Fish Out of Water (7 page)

Besides, Ellery Cramer wasn’t bad-looking—and he had that sort of ice-blue-blood thing going on in his ramrod posture and his defiantly clenched jaw. Sexy. Power, strong will—those things had always attracted Jackson. He was not above comfort sex or a playful romp, but the person who made Jackson work for it was the lover Jackson wanted in his bed.

Yeah, that crush was still going strong, but Jackson had too many people looking to him right now—and somebody did
not
want him to have too much information.

He sighed. And if he was fronting the money to help out Dave and Alex, Ellery had a bank account to stand on in the “not an asshole” department.

And if that bank account was helping out his friends, Jackson was obliged to knock the chip off his shoulder so he could stand with them.

He approached them slowly but with purpose, and he got there in time to see them cup each other’s cheeks and smile absurdly through tears they probably wished they hadn’t shed.

Dave saw him first, and they dropped their hands to their sides—and then clasped them.

“So… you want anything else? A pint of blood, perhaps? We got chocolate and vanilla—let me open up a fucking vein.”

Jackson winced. “Not necessary,” he said, feeling the guilt-shiv twist in his stomach again. “But here—” He handed Alex his card, with Ellery’s number and extension written hurriedly on the back of it. “This guy here is having an SUV delivered to the hospital to get you home. The delivery guy is going to leave the keys at the info desk in the front. By the way, you’re now official consultants to the defense firm, so if anybody gives you shit about hanging with me, tell them they’re interfering with a crime investigation and that’s a fucking crime, you hear me?”

Jackson nodded and watched as the two of them, stunned, nodded back.

“Good. And now, as just a personal favor to me, could you do me something?”

“You got us a car?” Dave asked. “Hell—I’ll blow you and Lex’ll get your rims.”

And
that
made Jackson laugh. “Uhm, kind of you but not necessary. No. Stay away from this case. They set your car on fire—you’re consultants, not spies.” He swallowed and tried not to look to where the smoke had eased up, but the stench of hot metal and melted upholstery remained. “And you’re friends. Guys, you’re smart, and you’re so fucking helpful, but most importantly, you’re alive, got it?”

They both nodded, and Alex came in for the hug. Jackson squeezed him tight, wishing he could do more, and Dave went over both their shoulders and squeezed tighter.

The hug eased up and Alex said disconsolately, “You know, we didn’t even have sex in it anymore. We just mostly sat and talked and….”

“Yeah, baby.” Dave squeezed his shoulder. “He gets it.”

Jackson did.

JACKSON CONSULTED
with the fire chief before he left—with mixed results. The chief, one Abe McKenzie, was a thick-chested, buzz-cut veteran of the department, with gray shooting through the stubble on his head and goatee; he lived and died law and order. Jackson asked for a copy of the arson report on the down low and was told it would be made available to the firm when it was available to the DA’s office and not a moment before.

“What about the police department?” Jackson asked, frustrated.

“They’ll get it if it’s pertinent to an open investigation,” McKenzie said, his voice gruff from too much smoke and too many fires. His team was busy cleaning up, and the forensics team had moved in to photograph the scene. He turned from his scrutiny of the busy, almost scavenger-like proceedings to regard Jackson fiercely. “Is there a
problem
with the police having that report?” he asked evenly.

Jackson returned his stare. The guy had a shallow line of scarring along his jaw, and white, even teeth, which, so far, Jackson had only seen when McKenzie’s lean lips had been pulled back in a snarl.
Now
this
guy could keep you safe at night
, his inner alley cat whispered, but Jackson ignored that voice for the business at hand.

“I think the car was torched to cover up evidence exonerating a guy who was arrested this morning,” Jackson said, keeping the root of that evil out of his voice. “I’m leery of
anybody
getting their hands on it.”

McKenzie’s eyes darted to the upper right and then back to Jackson’s face. On a lesser person it would have been an eye roll. “Nice dodge, Mr. Rivers, but we know your name and we know your story and we know that you’ve got an axe to grind. We’re not your fuckin’ axe, you understand me?”

Jackson snorted. “Just don’t be the fuckin’ three-ton whetstone in my way, and I’ve got no problem with that,” he muttered. He fished a card from his cell phone case and handed it to McKenzie. “Any help you got, I’ll take. Any shit you got, you can dish that somewhere else.”

McKenzie let out a bark of laughter and raked Jackson up and down with his eyes. “You? You need them both at the same time. Now get out of my face and let me secure my scene.”

“Yes
sir
!” Jackson backed up and gave the guy a two-fingered salute before turning away to his car.

He’d left his old Toyota illegally parked, thinking he was just going to hit Dave and Alex up for info, not witness an arson fire.

It had a ticket on it.

He crumpled the ticket up into a tight and tiny ball and chucked it into the back, where it joined its litter of brethren and sandwich wrappers, rolled up identically. Once a month, he rather enjoyed sweeping them out like little recyclable ping-pong balls when he cleaned his car. Usually he saved one or two for Billy Bob to play with—he thought of it as a circle-of-life sort of thing.

What he did
not
enjoy was cruising all the way down 5 to 80 to take the Northgate off-ramp to the little knot of dirtied suburb where Connie lived. Jackson hated this part of town. Sure, his duplex on Elvas wasn’t in an
awesome
neighborhood, but he’d grown up here, in North Sacramento. The apartment complex where he’d lived through high school was still there, crumbling concrete stairs and all. God, the day his mom’d kicked him out so her boyfriend could move in had been the best day of his life, because Kaden’s mom had taken him in and let him sleep on their couch—even though he was pretty sure she knew he was sleeping with her daughter at the time.

But he’d gotten a job ASAP, and after high school, when K was in college and Jackson had been taking preliminary criminal justice courses and applying for the academy, he and K had roomed together for a while in an even shittier apartment. He’d thought his life would be chocolate once he got in.

Not so much.

Connie Coulson lived right in the middle of the real estate that used to represent the center of Jackson’s life. Jackson could have hated the guy for that alone.

South Avenue was an oddly rural collection of tiny houses on plots with actual yards. Some of the yards were well-kept behind wrought iron or hurricane fences, and some were trashed, and all of them were brown and dusty in the final days of summer during a drought. Before she’d passed away, Kaden’s mom used to say the neighborhood was like the neighborhood she’d grown up in as a little girl in the South—only without the green to make it pretty.

And with too many fences.

Connie Coulson’s cottage-style house was not one of the ones with the wrought iron or hurricane fencing. His lawn was dirt, and his dirt was full of trash. It looked like the back of Jackson’s car, only without the military precision of the rolled-up balls of paper.

This would have been in keeping with the décor of the rest of the neighborhood, but when Jackson parked, he noted the Navigator-style SUV in front of the house—hell, it was almost as big as the house itself.

Black, chrome rims, tinted windows—nice, Connie. Unobtrusive. Way to show you were
definitely
living on the salary of a gas station clerk.

Idiot.

Jackson knocked sharply at the door, unsurprised when it didn’t open. He heard ratlike scuttling throughout the house—also unsurprising. The scuttling grew louder, and after pausing, just a moment, to see which direction the pounding footsteps were going, he took off at a dead sprint for the backyard.

And got there just in time to see a scrawny guy with shockingly red hair and greenish freckles against pale skin burst out the back door.

Jackson took three full strides, hitting the middle step of the porch with the ball of his foot and using his momentum to vault over the railing. He caught Connie midair, and together they crashed through the other side of the rail, landing with a solid thump on the hardpan dirt below the porch. Connie lay on his back, mouth opening and closing like a landed fish, and Jackson had
his
fall cushioned by about a hundred pounds of stringy flesh and pointy bone. He felt some bruises starting on his knees and at his ribs, but he was doing well enough to sit up on his knees, straddling Connie’s thighs. He took a second to wish that of all
the men he’d interacted with this day, he’d been able to sit like this on anyone but this
one.

Connie raised his arms weakly to try to fend Jackson off, and Jackson grabbed his wrists before the fending could work its way up to a full-on flail.

“Nah-nah-nah,” he managed, slamming Connie’s hands down above his head. “You’ve been a bad boy, Connie—you don’t get to go anywhere until you tell me what you did.”

“I don’t gotta tell you
shit
!” Connie really hammered that last word, and spit flew out of his mouth.

Jackson grimaced and wiped his chin on his shoulder but didn’t loosen his hold. “You took last night off,” Jackson said and watched him flinch—pretty hard to miss from this close up. “You called your boss, who’d been working all day, and told him you were sick, and now he’s in jail for something he didn’t do. Now I was coming to see if you were really sick—if you’d been smart, I would have found you with a shit-ton of Kleenex and in your bathrobe, but
no
. You’ve got to be blowing out of your own house like a bright-eyed fucking squirrel and force me to bring you down. So we know you’re not smart, and we know you’re not
sick—
what we
don’t
know is why you called in and left your boss swinging in the breeze.”

Connie closed his eyes. “Didn’t want to hurt Kaden,” he said, his breath coming in forced pants, probably because hey! Jackson was lying on his ribs. “But… but see….” He grimaced and bit his lip. “I was supposed to be there. I was supposed to be the fall guy. Because they said if I didn’t, they’d….” To Jackson’s disgust, Connie began to cry, big hiccupy sobs, with snot running down his nose into the creases by his mouth and everything. “See,” he wheezed, “I play the ponies at Expo—”

“Gambling?” Jackson asked, scrambling up. He kept Connie’s wrists clasped together and reached into his pocket for a handy zip tie. He wasn’t a cop anymore, but old habits died hard.

“Yeah—I was in deep, they knew it. One of them came in for his payoff and passed me a tip.”

Jackson grunted. “And what a nice car you bought with it!” He wrapped the zip tie with professional speed and pulled tight.

“What the fuck?” Connie demanded, shaking his bound wrists. “You’re not even a fucking cop!”

“Nope. But I need you to answer my questions, and I don’t feel like tackling you again.” In fact, Jackson’s knee—which was already a miracle of modern engineering and daily collagen boosters—was singing the opening number from
Les Mis
. His chest, which still showed the lumps of scarring under the skin, ached from the exertion, and he longed for his Pilates ball so he could stretch out his torso.

And he wasn’t about to tell this shithead
any
of that.

“Yeah,” Connie muttered. “If you were a cop, I’d be fucking
dead
. Those assholes….” He shook his head and turned miserable green eyes to Jackson. “You’ve got to understand, they were already shaking us down. First it was free coffee, then it was free food, and that wasn’t so bad, right? Treat the guys right and they get the perps before they hit your front door. But I got in deep with my bookie—”

“Name?” Jackson had his phone out and was making notes furiously.

“Hendrix.”

Jackson frowned. He had a line on most of the big names in town—Sacramento had a lot of small sports action, some high rollers betting on basketball and the football teams in the Bay Area and, of course, the ponies. But most gamblers in the area went to Cache Creek out by Stanford Ranch. Indian gaming—big casinos, lots of action.

Hendrix was
not
on his list of contacts for gambling.

A car backfired, and Jackson looked down the gap between the house and the fence to see a black SUV with tinted windows cruise down the street, taking its time. Out of instinct, Jackson backed up a little so he was covered by the house and asked, “Who in the hell is—”

“Sergeant Ross Hendrix,” Connie said guiltily. “He runs a ‘friendly’ game of poker out of the back of one of the restaurants on Del Paso.”

“Friendly?” Oh, there were all sorts of ways cops could be friendly. Jackson hadn’t trusted any of them as a kid, not as an adult, not as a cop, and definitely not as a “retired” officer.

“He’s good,” Connie muttered, shaking his head. “You come out ahead a couple of times, and then you lose, just a little. Then you lose just a little more. And then you do just a little favor—”

“Which was…?”

Connie looked away. “I… I looked the other way. That cop that came into the station—Bridger? Saw him with a working girl in the back of his car. She was… working. On him.”

Jackson groaned. “Seriously? Can they not come up with anything more original? Just once I want to see a bad cop trying to take over the fucking world. But no—money, gambling, sex—”

“Drugs—”

“Fucking lovely. Jesus, I want some new fucking vices.”

“Just once,” Connie sneered, struggling awkwardly to his feet, “I want to see a
good
cop with
no
fucking vices. Wouldn’t that be fucking lovely?”

“There are good cops out there,” Jackson said fiercely. God, he’d known some—some dyed-in-the-wool, true-blue fucking heroes. There just weren’t enough of them—with or without the bad cops, there just weren’t enough people anywhere Jackson had ever felt he could trust.