Fish Out of Water (12 page)

“No,” he repeated, but this time it was the truth. He could see Jackson’s chest, and it appeared muscular and well worked, just like his abdomen. The scars just
were
, bare and inglorious but not ugly. Simply flesh—painful keloid flesh, but flesh. Ellery reached out a shaking hand, the urge to touch overwhelming him. Very carefully, he stroked his fingers down the whole of that amazing chest, sweaty and strong and covered faintly with dark blond hair—because no, Jackson Rivers wouldn’t give a fuck about grooming.

Jackson’s indrawn breath, sharp and surprised, pulled Ellery back. Jackson’s hand—dusty, battered, bloody at the knuckles and tough—cupped under Ellery’s chin, and Ellery was forced to make eye contact again.

“Oh,” Jackson said, and he nodded as though surprised. “Okay. I… I need to shower. And we have work to do. And if you’re here too late, you can sleep on the couch.”

“The couch?” Ellery gasped, absurdly hurt. He’d just made a
pass
at the guy and he was exiled to the couch when even the neighbor
knew Jackson slept with everything that moved.

“Yeah.” Oh, yay, the sarcasm was back. “Because
you
are not a one-night fuck, Cramer.
You
are a complication.” Jackson’s jaw lost some of its hardness, and his lower lip quivered, just once, before he had his game face on again. “My brother’s in jail tonight. I’m not getting laid when my brother’s in jail.”

Oh God. Jackson had needed to remind
Ellery
about professional behavior. There was not a hole deep enough in the world, much less in Sacramento, for him to hide in.

But Jackson didn’t castigate him or humiliate him—any further than he’d humiliated himself, at any rate. “Let me shower,” he said abruptly, turning his back and stalking—well, limping, but limping with
power—
toward the bathroom in the hall. “You boot up our computers. My network is
Homerange
, I use my work e-mail for ID, and my password is
raging4rivers
, no caps, no spaces, four is a number, not a word. We good?”

“Got it!” Ellery followed him out of the intimacy of the bedroom, yearning for his laptop and maybe a beer.

It wasn’t until Jackson took an abrupt right into the bathroom for his shower that Ellery realized he’d been staring at the man’s bare, muscular ass since he turned around and walked away.

Don’t get too excited about that. It’s probably the last time you’ll ever see it.

But as Ellery sat down, microbrew in hand, and started to log on to the Internet, he thought,
That right there would be a crying shame.

He also thought that he had a half an hour,
maybe
, to finally research one Jackson Quinn Rivers and find out what in the hell had happened before Ellery moved to Sacramento.

JACKSON LEANED
back against the wall as the water sluiced down, and closed his eyes against his day.

His body ached, his knee throbbed, and the water stung the myriad scrapes and bruises he’d acquired struggling with Connie.

And then he remembered the look of misery on Connie Coulson’s face right before he confessed to being unable to put his dog down, and how
that
was the guy who’d ended up blown to pieces in his own backyard.

God.

And none of that—
none
of it—could keep him from feeling the burn of Ellery Cramer’s tentative touches on his chest.

Jackson had read the guy all wrong.

Or a little wrong.

He was still a bit of a prig, and he still had a stick up his ass, but maybe he had the stick up his ass because a better alternative hadn’t presented itself.

Maybe, just
maybe
, Jackson would be the better alternative.

But Jackson really couldn’t
do
that right now.

His knee ached fiercely, and he spent a moment hating his former colleagues. God, bitter, jaded cops were bitter and jaded. They hated an IA rat with a dead-eyed passion. But they weren’t dirty. The officers who had cornered him after Connie’s death had been as eager as the next cop to give Jackson shit, but none of them had been in on it.

Jackson had spent enough time with Hanover, God damn his soul, to know what a dirty-cop smirk looked like. He’d spent enough time with himself, wearing a wire, to know the grimace that shame bile brought to a cop’s face.

So they were dealing with dirty cops, yes—but not the ones who’d given Jackson his ration of crap.

In fact, Jackson knew exactly two dirty cops at this point. One was dead and the other was hidden behind a union lawyer.

With a grunt, he turned off the water and toweled dry, then hobbled to his room to get dressed. He came out in two minutes, hair combed, wearing basketball shorts and what Kaden used to call a
beater
until the eighth grade. That was when Jade had pointed out the term was short for
wifebeater
, because that was the uniform worn by the guys in the show
Cops
when they got arrested for domestic abuse. Rhonda had put an end to
that
term right quick, but Jackson still heard it in his head whenever he wore a ribbed tank.

He could deal with the Mikes of this world—the old guys who tried really hard to give change a chance but who were dismayed to find that political awareness had passed them right by while they were scratching a blue-collar life out of an information age. If Jackson had stayed a cop—and hadn’t had a year with little to do but surf the Internet and try not to become a troll—he might have become Mike. Confused about how all the best intentions turned into saying all the wrong things.

Pondering that, he got to the kitchen and saw Ellery glance up from his laptop almost guiltily. Great. Somebody had been looking up Jackson’s past.

Jackson sighed and plodded to the refrigerator to get himself a beer. He came out with a carton of hummus and some veggies, as well as some pita chips from the top of the fridge. He set it all down on the table, then settled down to his own computer, which lived in the kitchen already.

Ellery looked up from where he was clicking madly—probably to disguise his search history—and made a grunt of disbelief. “You’re still hungry?”

“It was a fuckin’
day
,” he defended through a mouthful of carrots. “Anyway, I figured I’d give you time to either finish up your porn or ask me a question.” He swallowed and looked at Ellery with meaning. “Either one is good with me.”

Ellery flushed. “You were a cop for six months,” he said, and Jackson was a little disappointed. Honestly, he’d been hoping for porn.

“I was,” he acknowledged.

“Does that include academy training?”

“Nope—and it doesn’t include my year in the hospital and rehabilitation.”

Ellery pursed his lips and looked Jackson over very carefully. “You were really young,” he said after a moment.

Well, not as young as he felt
now
, with those perceptive brown eyes focused on his face and that remote, handsome face engaged in some sort of human emotion interface. “And your point is….”

“Why’d you do it?”

Jackson tried not to choke on his snap pea. “I’m sorry?”

“You were young, you were broke, you came from a disadvantaged background. Every profile in the world would point to you becoming the kind of cop your partner wa—”

“Dirty,” Jackson said darkly, trying not to think about that first horrible realization. “You’re talking about what makes a dirty cop.”

“Yeah,” Ellery acknowledged. “Why wasn’t it you?”

Oh, like Jackson hadn’t asked himself this question. He’d spent a year on his back, in pain, wondering if the sniper from the force who’d gotten him was going to come back and take another shot. Yeah, they’d caught the guy. Yeah, he’d been shipped out of state, some military prison where he might survive in general population. But that hadn’t stopped the fucking dreams.

Ellery was looking at him like this was a nostalgic stroll down childhood memory lane.

Jackson glared. “Do you remember eighth grade?” he asked, not at random, although it probably felt like that.

Ellery’s eyes unfocused and then moved to the left, as though he were accessing information in a particular database. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “My acne showed up, I was thirty pounds overweight, and my mom made me take her best friend’s daughter to the school dance.”

He had to laugh at that. “Sounds….”

“Pathetic?” Ellery asked bitterly.

“I was going to say bucolic. Eighth grade for Kaden and Jade Cameron, Rhonda Adams, and Jackson Rivers, day two. Rhonda got to school a few minutes ahead of us and was hanging out across the street. She watched a few drug deals go down and saw the girls she used to play dolls with agree to sneak behind the school to give blow jobs for money. She was so busy watching—and hoping nobody noticed her from her spot under a tree—that she didn’t notice the Drek.”

“Drek?” Ellery was staring at him, entranced, like a little kid hearing a story.

“Short for DeAndre Ricky. Drek. Anyway, Drek saw Rhonda, recognized that she was a ‘good girl,’ and decided he was going to pull her around behind the Jiffy Lube and make her not a good girl anymore. She was kicking and screaming when K and J and me walked up, but Drek was a six-foot gorilla who had flunked the eighth grade three times. So Rhonda was ours, right? We launch ourselves at Drek and are in the process of getting the holy mother of shit beat out of us when a cop shows up. And God, nobody in our neighborhood loved cops. Cops were going to take you from your moms when she got high, they were going to bust you for having a beer—cops were the fucking boogieman in Grant Union District in 1995, you feel me?”

Ellery nodded, and Jackson tried to put away the nausea thinking about that day brought up.

“So the cop shows up and Drek’s not giving up—he’s got Rhonda, and her clothes are torn and she’s crying, and the cop pulls out a Taser and takes him down. Now, today, I know he did it all wrong—he fucking did. Broke about ten kinds of rules, including Tasing a minor without announcing his affiliation with the police department, but back then? Drek went down, shitting his own pants, and we went to get Rhonda up and help her home. We were all beat to shit—J too, because she fights mean—and we weren’t going to school after that. Anyway, the cop takes one look at us and shakes his head and says, ‘You keep your bitch dressed and she won’t cause no trouble, you hear me?’”

Ellery gasped.

“Yeah.” Jackson took a heavy pull off his beer. “See, the lot of us—black, white, whatever—we were all thugs and whores to this guy. He sincerely didn’t give a shit who we were just as long as we didn’t cause trouble. But….”

“But he saved your friend.”

Jackson nodded. “Yeah. He saved my friend. And then walked away. And that was…
fascinating
to me. I started watching the cops after that. I started seeing who was there to help, and a few were. When they started the whole urban cleanup thing at that district, I watched to see who abused the hell out of their power, and there were a few of those too. And there were a few who weren’t great and weren’t awful. They just
were—
just guys doing a job, but they didn’t know enough about human nature to do it any better than that. And they didn’t give enough of a shit to learn.”

“So when you became a cop—”

“You say that like it’s easy. Training they give you, if you make it, but room and board and tuition? No. I had to work for two years to save up enough money to get me through six months. When I was in, K and I worked night shifts at a gas station just like the one he owns, because he was going to business school and I was taking criminal justice classes to prepare for the police academy. We roomed together, and the girls stayed with his moms—
mom
.” So easy, sometimes, to slip back to being in the sixth grade, when the kids said
moms
because it was cool. “And it was hard. I volunteered for nearly every cop function I could find, including wiping their asses so I could get someone to sponsor me and hire me when I was done, but it was worth it, I thought.”

“Yeah? Who sponsored you?”

“Hanover.” Jackson watched as Ellery choked on his last swallow of beer. “You recognize the name.”

“You got partnered with him,” Ellery said, and the look of horror was eloquent.

“Yup. And within the first month, I watched him take bribes, I watched him take drugs from one dealer and have another front them, and I watched him take favors from the working girls so he’d let them continue to work.”

“I’m so sor—”

“I did it because I’d just worked most of my life not to be that guy. Not to be the cop who didn’t care about the good from the bad. I wasn’t going to let
that
guy’s shitty character define
my
life.”

Ellery nodded. “That’s… well, it’s sort of fucking noble. I’m really impressed.”

Jackson rolled his eyes. “I’m glad it impresses you. I don’t guarantee I’d make the same choices ten years later, but I’m glad that one impressed you.”

“You wouldn’t?” He sounded hurt.

“I wouldn’t go dirty,” Jackson said, surprised how much he wanted Ellery to know that.

“Then what would you do?”

Oh, the what-if game? Jackson was a master at it. “I don’t know. Quit the force, maybe. Say I wasn’t cut out for it and then move the fuck away. Where’d you grow up?”

“Boston.”

Jackson thought about it. “Yeah, I could live there. But you don’t sound like a Kennedy.”

“Elocution lessons, and no, I only wish I was kidding.”

Jackson snorted. “The proverbial silver spoon?”

Ellery leaned back in his chair, and the expression that crossed his face was curiously filled with self-loathing. “My mother picked out the silverware before my sister and I were conceived. We had to pick a career that both provided a service and made a decent living. She had veto power on what our tuition money went to. Coming home for winter break was like being a duck and getting deboned—every part of your life as a college student on display at the dinner table.” He shuddered.