Unexpected Backup
JACKSON HAD known some good officers and some really, really bad ones, and when all was said and done, going to the wall for Adele Fetzer and Jimmy Hardison had been one of the smartest—and best—things he’d ever done.
Officer Fetzer was a thirty-year veteran of the force, a Black woman in her fifties with a few gray hairs clubbed into submission with the weight of the midnight black wealth of them into a tight, single braid down the back of her head. Jackson had been with this woman in a firefight, and he’d never seen that braid—or Fetzer’s composure—waver. Not once.
Hardison—or Jimmy, as he was known to his friends—was the kind of paunchy white guy who had probably needed to work his balls off to pass his fitness exams year after year, but he kept doing it because he didn’t trust anybody to have Fetzer’s back but him. They were both married to other people—thank fuck, because they’d kill each other otherwise—but they had the kind of partnership that brought out the best in them.
It was what partners were supposed to do for each other, and Jackson felt the pang of Henry’s absence so strongly he had to suck in a breath.
“Rivers,” Fetzer said as they neared, “I understand you were first on the scene. Would you like to sit down?”
Jackson nodded and glanced at Galen and John, asking them to move away with a flick of his lashes.
They exchanged glances, and while John shook his head, Galen made shooing motions and proceeded to move aside so Fetzer could take a seat near him. Jade and AJ stood and quietly made their way to the other end of the room, and Crystal whispered, “I’ll get you a soda, Jackson,” before fleeing down the hospital corridors.
“Sorry,” Ellery said, not moving from his elbow. “I should have thought of that.”
Jackson winked at him, suddenly grateful for Ellery’s constant manners, the sanity he tried to inject into every situation.
“I can tell you what I know,” Jackson said, and then with a careful emphasis, he said, “or I can tell you what I know .”
The two police officers understood what that meant.
“Start off telling us what you know,” Adele said, pulling out her notebook. “Jimmy and I are trying to make our paperwork look good. Then tell us what doesn’t need to go into the paperwork.”
Galen raised his eyebrows. “I am impressed,” he said dryly. “That is a lot of loyalty.”
Hardison shrugged. “Not sure if you saw this guy bail our asses out of a firefight about six months ago, but we were very grateful.” He glanced around the room, and for a big guy with a jowly face and pouches around his eyes, that visual catalog missed nothing. “Are you gonna tell me these guys are hand models?” he asked.
It was close, but Jackson managed to contain his snicker behind his own hand. Ellery’s mouth had a little war with itself, but he kept his face straight. Galen, on the other hand, almost whooped with laughter, and only burying his face in his shoulder kept him from alerting the entire room.
“So no?” Fetzer asked dryly. “Not hand models?”
“No,” Jackson said on a barely contained chuckle, and the moment he thought, Wait until I tell Henry , the mirth drained out of him. “No,” he repeated again, feeling the strain back on his shoulders. “So like I said, let me tell you what we know.”
He told the two officers about their friend’s mother and her propensity for taking in strays, feeding them, clothing them, helping them find shelter. Henry had been on call to make sure this nice woman was safe, and he’d called Jackson with gunshots in the background. Jackson had shown up on scene, ministered to Henry, gotten the details about the two people running away from violence, and had gone after them to protect them.
And had then come here to see if Henry was okay.
Fetzer put her notebook away first. “Okay, then,” she said. “Now tell me everything you left out.”
And Jackson, who ten years ago had sworn he’d never trust his former boys in blue again, did.
WHEN HE was done, Hardison took another glance around at the “hand models,” and then cast Galen a gimlet eye.
“He said you were walking from the church with your boyfriend,” he noted, “and a kid tried to solicit you both, as a couple. Why?”
Galen grunted. “I think because we were nice to each other. I think he figured he’d rather be with two safe old perverts than with someone a little less old.”
“Yeah,” Hardison said, “but you guys—you got a… I don’t want to say operation going, but you’ve got a system here. This kid was young. You wanted to make sure he was taken care of. Where would you have sent him if he’d been legal?”
Galen glanced at Jackson and then shook his head. “Well, probably to Isabelle’s house first, anyway. But yes—you guessed that we’ve got a connection to adult industries. In this case, film. My boyfriend doesn’t put anybody underage in front of the cameras—besides it being a felony, he hates the thought of kids feeling coerced. But sometimes the over-eighteen-year-olds know who he is, and they want a job. Three-quarters of the time, he talks them into working for a gas station or a pet store—that’s a lot of his business right now, if you must know the truth. Places where someone young and unskilled can start out in retail and then earn a living wage. But some kids want to make a living with their bodies still—they’re good at it, they’ve had practice, and they can make more than a living wage, and my boyfriend gives them that chance.”
Fetzer and Hardison met eyes, and Hardison said, “Johnnies.”
Galen inclined his head. “Guilty as charged.”
“We’ve just seen a lot of your clientele mixed up with this guy,” Adele said, indicating Jackson. “And you know what? I’m not going to judge. Nobody else was giving that kid soup and a place to sleep and not making demands on him. Your boy stays on the right side of the line, we won’t give him crap, are we understood?”
Galen nodded. “We are. But I’m still not going to point out which guy he is.”
Fetzer laughed a little. “You are a good partner. Understood. So this kid hit on you, and you took him someplace safe. What happened to make it not so safe?”
And it was Jackson’s turn to talk again. This time he told them about what Cowboy had seen in the night and the mostly untold story of Shitbag Retty and the Twitty woman.
“Oh….” Fetzer let out enough of a breath to sound scared, and Hardison glanced at her.
“What? These Moms for Clean Living people—nobody takes them seriously, right?”
“Jimmy, does your wife ever get you to go to church with her?” Fetzer asked sharply.
Jimmy managed to look abashed. “You know, Adele, with the kids out of the house, we don’t really… you know. We got better things to do on Sunday besides go to church.”
Fetzer—and Jackson—stared at him in surprise, and Hardison’s ears turned red.
“See,” Galen pointed out dryly, “sex really can save the world.”
Jackson and Ellery stared at him in horror, but Galen’s night had been as awful as theirs, and he refused to back down.
“Conceded,” Jackson finally said, and dammit, something in his soul lightened saying the word. “Jimmy, they might not have a lot of pull on you and your wife, but there’s a lot of….” He wanted to say “good.” Oh, he really did. But “good” people shouldn’t be swayed so easily to hate other people, should they? “Gullible,” he said after a noticeable pause. “There’s a lot of gullible people who really do think that reading a book about a gay kid or a kid who’s Asian or Latino or Black will make them less White and less Christian. These organizations prey on that gullibility —”
“Ignorance,” Ellery and Galen spat together.
Jackson gave them a look and then again conceded . And felt better for it.
“Ignorance,” he said. “And they use people’s fears against them. Our young friend wasn’t talking about a safe place for LGBTQ youth—he was talking about the kind of place where they pray it away.”
A whole treatise on fatherhood and acceptance could have been written on Jimmy Hardison’s glance around the room this time. “This is a safe space now,” he said, glancing at Fetzer. “And you trusted us in it. So you trust us not to fuck up dealing with these yoyos. What do you have in mind?”
Jackson let out a breath and outlined his plan to interview the kid’s mother before skulking around the Stepford Dragon compound to see “what could be seen.”
Fetzer wrinkled her nose. “That’s it? That’s your plan?”
Jackson scowled at her. “I may have to improvise,” he told her, wounded. “Not even Ellery knows everything I’m gonna do, you know.”
She humphed. “Listen,” she said after a moment. “You know we can only do so much. We can pursue this Retty person—and the boy’s description was pretty thin—and we can look for someone called ‘Twitty’ who likes to dress like June Cleaver in slacks, but until we interview your boy, we’ve got nothing on them. Jimmy and I can’t stop you from looking, but we can’t help you either. But I can tell you what constitutes a reason to intervene. If you get a chance to talk to the kids in the compound—and no, I won’t ask you how—ask why they stay and if they’re afraid of punishment if they leave. Ask if they get fed, what their daily regimen is. There’s no laws against making kids pray if the place is billed as a religious school.” She turned to Ellery. “Is it?”
“On my to-do list,” Ellery told her promptly.
She nodded. “No laws against making kids pray, but there’s laws about not feeding them, not letting them sleep, not letting them pee—anything that reeks of kidnapping, that will get our toe in the door, and Jimmy and me can ask for a warrant.”
“Or fraud,” Ellery said, and Jackson saw his sharkiest, most toothy smile, the kind that made bad guys shiver.
Fetzer nodded. “Hard to do with a church, but as far as I know, this is just a ‘special interest group,’ so we might make it stick. But yeah. Your instincts are good as always. I’d say that’s a place to investigate.”
Ellery nodded, looking suddenly thoughtful, and he glanced at the clock. “Actually, that gives me an idea. If you will all excuse me?” He was pulling his phone out as he walked away, and given that it was almost human time on the east coast, Jackson figured he was calling his mother.
Fetzer broke into Jackson’s thoughts by saying, “Okay, that’s my good deed for the night. But how about you? You got anybody to go as backup?”
Jackson liked the woman, but he thought seriously about kicking her.
But before he could crank himself up to do it, she dropped a gift from heaven in his lap. “What about that Gabriel kid?” she asked. “You know, the one who testified back in November? I always thought he got a raw deal. What’s he doing these days?”
Jackson blinked. “He’s managing a trailer park and keeping his nose clean,” he said, but inside, a part of him was doing a touchdown dance.
“He miss being on the job?” Hardison asked. “He was a big deal UC, you know. I mean, yeah, he tasted the candy, but that happens undercover. Forced retirement—that was rough.”
Cody Gabriel had been on the verge to confessing his habit to his CO when some of the bad cops that made Jackson distrust the breed as a whole had fucked him over and forced him to make a bad choice out of a hand of worse ones. What had been a worrisome habit, picked up to make his cover viable, turned into his entire life in one terrible day. Jackson and Henry had pulled him out of that, and he’d absolved himself with his testimony—and hopefully found some redemption as well. Jackson had promised not to cut the guy loose, and he’d lived up to that. A couple phone calls a week, and he stopped by on the weekends or when he was in the area.
He knew Cody’s nagging little secret.
“He’s bored shitless,” Jackson said, and it was hard not to do a cartwheel as he said it.
“Bet he’d love to ride some shotgun,” Hardison told him.
“Oh no,” Galen muttered, correctly sensing that Ellery would probably have objections.
“Oh yes,” Jackson agreed, and he felt some hope thrumming through his veins, some excitement. Henry would pull through, and Jackson would find out who’d done this to his friend.
“Oh fuck,” Galen said.
FETZER AND Hardison left shortly after that to go file, Fetzer promised, just enough of a report to make sure their bosses could keep an eye out on the Stepford Dragons and to be alert for kids in the compound where no kids should be, but not enough to make anybody look twice at Galen Henderson.
He’d never pointed out who John was, and Jackson and Ellery were fine with keeping it that way.
For a moment the waiting room was quiet; many of the kids were sleeping, Dex and John were busy on their phones, making sure everybody knew the office could expect a late start the next day and securing their old receptionist, Kelsey, to come sub for Isabelle for a week or so.
Galen had brought his own tablet, but it was currently using the one outlet in the room to charge. Jade’s boyfriend—and Jackson’s good friend—Mike had gone to pick up coffee and breakfast sandwiches for everybody, with careful instructions from Vinnie, one of the flophouse kids, detailing what they would and would not eat. (Mostly, Jackson figured, they’d eat eggs and dry toast. The thought made him shudder. It was no way to live.)
Jackson was restlessly playing a game on his phone when Bobby approached him.
“Heya,” Jackson murmured, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Reg was asleep. There was probably a name for what Reg had suffered from most of his life—his short-term memory wasn’t great, and he had difficulty with words and reading in general, although he tried to read every day. He’d always wanted to be smart, and Bobby, who had come to Sacramento to work right out of high school, had helped him better his education as best he could.
But there was no magic cure for whatever short-circuited in Reg’s brain on a daily basis, and part of the job Bobby had taken on as his lover was to make sure Reg was cared for. Simple things—Bobby’s coat over his shoulders and a borrowed pillow so he could sleep in the chair—kept Reg from losing his composure. If he woke up and Bobby wasn’t where he was expected to be, and he was in a hospital to boot, because those places had bad memories for the two of them, Reg could have a very bad night.
“He should be okay,” Bobby said softly. “But… but what can you tell me about my mom? Besides the Disneyland thing?”
Jackson gave the young man a quick smile. “She was scared,” he said bluntly. “But brave. Cowboy was clinging to her. I don’t think she would have agreed to go down south with him otherwise, but you know. The kid had been let down so badly by the women in his life, I guess. She refused to be one more.”
Bobby gave a short nod. “You know my mom’s the best, right? I mean, I didn’t take it easy on her, really. I left fuckin’ Dogpatch, and then, as far as she knows, the next minute I’m gay, and I’ve got a boyfriend, and hey, hello, porn . But she… she never tried to yank that whole ‘You’re my son and I love you,’ thing away from me.”
Jackson grinned at him. “Did she tell you she was disappointed in your life choices?”
Bobby had a wicked grin himself, and a strongly handsome face that had made him a favorite on the website. He was still, as far as Jackson knew, making the occasional video. Reg was proud of him. It wasn’t how Jackson worked—but God, if it worked for these guys, he was all for it. They were solid people.
“She told me I’d never be a teacher,” he said with a shrug. “But I was never smart enough for school as it was. I sort of figured that ship had sailed.”
Jackson doubted that he wasn’t smart enough, but he was an amazing carpenter, which was how he made his real living. “You were lucky,” he said, meaning it. “And she loved being a mom, I think.”
Bobby nodded soberly. “I knew she was helping John place the kids that he ran into on the street. I just, you know, never thought….”
“Nobody did,” Jackson said, thinking about Henry. “There was no reason for it to be dangerous like that.”
Bobby nodded. “Which is why you shouldn’t blame yourself too much for Henry,” he said, and Jackson felt as though the boy had punched him in the chest—but lovingly so.
“I don’t—”
Bobby shook his head. “Course you do. But don’t. You and Henry, you both do what you can to back people up. If he called you when it was going down, he knew you’d get there. I mean, when I was a kid, I always wished I could fly. Still hasn’t happened. Pretty sure you don’t got wings either. Thanks for what you did for my mom.”
And with that, he stood and made his way back to Reg, and finally, finally, a woman walked in with a bloodstained smock and a set of magnifying specs balanced on the top of her head, and Jackson thought they just might have some news.
Dex and Lance got there first, but Dex grabbed Jackson’s shoulder when he tried to hover in the background, and Jackson was grateful.
“Surgery was a success, mostly,” the surgeon said soberly. “He had some intestinal perforations, which are always tricky, and we had to patch up the leaky parts and clean out the contaminated ones. His shoulder was a through-and-through, so thankfully no shattered bones to contend with. But he’s going to need to be monitored constantly for internal bleeding and infection. We’re looking at a week in the critical-care unit at a minimum, and there’s the possibility of more surgeries in his future. But you can tell his friends—” Her eyes scanned the waiting room and widened slightly. “—all of them,” she said, “that for the moment, he’s stable. He should be coming out of the anesthesia within the hour. We checked his paperwork, and David Worrall?”
Dex nodded.
“You’re his only blood relative. Is there anybody else you’d like to clear to be in the room with him at any given time?”
“Lance,” Dex said promptly. “I mean, Dr. Luna—he gets visiting privileges. My husband, Carlos, for the times I can’t be. And he’s gonna need to talk to Mr. Rivers here sometime tomorrow.”
Jackson wanted to cry with gratitude. He also wanted to run the other way.
“Okay, then,” the doctor said. “I’ll put him on the list too. Anybody else?”
“Jackson?” Galen Henderson was a lot of things—dry, snarky, self-assured, disdainful—but this was the only time Jackson could remember him sounding as though he were pleading.
“Galen Henderson,” Jackson said. “His boss—and his friend. Trust me, if Henry needs diverting, sniping at Galen will punch the ticket.”
“Yeah,” Dex said, nodding. “Galen’s fine.”
“Good.” The doctor nodded. “So, who’s first?”
“Lance,” Dex said softly, nudging Lance with his shoulder. “But please tell him the rest of us were here, and we love him, okay?”
And Jackson saw the tears that Lance Luna had kept at bay during the entire awful night, finally slipping down his cheeks.
“You gotta come with me,” Lance almost begged. “God, Dex, I don’t think I can do it without you.”
Jackson watched Henry’s brother wrap his arms around Henry’s lover’s shoulders and soothe him enough to function, and suddenly he hungered for Ellery in his own arms so he could cling to somebody too.
It had been a long goddamned night.
Dex turned to Jackson just before he and Lance followed the surgeon down the hall and held his fingers up to his ear in the universal “We’ll talk” gesture, and Jackson nodded.
Then he turned wearily to John, who stood and spoke. “For those who didn’t hear—he’s stable. Not out of the woods completely, but Lance and Dex are going to go sit with him as he comes out of the anesthesia. You guys should all go back and get some sleep, and while I might hit the office around noon, tomorrow wasn’t a scene day, so pretty much Kelsey’s going to be answering phones for a few hours and that’s it.” He gave a little smile. “You guys were great tonight. You really showed up for your brother, and me and Galen and Dex and Lance—we’ll make sure Henry knows how much he means to y’all.”
Jackson blinked, and he felt Ellery’s almost comic surprise next to him.
John had to be tired if he was letting his southern roots show.
The waiting room started to empty out, the kids holding hands or draping arms over shoulders, seeking comfort in physical closeness, Jackson thought, which probably said a lot about why they’d ended up at Johnnies in the first place. Sometimes sex was just expression—and sometimes when you were young and fit, it was the expression you craved.
“I’m going to take Galen home,” John said, offering his arm to Galen on one side as Galen leaned heavily on his cane on the other. “I already texted Dex to tag me after Henry wakes up, and Galen can come take a shift after he’s had some rest.”
Jade drew up alongside them, Crystal and AJ at her side. Jackson had taken a few moments to talk to them quietly as they’d waited and update them on the game plan.
“We’ll text you about any new developments,” Jade promised. Jackson’s sister-of-the-heart looked rumpled—she still wore a cap over her magenta-tinted hair to keep the style neat, and her usually impeccable makeup hadn’t been applied. The crackling intelligence that characterized her sharp brown eyes and curvy body had been dimmed a little by sleep deprivation, but Jackson could feel it—will and vitality and a pure lack of bullshit—thrumming under her frowzy demeanor. Jade yawned in the middle of saying something else and then picked up the thread again. “And don’t worry. Jackson’s not going anywhere until he’s got backup.” She gave him a mutinous look then, and he held up his hands.
“I’ve got backup,” he said placidly. “Or I will before I really go at it tomorrow.”
“Who’s backup?” Jade asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Yes, Jackson,” Ellery said smoothly. “Who’s backup?”
“I’ll tell you when he says yes,” Jackson returned, just to be contrary. Ha! Think they were going to keep him down because his partner was laid up. Nope nope nope nope nope.
Jackson Rivers was done being a grown-up for this long, awful night. Peace fucking out.
THE DRIVE back was about a thousand years long, but part of that was that Ellery had to take him to Isabelle’s apartment building to pick up Jennifer. Thank God the haunted minivan cooperated, because by the time Jackson pulled up alongside Ellery’s Lexus in the garage, his legs and arms felt leaden, and his throat was doing that awful tickle dance that said he’d gone out in the rain and dried in the air-conditioned hospital and wouldn’t that be a nice way to get sick?
But Ellery had arrived first, and he shoved a hot tea and Theraflu concoction into his hands pretty much the minute he got undressed.
A year ago he might have chafed at the nurse-maiding, but now? He just grunted, “Thanks,” before he tossed that shit back, let out a belch, and took his glass to the dishwasher while Ellery eyed him suspiciously.
“What?” he asked as he returned to their bedroom. There were two bedrooms in this house, and each one had an absurd amount of floor and closet space. Jackson had noted this before, but he didn’t really appreciate it until he climbed into the king-size bed and realized it felt as though he and Ellery slept in a corner, almost like their bed alone was a loft and the rest of the house belonged to somebody else. Sometimes being able to curl up in a ball in the corner was way more comforting than being in freefall with every step through the atmosphere.
“That was way too easy,” Ellery said as they climbed into bed. “Why didn’t you fight me on that?”
Jackson grunted. “We’re getting married in June—I assume we’ll discover more, better things to fight about by then. In the meantime, the person who shot Henry is running around free like a Tweety bird, and I don’t have time to be sick.”
Ellery scowled, only appearing partially mollified. “That’s very mature,” he said, snuggling up to Jackson like a magnet to a refrigerator. “Why has it taken you this long to figure that out?”
Jackson managed a reluctant smile in the dark, and he rolled to his back again, the skin only a little tender from a long, nasty wound inflicted before Thanksgiving.
“I’m stupid,” he said, letting Ellery rest his head on his shoulder, “but I’m not that stupid. Thanks for the nurse-maiding, Counselor. It was kind, and I should have said something coherent.”
It was Ellery’s turn to grunt. “Given that you didn’t fight me too hard on backup, you’re completely forgiven. You’re, uhm, not planning to go back on your word, are you?”
Jackson recoiled as though slapped. “No. No ! Geez, Ellery, has it occurred to you I have somebody suitable in mind?”
“Well, yeah, but you sent them to Disneyland,” Ellery snapped, probably irritated because he’d rather been counting on Sean Kryzynski himself.
Jackson chuckled, remembering the look on the young detective’s face when Jackson had, with Dex’s blessing, consigned the little party to the unexpected trip. Well, it wasn’t every night your once sworn enemy got you out of bed, shoved two fugitive witnesses into your hands, and said, “Hey, everybody, I’ve got an idea!”
But the timing would be perfect. By the time Shitbag Retty or whoever could track down exactly who had been shot that night and then looked up friends and contacts, Sean and Billy could be most of the way to the Grapevine. It would take some fancy computer skills—and a psychic, which Jackson understood did not come standard to most outfits, which was why he bought Crystal yarn and catnip tea and pastries as often as possible—to figure out where Isabelle and Cowboy had been placed and where they might have gone at the drop of a hat. And even then, tracking a group of people you didn’t know—and Jackson knew for certain Billy’s ID was problematic because he’d never legally changed his name from Guillermo Morales to Billy Carey, like many of the kids did when they wanted to reinvent themselves via Johnnies, although much of his ID was in that name.
Frankly, Jackson didn’t think Shitbag Retty had the master-criminal skills to navigate that wrinkle.
No, the more he’d pondered it—and questioned Cowboy and Isabelle and John and Galen—the more certain he’d become that their Retty had stumbled upon Cowboy, and every move thereafter had been a decision of impulse. She didn’t know who she’d shot through that wall in Isabelle Roberts’s apartment, and she had no idea who she was dealing with.
Jackson smiled into the dark and knew the expression was unpleasant.
“What?” Ellery asked. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking she has no idea what she’s unleashed,” Jackson said, his voice hard and angry. Henry Worrall wasn’t just liked—he was beloved . He was necessary . And Shitbag Retty, whoever she may be, had tried to take him out of the world.
“Be careful,” Ellery murmured, stroking Jackson’s bare chest. “I’ve been where Lance is tonight. It’s… rather awful, knowing exactly how he feels.”
And Jackson had a very clear memory of waking from a bare doze at Ellery’s hospital bed and seeing an assassin preparing to take Ellery out.
His blood froze all over again.
“Same, babe,” he whispered, smoothing Ellery’s hair back from his brow. Any product had long since flaked away, and it was limp and smooth and soft. “Same.”
“Which is why….”
Jackson wanted to laugh, but outside the sky was lightening up just the tiniest degree, and the rain had all but stopped. He felt sleep weighing on him like a wet bag of wool, and what he managed was a mumble.
“He’ll be fine, baby. He’ll be fine.”
As his eyes closed and consciousness whispered out, he couldn’t decide if he meant his choice for backup or Henry.
In the end, he decided it was both, and for once his sleep went untouched by dreams.