Mama Said
JACKSON TOOK off into the wild blue yonder in the haunted minivan shortly after breakfast. Ellery did some computer work at home and then left as well to be at the office by eleven thirty, still tired and irritable, not least because Jackson was spending all his immaturity points on not telling him who his backup would be.
It didn’t help that Jade and AJ seemed to know, and they wouldn’t share the secret.
“It was right there,” Jade said. “His name was even mentioned last night—don’t know why you don’t remember.”
Ellery stared at her. He couldn’t for the life of him think of who she was talking about. “Is it somebody I’d approve of?” he asked hesitantly, and now she was staring back.
“Who are you, his agent?” she asked, and he had a flashback to the days when he and Jade had loathed each other, before they’d bonded over the care and feeding of Jackson.
“I’m his boyfriend. Fiancé. Husband to be.” Ellery paused before he added “soulmate” to that list. “Jesus God, I’m a man sorely in need of coffee,” he finished pitifully, and since he was normally a tea drinker, that spoke to his desperation. Jade did have pity on him then and pointed to the giant pot on the counter behind her perch at the reception window, where everybody’s mugs sat next to the sink.
“Thank the gods,” he muttered, moving forward to pour his coffee into the “World’s Most Uptight Boss” mug Jade and Mike had gotten him for Christmas. He liked to think it was a term of endearment, but if he kept harping on Jackson’s mystery partner, he suspected it might not be tongue-in-cheek anymore. After a grateful sip—cream, no sugar—he turned toward Jade and tried to start their conversation again. “Do we have any news on Henry?”
She nodded and took a sip of her own coffee. Her mug had been a gift from Jackson and Ellery, and Jackson had found it at a craft fair in Colton. It was of solid ceramic construction with a weighty base and a fiery black glaze with a magenta finish. Ellery remembered the conversation surrounding it. He’d been worried about it being dishwasher safe, and Jackson had pointed out that it would probably be used in the office—no dishwasher, just a sink. The point was, the object was beautiful, it was well suited for Jade, she was using it, and Jackson’s propensity for being thoughtful was one more reason Ellery was going to worry about him when he was out there on his own.
Gah!
“Dex texted me and Jackson this morning right before you got in,” Jade said, oblivious to Ellery’s rabbit hole. “He said Henry woke up for a few, got all cryey and slobbery because Dex was there, mooned at Lance, and said Jackson needed to get his ass in there the next time he’s awake. I suspect that might be Jackson’s final stop before backup.”
Ellery tried not to gulp coffee—even with cream it was rather hot. “Wait… where’s he going first?” Jackson may have told him, but honestly, Ellery’s memory of the night before was a little fractured. Worry, he knew, and sleep deprivation. And worry.
Jade scowled. “First he was going to visit K-Ski’s house and get Cowboy’s address and pick his brains a little more. Then he’s going to go visit Cowboy’s mother. We need to see if the kid was taken on false pretenses or kidnapped or what. C’mon, Ellery, I thought you were a lawyer!”
Ellery scowled at her. “I am,” he said. “I’m even a lawyer who was in the room last night.” He let out a breath and conceded defeat. “But I have to admit, I was really worried about Henry, and I may not have been on the top of my game.”
Jade gave him a measured once-over. “Wow—look at you. A year and a half ago, you would not have admitted that.”
Ellery decided to give her a gift. “Well, a year and a half ago, Jackson wouldn’t have let me pump him with Airborne and Theraflu after a night in the rain, and you might have insisted on going out with him packing a weapon. We’ve all grown wiser.”
She cracked a smile then, a radiant one, and Ellery felt his fondness for Jackson’s sister steal back. “Yeah, we have.” She sobered. “And so has Henry. I will not be okay about that boy until they let him come home. This is like when you and Jackson were in the hospital for what? Three weeks? God, I can see why Jackson hates the place so much.”
Ellery could only nod. Jackson had hidden his discomfort well—and part of it had probably been fatigue—but he’d managed his phobia like a champ the night before. Now that Henry was better, though, and everybody’s fear wasn’t such an overriding stabilizer, Ellery hoped he could continue to manage today.
Also, “God, I wish I could see Henry with him,” he added, not even sure the words were going to come out.
Jade raised her eyebrows. “That was good, Ellery. Like a real person with friends and everything. What prompted that?”
Ellery didn’t even bother to scowl at her. He simply shook his head. Henry had carried such a chip on his shoulder when he’d first come to Jackson and Ellery—their first client, actually, with Galen by his side, forcing him to contain what they’d all thought was raging homophobia and chronic ingratitude.
It had turned out to be chronic self-hatred and raging embarrassment. Henry had spent his life parroting his father while at the same time knowing he was everything his father hated. Once he’d come to Sacramento, come out to his brother, and realized he had people here—and not just people, family —he’d turned not only into Dex’s little brother, but everybody’s little brother.
Even Ellery’s.
Ellery had seen how frantic Jackson had been as he’d driven them both to the crime scene the night before, but he hadn’t, until right now, told anybody—even Jackson—how worried he’d been for somebody he’d come to care for very much.
“It’s so easy for Jackson to care,” he said weakly, and then he did take a gulp of coffee because his voice sounded wobbly, and he was supposed to be here to work on Henry’s behalf, dammit.
He was surprised to see Jade’s dark fingers, tipped with magenta polish, wrapping around his own as he cradled his mug.
“It’s not,” she said throatily. “But he does it anyway. Just like you. Who do you think you’re fooling, Ellery? You let the boy use your cabin on New Year’s so he could take Lance on a vacation. You asked your mother for a loan to pay him before we got up to speed so Galen could have him as an assistant and Jackson could have him as backup. Yeah, I do the bills. I know how much we make and how much we don’t. You’ve gone to the wall for him a thousand times since he and Galen walked in here last June—and not just because Jackson loves him. And not only because Galen loves him too. It’s okay to have friends, Ellery. In fact it makes you a better human.”
Ellery shrugged and lowered his hands so she didn’t have to reach so far to keep holding them. He liked it—it reminded him of his mother’s careful comforts. “I thought you and Mike were my hard limit,” he said, trying to be flippant, and he did manage to make her smile.
“Too bad, we’re family,” she said, practically singing. “And I know Galen is like your work wife. It’s almost sickening how good you two are as partners in this firm. And I know it’s not something you expected, but, you know, it’s not a bad thing.”
“It is for them ,” Ellery said, almost grumpily. “As thrilled as I am that it wasn’t Jackson this time, I was not happy to be in the hospital for Henry either. People aren’t going to be our friends for long if they find out taking a bullet is the cost of it.”
She dropped her hands and rolled her expressive eyes. Even after their late night, she’d come to the office in full makeup, and her hair—lately allowed to curl naturally into tight spirals but still tipped with magenta—looked “done” as his mother would say.
“I know you’re dumb,” she said, obviously out of patience, “but last night’s bullet was taken for Isabelle and a fourteen-year-old kid John and Galen saved from the streets. I mean, yeah, Henry would take a bullet for you, but you need to keep track in case that’s what happens next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” Ellery snapped, stung.
“Tell that to Jackson,” she retorted. “For guys like that, there’s always the possibility of a next time. And every next time, the people like us have to deal with it. C’mon, Ellery—you and I have dealt with it as partners for a year and a half now. Are you bailing already?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said on a sigh, and with that resolution, it felt like some of the fuzz had cleared out of his head—even without coffee. “But thank you. Like you said, we’re family, but you’re really good at it.”
She grinned again—blinding, but still a little softer than it might have been before they’d gotten to know each other. “Thank you,” she said. “So AJ and I have started background on the Wonderbread Wagon Stepford Dragons—”
Ellery surprised himself by almost snorting coffee.
“It was either that or the Killer Karen Klub,” she admitted, “you know, KKK? But”—her expression grew grim—“one of my favorite people is actually named Karen, and I just can’t use her name like that. Makes me feel dirty. So anyway I sent you a link, and AJ and I have more to scroll through. I was going to try to do a dossier on all the leaders of the chapter out here but….” She grimaced.
“What?” Jade was more than capable of that kind of research. In fact between her and Jackson, Ellery and Galen almost never walked into a case without knowing exactly who they were defending and whether or not they had a chance at a defense.
“None of these people are who they say they are,” she said. “I mean, most of it is superficial—a name change in another state, a move, an altered employment record—but that’s even on the lower levels. So far. You’ll see what I mean when you start to look through it. I’ve gotten through two of their top five officers—they’ve got a chapter system, and this is the Sacramento chapter. It’s one of six across the country. However… fun fact. You’re gonna love this….”
She made the “gimme-gimme” motion with her hands, and he blinked and tried to remember he was supposed to be intelligent.
“None of them are from Sacramento?” he hazarded.
“Give the man another cup of coffee!” she crowed before quickly sobering. “None of them. Not one of these uptight, ‘let’s fuck shit up for anybody not straight, rich, and white’ bitches is actually from this state . I mean, it’s sort of weird. It’s not like California doesn’t have its own supply of shitheads, right? In fact, I assumed this chapter was from here. We’ve all met homegrown shitheads out in public, showing their asses. But this particular chapter of Sacramento Shitheads does not appear to be from Sacramento.” She shrugged and held her hands out. “Maybe I missed something. I could be wrong. Like I said, I only got to the first layer of changes. I’ll continue to data mine, and so will AJ, but that is something you may want to take a look at when you go all lawyerly and shit, right?”
Ellery smiled in bemusement. He remembered how Jackson had assumed Jade would eventually go on to law school and how Jade had laughed at that, saying she didn’t want the responsibility.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “you really would make a great lawyer. Are you sure you wouldn’t—”
Her expression of horror was eloquent. “No. No. We’ve lost our chance to have a Black woman president with a law degree. I’m going to just mind the shit in my own backyard, thank you. Now go do official stuff with what I gave you. Go! Before you finish your coffee and we have to start the coffee/bullshit cycle all over again.”
Ellery held up a hand, balanced his coffee, and went, more eager to see the information she’d sent him now that she’d given him an angle.
He wished rather wistfully that she’d take him and Jackson up on the offer to put her through school, though. She’d make an awesome Madame President someday.
AN HOUR later, after scanning the data updates that Jade and AJ sent him periodically, he wasn’t thinking about anything but the mess of identities on his computer. There were maybe twenty people employed by Moms for Clean Living—fifteen of them locals, male and female—who had been hired through nearby churches. But as Jade had noted, the five most prominent women, the ones with titles—president, vice president, treasurer, activities director, public relations director—had, well, diverse histories, to say the least.
Ellery could see how tracking their info could have been difficult. Valerie Trainor, president, had been Valerie Schmitt in Nevada before a divorce, but she’d been Melanie Schnarf in Arkansas before she’d gotten married to Conway Schmitt after she’d gone to school in Florida.
Conway Schmitt was a preacher, until he’d been arrested for—Ellery had to suppress his gag reflex here—molesting the preteen boys in his choir, which had happened shortly before Valerie had changed her name—and her identity—for the final time.
Okay, then. Valerie Trainor, originally from Arkansas, and originally Melanie Schnarf.
One down.
Ellery moved on to the vice president of the chapter, Ellie Medlar, who used to be Elinor Carpenter before she got married in Tennessee, and before that had been Selena Chalmers in Alabama. Before she’d gone to school at—oh, hey.
Florida State.
Ellery took a deep breath then, checked the time, and realized that an hour had gone by already and he hadn’t heard a thing from Jackson.
Which was too bad. He finally had the barest hint of a pattern.
At that moment Jade slipped into his office and glanced over his shoulder.
“What’s up?” he asked, rubbing his temples gingerly. Low on sleep, high on coffee, and now buzzing on information overload, he wasn’t sure he could open a folder on another ladder-pulling white woman. It was incomprehensible to him. These women had, so far, been born poor, worked hard for an education with their MRS on the side, and then had set about making the same support systems that had given them food, clothing, and education when they’d been children absolutely unavailable to anybody else. Valerie Trainor and Ellie Medlar had been given access to libraries and free books as children, as well as free lunches and after-school programs, and then had spent the last three years trying to kill those programs in California. It wasn’t even their state!
He tried to breathe through the indignation and focus on what Jade was doing, but it was hard. Jackson didn’t have a corner on retribution and vengeance, he thought crossly. Ellery had been hoping his big brain could kick some ass, but it didn’t feel like that was happening right now.
“I’m sorry, Jade,” he murmured. “What did you say?”
“I asked if you were ready for some fucked-up bullshit and a break,” she said, and he finally caught on to the unholy smile on her face.
He cocked his head. “Yes and… uhm, yes?”
“So you would not believe who is canvassing our neighborhood today. Want to guess? C’mon, Ellery,” she said, practically dancing. “Guess.”
Ellery knew his eyes rounded. “No,” he said, not sure if he’d heard right.
“Oh yes,” she said, nodding. “Yes. If you guessed the Stepford Dragons, you would be right . How far have you gotten on the information I gave you?”
He grimaced. “The grand poobah and vice grand poobah. Don’t tell me either of them are in our reception room.”
Jade shook her head. “No. This one claims to be one of the local folks. I forget the designation—volunteer, minion, whatever—”
“Flunky,” Ellery said, and she nodded.
“Yeah, that. Anyway she was going to leave some pamphlets here, and I told her I’d have to ask my boss.”
Ellery snorted, because if Jade had wanted to set those pamphlets on fire, nobody in the office would have much more to say than “The fire extinguisher is in the corner by the shelves.” But they wouldn’t have to do that because Jade herself had been the one to install it.
“Yeah, I know,” she said, as though he’d stated the observation out loud. “But keep it to yourself. I’m saying, we’ve got a flunky in here, and we have a chance to—”
“Pick her brains,” Ellery finished, because he wasn’t stupid. “Did you get her name?”
“Piper Lutz,” Jade said. “She’s in your list of people to check out, but way at the bottom.”
Ellery nodded, suddenly much more awake—and much more excited about his day. “Well by all means, offer the young—”
“Forty-five if she’s a day,” Jade said.
“—ish woman some coffee,” Ellery continued smoothly. Then, “Are we her first stop in this complex?”
Jade frowned. “I’ll have to see. Why?”
“Because you may want to warn the other businesses. Just… you know. Have them play along. Or, you know, in the case of the teacher’s union, have them not be there when she comes knocking.” There were three businesses in the upstairs part of the converted Victorian house/office building strip where Ellery leased office space. His own corner suite was big enough to fit three lawyers comfortably—he and Galen had decided to be particularly picky about their third since so far their chemistry was pretty solid—and a teacher’s union was next door. Next door to those people—who had all proven to be lovely and kind and a cross between cynical as hell and too innocent for this world—was a headhunting/temp agency run by a couple—men—who specialized in niche markets and queer-friendly businesses. Often their workers used the office space Derek Huston and Rico Gonzales-Macias provided to deliver contract work Rico and Derek had procured for them, and the office culture was practically sparkling with optimism, good will, and genuine friendliness.
And rainbow flags of every variation.
Ellery wouldn’t sic this woman on them for all the gold in the world.
“On second thought,” he murmured, “maybe you and I should… discourage this woman before she leaves.”
Jade’s manic gremlin grin cranked up a notch. “Oh please, oh please, oh please,” she muttered, holding her hands together like the praying angel he knew for a fact she’d never been.
“Yeah,” Ellery said, a shaft of pettiness brightening his heart from the inside out. “Let’s do that.”
“Excellent,” she said. “Excuse me, Mr. Cramer, I need to go fetch some coffee.”
“That will be all, Miss Cameron,” Ellery said primly, and they exchanged grim glances of the same evil joy.
Fifteen minutes later—and Ellery had to applaud Jade for keeping the woman waiting that long—Jade escorted a brittle blond woman in. She was a well-preserved forty-five, he thought critically, with ropy muscles in her thin wrists indicating a dedication to the gym, and an impeccable outfit of blue slacks and cream-colored Chanel jacket over a gray blouse. Understated and classy, right down to the little touches of pearls in the ears and a thin gold chain with a cross at her throat.
Jade gestured to the seats across from Ellery, and she turned and said, “Thank you, Jade, that will be all,” as though she owned the place, and Ellery widened his eyes at Jackson’s sister because he honestly thought she was going to set the bitch on fire.
“Ms. Cameron,” Ellery said mildly, emphasizing the title. “Thank you so much for keeping Ms. Dunkel company while I finished up in here.”
Piper Lutz’s face, which had been schooled and pleasant—and mostly unmoving thanks to healthy injections of Botox in the cheeks and forehead—froze, and her large, heavily kohled and mascara-enhanced blue eyes turned into ice chips.
“Lutz,” she said coldly. “My last name is Lutz.”
“Oh, my bad,” Ellery said, smiling at her. He’d been told by everyone in the office to stop trying to charm people with his smile—charm was not his strength. He believed them today as he watched the woman recoil with what looked like uneasiness. “I was studying a file, and I must have confused you with someone else. My apologies. By all means take a seat. I understand you were asking to solicit your political group here?”
Ellery wondered if shifting gears was more or less painful with that much of her face frozen. More painful because her muscles had to work twice as hard to present any sort of emotion, or less painful because humanity had been frozen with her face and everything was numb.
It was an uncharitable thought, but then, since her organization didn’t pay taxes, he figured she didn’t really need his charity.
“It’s a mother’s group,” she said, obviously trying to force the mask in place. “I’m sorry if you were misled by your receptionist—”
“My paralegal assistant,” he corrected. “And what do you do for a living?”
Watching somebody flush after having as much work done as Bertha Dunkel, now known as Piper Lutz, was pretty entertaining. The parts of her face recently injected didn’t actually turn red—but the rest of her face blotched up nicely.
“I’m a stay-at-home mother,” she said. “My children take up most of my time, but I do try to dedicate a few hours a week toward Moms for Clean Living.” Her smile was back in place, and Ellery remembered his mother and sister fiercely advocating for stay-at-home moms. “It’s not something I could do, Ellery,” his mother had said often enough, and Ellery tried to give this woman the benefit of the doubt.
It was harder, though, now that he’d read her dossier.
“Oh really,” he said, giving his scary smile again. “How old are your children?”
Piper’s hair formed two graceful wings framing what was probably a round face in an effort to create the “perfect oval” women seemed to chase. She carefully ran her third finger from her part, down her hairline, to her ear, where she flipped her wing of hair back—a tell of discomfort if Ellery had ever seen one.
“Oh, my youngest is a sophomore in UCLA,” she said, trying for an indulgent smile. “Which is why I have time to volunteer in this worthy cause.”
“And what is it, exactly, your organization does?” Ellery asked.
“We like to think of ourselves as public education’s watchdogs,” she said, with a slow bat of her eyelashes. “We’re a grassroots movement that sees the gaps of oversight in our public schools, and we try to add that extra layer of monitoring to protect our children.”
“So you help in the classroom?” he asked, pretty sure that was not the case.
“Oh no, our focus is more generalized than that.”
“So you raise money for school activities and enrichment?”
“Oh no—going outside the classroom to see the larger world is something that should be between students and parents only. We don’t believe in enrichment.”
Ellery knew his head tilt of disbelief had increased a few degrees, but God help him, that was a rough one to swallow.
“You help purchase materials?” Ellery asked. “Because it’s well known schoolteachers are already putting a great deal of their own money into classrooms, so I’m sure that sort of thing would be helpful.”
“But that’s their job!” Piper laughed, and Ellery fought the urge to lean over the table and grab her by the throat. “They sign on knowing that they’re responsible for what the government won’t provide.”
Behind the door he heard a strangled sound of what might have been fury, and he politely coughed to cover Jade’s grunt of disbelief.
“So,” Ellery said carefully, “you don’t help the schools obtain resources, you don’t volunteer time to assist their personnel, and you don’t seem to be rallying for them to have more materials or to enrich their curriculum, have I got that right?”
The weird, uneven blotch had bled from her overplumped features, and what remained was an almost corpse white. “Well, we leave those things to the powers that be,” she said.
“So what exactly do you do?” Ellery kept his “pleasant” smile in place, and she did that smoothing the hair back thing again, so he knew it was working.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You say you’re a school monitoring system—what exactly do you monitor?”
“Well, we are particularly interested that teachers stick exclusively to the curriculum—”
“That you expect the government to buy materials for—”
“And in no way deviate from what is the acceptable list of standards and concepts that children should be learning.”
“But you’re not willing to help in the classroom,” Ellery summarized.
“We mostly look to make sure no foreign concepts enter the school system that parents don’t approve of,” she finished in a rush, as though she and Ellery had been racing to a conclusion.
“You ban books,” he said shortly, and that flush returned, this time with more force and intensity.
“Only the ones we feel—”
“Who feels?” he asked.
“What?”
“Who’s we?” he asked.
“Our coalition,” she said, almost eagerly. “Moms for Clean Living.”
“So your little group”—he waved his hand dismissively—“has suddenly decided that they get a say in what kids get to read?”
“We don’t want children exposed to foreign ideas,” she said, her mouth setting mutinously.
“Foreign to whom?” he asked. “Explain this?”
“Well, to regular, law-abiding—”
Ellery pulled up a list of books that Jade had printed out for him while they’d put Piper Lutz on hold. “So a book about Rosa Parks as a child is foreign?” he asked.
“It makes white children feel bad about a specific time in history,” she said stonily.
“They should,” Ellery retorted. “We all should, so it doesn’t happen again. This book about the kitten bringing sushi to school—that’s bad?”
“ Americans ,” Piper enunciated, “eat sandwiches.”
“Not in this law office,” Ellery said promptly. “And what’s your problem with purple crayons?”
“We feel that six is too young to learn about the LGBTQ world,” Piper said, her voice getting shriller. “That book encourages sexual deviancy.”
“That book encourages children to be purple,” Ellery said. “Whatever purple means to them. And it tells them to be kind to children who don’t fit into the already established modes. I notice your group doesn’t promote any sort of antibullying campaigns, and it has, in fact, defended bullies from school administrations all across the country. Do I have that right? You would rather have the bigger kids pick on the smaller kids than have the smaller kids be safe?”
“We think of it as peer reinforcement of societal norms,” she said without a trace of shame.
“That’s amazing,” Ellery said. “You can justify shoving queer kids in lockers and driving them to suicide. I’m in awe.” He picked up the fliers she’d placed on his desk, yanking them from her hand before she could reclaim them. “Ma’am, do you have any idea who’s in this office complex where you’ve chosen to peddle your ideas?”
For a moment there was silence, and Ellery watched as the slow realization seeped in.
“Your law office, a union office next door, and a temp agency?” she said, and he realized she—or somebody else—must have briefed her without truly comprehending the thumbnails provided by the internet.
He nodded slowly. “Ms. Lutz, are you a Sacramento native?” The first level of her dossier had claimed that, but the lower levels—the Bertha Dunkel levels—had proven that claim false.
A look of puzzlement crossed her features. “Nossir. We came to California about five years ago.” Her accent slipped, and for a moment, the entire facade of elegant, wealthy woman seemed to slide, like her plasticized features, off her face.
“Was that when you changed your name from Bertha to Piper?” he asked.
“No,” she said, more and more baffled. “That was back in college.”
“Florida State,” he clarified.
“Yes,” she said, “How did you—”
“Are any of the people in your organization actually from Sacramento?”
“Well, most of us followed Twitty from school—”
“Wait,” Ellery said. “You followed who ?”
Piper Lutz—once Bertha Dunkel—had fully abandoned her wealthy socialite on a mission guise and was now a cornered wolverine. “I don’t know who in the hell you are,” she hissed, “or how you know so goddamned much, but I will just take my fliers and go on my way—”
“Who’s Twitty?” Ellery asked, his voice hard. “You tell me who Twitty is and I’ll tell you a little secret that will make your entire day much easier.”
“It’s our little nickname for Mel… I mean Val… I mean—”
“Valerie Trainor,” Ellery said, his heart thudding in his ears. “Okay, why do you call her that?”
“It was an old joke. Her ex-husband’s last name was Schmitt, but his first name was Conway, so, you know, Conway Twitty, but Schmitty? But we just called her Twitty—”
“What about Retty?” Ellery asked, suddenly so eager for this windfall of information that he could almost jump over the desk and sit on this woman for intel. “Do you have any background on her?”
“You can’t make me say anything!” Piper Lutz screamed. “You can’t make me say anything ! Now tell me your filthy little secret!”
Ellery blinked and had to scramble before he remembered what he’d meant by that.
“Oh,” he said, rocking backward. “Absolutely everybody in this business complex thinks of your organization as the Ku Klux Krazies. There is a plethora of lawyers in this immediate vicinity that would love to sue you for inflicting unnecessary trauma with your little spiel. I’m a criminal attorney, so you don’t have to worry about that coming from me , but my partner in the firm is dying for a shot at you. You’re lucky he’s not here—he would have stripped the skin off your body with his acid tongue. But seriously, nobody here likes you. By all means, take your shit and go.”
He threw all but one flier at her, and she gathered them up, stuffing them into her Coach bag before fleeing out the door Jade was holding open for her. They both heard the ring of the glass door to the walkway outside the office, and before the hydraulics would let it close, the clatter of her pumps as she hauled ass down the concrete-and-iron staircase next to the elevator.
The door rang closed, and they both heaved a little sigh of relief while Jade slumped against the door.
“Holy God,” she murmured. “Ellery, I haven’t seen a takedown like that since you had Jackson on the stand bleeding.”
Ellery shuddered, remembering that moment. Jackson had testified willingly, shown the wound on his back from the plaintiffs without judgment, but Ellery had never forgotten the fury that had coursed through his veins and how hard it had been to control.
This had felt worse somehow.
Maybe because Henry wasn’t able to defend himself. Maybe because Jackson was out there suffering, on a mission of vengeance, hurting inside while missing his friend, his partner, and needing so badly to get the people who’d hurt him.
It was the helplessness, Ellery realized wretchedly. The helplessness bred the fury, and the fury… he took a deep breath.
The fury bred mistakes.
“Oh, I shouldn’t have done that,” he murmured.
“I don’t know why not,” Jade said with a snort. “That was really impressive.”
Ellery shook his head. “I tipped our hand,” he said. “I just made things harder for Jackson. I just made things harder for us .” He swallowed sickly, thinking about all the things a group like this could do to the people in their office complex. “I made our entire office complex into a target for these assholes.” Oh hell. “Oh, this is bad.”
“No,” she said soberly. “I mean, yes. It’s possible they’ll take some shit out on us. But I’ll go talk to Nate, the receptionist next door, and to Rico and Derek next to them, and warn everybody. Nobody has the right to make you eat shit, Ellery. Everything that woman said was abhorrent. I’ve rescheduled everybody for today, and AJ and Crystal are still on research and backgrounds. As you can tell, it’s a slog. You call Jackson, because we’re both dying to check in with him, and then we’ll get back to work. Tomorrow we’ll make the firm run. Today we’re hunting down whoever did this to Henry. But what you just did? That was part of who we are . Like you told her—Galen would have left her in tatters. Neither one of you has it in you to lie down and take it, even if it would make it easier.”
“None of us does,” he said with a sigh. “Maybe we should have AJ take some time off research to beef up security around our building. I… I’ve got a bad feeling about these people, Jade. I just pissed them off and made it personal. You make sure the other offices know this, okay?”
“Will do,” she said. “I’ll order lunch when I get back.” She gave a little smile. “Sushi.”
Against his will, Ellery found himself chuckling. “Chopsticks only,” he said primly, and she winked before grabbing her coat and venturing into the windy bright sunshine of the post-rainy day.
Ellery sat thoughtfully down at his desk and checked his phone for a text from Jackson, pleased to see that he had one.
Just saw Cowboy’s mother. Ugh. OMW to see Henry. Talk when done.
Part of him was disappointed. He wanted to talk now , and he was not ashamed to say he wanted comfort. Dammit, the office was unnervingly silent without Henry and Galen, and Ellery’s heart hurt because he was missing friends , not merely coworkers, and Jackson’s voice would take some of that loneliness away.
But part of him was comforted, because Jackson had texted. Ellery knew he was on task and where he was heading.
It hadn’t always been like that. Ellery could take the win.
But he couldn’t go back to reading those dossiers with all those fake identities sliding from one picture of a smiling white woman with botoxed cheeks and streaked blond hair to another. After his confrontation with Piper Lutz, the thought made him nauseous—but also curious. Where had all these women come from? Florida State University seemed to be the epicenter, but what had happened there, and who had been involved, to send them all on a quest to ban books and bully anybody who wasn’t exactly like them?
Ellery had one major resource in this matter, and he wasn’t afraid to tap it.
Besides, his mother had a soft spot for Henry, and she’d never forgive Ellery if he didn’t update her on his injury. If nothing else, she’d already asked for his hospital room number to make sure his room was overflowing with flowers.
And she’d be really hurt if she wasn’t asked to assist with the vengeance part too.