Fish Out of Water (26 page)

“I’m saying
he’s
stupid,” Ellery said clearly, “because you’re too insignificant to antagonize.”

“I’m
what
?” Bridger roared, and Jackson scraped his elbow on the concrete of the stairwell as he grappled with the leviathan. Fuck, the guy was big, and now he was pissed, kind of at Ellery, but mostly at Jackson for getting in his way.

Fortunately he was also dumb.

He cocked his arm back and howled when he banged it on the handrail, and then tried a punch that had no aim and no follow-through. Jackson ducked it and then went in for the hug, hauling the guy close and personal so he could reverse their positions in the cramped stairwell.

“Get
off
me!” Bridger snarled.

“My
pleasure
!” Jackson snapped before catching one of Bridger’s knees with his foot and shoving at his hard, muscled torso with all his might.

Bridger went over, landing on his back and shoulders as he slid down the stairwell, yelling the whole way.

Jackson grabbed Ellery and started charging up to their level before Bridger hit the landing.

“But what if he’s hurt?”

“Do you hear him yelling?” Jackson asked, thanking God he kept himself in shape and apparently Ellery could run.

“Get back here, you fucking coward! Traitor! Pussy!”

“Yes I hear him yelling!” Ellery panted. “The whole world hears him! Which level are we on?”

“One more!” Jackson risked a look behind them and saw Bridger hoisting himself painfully to his feet—and getting ready to charge up the stairs and at
them
.

Which was actually a pretty good idea.

With his next step, he heard the jingle of his key fob, one of the new types that unlocked the door by its very proximity. He sighted their landing and turned, letting Ellery pass him.

“Bridger!” he yelled, looking down the two landings and hoping the guy wasn’t cranked up enough to fly.

“I’m—” Pant pant pant. “—gonna kill you!” Bridger gasped.

“What’s stopping you, you fucking murderer!” Jackson called back.

Bridger stopped for a moment, horrified. “You can’t—you fucking
traitor
!”

“Yeah, I tell IA about a dirty cop and I’m a traitor—you
kill
a cop and you’re a murderer!” Jackson called back. Very carefully, one step at a time, he edged up to where Ellery stood.

Bridger hesitated then, mired in a surprising grief. “He… he was a good kid, Miles,” he said, like it had just occurred to him. “A wife, a kid—”

“And you deliberately roofied your witness and shot him,” Jackson snarled, handing Ellery his keys and shoving him toward the car. “They’re going to rip out your spleen in prison, asshole. They’re going to dine on your guts while you watch.”

Bridger hauled in a breath then, like he was going to need it to last him, and exploded up the stairs. “
I’m gonna fuckin’ destroy you
!”

Jackson shoved Ellery in front of him, and together they sprinted toward the car.

ELLERY’S HEART
thundered so hard in his ears he could have sworn he could barely hear, except Jackson was shouting “Start the car, asshole!” loud enough to shake the windows of the Honda, and he could hear
that
just fine.

“Why am I driving?” he panted.

Jackson ignored him. “Don’t floor it. He’s on foot, he’s two floors up from his car—he can’t catch us.”

“Then why—”

Jackson fumbled for his phone, shouting, “
There
! Stop!”

Ellery hit the brakes with enough force to throw them both forward, but Jackson didn’t complain. Instead, he hopped out of the car and ran around it, taking pictures, before something made him look up and he sprinted for the car.

Ellery looked in the rearview mirror, and just as Jackson hopped in and slammed the door, he saw Bridger bearing down with speed.

“
Go, go, go
!”

This time Ellery floored it.

“Toward 50, west,” Jackson ordered. “Be ready to take the Business Loop split. It’s right there!”

It was the least obvious direction to go, especially if they were going to the capitol, and it was also the quickest way to get in a place they could disappear.

“On it!” Ellery was good at driving just fast enough to make the green lights but not fast enough to trigger the yellow. He kept his head and drove with his usual precision, smiling a little when he flew through three lights in a row. Just as he was taking the hard right for the freeway, he saw a black SUV braking hard three lights back.

He closed his eyes and hoped.

“That was exciting. Why’d we do—”

“Why’d you call me stupid?” Jackson demanded.

“Why’d you get into a pissing match with a gorilla?” he demanded back. “Jesus
fuck
, what was the purpose of antagonizing him!”

“So he didn’t go bother Toe Tag!” Jackson shot back. “If he was there to see his handiwork and maybe contaminate the body and destroy some more fucking evidence, anything that could distract him from that is a
good thing
!”

“Getting your face pounded in is
not
a good thing!” Ellery gripped the wheel hard enough to make his knuckles white, mostly in an effort not to flail.

“I didn’t get my face pound—”

“You’re
bleeding,
moron! I know you’ve got friends there, but is it really necessary to keep trying to go back to that fucking hospital?”

“Bleeding?”

Oh God, he had the balls to sound confused. “Your elbow, your lip,
another
cut under your eye.
Bleeding.
” The one from his fight with Connie Coulson
still
hadn’t healed.

“Oh—oh, damn. Didn’t see that.” Jackson checked himself out with more irritation than pain. “Oh god
dammit.
On the fucking new upholstery?” His voice cracked with true distress.

Ellery gave a bitter laugh. “Really? He could have taken you apart, and that’s what you’re worried about?”

“This is the only new car I’ve ever owned. I’ve seen my own blood before!”

“Well I’ve seen too goddamned much of it!” He was shaking. His heart, his core, his stomach, all shaking. And Jackson didn’t seem to see or notice or give a damn. Instead, he was rooting through the glove compartment, which he closed with a furious snap.

“Dammit
.
I haven’t put in a first-aid kit yet!
Shit
!”

Ellery took the off-ramp by N Street and headed for Alhambra. “I think you’re more worried about the goddamned upholstery than you are about the gorilla who almost killed you!”

Jackson looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. “What are you freaking out about? Jesus, I do that shit all the time. Do you think I come into office looking like hell just to dick with you?”

“
You said you did sudoku
!” Ellery shouted, out of patience. “You said it was the most boring job known to man! You said it was no big deal!”

“Well I
lied
,” Jackson shouted back. “I lied because I was sad and scared and you were worried, and it….” He growled and got his voice back. “You know, if you think you can change who I am and what I do after one lousy fuck, we may as well stop fucking and just keep working together.”

They were blocks away from the capitol, but Ellery saw an open parking spot on a side street and cut the car neatly to the left, dodging traffic as he went. He skidded into the spot with a screech of brand-new tires and brought them both up hard against their seat belts and then back again. It was a hundred degrees outside again, so he didn’t turn the engine off, but he did put the car in Park so he could turn and have this fight out face-to-face.

“It was
not
a lousy fuck, you arrogant shit! It was a
superlative
fuck—it was
three
of them, four if you count the shower—and I’m
not
willing to let it end there because
you
had a chance encounter with a bad guy in a stairwell that stinks of piss and is now wearing a decent portion of your skin!”

“Well, I can’t
not
do what I do!” Jackson flailed for a minute, and then he folded his hands under his arms and threw himself back against the seat. “I knew this was a bad idea.”

“Oh no you didn’t,” Ellery snapped. “You knew this was a
wonderful
idea.
I
am the best thing to ever fucking happen to you, and I’m
not
trying to change you, you stupid asshole, I’m trying to
keep
you.” Okay.
Now
he was out of wind. He turned around and leaned back against his
seat. For a moment both of them scowled through the windshield, and then Ellery cut a sideways look at Jackson.

And saw that his eyes were shiny.

He was hurt.

Not just his skin, his everything.

Fuck.

Tentatively, Ellery reached out and traced a drop of blood under Jackson’s cheekbone with a shaking thumb. He reached into his pocket with his other hand and pulled out a package of Kleenex and turned back. Jackson was still scowling out the window, and he made a grab for the tissue, but Ellery caught his hand.

“Let me. Please.”

Jackson kept staring straight ahead, but he gave a small nod, and Ellery dumped some water on the tissue and started to clean his skin.

He finished the cheekbone and used a finger under Jackson’s chin to get him to look Ellery in the eyes so he could clean the other wounds.

“You scared me,” Ellery said quietly, working away. “You may be able to find bedmates by just shaking your ass, but I don’t like enough men to want to sleep with them. I’m not ready to start looking again.”

Jackson swallowed and nodded. “Don’t assume I’m dead just because I’m down,” he said roughly.

“Well, maybe don’t antagonize someone who can kill you!” Ellery’s stomach still shook. “I
like
you. Sometimes. Mostly. Sort of.”

“Well,
that’s
a ringing endorsement,” Jackson said sourly. He took a quick check of his face in the mirror and then held his elbow up to check it out and sighed. “There’s a grocery store in about two blocks. Let’s go there and get some bandages. Here, give me the Kleenex and I’ll try to keep the blood off my shirt.”

“You are really fucking difficult, you know, that right?” Ellery asked, thinking the words were rhetorical.

“Which is an even
better
reason to not sleep with me again,” Jackson said, but he didn’t sound angry anymore, just resigned.

“It’s a shitty reason not to sleep with you anymore,” Ellery said, using some hand sanitizer and throwing the Kleenex in the fast-food bag that still held Jackson’s little trash-made ping-pong balls. “Difficult means worth keeping.”

Jackson snorted. “You’re lying.”

“No, I’m totally not. There’s precedent.” Ellery made his voice smug, his courtroom voice, the one that nobody bothered to contradict.

“You are such a dick,” Jackson muttered, still gazing ahead. But his lips were quirking up and he no longer looked hurt, so Ellery was calling it a win.

Suddenly Jackson stiffened. “Did you see it?”

Ellery glanced out the window just in time to see a familiar squarish black SUV. “Is that him?”

“Yeah, probably. Think he’s heading for the capitol?”

“Mm….” Ellery tried to get his head out of the Jackson space and back into the space where their lives were in danger. “I have no idea. I mean, yes, if our luck’s against us, but think. Does he
really
want Chisholm to know his daughter is dead?”

“Obviously not,” Jackson said thoughtfully. “Not if he went to all those lengths to hide who she is.”

“Maybe he wants to see what Chisholm knows?” Ellery wasn’t sure. Complete speculation wasn’t his strongpoint.

“Let’s go rattle their cages,” Jackson said, an evil smile twisting his lips.

Ellery pulled the SUV into the grocery parking lot and grabbed Jackson’s hand before he could get out. He wasn’t gentle, in spite of the scrapes and bruises on the back. “Jackson, look at me.”

Jackson faced him—and then rolled his eyes.

“Charming,” Ellery muttered. “Go be a teenager on someone else’s watch. I need a man today, sweet-shit.”

“Sweet-shit?”

“Shut up. Look, we’re going to go face Chisholm my way, okay? I want to make an appointment, greet him as a colleague. Hell, if the gods are fucking smiling, he’ll think I’m as crooked as he is and offer a bribe, and
bam
! I’ve got a reason to subpoena shit he read in the fifth grade and we’ve got a case, okay?”

Jackson grunted. “Yeah, I’ve got it. I’m the gorilla now. I’ll be your muscle, you’ll be the brains.”

“Not a gorilla,” Ellery corrected grimly. “A tomcat. Try not to piss in the corners, tomcat, or we’ll both have to live in the stink.”

Jackson nodded once and then hopped out to go get his first-aid supplies. Ellery watched him go and hoped he didn’t have to beat someone up in the middle of Safeway, because their day was complicated enough already.

UNLIKE THE
hospital parking garage, which was full pretty much all the time, the paid garage by the capitol was only at about half capacity on Saturdays. On the one hand, it didn’t say much for the dedication of the public servant, but on the other, it made it easier to pick a spot next to a nearly identical white Honda CR-V with dealer plates.

“Hunh,” Jackson said as they hopped out of the car and into the sweat cauldron that was the parking garage.

“Hunh what?” Ellery was just relieved they weren’t shouting anymore. He couldn’t remember being as pissed off and
passionate
about anything in his entire life, but it wasn’t a comfortable feeling.

“The dealer was right—it fits right in.”

“Well, your brown Toyota was
old
. I can’t believe you didn’t get made all the time.”

Jackson grunted again. “Liked that car.” He strode quickly through the garage, and Ellery worked hard to keep up.