School of Fish Read online

“Belt,” Kryzynski panted. “Left side.”

  Jackson grabbed it, remembering all of the protocol they’d drilled into him at the academy. He radioed in an “Officer down! Repeat, officer down!” with one hand while staunching the blood with the other, his own breath coming in quick little bursts. When prompted, he gave the address of the building and their location, then identified himself as a civilian giving first aid.

  He set the radio down to use both hands and made eye contact with Kryzynski, trying to offer reassurance.

  “How’s the breathing there, buddy? You doing okay?”

  Kryzynski nodded. “Maybe my lung. Chest hurts.”

  “Hope it’s not your liver, ’cause that sucks large.”

  Kryzynski let out a short, breathy laugh. “You would know that.”

  “Yeah. I can give you the ins and outs of the hospital. It’ll be great. I know the best nurses.”

  “Male or female?” He said it lightly, but his whole body was trembling, lines of pain making his young face old.

  “Both,” Jackson said. Then, “Hey, you want me to call someone?”

  Kryzynski closed his eyes and nodded. “Yeah.” A faint spittle of blood filmed his lips. “Yeah. Head of the Oh-Four. He won’t hear this call in his—” He struggled for breath. “—area.”

  “I can do that,” Jackson told him. He caught Kryzynski’s hand. “You’re going to be fine. I can hear the ambulance now. You got a pool at your place?”

  He shook his head no, eyes still closed. “Shitty cop apartment.”

  “We’ll hook you up. You can hang out, pet the cat, put your feet up. People will be jealous. Wonder why they didn’t get stabbed after noodles. It’ll be great.”

  Sean’s lips curled up in a smile, and he let out another small laugh. One that sputtered more blood.

  The EMTs clattered through the breezeway first, and Jackson squeezed Kryzynski’s hand before he stood up. “Hang in there, Sean. I’ll make that call. You’ve got people, okay?”

  He backed away slowly, shaking, and watched as the two professionals—one of whom he knew well—began to call stats, checking Sean’s vitals, calling the hospital and asking for blood and preparation.

  The EMT he knew—a round, fortyish guy with thinning brown hair—looked up and caught Jackson’s eyes. “Not you this time. That’s a first.”

  Jackson couldn’t even grimace. “Sucks to be on this end,” he said numbly, and the guy nodded and then went back to his job just as Ellery came hauling ass through the breezeway, Jade on his heels.

  “Jackson?” Ellery grabbed his arms and shook him. “Where are you hurt? Where are you bleeding? Why aren’t they working on you?”

  “It’s Sean, dammit,” Jackson snapped, and Ellery pulled away long enough to really take in the scene.

  When he realized it was Kryzynski on the stretcher, he gave a definite wobble. Jackson caught him, a flood of emotions from relief to guilt to fear hitting him hard in the chest.

  “I’m fine,” he said, a little gentler. “But someone needs to check on Galen.”

  “On it,” Jade said. “Did he get in?”

  “No. Bad guy was still working on the lock.” Jackson frowned. “See if you can get Galen to open the door from the inside. The guy didn’t have gloves, and he was handling the doorknob. There should be prints.”

  Jade nodded and took off, and Jackson and Ellery were left watching the EMTs work. Where were the police? Normally when Jackson was working a case, Kryzynski was all over his ass. Where were the cops when it was one of their own?

  “He….” Jackson frowned, trying to remember every detail. “He jumped the fucking railing, if you can believe that shit. Landed….” In his mind, he could see the tumble, the way the guy had rebounded, the way he’d still had his knife in his hand, turned out. “He’s trained,” he said. “He was young, really young. Looked like a high school student, but he held that knife like a pro. He was heading out the breezeway when Sean came running in after him, and they collided. I don’t even know if the kid meant to stab him. They bounced off each other, Sean went down, and—”

  “And you called for help,” Ellery finished. “It’s not your fault, Jackson.”

  Jackson shook himself. “I tried to warn him. We don’t have a protocol,” he said helplessly to Ellery. “Cops have a protocol: who goes in first, who comes next, how you approach a suspect. Me and Sean, we… we didn’t have a protocol.”

  For the first time in the ten years since a sniper’s bullet had ripped away his career, Jackson actually felt his time in the academy rattling through his bones without the contempt he’d carried for so long. Had he done it right? Sean had let him go first. Had he done it right? He’d called warning. He remembered that. Clearly. He’d warned him. God, had he done it right?

  Jade came clattering down the stairs while Jackson watched the EMTs put a stabilized Kryzynski on a stretcher and ran him to the back of their unit, which was double-parked on the street.

  “Galen’s okay,” Jade said, puffing a bit. “I told him about Kryzynski.” She looked at him, her eyes sharp. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, the words coming out a little harsher than he meant them. He shook himself and looked at her. “I’m sorry. I’m fine. I… the kid vaulted over the goddamned railing.”

  Jade let out a low whistle. “That’s not your usual move,” she said, and Jackson smiled a little. “Uh-oh, here comes the po-po. Looks like your day just came to a screeching halt.”

  Jackson nodded and remembered his promise. “Jade,” he said, voice low, “Sean’s boyfriend is apparently the captain at fire station oh-four. I have no idea if he’s out or what the deal is, but could you find the guy and let him know? This is not their district. He won’t hear about it, and I think Sean would like him there if he can be.”

  “I hear you,” she said. She squeezed his arm. “He’s going to be okay, baby. I’ve seen you look way worse and be back on our ass, giving us shit, the next day.”

  They all looked as Henry pulled up to the one spot in the miniscule parking lot by the stairs. It was just big enough for four cars, and today, Ellery’s Lexus was one of them, and Galen’s Town Car was the other.

  “Go warn Henry to stay away,” Jackson said as the responding officer approached him. “This is going to be ugly.”

  “On it,” Jade said and disappeared.

  On his other side, Ellery stayed right where he was. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said firmly.

  Jackson managed to give him a weak smile. “I’m glad,” he said, voice soft. Then he took a deep breath and turned to face the music.

  And God, he hated this tune.

  Forty-five minutes later, they were still standing outside. They’d moved to the breezeway to be in the shade, but the two officers—a thin, blond woman in her forties and a huskier, bronze-skinned man about ten years younger—were both dogged and irritatingly dense. In the corner of his mind, Jackson wondered why there weren’t detectives there, why this wasn’t a bigger deal. There should have been press, bells, whistles, clown cars!

  But no, he had these two yahoos, who were definitely not the city’s finest.

  “So you don’t know who stabbed the officer?” the woman, Lindstrom, asked for the fifteenth time.

  “If I did, I would have said so,” Jackson retorted.

  “You’d think so, right?” her partner, Craft, sniped. “But all I got from you is that the guy in the offices texted you that someone was breaking in.”

  Jackson and Ellery both held up their phones with the text on it.

  “You could always go ask Mr. Henderson,” Jackson said evenly.

  “Why can’t he come out here?” Lindstrom asked, her voice gaining a nasty edge.

  “Two reasons,” Jackson said, wishing for a weapon in a way he didn’t think he was capable of. “The first being that you haven’t asked him to come down. The second being that he has a disability, and it would really be more courteous for on
e of you to go up, you know, maybe check out the door? You haven’t even checked for prints, and I know our paralegal had Mr. Henderson open the door for her so she didn’t disturb any prints on the outside.”

  They ignored him.

  “What, is forensics on strike?”

  “An off-duty cop got stabbed by a housebreaker,” Lindstrom said. “That’s all we’re seeing here.”

  “How would you know?” Jackson asked, irritated as fuck. “You’re not looking. This cop solved a lot of cases in the last year. He just got his detective’s shield before thirty, for sweet fuck’s sake. Do you think he did that by taking the easy way out? The very least you could do is print the fucking doorknob!”

  “You said the perp looked young,” Craft badgered. “What makes you think he’d even be in the system?”

  Jackson frowned. “The way that kid moved,” he said after a moment. “He vaulted over the railing and onto the ground, but he was ready for the fall. He’s practiced—tumbling, parkour, something. He kept his grip on the knife through the roll, and he had it out when he ran into Kryzynski. This was not a punk kid. He may not have known jack about breaking into an office, but he was not new to holding a weapon or running from the law.”

  Ellery studied him for a moment, and Jackson saw his eyes narrow. He’d thought of something, but he was not telling the police that. Ah, Jackson knew that feeling, but it hit him that Ellery had only learned of it this last year.

  “Does this mean something to you, Mr. Cramer?” Lindstrom asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Ellery lied smoothly. “But what does mean something to me is that you haven’t even called your forensics team when we’ve told you repeatedly there are fingerprints. This man stabbed a detective. Shouldn’t we be talking to someone higher up on the food chain?”

  They both glared at him sourly. “I’m not sure if you heard this, but there was an active shooter in the public defender’s office this morning. Most of our forensics team is down there picking up shell casings and trying to figure out who the guy was. He didn’t have ID, you know.”

  “I know,” Jackson said. “Detective Kryzynski was the guy who took that guy down.”

  They both nodded, and Jackson heard the obvious, unasked question. Why weren’t these guys asking why two defense attorneys would be hit in the same day?

  His gaze flickered to Ellery, and Ellery clearly had the same thought. Ellery’s eyebrow arched up incrementally, and Jackson realized that was two things Ellery knew that Jackson didn’t.

  That file, he thought. The one with the other kid’s case; that was the thing Ellery knew and Jackson didn’t.

  They needed to see that file.

  “Do you think this was revenge?” Lindstrom asked, sounding excited by the idea.

  “How could that even be possible?” Jackson snarled. “This guy wasn’t at the original scene. He didn’t know me or Kryzynski. He had no idea the bunch of us would be eating lunch together when that text came through.” Jackson glared at them and then looked at Ellery and nodded.

  It was time to wrap this up.

  “Is my client under arrest?” Ellery asked smoothly, and both the cops flinched.

  “No.”

  “Then he’s free to go,” Ellery said. “You’ve kept him out here covered in blood with no shirt for nearly an hour. It’s high time we leave.”

  “Where’s he going?” Lindstrom asked.

  “Our law office. Don’t worry. We’ll leave the doorknob unmolested until five o’clock this evening so you can get forensics down here.”

  “They should be here shortly,” Craft told him, and Ellery gave them both a curt nod before pulling out his wallet and giving them a card. “Here’s our information, although I know you have it down already. Please call us if you have any more questions.”

  “Hey, we didn’t say you could leave.”

  Ellery gave them both a disdainful glance. “You have no reason to keep us here. And our friend is in the hospital. We would like for Mr. Rivers to go get cleaned up so we can visit. You may know the man—he’s a cop.”

  Jackson had texted Jade, and she held the door open for them as they approached. Jackson noticed that the doorknob had been dusted, and he looked at Henry.

  “You got ’em?” he asked.

  “Got ’em.” Henry held up a perfect photograph of a neatly powdered black print on his hi-res camera phone. “Waiting for you to log in.”

  Jackson had learned how to lift a fingerprint in the academy. Although it was a task more often handled by the local forensics team, Jackson hadn’t wanted to be left out. He’d taken classes in using the database that housed criminal fingerprints on file and had urged Ellery to buy the equipment capable of taking Henry’s picture and converting it to a biometric scan. He’d passed the knowledge on to Henry, a lot of it by phone as he’d recovered and Henry had taken on some of the PI duties at the firm. He was anxious to get back into the seat and help again, but first he had to—ugh!—get all of Sean Kryzynski’s blood off his body.

  “Password is Billy Bob Wants His Balls Back. Capitalize every word and put exclamation points in between them, with a five at the end. Are there extra clothes still in the drawer?” he asked as Henry ran off to start the process.

  Jackson started keeping an extra set handy in his early days, when he and Ellery had both worked at the area’s biggest criminal-defense firm. Even though he hadn’t been on the street in seven weeks, he was pretty sure he still had some old clothes in Jade’s office.

  “Ugh. Yes. I was going to make you take them home and replace them with something decent,” she muttered.

  Jackson took a deep breath and tried to remember his new-and-improved Jackson resolution, and part of that involved not wearing clothes rotting off his body out of sheer perversity.

  “I wasn’t supposed to be back,” he told her, rummaging. He found them, folded neatly, behind six reams of copy paper and a case of pens. “I’ll try to remember some of my newer stuff when I come back in tomorrow.” He looked up and found everybody staring at him. “Yes,” he snapped. “I’m coming in tomorrow. Kryzynski’s in the hospital, and someone tried to break into our office, and we’ve got a seventeen-year-old kid in jail about to be tried as an adult and another kid whose life might be ruined because someone was trying really hard to make it so. This is no time for me to extend my vacation.”

  Ellery gave a reluctant nod. “Fair,” he said. He grimaced. “I don’t suppose we can ask you to be careful?”

  Seven weeks of recovery, but Jackson hadn’t been the only one recovering. Ellery had been pulling his tattered faith and hope for Jackson back around his own heart, trying to sustain himself for living with Jackson and all his copious damage.

  “Of course you can,” he said gently. “I’ll have Henry with me. You heard him at lunch today. Man, that kid’ll make sure I eat right, take my vitamins, don’t walk into any gunfights. I promised you all.” He looked at Jade and Henry and even Galen, who was leaning on the doorframe to his office, taking in the show. “Life just got good. Don’t want to check out yet.”

  He remembered Kryzynski, squeezing his hand with a pain in his chest not unlike the thing that Jackson’d been recovering from for seven weeks. “But that doesn’t mean we’re getting any sleep until we know who did this to our friend.”

  “Truth, brother,” Henry said gravely.

  Jackson nodded and turned toward the bathroom. God, he needed a breath to himself.

  And he needed to wash the goddamned blood off his hands.

  Two Fish, One Pond

  JADE HAD canceled everybody’s afternoon appointments because she was a powerhouse of efficiency, and Ellery wouldn’t have been able to afford her if she hadn’t been devoted to Jackson.

  When Jackson emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, wearing a tattered black T-shirt that read My Way or My Way in bright pink letters, and a pair of jeans so transparent they were mostly indecent, everybody else had set up in the conference room, and Ellery was
passing copies of the files and the police reports around the table.

  “Jade has scanned copies of these and sent them to Crystal, and she’s giving them to our old firm—”

  “Feisty, Llama, Hamster and Clopper,” Jackson inserted, and Ellery rolled his eyes for form. The actual name of the place was Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson and Cooper, but since they’d fired Ellery for doing the right thing—and Jackson and Jade had quit in protest rather spectacularly—Jackson refused to use it. Ellery had understood the firm had made a business decision. A defense attorney with a well-developed moral compass was not going to make them as much money as one who would just plead people out whether they were guilty or not. Jackson and Jade held grudges.

  “Yes,” Ellery returned blandly. “Feisty, Llamas, Hamsters and Cloppers now hold our future in their hooves. Or paws. Or whatever. Anyway, I also sent copies to my mother.”

  Jackson looked panicked. “Did you instruct her not to come over?”

  “She lives in Boston, Jackson. She’s not just going to hop a flight over because I sent her an email.”

  Jackson shook his head. “She will too. She’s been out three times in the last year. We can’t get rid of her!”

  “She was out to help take care of you,” Ellery said patiently. “I had to go back to work, remember?”

  Jackson shook his head. “Next time, you stay home and let Lucy Satan defend criminals. She’s terrifying. She’ll scare them straight.”

  Ellery gritted his teeth and refrained from telling Jackson that his mother’s name was Taylor. It never worked. Jackson’s uneasy relationship with Ellery’s mother seemed to include both affection and exasperation, equally mixed, and Ellery wasn’t going to solve it now.

  “Well, she has her own firm,” Ellery said, “and we’ve got a job to do.”

  Jackson sobered. “Got it. Okay, so we have five sets of eyes here and a lot of highlighters. Yellow highlighter for connections you see between the two cases and blue for inconsistencies. Everybody gives a twenty-minute review, and then we compare notes.” He glanced at Ellery. “You good with this?”