Fish Out of Water (16 page)

He turned so they were chest to chest, and the heat Jackson threw off enveloped him. He tried not to get lost in it. “Then
you
understand,” he growled. “Nobody but me gets to see your nightmares. You’re going to play the caveman thing with me, then we’re both in the same goddamned cave.”

Those eyes bored into his, fiery ice, and then Jackson took a forced step back and looked away. “May never happen,” he muttered. “Go take a shower.”

And Ellery had
had
it with the “we can’t right now” excuse. He followed Jackson, grasping his chin, forcing those eyes to meet his.

“I mean it,” he said, his best courtroom gaze locked. “Until we
both
walk away from this, I got dibs.”

Jackson’s mouth quirked up at the corner. “What are we, ten—”

Ellery hauled him forward and kissed him hard, tongue sweeping in. Jackson’s gasp of surprise filled something aching in his stomach. He’d felt so… so
limited
next to this man, so lost in a world he barely skated over. But Jackson let out a needy little moan, and Ellery could fill it,
Ellery
could give something more than just a wickedly written brief.

Jackson grabbed Ellery’s ass with both hands and ground up, humping and frotting with a blatant urgency, and Ellery had to push both hands against Jackson’s chest to break away.

They both panted, staring at each other for a moment, and Jackson looked as lost and as stunned as Ellery felt.

“Not until—” Jackson threatened.

“Your brother is safe,” Ellery acknowledged, chest heaving. “But nobody else until it’s out of our systems, you hear me?”

Jackson cocked his head, contemplating Ellery like a cat eyeing a mouse. “Why?”

Ellery frowned and backed up, watching as Jackson got a better grip on his
tented
towel. “Because
I
do relationships, and whether we even
have
sex, that’s what this just became.”

Jackson looked like one of those cat videos when the cat got water on its nose. “Since
when
?”

Ellery knew his smile was smug, and he didn’t give a shit. “Since you gave me fashion advice,” he said, sweeping off to the bathroom. “Not even
Mother
tells me what to wear.”

In the shower, he beat frantically at himself so he could achieve that barely satisfying three-minute hand-date he’d become so adept at in college. As he leaned against the white tile, panting and watching his jizz wash down the drain, he was forced to admit that had been a great line—but fashion advice wasn’t really the reason.

No, the reason they were in a relationship was no more and no less than that Ellery
said
so. He’d fallen asleep with that man in his arms, allowing Ellery to see him so naked after a day of being badass and fearless he’d been shaking with it. Jackson had let
Ellery
do that when he didn’t even let Jade. There had been a curious source of power in those hours, a sense of fulfillment that Ellery had not ever imagined when holding someone you thought you barely liked.

Ellery wanted that. He wanted
Jackson
. If he had to bait the guy with sex to get him to curl up on Ellery’s bed for some basic comfort stroking, then so be it. Ellery was defending Kaden pro bono—and putting his reputation and even his safety on the line to do it.

Kaden was a great guy and all, but Ellery didn’t even defend innocent men unless there was something in it for him—at least a notch on his belt.

Ellery had found his payment for this case, and its currency was Jackson Rivers.

“DO YOU
have evidence to support this?” The Honorable Charles Bentley was a rumbly, weathered sort of man, hunched over his bench like a dragon hunched over his gold. He’d long ago lost more than a few threads of his comb-over, and he peered at the case notes in front of him like he was translating the Rosetta Stone into an undiscovered language.

“Yes, Your Honor. May I approach the bench?”

Ellery had managed his notes and copies for Arizona, and he handed them over as they huddled at the bench.

Judge Bentley scowled at Ellery in irritation. “This case was going to suck enough—you realize that, don’t you?”

Ellery grimaced. “Yes, sir. But instead of waiting for the real evidence to come in, we were given what was supposed to be a legal document with an
un
documented photo in it, and that’s grounds for dismissal. Mr. Cameron’s friend Mr. Coulson—who was supposed to have been in the minimart when the crime took place—was shot and killed in a drive-by incident only hours after the crime. We might have had proof that the suspect was drugged and rendered unconscious when the crime took place, but the paperwork—the
original
paperwork, not the paperwork with the timestamp
hours
after evidence of drugs would have disappeared—was burned up in a mysterious car fire. This file verifies all of it. And if there’s even the slightest chance this is true—”

Bentley nodded. He wasn’t the easy judge, or even the flamingly liberal judge, but if you dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s, and had your memoranda, briefs, and your police reports in meticulous order, he was actually better than either of those things. He was absolutely consistent about maintaining order and procedures.

Ellery couldn’t have picked a better court official out of a lineup of them, and Bentley didn’t let him down.

“Is the DA intent on prosecuting
this
man for the murder of Officer Collin Miles?”

Arizona nodded coolly. “He is our suspect at the moment, Your Honor.”

“Well, then, given that making him your suspect also puts him in
immediate
danger if Mr. Cramer’s theory is correct, I have no choice but to remand Mr. Cameron and his family into court custody. Is the man’s family ready?”

Ellery looked to where Jackson and Jade sat flanking an elegant African American woman wearing a cream-colored suit dress, and two children, a boy and a girl, both dressed neatly in school uniforms.

Jade was dressed in her
best chocolate-colored suit, and Ellery thought he’d never seen a family look more composed or more legitimately innocent in his life.

Jackson sat on Rhonda Cameron’s right, and he was wearing jeans and a sport coat. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and those clever green eyes didn’t miss a single detail of the hearing. Ellery got the feeling he was searching out the faces of everybody in the courtroom as well. Jackson saw Ellery’s questioning look and nodded. He turned and spoke quietly to Kaden’s wife, who in turn spoke to the children.

“Yes, sir.” Ellery turned back to the judge. “The family is ready.”

“Pretty cocky, weren’t you?” Bentley asked dryly, but Ellery’s poise never wavered.

“I had to be, Your Honor,” he said soberly. “These are good people and their lives depend on us.”

Bentley’s eyes went wide before his usual stoic mask of objectivity slipped back into place. “I’m glad you’re taking this seriously, young man. A peace officer has been killed, and protecting his killer is
not
going to make us popular.”

“It will if he’s innocent,” Ellery said without blinking. He’d defended a lot of people in the past six years, both as lead counsel and co-counsel, and had been passionate about his place in the court system, even for the guilty.

But maybe because he’d
met
Kaden Cameron, he felt more strongly about this case than any other. Maybe it was that he’d known part of Cameron’s family before the crime in question that made him more passionate, or maybe it was that he’d become more and more immersed in a world where people didn’t trust the police and had to deal with crime on their own. He’d never felt quite so invested in seeing a client protected, in personally seeing justice done, so that the people caught in the cogs came out unhurt.

Of course, maybe it was because he’d held Kaden Cameron’s best friend in his arms through a rough and painful night too.

But no. Ellery was too much of a professional to let that affect his job, right?

Jackson caught his eye again and winked grimly. For the first time in his life, Ellery felt like he belonged to the cool-kids’ club. An intense and frightening club, maybe, one in which the members weren’t going to be popular and might even be in danger—but Jackson had given him chances to back out, and he’d said no. At first, it was because this really
could
be the case of his career. But after that first phone call from Jackson, angry and disheartened and self-recriminating, Ellery had—maybe for the first time—seen what sort of stakes his clients played for.

When Jade had come in, worried for her brother but worried for Jackson too, he had wanted to be in the game
so
badly.

Now, after the night before? After their kiss that morning? He’d have to be flattened with a stun gun to let anybody drag him away.

Ellery and Arizona walked back to their seats, and the judge had everyone rise. As he pronounced the defendant remanded to protective custody along with his family, trial to be determined later, a collective sigh went up on Kaden’s side of the courtroom.

And an angry murmur went up on the side of the state.

“Cop killer!” someone shouted, and the cry was taken up—along with the ugly racial epithet Ellery had so dreaded. The court officials showed up, two competent, frightening men with big shoulders, lean faces, and MIB suits, and Jackson herded the family along with them and out.

Ellery finished packing his briefs into his case, and Arizona came up to talk to him.

“You’d better be right about this,” she said grimly. “My office is tracking down Kaden Cameron’s every last traffic ticket, his hospital bills, every time he even
breathed
wrong, and you know the first thing that came up, don’t you?”

It was unavoidable. “Hit me with it—I will not be surprised.”

“Your PI is sleeping with your defendant’s sister!” she hissed.

“Nope. Not surprised. And not ‘is sleeping’—‘
was
sleeping.’ They grew up together.” He thought of that story, the three of them banding together to save Kaden’s wife-to-be. “You spin this into a family conspiracy and I’ll show you this family for real, Zona. Jackson Rivers coaches Kaden’s kid’s soccer team. You saw those kids in uniforms? I listened to Kaden Cameron brag about his kids in dance and sports, his wife the teacher—you try to make this family dirty and I’ll show the world what racial bias really looks like. And
then
I’ll show the world what it’s like to live with the dirt on the wrong side of the law. You know so much about my PI, Arizona, you tell
me
why they had him wear a wire for
three months
to indict a cop who was dirty when he only needed to wear it for
one day.
”

Arizona looked at him like he’d grown another head. “He did what? Why would he need to indict a cop? He was shot by one—wasn’t that enough?”

Ellery squinted at her. “Arizona, I’m going to do you a solid. You need to go look up the IA investigation Jackson was participating in
before
he got shot by someone from his own force. I know you probably think you saw the whole thing on video eight years ago, but that file—it’s interesting reading.”

“Why would I even have that file?” she asked, frowning.

Ellery’s internal alarm started pinging. “Because it was a joint initiative between the DA’s office and Sac PD,”
Ellery said, watching her wide, square-jawed face harden to concrete. On a hunch, he said, “Bill Chisholm had his signature all over it. Did he work for the DA’s office back then?”

Arizona’s head snapped back like she’d been slugged in the chin. “How did you know?” she hissed, grabbing Ellery’s bicep. Her manicured nails were leaving dents—or bruises.

“Because I have access to the original files,” he said, and his warning bell dinged a little louder. “Jackson showed me, thinking they might help.”

“I had no idea that investigation was happening,” she said, her voice a foul, murderous grumble. She thrust out her jaw like a boxer. “What does this have to do with Kaden Cameron’s case, anyway?”

“Jackson was investigating police corruption—he had his partner dead to rights. It should have been an end to the investigation. But they kept sending him in and not telling him why. What does that tell
you
?”

Her eyes narrowed. “It went a lot deeper than one guy taking payoffs.”

“How cute and naïve that you think that’s all he did,” Ellery said, disgusted. He
liked
the way Arizona looked outraged when he said the word
naïve
. It made him feel like he was on the right track. “But yeah, that’s exactly why they kept doing it. And then Jackson was shot—and he was supposed to be dead, trust me. His partner
did
get dead, and they hunted down the sniper, and that was the
end
. No investigating deeper, no more IA, and Bill Chisholm’s got his fingerprints all over the case, right down to Jackson’s commendation and his release from active duty. Eight years later, same neighborhood, where everybody
knows
the cops are dirty but everyone’s terrified to tell, a cop gets shot in a quickie-mart—allegedly by a guy who claims to have been drugged. We’ve got no legal crime-scene photos, no explanation, and a civilian photo taken by a girl with track marks who apparently had the surviving cop’s permission to be there. You tell me nobody’s dirty, I’ll call you a filthy stinking liar.”

Arizona was staring at him, her lips compressed so tightly her red lipstick had rubbed off and Ellery could see a blue tinge around the outside.

“You stepped in a big steaming pile of shit,” she said after a moment, her voice hoarse.

“Yes,” he conceded. “Yes, I did. But you know what’s not in
that pile of shit?”

Arizona swallowed. “Solid proof.”

“A-fucking-men. So you keep taking your pressure from the capitol, but you let me know when you have a chance to do some real law work on your own, okay?”

“Don’t be smug,” she snapped. “I need to see that file!”