need to figure out what the hell happened. What next?”

Jackson narrowed his eyes and started issuing orders.

Ellery narrowed his right back and started issuing his own.

JACKSON MUST
have been losing his touch. He leaned against the passenger door and glared at Ellery as they cruised up 80 toward Roseville.

“I can get my own car,” he muttered.

“Stop being a child. I got the firm to give you a down payment, but you need me there to expense it.”

“We don’t have time for this. We have—”

“Cool your jets, Jackson. I brought the laptop. I’ll be working while you get a functioning vehicle. It’s not a hardship.”

“I put the board in the back of your car. I could have
skateboarded
to a dealership in town.”

“But we don’t have the discount with the dealers in town.” Ellery pitched his voice like a mother talking to a fractious child. “And if you keep bitching, I’ll suspect you don’t want to spend time with me.”

A slow moment passed, and Jackson tried to catch his breath. It was
embarrassing
how much he wanted to spend time with Ellery.

Ellery didn’t hear the thickness in Jackson’s chest, though, and for a moment his guard dropped and he became the somewhat nerdy social outcast Jackson had never suspected lurked behind the guy in the expensive suits.

“So you
don’t
want to spend time with me,” he said, sounding sad.

“Don’t be dramatic,” Jackson muttered. “We just have shit to do.”

Ellery perked up like he heard the neediness behind the snarl. “Well, consider this on your list, and we’re getting it done,” he said primly.

Jackson laughed in spite of his funk. The kids had looked so scared. He wasn’t sure how to process that. Kaden and Rhonda had been, well, K and Rhonda. They’d fussed about extra clothes and hair ties and enough shorts and at least one sweater and a swimsuit in case there was a pool. Jackson had watched the two of them switch into team mode ever since they’d started actually dating
in their junior year of high school, and it had always impressed him. He and Jade could play second fiddle to their leadership, but they’d never be first seat.

Jackson had still been touch-and-go when Rhonda had delivered their oldest, a girl named River. Jade had talked up being jealous—mostly, Jackson suspected, to keep him from crying when he woke up and realized he’d missed a part of his friends’ lives that he’d been looking forward to. Rhonda had named their little boy Diamond, so Jade’d shut up.

River and Diamond. Jade and Jackson had once talked about getting married just so they could be auntie and uncle together, because those kids were bright spots in their lives. But that had just been talk. Jade was still waiting for someone she hadn’t grown up with, and Jackson had been so… afraid. Afraid of nightmares, afraid of getting close, afraid of letting anyone actually see
what his nightmares looked like. He’d bring people over, fuck them if they wanted or talk to them until they fell asleep on his couch, because he
knew
that with another person—living, breathing, warm—in his house, in his bed, he could keep it together.

But the night before…

He hadn’t.

And this asshole who had mostly been fun to mess with or lust after—privately—had been the one person to see the frightened child Jackson hid so very well.

Jackson wasn’t sure how to deal.

So he dominated. That was what he did.

And Ellery was doing it right back.

Jackson wasn’t sure what to do with that. His first instinct was to bolt. Why else would he put the board in the back of the Lexus? But Ellery had a contingency for
that
too. Jackson’s second instinct was to curl up in a corner and hiss until he came up with a plan.

Yeah, Jackson. How’s that working out for you?

“So after I get the car, you’re going back to the office and I’m going to interview—”

“We’ll have it delivered to your house, and the two of us can go to the precinct and talk to the IA liaison.” Smug bastard.

“Why do you need—”

“But after that, we’re going to stop and make, like, thirty copies of your damned file, and we’re going to leave one in your house and one in the office and send one to my mother and one to each of the partners of the damned firm,” Ellery said darkly.

“We’re going to
what
?” Jackson asked, horrified. “Why in the hell would we want to—”

“Because the DA’s office doesn’t have the file we do,” Ellery told him, still scowling. “And they should, because you had an ADA and his assistant working on your shit. There is no fucking reason for that shit to disappear unless people up top decided to
make
it disappear. So yeah. We’re going to make a zillion copies and make sure everybody has one and send a couple of them to unrelated third parties and a safety deposit box as well. That shit is going to get some
play
.”

Jackson sighed and leaned against his fist. “Wonderful. Maybe we can dredge up some of the footage. I’m sure they’ve got some shots of the EMTs working on me, or me in the hospital. Department milked that shit for months.”

“You’re lucky they did,” Ellery told him. “As far as I can see, that might be the only reason someone else in the department didn’t take a crack at you. When you finally came out of the ICU—”

“Sniper captured, trial done with, news over,” Jackson filled in. “Yeah, I get it.”

“But seriously, why risk another shot at you when—”

“When I had my file and I had to pull my shit back together.” Jackson sighed again. “Why? Why Kaden? Why Kaden’s gas station? Seriously?”

“Maybe it was the luck of the draw,” Ellery said. “They were running that area already, and Kaden was bound to have a dust-up. Or maybe it was… lucky,” he said after a moment.

“
Lucky
!”

Ellery nodded. “Look, Jackson, I know Kaden is your friend, but that’s the point. If this had happened to anybody else,
any
small business in that section of the city, that person would have been screwed. Nobody would have believed them, they would have gotten a public defender with two hundred cases, and it would have been pled out. I looked up the guy Kaden would have drawn if you hadn’t intervened? He would have sold Kaden down the river just to get him off his roster. And the problem would have gone on and some poor innocent person’s life would have been ruined and they would have been clueless as to why.”

“But Kaden—”

“Kaden has you and Jade, and not only do you work at a law firm,
you
have dealt with dirty cops, and you’ve got info nobody else does. So maybe if everything happens for a reason, the reason for
this
happening is that you’re in a position to stop it. I mean, that’s what we’re really going after, right? Not just the person who’s trying to frame Kaden and why, but to root out the corruption, get rid of the same people who almost killed you, right?”

Jackson scrubbed at his face. “Sure. Why not. Hop on that donkey and go fight that windmill. I hear you.”

“I thought you might,” Ellery said, and he was so goddamned smug Jackson wanted to smack him.

“But what’s
your
excuse?” Jackson asked.

He was surprised when Ellery gave a lying shrug. “Like you said, this case could completely make my career.”

“Yeah? That the only reason?” Jackson needled, irritated because Ellery had seen so cleanly into his own motives.

“Sure,” Ellery said, eyes directly on the road. They’d reached Roseville, and he took the Sunrise exit, which opened pretty much onto a giant intersection.

Jackson just kept staring at him until he cut a sideways look toward the passenger’s side.

Jackson forced a laugh. “You’re not doing this for me!” he insisted. “You hardly
know
me. No, no, no—like you said, your career, your chance to defend someone innocent, my—”

“Six years,” Ellery said, voice brittle. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

Jackson grunted. “I was leaving the building with Jade and the… yeah, the waitress who works in the sandwich shop around the corner.” He chuckled in reminiscence. “She was sweet. We used to pity fuck about once a month before she met her husband—nice kid.”

Ellery growled. “Yeah. Pfeist introduced you to me and you took your arm from around that girl and shook my hand. And if you were straight, that would have been fine. You were hot, I couldn’t have you, so the fuck what. We didn’t have to like each other to work together and boo-fucking-hoo.”

Jackson remembered that, remembered seeing Ellery looking remote and unapproachable, rich and unembarrassed. He remembered that icy sweep of Ellery’s brown eyes down his body and how he hadn’t been
nearly
as okay with his scars then as he was now. He’d become defensive, had assumed that Ellery’s disdain would be solely based on appearances and that nothing he could do would impress the new guy at the office.

“I looked you over,” he said, remembering it now. A blatantly sexual, body-stripping gaze, one he’d used on a couple of people to get them naked in seconds.

“You made me hard,” Ellery confessed, sounding pissed as hell. “Just one look. And you turned away. And that was it—you had your exclusive little club of everyone who
wasn’t
me, and I got dry reports and sarcastic retorts when I asked for more. The end. Ellery Cramer, off the fucking island.”

Jackson let out a half laugh. “So… that’s what this is? A chance to be part of the group?”

The light turned green, but not before Ellery cast him a smoldering, half-resentful, half-lustful glare from under hooded lids. “A chance for you to see me as worthy,” he said, and it should have sounded corny, but he was angry and vulnerable and defensive.

Jackson shook his head and stared blindly out the window. “You were a rich guy right out of college, Ellery. I was a disgraced—”

“You were
not
disgraced!” Ellery objected hotly.

“Well, as far as the department goes, someone leaked the IA thing when I was in the hospital, and no. Not a lot of visitors. So yeah, you looked at me all cool and shit, I was going to shake you off my back feet. Better that than give you a chance to….”

Shit.

“I won’t hurt you.”

Damn him. Damn Ellery anyway for seeing it when Jackson didn’t want him to.

“We’re not in a relationship.” Jackson could swear they weren’t.

“I’ll be at your house tonight. I’ll bring takeout.”

Jackson grunted. “You’re psychotic.”

“Yeah,” Ellery said, a shit-eating grin taking over his face, “but at least you’re taking me seriously.”

“You’re going to bat for K. I have to,” Jackson retorted. But his voice sounded weak in his own ears.

THE DEALERSHIP
was a struggle as well. Jackson wanted an old Toyota sedan—he had insurance and the expense money, and he was hoping to break even when all was said and done.

Ellery had actually
called ahead
so he could test-drive a new Honda CR-V.

“What in the hell?” he asked as they were escorted to the car. “I wanted—”

But Ellery had sort of… well, there was this thing he did in the courtroom. Jackson had seen it himself. He just stood, tall and remote, and the world parted around him to his specifications. Jackson was used to getting his way, it was true, but he was used to
fighting
for his way.