Devil and the Deep Blue Fish (Fish Out of Water #8)

Fish Food for Thought 1

“DAMMIT, FUCK, he’s gonna get you, Henry, dodge!”

“To the left, to the left, get your gun—your gun, Jackson, not your grenade launch—oh.”

“ Ha ! There we go! Die, motherfucker, die !”

“Whew, wow. Okay, yeah.” Henry Worrall threw his X-box controller onto the arm of the leather couch with relief. “Well done, my brother. I’ll believe you next time when you say you got it.”

Jackson Rivers, Henry’s PI mentor and friend, set the game to practice, but he didn’t shut it off, and he studiously ignored Henry’s sigh.

“You should always believe me when I say I’ve got your back,” Jackson said, giving Henry what he hoped was an animated smile.

Henry wasn’t fooled. “God, Jackson—have you slept at all this week?” he asked, sounding helpless.

“Have you?” Jackson shot back, and he felt a wave of petty satisfaction when Henry winced. But Henry’d had a year to learn how to be a real boy, and apparently he’d passed Jackson up on the emotional honesty scale in that time.

“I’m worried as fuck about Randy,” he said dispiritedly.

Just hearing it said out loud helped ease the tightwire of stress between Jackson’s shoulder blades.

“Burton says there’s no sign of the guy,”

Jackson admitted with a sigh.

Abruptly, he was tired, which was an improvement over the manic tired-not-tired that had possessed him since their friend had been spirited away by friends in the military after a close brush with a killer.

And not just any killer, it turned out.

A special nutcase, nicknamed “BJ”

by the covert ops unit assigned to track him down.

Apparently this guy got off on catching—and killing—people in the act.

He loved to thrust a knife between the ribs of the person giving the blowjob, and then cut the throat of the person receiving the blowjob.

So far, he’d killed at least five women and six men that they knew about—and he would have killed Randy but, well, Randy was special .

Jackson maintained that Randy’s job as a Johnnies model in adult films made him particularly impervious to shame.

Randy hadn’t frozen when the 7-Eleven clerk, shamelessly taking advantage of Randy’s naivete and love of a good Slurpee, had died in the act.

Instead, he’d screamed in the killer’s face and taken off running.

Fortunately he lived in the flophouse—an apartment that housed a number of guys in the same line of work—and it was right across the street from the convenience store.

As far as anybody could figure out, Randy had run fast enough to disappear into the apartment complex before the killer could even recover from what had to be a terrifying bray in his face as he was achieving his own climax, so to speak.

Henry, who admittedly knew Randy better, said that Randy was so loud and so spazzy and so pure of heart the gods simply stuck their hands from the heavens and took hold of the killer, proclaiming, “You shall not pass!”

Either theory held validity, as far as Jackson was concerned.

Randy, for all his quirks, was a sweet kid.

He needed to do some growing up (not physically, please, he was six five as it was) and get hold of his many neuroses, allergies, and divergences, but underneath all the noise was a gentle giant who wanted to do good so badly .

He was the first in line to take over a roommate’s chores or to go fetch a favorite treat or to lend a book or an article of clothing or an ampule of lube.

(Life in an apartment full of young adults who had sex for a living had its own rules.) If anybody deserved to go hauling into the ether, pants around his ankles, to avoid the icy claw of death, it was Randy.

Which was why Jackson had called his contacts in the south with the serial-killer hunters to come take Randy somewhere safe.

But getting Randy to safety and assuring themselves that the killer was out of the way and wouldn’t track down Randy’s brothers in the flophouse were two different things.

Henry lived in the same building, and Jackson, Henry, and AJ, another law firm employee, had made sure the security setup from the last time something like this had happened was still securely in place.

Everybody was wired for sound now—the kids who lived with Randy; Henry and his boyfriend, Lance, who lived in the same complex; Jackson; his fiancé, Ellery, a founding lawyer at the law firm; and Galen, Ellery’s partner— everybody had a cell phone that would alert if a rabbit so much as sneezed in their area.

And given that there was a cantankerous neighbor who lived upstairs and liked to stomp loudly on Henry’s ceiling when she thought somebody was enjoying too much life, that had pretty much ensured Lance and Henry had enjoyed zero alone time since Randy had been taken away.

So that was one very good reason for Jackson’s sleeplessness, but he and Henry both knew that wasn’t it.

Jackson was pretty good at danger—had gotten damned used to it in fact.

This wasn’t the first time somebody they knew and cared about was in trouble, and the fact that Jackson was on a first-name basis with a bunch of the serial-killer hunters in the covert ops unit probably said something uncomfortable about Jackson’s personal life.

But the most uncomfortable thing about his personal life, he thought irritably, was that for one reason or another, it had ceased to be personal.

Fact was, Jackson hadn’t slept well in over a decade, for a lot of very good reasons, from betrayal to fear for his person to regret to terror for the people he loved.

The hell of it was, Jackson had been working really hard to at least be functional, and Ellery had been on board with his efforts.

He still spoke to a counselor of sorts every week, and he’d been opening up to his friends and family more since Ellery had come into his life.

He wanted to be a real boy almost as much as Randy did, he thought sardonically.

But Randy simply had some growing to do.

For instance, maybe taking a blowjob in trade for his birthday Slurpee hadn’t exactly been prudent.

But for Jackson?

The answers were a little less simple.

“Jackson?” Henry asked gently. “Are you having second thoughts about the wedding?”

Jackson actually laughed. “No,” he said. “When it gets really bad, I wake up and think, ‘I’m getting married in June,’ and that actually calms me down. I don’t use it too much, though. I need something in my heavy-duty arsenal.”

Henry made a sound—a pained sound—like he knew something Jackson didn’t, and when Jackson glanced at him, he was massaging the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t give me that shit,” Jackson said bitterly. “We all play mind games with ourselves to function. You know that as well as I do. I’m sure you’ve got a list of yours.”

This time Henry grunted and picked up his remote control, began scrolling through his character options for a new skin. “Very perceptive. Let’s see. My ex-boyfriend will be released from custody in two months. That keeps me up at night.”

“I’ll add it to the list,” Jackson said grimly. Henry’s ex was an abusive toxic nightmare, and his role as Henry’s brother-in-law had pretty much trapped Henry into an eleven-year stint as an unwilling mistress. Henry’s effort to break away from the guy had resulted in a lot of torn knuckles on Henry’s part and a stint in military prison on behalf of Henry’s ex.

“Naw,” Henry said, a twisted grin in place. “He’s my boogeyman—let me fight him. Most of yours are far more colorful.”

Jackson grunted again, but this time in appreciation. He and Henry had started out at odds, but when Henry had lost the chip on his shoulder and Jackson had learned to apply his fully functioning empathy to everybody , even rednecks with attitude as it turned out, they could be more than friends. They could be tighter than brothers; they could be partners who functioned so well together sometimes it was like Jackson loaned out his brain so Henry could take over.

Henry was giving him a way to talk, and Jackson needed to appreciate it.

“I’ve let people down in my life,” Jackson said simply. “Not on purpose, and certainly not for lack of trying. But….” He swallowed. “When you’re about to get married, that’s the sort of thing that haunts you.”

Henry nodded and kept sorting through the costumes on the screen. “Same,” he said softly.

Henry looked young—sounded young most times as well—but he’d survived domestic abuse, and he’d been to war. Something about those experiences gave him weight when he confessed to feeling the same.

“It’s… it’s nothing I can do anything about,” Jackson murmured. “It’s not even anything I’d change if I could. But it scares me when I think of who I’ve failed and how badly I don’t want to fail Ellery.”

Henry let out a long sigh. “Help, I’ve been shot,” he said without heat or passion—or truth, since his character on the screen wasn’t engaged in anything remotely warlike at the time.

But probably with accuracy, Jackson reflected. Henry had betrayed his sister, and whether he’d done it willingly or had been blackmailed, bullied, and threatened into it, he wasn’t going to let himself off the hook that easily. But he could make his peace with it.

Jackson had to do the same.

“You’re a great kid,” Jackson murmured, feeling—wonder of all wonders—tired.

“I’m almost thirty, moron,” Henry muttered, prickly as always. He set his remote down and yawned, and Lucifer, who’d always loved Henry best, made an awkward leap into Henry’s lap, crashing on his missing foreleg and doing a faceplant into Henry’s thigh. Henry stroked the cat’s smooth black fur and smiled, and Jackson felt a familiar prickle on his shoulder as Billy Bob, who had been lounging on the back of the couch, reached out and kneaded him some biscuits.

It was a brief, sleepy moment in the evening, not too long after dinner. One that said Henry might crash on their couch for a much-needed nap, and Jackson, maybe—just maybe—might retire to the bedroom and sleep. Ellery was working late at the office tonight, a thing he did rarely but offered to do this night because Jackson’s insomnia had been so terribly acute.

“I don’t care when you sleep, Jackson. If it’s after dinner, it’s after dinner, but fuck us both, you’ve got to get some sleep!” When he’d spoken next that afternoon, his voice had dropped, throbbing gently with worry. “Besides, baby, if you fall asleep after dinner, I’ll get home just in time for your first nightmare. Timing is everything.” He’d given a twisted smile then, and Jackson had been terribly, terribly aware that what hurt him hurt Ellery too. Ellery would probably like to sleep uninterrupted as well, and while the first nightmare was almost a guarantee these days, the second, as long as Jackson had Ellery in his bed, was often not. A compromise of sorts, and Jackson understood.

Jackson found himself giving in to it, laying his head on the back of the couch, letting his cat’s steady kneading lull him into a sort of somnolence. He was there, almost asleep, when Henry shifted on the couch.

Jackson popped awake in an instant at Henry’s muttered oath, his heart pounding with the urgency in Henry’s voice.

“I’m up!” he said, struggling for breath. “What do we need to do?”

“Nothing,” Henry said firmly, although he was already on his feet and heading for where his shoes sat and his jacket hung in the foyer. “This is a me thing, not a you thing.”

“But you don’t have you things,” Jackson complained. “Me, your boyfriend, the law firm—we’re the beginning and end of your existence!”

Henry’s laugh was warm and rich, and Jackson had a moment to reflect that he was glad Henry had gotten to the point where he really could laugh like that. And also that Henry had a full life—he wasn’t only liked, he was beloved —by his brother, his brother’s family, Galen, Galen’s husband, John, all the boys he helped to mentor in the flophouse, and by Lance, his boyfriend, who thought Henry was the best man he’d ever known.

“No, seriously,” Jackson said on a yawn. “Tell me where you’re going. I’ll fuss if I don’t know.”

Henry grimaced. “Actually you’ll probably get called in on it too, so I may as well tell you. You know how half the kids who ended up at the flophouse got there because they hit on John or Galen?”

Jackson nodded, because he talked to the kids. “A lot of them were cruising for business,” he said frankly. “They hit on John and end up with the world’s most ethical porn director, who tries to give them any job but the one they asked for.”

Henry inclined his head. “And he only gives them that one if they’re over eighteen and are still interested after they’ve been cleaned up, evaluated, and spent some time off the streets.”

From what Jackson understood, John ended up with one porn model in twenty or thirty offers, but he never took advantage of his own employees, and he’d helped a lot of kids find a way to a different home.

“Did he get another one?” Jackson asked, curious. He knew that sometimes Henry was called in when the kids ended up at John’s receptionist’s house so he could make sure Isabelle Elaine Roberts was safe when she had a stranger sleeping in her guest room.

“Fourteen,” Henry said grimly, and Jackson winced.

“Dear God.”

“Yeah. So I’m on to help talk to the kid, but I think Ellery’s going to be called in too.”

Jackson frowned. “He’s fourteen. Has he been accused of something besides solicitation?”

Henry shook his head. “No, I think he witnessed something. John and Galen got the story out of him. I think they’re headed here.”

“Aw shit,” Jackson muttered. “Your gig sounds more fun.”

Henry chuckled, but it was a strained sound, and Jackson understood the cost that must be involved with taking care of a kid who’d been out on the streets the way this one had been.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I know it’s gotta hurt.”

Henry shrugged again. “It’s hard. I mean, I’m glad we can get them to someplace good—a shelter, a foster home, someplace not the street, but….” He sighed. “My old man was a piece of work,” he said. “There was a reason Davy and I had such fucked-up lives before we came out. But we always had food and a place to sleep. Can’t say that would have been the story if Dad had known about either of us, but….”

“You’re going to see yourself in them,” Jackson said softly. “I was one good friend and his mom away from being one. Don’t think I don’t see that too.”

Henry shook his head. “See, that’s why you don’t sleep,” he said, blowing out a breath. “Because you know these things—you’ve already thought about them, and you see them going on in the world, and they scare you shitless. Some of us get surprised every single time.”

Jackson chuckled weakly. “Yeah, but you also get to sleep.” As he spoke, his back pocket buzzed, and he answered it as he stood and stretched.

Galen and John will be by in an hour or so. Maybe prep them some food.

“And you were right, sensei,” he said, bowing in Henry’s direction. “Go. Do good things. I’ll stay here and make your bosses soup.”

Henry grinned. “The wonton soup you fed me was outstanding !” he said before heading for the door. He paused, his hand on the knob, and turned. “Jackson?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever it is you think you failed at, whatever it is you think you didn’t do, you gotta find a way to let it go, man. You’re a good friend—a good man. Get some fuckin’ sleep.”

And with that he was gone, and Jackson was fishing the ingredients for homemade wontons out of the fridge again.