Fish Out of Water (31 page)

“Where are you taking him?” he asked.

“Mercy San Juan unless he’s got a place he already goes.”

“Davis Med Center,” Ellery said, thinking they’d be pissed if Jackson ended up somewhere different. “They all know him there.”

The EMT was a stocky, ruddy guy in his thirties. “Sucks to be
that
guy,” he said, and Ellery was forced to nod.

“I think he’d agree.”

ELLERY DIDN’T
recognize this set of police officers, and he wondered if they would have given Jackson shit too.

He
did
give them the license plate of the black Dodge Durango, and told them about the backfiring and how that SUV had tried to run them down once already, and had been seen—driven by Scott Bridger—more than once the day before.

“You have evidence against Officer Bridger?”

Ellery nodded. “Jackson collected it yesterday.” He closed his eyes and thought. “He took fingerprint pictures and pictures of the license plate, which he sent to the secretary at our law firm. She ran the plates and probably filed the evidence.”

The officer looked at his legal pad. “Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson & Cooper, right? Will she be there when we call, or should we wait until tomorrow?”

Ellery’s jaw hardened. “Well, if you hadn’t been dicks to her about seeing if Jackson was all right, you could have asked her ten minutes ago. She just left with her boyfriend to see after the goddamned cat.”

The cop—Officer Kryzynski—took a deep breath and let it out.

“Why didn’t anybody tell us that?” he asked, voice tight.

“You were bullying her,” Ellery shot back. “Was it because she’s black? Because she’s female? I have no idea, but you weren’t giving her a chance to speak in complete sentences.”

“We were—”

“You asked her if she was on drugs. The woman was standing barefoot in a destroyed kitchen and you asked her if she was on drugs.”

“She was hysterical!”

“
So. Was. I.
” Ellery glared at young, blond, broad-faced Officer Kryzynski. “Do you not get it? She doesn’t trust you right now because none of the policemen around her have proved trustworthy. The guy in the ambulance has been shot by cops before—and he
was
one. A good one. And he got partnered with a dirty cop in a shitty situation, and your brotherhood hasn’t made his life easy. And if
my
house had been shot up, you people would have let me have a fucking Valium before questioning, do you know why?”

Kryzynski shook his head. “Enlighten me.”

“Because I’m a white man who lives on American River Drive.”

The officer’s eyebrows shot up—light blond over piercing blue eyes. On any other day, Ellery would have enjoyed his square-jawed American-boy face. But today he wanted to punch it. “So what are you doing
here
?”

“Sleeping with my boyfriend,” Ellery snarled. “Are you going to call me hysterical now? Does that make everything fit?”

Kryzynski swallowed angrily. “You are making an awful lot of goddamned assumptions about us—”

“I am,” Ellery agreed. “And they might even be wrong. But I’m not going to know that if I don’t trust you, am I? You started out not trusting
us
because Jade was a black woman in a bathrobe in Jackson’s kitchen. I can either not trust
you
because you’re all white cops, or I can give you my evidence and trust that you’re not all
crooked
white cops. So what’s it going to be? Are you going to betray my fucking trust?”

The young officer shook his head. “No. But we need that evidence.”

“Well, I’ll ask her to send it to you. Give me your e-mail address—fuck. I need to get my phone.”

His feet were raw and hot on the front carpet, and he realized the driveway was already cooking. He must have burned the soles of his feet when he’d been talking to Jackson on the sidewalk. God. God, what a fucking day.

It got worse. He got back into the house and stepped over the bloody detritus on the carpet and tried not to weep, thinking,
My phone. Jackson sent me all the info—I just need my phone.
He was in the middle of rooting through the hamper for the slacks that held his phone when he glanced up at the table with the charger.

And realized that Jackson’s phone, which had sat squarely on the bedstand in the charging station since the night before, was gone.

Ellery blinked. It had been there that morning when he’d gotten up smelling like sex and like Jackson. Now it was gone.

Breathing deeply in outrage, Ellery found his phone and started an e-mail. He was still tapping madly as he strode barefooted onto the front lawn.

Officer Kryzynski was waiting there for him, an expectant smile on his face. “So, do you need my e-mail?” he asked.

“Yup.”

Ellery tapped it in—next to twenty of his best and highest-placed contacts, along with his mother. “So, you ready?” he asked, voice hard.

“Hey, I won’t get to look at it until this afternoon,” the officer said, shrugging.

Ellery hit Send. “Well, all of the other people I sent it to are going to see it bright and early in the morning.”

“What happened to trust?” The surprise on his face could have been faked—and so could the hurt—but Ellery didn’t give a shit.

“Trust disappeared when one of
your men
stole Jackson’s phone. Do I know which one? No. So guess what?”

Kryzynski sighed and rubbed his forehead. “We’re all dirty again,” he said softly.

“Get your shitty fucking ass off Jackson’s front lawn.”

The man turned to Ellery, his face eyes narrow and flinty. “My name is Sean Kryzynski,” he said, voice strong. “And you’re going to see that name on the arrest report for Scott Bridger, and I’ll make sure I’m involved in the investigation of who killed Collin Miles—”

“It
wasn’t
Kaden Cameron,” Ellery snapped.

Kryzynski shook his head. “You know,
that
I could have figured out for myself.”

EIGHT HOURS
later, Jackson was out of surgery, and Ellery sat next to his bed, writing acres of case theory and briefs and documenting the holy hell out of the past three days.

He wasn’t taking any chances.

He was sending the entire lot of it to everybody he’d ever worked with or known. His first boyfriend, who now worked civil suits for a giant corporation, was getting a copy of this criminal brief.

Fuck discretion. If Ellery was gunned down in a pool of blood to cook on the fucking asphalt, he wanted
someone
to know who might be responsible.

And if Jackson died and Ellery lost his fucking nut, he wanted a credible defense if he did something unthinkable.

He’d left the house cleanup to Mike and Jade while the CSIs were still counting shells, but he felt like a coward for doing it. He just kept thinking that he couldn’t look at Jackson’s blood—
couldn’t look at Jackson’s blood—
when he didn’t know how Jackson
was.

Instead of staying there in the wreckage, harassing the scientists, he’d driven home to shower and change. He very carefully didn’t think about the bullet hole that ran from his car’s trunk to the engine—which was now making funny sounds.

He couldn’t get through the rest of this day with Jackson’s blood on him. He just fucking couldn’t.

It hadn’t mattered. Jackson was still in surgery when he arrived at the hospital, and for an eternity—maybe two or three eternities—he sat staring blankly at his phone, wondering who to text. Every fifteen minutes it was Jade—
No news
. Every minute after that, he called up his mother’s number… and then didn’t know what to say.

When the doctor came into the waiting room to say that Jackson was out of surgery and had been moved to ICU, Ellery actually saw spots in front of his eyes. Oh God. He should have called someone. Not for Jackson—for
him
. He nodded at the doctor and wiped his face with hands that shook.

“When can we… I… can I sit in his room until he wakes up?”

“Are you family?” the doctor asked, but not as though this were a sticking point.

“I’m the boyfriend,” Ellery said. And if Jackson didn’t like it, fuck him. He’d have to wake up to dispute it, and Ellery could argue him back under the anesthesia if that happened.

So Ellery gained access to Jackson’s ICU unit. Then he texted Jade, opened his laptop, and tuned out everything else besides Jackson’s heartbeat monitor and writing a fucking creditable account of how he came to be sitting next to a hospital bed, trying not to cry with relief. The account was important. He was going to have to leave Jackson’s hospital room at some point, and he wanted to ask for protection. Paperwork, dammit. Paperwork mattered.

He got a call about two hours after he’d arrived at the hospital. He had to make a decision. The cat could have his leg amputated or he’d need to be put down, what was it going to be?

“Lose the leg,” he told the vet dispassionately. “That animal will still be fucking German shepherds on three legs.”

“Uh, about that,” the vet replied. “We suggest neutering an animal who is not going to be used for breeding.”

“Is that safe?” Ellery asked, wondering when the sex police had gotten into animal husbandry.

“We won’t do it
now
,” she said seriously. “But he’s going to be here for at least two weeks under care. If you give authorization, we can have him neutered before he goes home.”

Ellery hadn’t known Billy Bob’s actual vet. He’d had Mike and Jade take him to the first place he could find on his phone and told them to claim him as the owner. He was officially in charge of Billy Bob, and yes, he was being asked to make this decision.

Ellery thought about where Billy Bob and Jackson would be living until the house got fixed up.

“Balls off,” he said, his tone short. “Cut them off. He’ll probably still molest the German shepherd, but maybe he’ll stay away from the lions at the zoo.”

And that was it. That was the last decision he was capable of making. His head ached from details, from hunger, from goddamned
worry
, and he had nothing left. With a growl, he slammed his laptop shut and set it on the end table next to his sublimely uncomfortable hospital chair. He looked to his left, where Jackson lay, face white, breathing even, machines beeping ceaselessly in their effort to tell the world he was still alive.

Ellery was the only one who heard.

He’d thought he was okay with Jade and Mike’s decision to stay and clean up Jackson’s home. Jade had been nearly hysterical about Jackson, but she wasn’t going to do any better in the hospital, and what they were doing seemed to be based on the desperate assumption that he was going to be okay. Ellery could understand that, especially for Jade. He was going to be okay—he
had
to be okay
—
so she was going to see about a place to come home to. That was her job. Both of them were being practical in a way Ellery wasn’t sure he could be, and he admired them for it.

He admired them more when they walked quietly into the room, carrying bags of food and a giant soda.

Ellery stared at the white bag emblazoned with the familiar sandwich shop logo swinging from Mike’s hand, and almost cried.

“Thank you,” he said, wondering how he’d managed to function so long without food.

“Turkey, avo, and bacon,” Jade said practically. “With a large root beer—that’s your usual, right?”

Ellery nodded even though he usually went for Diet Coke, and took the bag, tearing into it without ceremony. Oh God, sustenance. It was amazing how much more
doable
the world was if you weren’t starving.

Between mouthfuls of sandwich and soda, Ellery caught up on the state of the house—and he caught them up on the state of Jackson.

“The refrigerator is shot,” Jade told him soberly. “And most of his dishes are gone. There’s been some structural damage to the corner posts, and it needs a shit-ton of spackle and drywall and stucco to be sound. We had PG&E come out and turn off the electricity on that side of the building until we saw what wires were hit, and the air-conditioning unit might be unsalvageable. We’re talking a month, maybe, in the heat of the summer, until we can get it back to spec.”

“Well, he’ll be spending at least a week of that in here,” Ellery told her after swallowing the last bite. “Maybe three. They had to reconstruct the bone, and he’s going to need X-rays again to make sure they pulled all the fragments. Lots of PT after this one—it’s gonna be ugly.”

“Well, I guess he’ll be at my place,” she said, sighing. “I was gonna turn in the lease and just take care of Kaden’s house, but—”

“Turn it in,” Ellery said, looking at Jackson. “My place is huge; he can stay there. His cat can piss on everything and I’ll hire another maid. Don’t sweat it.”

“He’s gonna
what
?”

Ellery jerked his attention to her outraged surprise. “You didn’t see that coming?”

“From
Jackson
? One-night stand
Jackson
?”

“I got two,” Ellery said, looking at that pale form on the bed. “I’m taking it as a sign.”

“Yeah, you do that. I’ll keep the fucking lease.” Jade snorted. “Nobody gets romantic like that after two nights.”

Ellery smiled at her, hoping his mouth and chin were firm. “I’m a lawyer, darling. I don’t have a drop of romance in my soul.”

THEY STAYED
for a few after that, talking quietly and watching Jackson sleep. When they left, exhausted and sad, Ellery told them he’d be going home shortly. He fell asleep, head back against the seat, until a tall nurse with light brown skin and dark freckles under his eyes tsked at him and chivvied him to a cot.

Ellery lay down and wrapped the thin blanket over his shoulders. “Thank you.” He kept his voice down to respect the night shift. It was hard—the room itself had muted light, but he could still see the brightness of the corridor outside and hear the activity that signified hospital life at all hours.

“You’re welcome, sweetness,” the man said, with enough camp in his voice to make Ellery smile. He’d worked hard not to ever lisp or swish, but he admired men who just did not give a shit. “It’s too bad Kaden and Rhonda couldn’t be here. But I’m glad he doesn’t have to be alone.”