Fish on a Bicycle Read online

  He didn’t want to blame Ellery for not getting something newer and less classy and more centrally located to anything but converted Victorian law offices, but he had told Ellery this was a problem when they were looking and… well.

  It was Ellery’s fault.

  Ellery didn’t make many missteps—Jackson had, in fact, been trusting him to know what the hell he was doing since they’d gotten together the year before—but this had been one.

  “So you’re going to take a skateboard?” Ellery practically whined. “Isn’t that… I don’t know. Dangerous? Juvenile? Embarrassing?”

  “Convenient?” Jackson rolled his eyes. “Now pop the trunk and let me put it in there. It’s getting hotter by the nanosecond outside, and I’d like to get some painting done before we have to close the windows and turn on the air-conditioning.”

  Jackson wouldn’t have minded just keeping the windows open and painting all the way through the day, but Ellery had already brought in his computer equipment, and he had a couple of towers. Without the AC, the towers could overheat, so AC it was.

  Ellery popped the trunk, grumbling, and Jackson sighed. This was just one more way he and Ellery didn’t seem to fit together. The skateboard had seemed like a good idea—yeah, sure, there were laws against it, but Jackson was more of a guideline-not-a-rule kind of guy.

  He put the skateboard in the trunk and slid into the car before Ellery backed it out of the garage and into the blistering morning sun.

  “C’mon, Ellery, nobody needs to know I know you. I promise I won’t even give away any of our business cards!”

  Ellery paused as the garage door closed and then continued to wind his way through the posh houses of American River Drive.

  “You had nightmares,” he said shortly.

  “Sorry,” Jackson muttered. He’d been working on it—he had. Had been talking to a rabbi, of all people, in an attempt to not let his emotional baggage strangle the best and longest relationship he’d ever had.

  “They were getting better.” There was no recrimination in Ellery’s voice—just acknowledgment that once again, Jackson was broken.

  Jackson growled and threw his head back against the seat. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Because last night’s nightmare had been more of a memory. Considering all the times Jackson had gotten shot or stabbed or beat up, you’d think that was what was haunting him. But no. What was tormenting him now was the memory of Ellery, his body blown back by the force of the bullet that penetrated it, because he’d stepped in front of an aluminum wall recently ventilated by a bastard with a gun.

  And then, oddly enough, there had been the face of the guy who’d shot him, after Jackson had emptied a clip into his chest. A waste of good skin, really—a megalomaniac who thought turning soldiers into serial killers made them better at their job.

  The guy had shot Ellery and Jackson had taken him down, end of story. Jackson didn’t regret it, really—but of all the things he’d done, all the ways he’d failed as a human being, it had been the first time he’d taken a human life like that. But that wasn’t the worst death.

  The worst one had been when he’d finished off the guy who’d tried to take Ellery out in the hospital. Jackson had killed him, up close and personal, a scalpel in the heart, before almost bleeding out himself from the kidneys.

  In his dreams, as he pushed the scalpel in, the man’s face—a blank, automaton expression, a man wrecked so horribly, his humanity didn’t even return in the moment of death—morphed into Jackson’s mother’s face, as she’d lain on the slab.

  And in the dream, he was just so damned grateful they both were dead.

  Then he’d kept waiting for the announcement from God that he’d had his human-being card revoked. He’d let Ellery get shot and he’d killed somebody in retaliation—two somebodies—and he wasn’t sorry. Even when his mother had been murdered last November, all he’d felt was relief.

  “No, you just want to go skateboarding down a busy road in the middle of the day.”

  Jackson wrinkled his nose. “It’s not really that busy. I mean, I know it’s downtown, but everybody parks at the levee and then walks. Seriously. Not nearly as much traffic as you’d thi—”

  “Why won’t you talk to me?”

  Jackson grunted and closed his eyes. “You know why you don’t get bad dreams?”

  “I do sometimes.”

  It was true—sometimes Ellery did. Now and then, he woke up with a start and told Jackson he didn’t want to go back to the hospital, and Jackson would hold him until he was asleep again. It happened maybe once a month.

  “Why you don’t get them all the time?” he asked.

  “No, why?”

  Jackson looked at Ellery—his hair slicked back, khaki’s pressed, polo shirt crisp and bright. They were going in to paint the new office. The license to operate would be coming through in a week, the space was leased, and Ellery’s old desk from Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson, and Cooper had been installed two days ago. They had a conference room, an office for Ellery with a smaller desk for Jackson, two vacant offices waiting for partners, and an office manager who was dying to come in and schedule them both to their last minute in the bathroom, if Jackson knew his sister-of-the-heart at all.

  Ellery had made that all happen. Jackson had helped, but it had been Ellery’s vision of owning his own law practice, of being his own boss, that had driven them both.

  Jackson was tired of working for bosses who cared more about the bottom line than the truth. Ellery was tired of limits, as he should be, because Ellery was a first-rate defense attorney, and if they could clone him, they could probably get all of the innocent people off death row. From what Jackson understood, there was an appalling number of them.

  It might not be the best way to make money, but the two of them wanted to make a difference.

  Before he’d met Ellery, Jackson hadn’t been sure that much idealism existed in the world.

  “Because you shouldn’t,” Jackson said weakly, not enough words to explain the fullness of his heart when he took in Ellery Cramer—a shark-in-a-suit lawyer who slicked back his hair on his day off and had never worn cargo shorts that Jackson had seen, not even in August, a man who had skeptical eyebrows and a beak of a nose and a pair of sharp, shrewd brown eyes that could assess a case without blinking.

  And the most steadfast heart Jackson had ever known.

  “I shouldn’t?” Ellery stopped at the intersection, taking the left from Fair Oaks to J Street. Some people took the freeway, but Sacramento freeways were like clogged arteries, and the surface streets were the shunts that kept them from being permanently blocked. He used the pause to risk a look at Jackson, who looked away quickly. “What does that mean?”

  Jackson stared out into the overbright sunshine before pulling his sunglasses from the vee of his T-shirt and sliding them on. “It means you don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” he said softly. “And it means you have faith in the universe, and that’s okay.”

  Ellery shouldn’t be afraid, because if someone was going to come after him again, they’d have to go through Jackson first.

  Jackson wasn’t good for much, not really, but he’d already proven himself as an excellent piece of cannon fodder.

  “You haven’t done anything wrong.” Ellery frowned. “I mean, you cleaned the cat box, right?”

  Jackson chuckled a little. “Yes, Ellery, Billy Bob’s box is pristine.” Jackson had even given old Billy Bob a bath—and contrary to what most people might think, the battered, snaggletoothed, three-legged tomcat actually loved the water, when it was warm and soapy and somebody was petting him. Ellery had finished up the bath with a long brushing using his silicone brushing mittens, and when they’d left that morning, Billy Bob was on top of Ellery’s bed, practically comatose with too much attention.

  “Then what?” Ellery negotiated the morning traffic with the aplomb of an elderly spinster. If Jackson’s car hadn’t been a tank that guzzled gas lik
e a sprinter downed Gatorade, Jackson would have insisted on driving, but it just felt wasteful to take that thing anywhere but on a mission across an apocalyptic wasteland to bring water to the thirsty masses.

  “Nothing,” Jackson sighed. He didn’t want to get into it. He hadn’t brought up the new dreams to Rabbi Watson because… gah! He was tired. He was tired of opening up his insides, letting the rabbi see all his damage and then waiting for the man to tell him how to fix it. He was just so tired of being damaged.

  Ellery grunted—a habit he’d picked up from Jackson—and then swerved into a Starbucks line that didn’t appear to be moving at all.

  “Here?” Jackson eyed the joint. “But it’s going to add twenty minutes to—”

  Ellery threw the car into Park and undid his seat belt. “We’re the bosses. We can be late.”

  “What are you—”

  Ellery—in his khakis and his polo shirt—was practically climbing on top of Jackson, and as Jackson stared, at a loss for words, Ellery lowered his mouth and kissed him.

  Brutally, without reservation, and without pity.

  For a moment, Jackson’s defensiveness, his pissiness, his irritation, all of it disappeared. Ellery—prissy, irritating Ellery, who was afraid of what people would think of Jackson skateboarding to the store—was kissing him for no rhyme or reason. And his kisses did what they always did, pumped endorphins through Jackson’s battered body and fed him the nectar of life.

  The car behind them honked, and Ellery slid off Jackson’s lap, moved into his seat, and put his seat belt on, while Jackson tried to catch his breath, adjust his shorts, and fix his brain, all at the same time.

  “What the actual fuck?”

  “How you doing?” Ellery asked, taking the car out of Park and edging forward.

  “I’m very confused.”

  “You’ve been pissy for two weeks, all defensive and ‘Nothing,’ and ‘I’m fine, I can deal.’ I mean, I thought we were over this bullshit, but I guess we’re not, and that’s fine. I just thought you should know.”

  Jackson blinked hard, and Ellery sidled up to the drive-through speaker and ordered a giant Frappuccino with whipped cream for Jackson and a small cup of iced coffee, one sugar, one cream, for himself. He topped it off with hard-boiled eggs for himself and a couple of chocolate croissants for Jackson, and then rolled the window up again to capture the cold air until they made it through the absurdly slow-moving line.

  “Know what?” Jackson could barely talk.

  “I love you, even though you’re being a complete and total pain in the ass.”

  Jackson growled. “I’m trying not to fucking whine here. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “I do if it’s going to make you a flaming asshole. Just tell me what’s wrong and get it over with!”

  I killed two people, and I’m not even fucking sorry!

  “Not before we go into work,” he muttered. “Because then you and I will be hashing it out all day, and Jade and AJ are coming over to help, and… just fucking Jesus. It’s private.”

  Ellery turned that perceptive brown-eyed gaze on him. “Understood. Is that why you haven’t told the rabbi yet?”

  “I haven’t told the rabbi yet because he’s a really sweet guy and I don’t want this to ride him. He can deal with the hospital phobia and the dead mom who was a junkie hooker bullshit. I’ll save the rest of it for myself.”

  Ellery let out a little laugh. “I’m not sure that’s how it works, Jackson, but okay. Are you really going to ride the skateboard to go get drinks and takeout?”

  Jackson shrugged. “Where it’s legal.”

  “You don’t even have a helmet!”

  “Oh, dammit, Ellery—”

  “No. I can’t let you go talk to a witness with a concussion. Can we make that a rule? No boarding without a helmet and pads?”

  “No, Dad. We cannot.”

  “Well, good luck getting me to give you the keys to get it out of the trunk.”

  Jackson was still sputtering as Ellery pulled up and paid for their order. Jackson nursed his pleasing sweet freezy in sullen silence and tried to plot how to get around Ellery’s damned super-controlling tendencies. He still hadn’t figured it out when they pulled up to the pretty converted Victorian house that was their office now.

  The houses down this block tended toward colorful, if tasteful, paint schemes. Dark gray and white, pale yellow and navy, forest green and eggshell—each building was an individual confection of turrets and crenellations and pretty-colored siding, but taken as a whole, the block was almost a fairy tale of enchanted houses. Ellery’s chosen office was painted dark gold with forest-green trim, and Jackson thought that alone was why he’d picked it.

  It was pretty on the outside. Of course, Jackson knew the place had a lot of good features—decent plumbing, internet, adjoining offices in case Ellery ever took in partners, an elevator from the ground floor to the second floor to make it accessible—all of it made for the perfect location for a starter business. But when they’d driven under the giant shade trees and Ellery saw the address, his first words were “Oh, how pretty.”

  They’d looked at three other properties, even one with a Starbucks on the corner, but Ellery always found a reason to love this one most.

  It was one of the many very dear things about Jackson’s shark-in-a-suit that made Jackson not want to bother him with the blood on his hands.

  But Ellery had stopped in traffic to kiss Jackson stupid, which meant Jackson was getting on his last nerve. Jackson had sort of promised himself he’d stop doing that. He really didn’t want to push his luck and have Ellery decide he wasn’t worth all the trouble.

  Ellery pulled up into the last available parking space in the covered carport, and Jackson gestured violently. “See?”

  “I said no, Jackson!”

  “But a skateboard—”

  “Will get you killed!”

  “We didn’t get to the store last night,” Jackson justified, “and we have no water, no snacks, and—”

  “Lunch delivery. You could always call Jade and have her bring beverages. We’re getting the refrigerator today.”

  “Maybe I just want a little freedom. Has that ever occurred to you?”

  This office—for the law practice of Ellery Cramer, Esquire—was Ellery’s baby. He and Jackson had worked a case in late January that had cost Ellery his job, and Jackson and Jade had quit too. Jade was a paralegal—she was very necessary to Ellery’s little operation—but Jackson was a PI, one at odds with most of the cops in the city. What good was he going to be to Ellery as he tried to fix the world?

  About all he could do was keep the walls painted and be the muscle of the operation. Unfortunately the last year had been hard enough physically that he wasn’t even as good at that as he used to be.

  Ellery cast him a skeptical look. “Not really,” he said, arching an eyebrow. “And I’m starting to doubt the strategy of letting you talk about this when we get home. Come on, Jackson. I’ll take us right back home if you don’t spill one thing, one honest thing that’s on your chest.”

  Jackson grunted. Ellery would do it too. “I’m not a lot of help,” he said apologetically.

  Ellery’s turn to grunt. “Of course you are.”

  “Any idiot can paint!” Or lay carpet or rewire the small kitchen area or install Ellery’s computer tower.

  Ellery cocked his head. “You need a case, don’t you?” he asked, as though he’d just discovered that sunrises were pretty.

  Jackson almost cried. “Yes!” Oh dear God, was that the problem? “Yes! Oh my God, aren’t you losing your shit? How can you not be losing your shit without a case?”

  Ellery flashed him an entirely unfettered grin. “I like decorating,” he said primly. “But don’t worry. I have the feeling as soon as our business license comes through, we’ll have all the cases you can handle.”

  Jackson’s job was to check out alibis, run down histories, generally look up information on
the people Ellery was trying to defend and the misdeed they were alleged to have done. But Jackson—and Ellery—had a long history of going above and beyond to get to the truth.

  Jackson shook his head. “No, I don’t want to be full up.” He gave a faint smile, knowing Ellery deserved to know this much at least, after his emotional unavailability of the last couple of weeks. “I mean, I know we’re on medical leave for a couple more weeks, but seriously, being on vacation with you hasn’t been bad, Counselor.”

  And Ellery’s grin turned wicked. “I’ve never had this much sex in my life,” he said smugly. Jackson leaned over in the seat, and Ellery met him halfway. A kiss—short, sweet, personal—and Jackson’s pissiness faded.

  Yes, parts of him were still broken, but the part of him that worked best was about to kick it into gear.

  A FEW hours later, Jackson dabbed at the navy-blue trim he was painting and moved his lips to the new Outbreak Monkey song coming from the Bluetooth speaker on Ellery’s new desk. The band had been one of his favorites ten years ago when they’d played dives in Sacramento, and they weren’t getting any worse.

  “Jackson!” Ellery stomped into the room. “Jackson! Jackson!” He hit the volume on the speaker. “Jesus, what is that noise? There are people standing right behind you, and you couldn’t put on your shirt?”

  Jackson almost dropped his brush, instead fumbling it so an arc of paint spatters covered his chest—and hit Ellery across the ironed polo shirt that he considered casual wear at an office that wasn’t quite open yet.

  “Who in the fuck is here?” He looked over his shoulder and blinked. One of the guys had casually mussed curly brown hair and a neatly trimmed goatee, as well as a linen suit that screamed “shark” just like Ellery’s blue pinstripes did. The other was stocky but trim, with wide shoulders, a military haircut, and was… oddly familiar? He had blond hair, blue eyes, a square jaw, and a flat grim mouth—it seemed like his lips should be fuller, plumper, and the eyes should maybe be not as hostile. The blond one was younger by a few years and dressed in cargo shorts and a close-fitting T-shirt, and even if he’d had hair down to his shoulders, his bearing screamed sir-yes-sir.