Undiscovered Talent 1
JACKSON TOOK a look at the apartment complex Cowboy’s address had led him to and swallowed.
Oh God. Not one of these.
Cowboy and Isabelle had been sitting to breakfast when Jackson had driven by K-Ski’s, a box full of doughnuts as a peace offering for the hour of the visit after the late night. Billy—a health food nut with a capital nut —had scowled until Jackson pointed to the three red-bean pastries he’d gotten so Billy could have some and not worry about processed sugar.
Sean had given Jackson a grateful look and snagged one of the cream-filled maple bars, the expression on his blue-eyed, Polish-handsome face that of a man about to indulge in a favorite vice.
Cowboy appeared different in the light—less scared, more street savvy. But he kept hold of the little yappy dog, and Billy confided that he was going to have a hard time ripping “puppy” out of the kid’s arms.
“I swear to God, if they took dogs in Disneyland, we’d bring him,” Billy muttered.
“Well, promise him he can see the dog when he comes back,” Jackson said. He paused. “And then keep that promise.”
Billy—a consummate smartass—rolled his eyes. “You think I don’t know that? You don’t make promises to that kid and not keep them.” His face softened. “Besides, my little brothers would be happy to be his friend. They can bond over little dogs. We’ll make him an honorary stereotype.”
Billy was proud of his Mexican heritage, and of his family, sans a father, who, Jackson understood, was a piece of work.
“The more family for this kid the better,” Jackson told him. He eyed the kid critically, knowing that a month on the streets could leave a lifetime of damage, some of it purely physical. “Make sure you and Sean take him to get tested,” he said softly. “And when you get back, he’s going to need a thorough physical.”
“And psych workup,” Billy agreed with a sigh. “Yeah. Three days at Disneyland isn’t going to wipe away all the bullshit like a magic diaper rag.”
“No,” Jackson said thoughtfully, eyeballing the way Cowboy took furtive bites of his doughnut as though somebody was going to steal it from him, “but you’d be amazed at how one great memory can help you hold on when shit gets bad. Don’t underestimate what this can mean to him, Billy. But don’t take your eyes off him either—not even in the bathroom. Especially in the bathroom. Make sure he knows he can have anything he asks for, even silly things like stuffed animals and toys and sweatshirts, and offer to buy him food or candy every hour. Don’t be surprised if he starts grifting for sugar daddies, thinking he’s got to pay his way, and make sure he doesn’t steal anything. Don’t take it personally if you have to teach him more than once that he’s cared for on this trip.”
Billy made a helpless gut-shot sound. “Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. My brother Roberto, after my dad left—he… he did bad shit because he thought he had to be the man of the house. Kids. They take on all this weight when the grown-ups around them fall down on the job.”
“You, Sean, and Isabelle can help him give a little of that up,” Jackson told him. Then he grinned. “Of course he’ll have to compete with Sean for the biggest kid at the park, you know that, right?”
Billy’s return smile was a little bit bashful. “I can’t wait to see,” he said, his ears turning a warm magenta. “My cop, man—he’s always so serious. I think he’s gonna be fun.”
And that alone sort of made Jackson’s morning brighter. “Pictures,” he said, sobering. “Your job is to take pictures of all of them. When you come back, Henry is going to need pictures to show him what the outside is like. You know him. He’s always so busy. He’s going to need something to help him make plans.”
“Like he and Lance needing their own trip to Disneyland,” Billy said excitedly.
“Yeah. Like that. I mean, he hasn’t seen a lot of great stuff about California. Show him what he’s missing.”
Billy let out a long breath. “Thanks,” he said softly. “Me and Sean, we felt so helpless last night. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t feel that way anymore.”
“Straight up,” Jackson said, and then, conscious that the morning was moving on, he turned toward Cowboy. “Hey, kid, is it okay if I sit by you and have a doughnut?”
Cowboy smiled shyly. “It’s okay, Mr. Rivers. You don’t even want to know what I’d do for a doughnut.”
Jackson winced. “You are absolutely right about that,” he said, meaning every syllable. “But don’t worry. All you gotta do now is give me a little more info, okay?”
The boy nodded and took another furtive bite of the doughnut that carved up a little more of Jackson’s soul.
Jackson took out his phone and opened a notes file. “Okay, first off the easy stuff. Your old address when you lived with your mom.”
Cowboy rattled off the numbers quickly, down to the apartment number and his mother’s first and last name—Reba Milton—and seemed faintly surprised, as though he hadn’t been aware he could do that.
“Awesome,” Jackson said. “Now, can you tell me what school you went to and who your favorite teacher was.”
Cowboy looked stricken. “You… you’re not going to tell them where I’ve been, are you?” he asked, suddenly near tears.
“Oh no. No, kid, not at all.” Jackson felt like a heel of the first order. “No—no. This is for later. When you come back I just want to get some books for you to read, you know? See where you are in math and stuff. You seem like a smart kid. We can catch you up in school in no time.”
“Will I have to go back?” Cowboy asked, those tears still threatening. “They all know I kiss boys now, and for all I know I’ll get the shit kicked out of me and—”
Jackson held his hands up. “Cowboy, I promise— promise —you that wherever you end up, it’s not going to be until you are ready. Right now I don’t want you to forget what school looks like, that’s all. And if you’ve read all the books from English class, you can usually pass all the tests so you don’t get too far behind. Okay?”
Cowboy relaxed a little. “Okay,” he whispered. Then, a little less frightened, he said, “Thank you, Mr. Rivers. I liked school. You’re right, I’ve been sort of bored, in my head, you know?”
“Smart kid like you,” Jackson said, “I bet you were. Don’t worry. It will make Isabelle feel more like a mom if she sees you reading some schoolbooks.” He was also thinking about Randy, who was amazingly smart with books but not great with almost anything else. That kid would have come in so handy right now, and Jackson hoped for the thousandth time that Randy was safe and cared for. “So that’s one thing—you write down your teacher’s name, and I’ll get you some books and stuff, and we’re good.”
“Okay, then, what’s the other thing?”
Jackson slid his phone over, and Cowboy started typing in his teacher and school. While he was doing that, Jackson started with the hard stuff.
“Okay, so you said four other boys, right? Caleb was the one who went back. Do you remember the others?”
Cowboy frowned and, unconsciously, took a big healthy bite of what was left of the doughnut. His eyes widened comically and then closed, and Jackson watched in fascination as the hit of sweetness hit the kid’s bloodstream like heroin.
He smiled slightly and said, “Caleb, Jacob Cornell, Danny, and Otto.” He opened his eyes again, and the most bemused smile crossed his face. “Otto Karekes,” he said in sudden memory. “It was a really odd name, and he said he was German.” His face fell. “And then he said this was better than he could expect to see in some other countries, where he might have been killed outright. I….” He turned troubled eyes to Jackson. “Do you think he was okay? Jacob too? Otto was the one who hurt his leg.”
“I’ll do my best to find out,” Jackson promised soberly. “And now one more thing. Sh… erm, Retty. She’s the employee you had the most contact with. Can I get a description of her? And Twitty too? Tall, short, dark hair, light hair, that sort of thing. Let’s go with Retty first.”
Cowboy was much more lucid—and much braver—now that he had some sleep in him. He described Retty as having long, wildly curly black hair, a square jaw, and—in Cowboy’s words, “Rough skin. Her cheeks were red. She was wearing, like, work clothes and that jacket—green with the logo in white. She looked, you know. Regular. Like a waitress or a lunch lady or someone who works at a pizza place. Like, no makeup or anything, and her shoulders were… sort of forward.”
The boy hunched his shoulders and, apparently unconsciously, assumed a grim expression, but also one that was almost… slack.
Retty really was hired muscle, Jackson thought. She was the attack dog. And Twitty—who was blond and thin and looked “like she should be on a magazine”—was the face of the operation.
Interesting.
Jackson winked at the boy when he was done and told him he was so smart and told him that they would probably leave on the trip that afternoon. He said this exchanging glances with Sean, who nodded, the unspoken order passing between them that Cowboy needed to be out of town by then.
And then Jackson turned toward Isabelle Roberts, who was wearing a set of Sean’s sweats and a clean pair of crew socks. She wasn’t a wispy woman—she filled out the sweats with middle-aged curves and comfortable hips—but she wasn’t self-conscious about it either.
“Ms. Roberts?” he said, pulling up near her to give her the illusion of privacy, “I saw Bobby last night. He can’t come—”
“He’d be easy to follow,” she said promptly, and he nodded.
“Exactly. But he wanted you to know that he’s really proud of you. And he and Reg are so glad you’re safe.”
Her wide green eyes sheened. “Thank you,” she whispered before shaking herself. “Are you sure there’s no way I can go to my apartment? I would really love my own clothes.”
Jackson laughed a little and pulled out a wad of cash Bobby had shoved into his hands before they’d all left the hospital.
“He gave me this to give to you,” Jackson said. “For clothes. Apparently he got tipped really well under the table on his last carpentry job. He was going to buy you cross-stitch patterns, but he said there was probably enough here for clothes too.”
Ms. Roberts gaped in surprise at the wad of cash before counting it. She gave Jackson a droll look. “You would think after three years on his own, he would know what things cost,” she said, her voice ringing with such amazing momness that Jackson’s mouth twisted. “Dear God. Well, me and Cowboy are going to have a field day at a Target somewhere out of town. Did you hear that, Cowboy? New clothes for the both of us. And then T-shirts at Disneyland.”
Cowboy gave her an unfettered smile, hugging Charming the dachshund close and seeming, for the first time, like a fourteen-year-old boy. “Awesome,” he said, and Jackson had some hope for the lot of them.
He and Ellery would make Sacramento safe for these two people if they had to dig a trench under all of Moms for Clean Living and its environs and let the building collapse into dust. There was no other way.
As soon as he got into Jennifer, his phone buzzed with Dex’s message that Henry had woken up, and Jackson should be by around lunch. He closed his eyes for a moment and sent up a prayer to Gru—or the spaghetti monster or the sky daddy or whoever was in charge of making sure smartass ex-soldiers with hero complexes could survive—and took off for Reba Milton’s apartment complex.
When he’d found a spot to park on the cracked, crumbling asphalt, he got out of Jennifer and paused, scoping out his enemy. He spent a moment staring at the two-story structure, old, with peeling paint on the warped eaves, cracked yellow stucco, and concrete stairs that didn’t look like they’d take a grown man’s weight.
The place was located on Watt near Whitney, and there was such a spotty vibe in this area. This particular complex was shoved between two brand-new strip malls, for instance, and while the strip malls appeared busy and prosperous, the complex, with the full concrete apron and the single row of apartments on the ground and on the top floor, was so damned….
Sad.
Jackson, Kaden, and Jade had grown up in a place much like this, not too far away from this one, but their complex had been surrounded by houses with trash in the yard and other complexes with the same concrete floor. No green anywhere , not even a tree in the back. But the difference, Jackson tried to remember. The difference in the apartment Jackson had shared with his mother versus the apartment Jade and Kaden had shared with their mother, Toni….
Jackson shuddered, remembering the bare, scarred walls in his mother’s apartment. The one couch, stained, the battered kitchen table and chairs that wobbled. He’d slept on a mattress on the awful brown carpet in the living room, and she’d had the one bedroom, with the bed that squeaked and howled whenever his mother was putting out for drugs, cash, or food.
Not often for food.
And one floor above, up the rickety stairs—don’t lean on the wrought iron railing because it wouldn’t even support the scrawny fifth grader he’d been—there’d been the Camerons’ apartment. Same icky brown rug, but it had been vacuumed, and any stains had been scrubbed out. A couch and a stuffed chair and a—oh joy!—television set, but also curtains and valences that were bright and cheery. The couch was frayed at the corners but clean, and the table was battered but sound. The chairs might have been a little wobbly, but they were shored up with sugar packets, and nobody got scratched on metal edges that had been torn from the sides.
There were pictures on the walls—discounted art, but matted and framed—and Kaden and Jade always, always , had a test or a project on the refrigerator. There had been two bedrooms, one for the twins and one for Toni, and Kaden and Jade had homemade blankets, from on-sale fabrics, but still homemade , that were in their favorite colors with action figures on Kaden’s blanket and, well, female heroines on Jade’s blanket, because even then she’d been a fighter.
And art. And color. And clean clothes in battered dressers. And schoolbooks.
And care.
But all of that had been behind the same door of peeling paint that had hidden Celia’s squalor.
Jackson checked out the apartment number—#4—saw that it was a downstairs unit, and stopped leaning against Jennifer the minivan to go see what was behind door number four.
He gave the door an authoritative rap, and then, true to his history in law enforcement, he moved to the side. Doors were thinner and easier to shoot through. After a few moments, during which he could hear footsteps and swearing and then the chain being put in the slot, the door creaked open and he was eye to eye with a woman who was doing her thirties the hard way. She was thin, with about four inches of roots showing and a lot of brassy, teased hair below that. Once upon a time she’d had delicate features, Jackson thought, but her face showed fatigue now, poor diet choices, and the ravages of nicotine, which issued from the apartment in a cloud. She was wearing black yoga pants, pilled almost into transparency, and a tight once-white tank, and was clutching a battered plaid blanket around her shoulders in deference to the weather.
She regarded Jackson with unfriendly eyes through the crack between the door and the frame, and he watched the slow computer in her head as she tried to figure out who he was and what he wanted.
“Kenny’s next door,” she muttered, “but he doesn’t got anything until tomorrow.”
He rolled his eyes. “I don’t want your dealer,” he said, and her grimace proved him right.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Where’s your kid?” He said it bluntly because he hated this place already, and he hated that Cowboy had lived here, and he really, really hated her .
Her eyes darted back and forth, and he wondered how badly she hated that Kenny was out of product. “He’s not here,” she said. “Kid’s in school.”
“No, he’s not,” Jackson said. “Guess again.”
Her lower lip trembled. “He’s supposed to be in school,” she whispered. “Someplace to teach him, you know?”
“Do you remember the place’s name?” he asked.
She closed her eyes. “Moms for Clean Living,” she whispered. “They were at the place, the rehab place. I was talking in group about how my kid was a fag, and this woman came up to me, all official and everything, and said they had a school that would fix it.”
She met his eyes for the first time, hers a bruised and battered brown with an element of childish hurt in there. Not in her thirties , he thought. Barely thirty. Had him too young. Didn’t know what to do with him. All the places she went to for help only fixed one side of things, like paint on five pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle.
He gasped and tried to jerk his gaze away, but she went first.
“Is my boy all right?” she asked, her voice a husky rasp. “They said he’d write, but… but he ain’t written.” She studied her bare toes with not even a hint of polish and swallowed hard. “I miss him. But they said he had to get the devil out of him because he was a fag.”
“That,” he said, not sure where his emotions were going, “is a terrible word. Your son is kind, and he’s funny, and he’s brave. You had no right— no right —to throw him away because of who he wants to kiss.”
She tilted her head and gestured with her chin. “Mister, I don’t know if you seen their place in midtown, but it was like throwing him from a trash heap to a castle, you know?”
“Not if they were going to beat him into submission, Reba,” he said, and part of him was screaming that he needed to get information from this woman before he went off, and part of him wanted to turn around and run, not walk, back to Sean and Billy’s and beg them, beg Isabelle, to take this woman’s child and raise him in a circle of love he would never want to escape.
And part of him wished somebody would do the same for Reba Milton, because even he could see that this woman had once been a girl badly in need of help, and nobody had stepped up.
“They wouldn’t beat him,” she said, with so much certainty he had to remind himself that Cowboy had run away because the other kids had told him they were scared there.
“Whatever they’d do,” he said, “it had them all terrified enough to run away. Your boy’s been living on the streets for a month , Reba. I mean, are you going to kick him out for kissing a boy when he’s sleeping on the sidewalk eating garbage?”
She squeezed her eyes tight. “Don’t lie to me, mister. I know what you do when you’re on the street. I did it so I could afford an apartment. My boy was staying in the family business, that’s all.”
Oh hell. Jackson needed caffeine, and sleep, and for Jade to remind him that he’d gotten clear of this apartment a long time ago. And he needed Ellery to ask him if he needed help so he could kick his feet and say no, he’d do it fine on his own, thank you, and he needed Henry to ask him what in the fuck he was doing there, and he needed Henry to be all right .
That last thought was what straightened his backbone.
“Reba, I’m not here to shit on you,” he said. “And I’m not going to report you to the cops. I need two things from you, and then I’ll leave you alone.”
She sniffled in response, and he wondered how much more he could hate himself.
“One, I need you to tell me about the woman in the rehab center, the one who told you she could ‘fix’ Cowboy. What was her function there? Was she an addict as well?”
Reba shook her head. “No—but all the people who worked at the center knew her. Some didn’t like her, but she had sort of… you know. A pass. The lady who ran the center, Cora, hated her, but it was like Retty had something on her. You could tell. Cora would scowl and look like she swallowed a bug whenever Retty was walking the halls.”
Jackson nodded. Blackmail or threats—something had forced the rehab’s director to violate confidentiality and allow an interloper.
“Sacramento Recovery?” Jackson asked. It was a few buses from this apartment complex, but he figured Reba must have worked nearby.
“I’ve got a job waitressing down the block from there,” she confirmed. Her face screwed up in pain. “It’s been hard to go,” she admitted, “without Cowboy to come home to.”
Jackson let out a breath. “Reba, you need to be not a mess to take care of him. You understand that, right? Giving him away to the Moms for Clean Living people—that wasn’t something you should do if you weren’t using, do you understand?”
“But he’s… he’s gay, and how am I supposed to deal with that?” she asked, and he heard the genuine question in her voice.
“Look,” he said, taking a breath. “My mother was a junkie and a whore, and yeah, she sold me to a john once for drugs, and I almost went to juvie for a year when I clocked the guy in the throat defending my virtue. But you know what she never, ever fucking did?”
“What?” Reba asked, voice shaking along with her hands. Jackson bet she was dying for a smoke right now, but she seemed to be glued to the crack between the door and the doorframe the same way he was.
“She didn’t give a damn who I kissed,” he said. “And she didn’t judge. Now if the sex work keeps you in your apartment, that’s something you can make your peace with, but I think you and I both know your waitressing money will go a lot farther if you’re not spending it on junk, amirite?”
She nodded. “Cigarettes are almost more expensive than meth,” she whispered.
“Right? So priorities. So if you want to see your son again, you get yourself straight. And if the Moms for Clean Living come by, you never fucking saw me.”
She nodded and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Was that the other thing you wanted from me? Before you leave me alone? Because I sure could use to be left alone.”
“Yeah,” Jackson said, swallowing hard. “I’ll be back in a month. If you’ve got your shit sorted, and you think you can not be shitty to your kid, maybe you could see him again for a little bit. But in the meantime, don’t fight where he is right now. He’s got people right now who will take care of him. I can make sure your kid lands soft. But you—you’ve got to not fuck with his head. No coming back and telling him that all is forgiven if only he’s straight again. None of that shit. Let him be a kid. Let him have some safety and some steady food. Take care of yourself, and remember how to be a mom.” His voice, which had assumed the hard edge of somebody reprimanding a teenager, softened.
“He’s a great kid no matter who he kisses. If you can’t see that, you need to leave him alone.”
She swallowed and nodded. “You’ll be back in a month?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.