2
Those things wouldn’t be on computer, but proof of them might be in tax records and property records, and those were the things people kept on paper. And these people would make sure the paper trail was clean and pristine. Nobody could get them on back taxes—no they could not.
It was the people those papers might connect them with that would bring this batch of snakes down, Jackson had no doubt.
He’d made his way through the property records, the employee records, the Miscellaneous Expense files, and was searching the file cabinet for one more thing—anything—when he stumbled upon it without even thinking.
Permission Forms.
Oh. Oh fuck. Yes.
Kids.
His movements quickened, any trace of hesitation and pondering what he was looking for and why dissolving as he realized he was dealing with a huge stack of paperwork, and he might not be able to photograph everything.
He’d already been girding his loins for plowing through a whole lot of data that night, and he was torn between taking all the pictures or maybe just, well, stealing the file , when he heard a clatter from upstairs and Cody Gabriel bellowed, “ Plan B now !”
Jackson shoved the file under his shirt and into his waistband, hoping that was enough to keep it secure, grabbed the portable dolly, and bolted out of the room.
And right into a gaggle of women so thin and brittle they reminded him of uncooked linguini.
He identified Piper Lutz on sight, and most of the other women—they were all one of many shades of blond—scattered, but one woman, midsized, with the slim, powerful physique he associated with tennis players and dancers—stood in the middle of the hallway and shouted “Stop!”
Jackson had never been great at taking orders.
“Nope,” he said, dodging around her and staying well out of arm’s reach of her smaller form. Not that he didn’t think Twitty couldn’t kick the shit out of him, but hitting women was not first on his list of defense moves, no matter how much he might have hated this one.
“Get back here!” she screeched, but while she might have been in superior fighting shape, Jackson had meant what he’d said to Cody about running every day so you could escape what chased you. Still holding the dolly under one arm, he leaped off the porch, clearing the steps in one go and collapsing into the soft, wet ground when his feet hit it. He rolled, dropped the dolly, bounded up, and kept running, cutting through the trees on the grounds since he didn’t have to take the sidewalks anymore and trying not to slip on the wet leaves behind the front of the main house. He kept to the shadows, dodging behind trees and staying well out of reach of the sodium lights that ran the length of the street.
He watched as the crowd of women, all in dress flats and sweater sets, went charging down the sidewalk in search of him. He assumed they’d separated, since none of them had been through the door before he’d darted behind the topiary to skirt the wrought iron fence behind the foliage. He kept running, keeping one eye on the lit street where the enemy was scurrying, crying to each other with shrill voices.
His favorite cry was, “What in the hell do we do if we catch him?”
He’d decided he wasn’t going to hang around to see what would happen if somebody came up with an answer to that question when he saw—lagging behind the women but still pretty fast—two big shadows in dark uniforms.
Security guards , he thought. Upstairs — not downstairs.
They knew what they were protecting—and it wasn’t paperwork.
Jackson continued to hug the shadows, wondering if it was lack of imagination or if everybody had the same aversion to snails and slugs Cody did but still finding it easier to move in the darkness than to outrun a witch hunt.
A thing he thought smugly to himself until he slid behind one last hedge on the corner and ran into a solid body, the oolf of the collision as quickly hushed by the body he’d squashed as it was by himself.
The rancid body he’d squashed.
Oh God. He stared down and found that yet another child, Cowboy’s age, but this one female, was staring back at him, her eyes wide and terrified, darting to the street and then back to Jackson in the shadows.
Jackson held his finger up to his lips and breathed deeply, The girl—thirteen, fourteen at the most—let out a long breath with him, and he nodded.
“Come with me,” he whispered. “I’ll get you out of here.”
The girl glanced behind her shoulder, underneath a holly bush, which made Jackson’s skin shrivel at just the sight of it, because the dark leaves, glossy with rain, were exquisitely pointed on each terrible end.
They must be so scared.
There were two other young people down there, androgynous with dirt and fear, all of them wearing thin sweatshirts with the Moms for Clean Living logo barely visible on their shoulders.
“Them too,” Jackson murmured. “Follow me.”
He realized the girl was shaking.
“A warm place to sleep,” he all but begged. “A bath. Clean clothes. Food. We won’t make you go back home if you don’t want to, and we’re definitely not giving you back to those monsters in that place.”
He watched the girl—God, she was tiny—swallow.
“What would we have to do?”
“Tell the truth,” Jackson said softly. “Scream it. Tell the fucking world. I don’t even know what they did to you guys in there—I don’t have details. But if you all were willing to run away, to live like this, then it had to be bad.”
She shivered, hard. “We’re all so cold,” she whispered. “So cold.”
He didn’t want to scare her; he couldn’t even imagine the level of trauma. “C’mon, sweetheart. I’ve got a minivan, and I can get you to child services and away from this place.”
She nodded and started to cry. “I want to go home so badly,” she said, her voice breaking. He held out an arm, and she burrowed in. Everything she was wearing was sopping wet.
“We’ll see if we can do that.” He remembered those parental permission forms. “I can’t promise, but we can at least see.”
She nodded against him, and he glanced out toward the well-lit street, where their pursuers seemed to have disappeared.
“You ready?” he asked, glancing at the kids behind his new friend.
He got hesitant nods, but at least they were nodding.
“Follow me.”
It had almost been fun when he’d been running through the underbrush in the dark by himself. A game. What would happen if they found him? His life would be a little harder, he and Ellery might have to get a little bit trickier, but really, what could they do to him? Call the cops on him? He had enough contacts in the department now—and enough cred—that he could probably avoid a night in jail. Hell, just the threat of Ellery would be enough to make most cops back down.
But it wasn’t so fun now. They were, what? Half a block away from getting these kids to freedom? Every slither through the bushes made his heart pound, and every cough, sneeze, or gentle moan made it stop.
These three kids were sick, he realized. Very sick. He’d been thinking about calling CPS, but he thought that maybe he should take them all to the hospital instead and have the pediatric administrators call after Jackson described the situation.
Hospitals had armed guards in the front, and Jackson had the proof that these children had been in the care of people who had mistreated them tucked right over his balls.
And although he hated to admit it, it was time to call the police.
HE WAS sweating in the cold humidity by the time they got back to the minivan, grateful for the pool of darkness they’d left the thing in. There were no streetlights on this side of the block, and while it might have made the giant blankness of the grounds creepy as hell, it also meant that the women—probably used to thinking of men as predators—were sticking to the lighted side of the street. He was busy lowering the back seat to let the kids scramble in when Cody ran up to the back fence from the inside and catapulted his first stray to the top.
“What in the hell?” Jackson said, before adding to the girl he’d been talking to. “There are blankets in the back. I think all three of you are going to have to squish on the back seat.” He paused and took a double take at the number of teenagers Cody had brought with him. “On each other’s laps,” he added. “ Hurry .”
With a growl he hustled to the fence and helped the first kid—an undersized boy of around thirteen who might never hit his growth spurt—down from the fence, and then a tall, gawky teenaged girl with a buzz cut, and then another, and then another. Around the time Cody boosted his last teenager up—a chubby, deconditioned young man who kept apologizing with every heartbreaking breath—Jackson could hear shouts. They’d been spotted. He helped the young man down with a muffled “ oomph ” and urged him to the minivan, wondering if they’d managed to find a way to squeeze all eight— eight —kids into a back seat that only fit four.
He ran to Jennifer while Cody was still clambering over the fence himself, noting that two of the smallest teenagers had squeezed, knees to ears, in the back storage area of the van under the hatch, and that blankets had been tossed to the kids who’d been hiding out in the rain.
He got a glimpse of Piper Lutz coming from one side of the street and Valerie “Twitty” Trainor coming from the other as Cody hopped in, and he hit the ignition.
He’d backed up and was squealing down the street, the minivan’s front bumper guard scraping on the ground with every pebble in the road, by the time Cody slammed the door shut and was wrestling with his seat belt.
For a moment, the only sounds were the minivan’s straining engine, the panting and whimpers from their full back seat, and the “ snick ” of the seat belt clicking into place.
Jackson took a deep breath and said, “This was not Plan B!”
Cody chuckled breathlessly. “Hell, son, this wasn’t even Plan F , but we pulled it off, right? Where to?”
“Davis Med Center,” Jackson told him, driving one-handed while he pulled his phone from his jeans. “But while I’m driving, I need to call in the reserves.”
“Oh God,” Cody moaned. “You don’t mean….”
“Yup. Lawyers, guns, and money, my man. The shit has hit the fan.”
THE FIRST call was to Ellery so he could mobilize child services and call Dave and Alex so they could warn the hospital they had an influx of adolescents that needed to be admitted stat and not housed in the ER. The third was to Andre Christie, Sean’s partner on the force, so he could get Fetzer and Hardison to the ER to help take custody of the kids, since they’d all been briefed on the situation beforehand.
And when all that had been done, he took a breath and finally asked the one burning question in his mind.
“What part of ‘look around’ did you not understand?”
Cody harrumphed. “The part where our hefty friend back there was locked in a closet, crying, with a clothespin on his nethers, and the kids from the girls’ dorm were sneaking food to the boys because they’d been put on short rations that night. Something about ‘encouraging his perversion.’”
Jackson blew out a breath. “Okay, so that was something, but I don’t know if it’ll get us out of a kidnapping charge.”
“Jackson, there were pictures of drag queens burning in hell with chopped-off penises on the walls.”
“Oh my God !” Jackson burst out. “That’s horrific . What in the actual fuck !”
“It… it….” The voice came from the seat directly behind them, and Cody glanced back, but both of them shut up.
“It was what, honey?” Cody asked, the compassion in his voice so natural Jackson figured he could forgive the guy for absolutely fucking up their plan.
“It was to make us want to be straight,” said the young woman behind them, one of the ones Cody had helped escape. “It… it was so stupid. One day I was fighting with my mom about my girlfriend, and the next all these Stepford wives were telling me I was going to hell. A van pulled up to my door, and my mom said, ‘These people will help you, sweetheart,’ and she shoved me in.” There was a sound of desolation in the girl’s voice. “She was crying. She… she put me in this fucking Jesus van and she was crying like she was the one getting hurt.”
“Often they don’t understand,” Jackson said, feeling wretched and hopeful at once remembering Cowboy’s mother. “I think… I think this group of people lied to your parents, maybe made this place sound like summer camp or a private school.”
“Ha!” came from a boy huddled on the far side of a seat, with another boy tucked in next to him. Both of them were so slender they fit under the same seat belt. “My old man just needed to rest his beating hand.”
“Well, hopefully you won’t have to go back there,” Jackson said, his head starting to pound.
“May as well,” the kid said glumly, staring out the window into the rain. “At least with the old man, he’d leave me alone sometimes. These people… wake you up in the middle of the night going, ‘Hey, kid, you thinking about dick?’ It’s like, ‘No, asshole, I’m thinking about sleep , but now I’m thinking you’re a dick.’”
That made Jackson’s shoulders stiffen. “So there were men in that house?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said the girl right behind him. “Two of them. Fuckers. Liked to think all we needed to straighten us out was their penis.”
Next to him he heard Cody make a pained noise. Fuck. Yeah, that too.
“They left me alone,” said the miserable, sick girl from the back.
“That’s ’cause you bit that one guy,” said their helpful friend with the buzz cut. “Epic move, Denise—seriously, we told that to all the new kids when they showed up. Told ’em you could fight back and end up on the street, but it might be worth it.”
“Wasn’t worth it,” Denise all but moaned. “They still had us by the clit. Poor Otto—that one bitch grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and said, ‘Hey, boy, we got a job for you,’ and he didn’t even have anyplace to run.”
“God, he was pissed he couldn’t keep up with Cowboy,” said the boy with the attitude. “But….”
The whole car shuddered when he said it. Jackson felt the air itself charge with sadness, trauma, and fear.
“Anything’s better than ending up like Caleb,” said the other slender boy, next to the boy at the window.
“What happened to Caleb?” Jackson asked, hoping that somehow these kids weren’t too traumatized to answer.
“None of us saw,” said the one girl—small, but well developed, as some girls had the misfortune to become in the sixth grade—who hadn’t spoken up yet. “We just….” That collective shudder again. “Mister, you ever heard the sound a watermelon makes when it’s dropped on the sidewalk?”
Jackson’s stomach rumbled weakly, and that empanada suddenly felt like a colossal mistake.
“Yeah,” he said softly.
“ That’s what happened to Caleb,” said the girl. “Those boys all tried to run away, and Jeddy here got hurt falling down the wall, and Caleb got dragged back by the ear. Retty was tearing him a new one in the courtyard and… and he went back there. We heard Caleb screaming, we heard that sound, and the screaming stopped. Next morning me and Otto were dragged out to the courtyard to clean up the mess.” He heard her take a deep breath, like she was shoring up her courage, but when she let it out her voice was still broken. “It… it was blood and brains. I don’t know where the rest of Caleb was, but I know what we had to slop out of the concrete with a mop bucket.” He heard another sniffle. “Otto tried to get away, but… but sometimes, when you don’t got nowhere to go, you’re just as trapped on the outside of hell as you are on the in.”
His stomach twisted at that, and beside him he heard Cody make a sound like a quarterback taking a tackle. He was spared from having to think of anything to say by Alex’s phone call, telling him to drive around to the back of the hospital where pediatric emergency personnel were waiting to debrief and give aid, just as they arrived, but the girl’s words stuck with him.
ONE HOUR, two. What he’d started to think of as the “outside” kids were all admitted for everything from delousing to antibiotics, but some of the inside kids had burns, bruises, marks.
The girls each had a blistering case of gonorrhea, which made both Jackson and Cody absolutely homicidal.
Jackson waited until Andre Christie arrived via the back entrance—which still smelled of stolen cigarettes, because health-care professionals had vices too—before he produced the wad of paperwork shoved into his jeans.
“And I didn’t get you anything,” Christie said, taking the sodden and sweat-drenched papers with distaste. A neat, dapper man in his mid-forties, Christie was madly in love with his wife and fiercely loyal to Sean Kryzynski. Jackson considered him a friend and an ally—and hoped that would be enough.
“Look,” Jackson said quietly. “I am worried about what will happen to these kids. It is hard to get kids away from their parents and into child protective services, and these kids were given to an organization that tortured them in the name of… of….”
“Religion,” Cody supplied helpfully.
“If that’s religion, you’re Miss Piggy,” Jackson retorted, about out of fucks, and Cody choked on his own snicker.
“I am not , in fact, Miss Piggy,” he said.
“And I’m not Kermit the Frog,” Ellery said, walking smoothly in at the most opportune moment possible.
“You say that,” Jackson conceded, drinking in Ellery’s slim, neat form wearing a pair of—oh my God —Mike’s old sweats and blue flannel shirt? He looked good. His hair had been washed and was flopping across his brow, and his eyes were tired, but God…. So dear. “But you seem to have brought the whole Muppet Show with you.”
Ellery harrumphed and gestured to the group of men and women behind him, all of whom were dressed in what Jackson’s sister referred to as “bra o’clock” clothes—after bra o’clock, all that mattered was comfort and, for women anyway, there was no bra involved. “I brought the most qualified advocates in the city, so….” He gave a toothy smile to Andre, who handed the paperwork over to him with a meaningful glance at Jackson.
“Marry this man,” Andre said, giving him a smug smile. “He knows how to get shit done.”
Jackson let out a tired cackle and sent Ellery a grateful look. “I’ll consider it. I understand invitations are already out.”
“They RSVP’d last week,” Ellery said primly. “Them, the kids—I hope to throw one hell of a party.”
Andre gave a toothy grin and then regarded the cadre of advocates with the same gratitude Jackson had felt.
“The kids are in rough shape,” he said, and Jackson nodded in agreement, a wave of exhaustion washing over him so hard it almost made him nauseous. He was fine, for the moment, to just let Andre talk. “Their parents signed them over to an institution using illegal behavior modification practices to make them, uhm….”
“Not gay or trans,” Jackson supplied, and while some of the advocates appeared horrified, about half of them took it in stride, so Ellery had probably gotten to that part in the briefing.
“Some of the kids would like a reconciliation, provided the home is safe,” Cody supplied.
“But some of them were, like, ‘Hey, went from one beating to the next.’” Jackson let out a sigh. “It’s a mess. And it’s one we don’t have the power to fix—” The enormity of the situation swept him again, but now was not the time.
“But how did you find out about it?” Andre asked. “I mean, I know you were looking into what happened to Henry, but seriously, what in the hell!”
So Jackson recounted how he and Cody had infiltrated the Moms for Clean Living headquarters, searching for something, anything , pointing to why Henry would have been shot by a woman wearing their merch. He managed to avoid talking about Cowboy—although Andre knew, he didn’t want pressure from the child advocates until the boy was safe—Jackson was honest about the documents he’d photographed. He wasn’t a police officer, and he didn’t need a warrant to get evidence. When Andre asked him why he hadn’t just taken pictures of the induction paperwork, Jackson gave Cody Gabriel a sour look.
“Because some asshole decided to stage a jailbreak without my knowledge or consent,” he muttered.
Cody’s grin added a hint of the devil to his angelic features. “What can I say? The kids made me as some kind of LEO from the get-go, and….” He swallowed. “Jackson, they were begging me—I mean begging me—to get them out of there. And then I heard that one kid sobbing from the closet, and….”
“I hear you,” Jackson said, relenting. He was pretty sure that the entire reason he’d tagged Cody Gabriel for this mission in the first place was that Gabriel would take his plays from the same playbook Jackson favored. He’d been a little disappointed when Cody had needed explicit instructions before he’d gone wandering through the house, but the frantic scream of “Rivers, Plan B!” had given him some solid reassurance that his faith hadn’t been misplaced.
“Hey, you found your own lost souls anyway,” Cody said, grinning. “Which did not surprise me one bit.”
“They were lurking outside of the fence,” Jackson told the others. “They’re the ones in worse shape. Much like the kid who….” He paused. “Ellery, did you fill them in on Otto?”
Ellery nodded. “Yes. He’s got his own advocate.”
A tired- but pleasant-looking woman wearing sun-and-moon pajama bottoms and a giant sweatshirt with cats all over it, gave a game wave.
“And Aileen already okayed Otto’s temporary residence at your halfway house, Jackson. I hope that’s okay. The older young men are being very responsible, and Jade and Mike will be spending the night there for a couple of nights to make sure it’s all going well.”
Jackson nodded, thinking of the bitter young man who’d thought that Moms for Clean Living had been a change of locale, nothing more.
“There’s another kid there—I don’t know his name—but apparently his homelife fit right in with the Moms for Clean Living philosophy. We may want to place him at the halfway house too. There’s five beds,” he said to Aileen. “So the place will take two more, but you may need a social worker willing to sleep on the couch. Like I said, the older kids have been pretty decently vetted—”
“And they’re very protective,” Aileen said. “We’ve met. No, it’s a good place, and I appreciate the extra beds.” She gave a nod to her fellow advocates. “We may need them. Homes for LGBTQ teens are not as plentiful as we might wish, so a place like yours might be the difference between helping these young men and sending them back to their parents.”
Jackson unconsciously put his hand on his stomach, fighting the temptation to lean against the wall. “Please, no—”
“They’ll do their best,” Ellery told him softly. He glanced at the army he’d thrown together with an hour’s notice. “Thank you, everybody. I can’t thank you enough—”
“We’re so grateful,” said a slender young man with three piercings and ink on his wrist disappearing into his sweatshirt cuff. “Getting these kids out of there—so often they run away, or—” They all swallowed at the same time. “—resort to self-harm,” he finished raspily. “Getting them legal help and social workers and therapists—it all starts with an act of bravery, and you two definitely did that.” He paused and said, “What would you have done if they’d caught you?”
Jackson shrugged. “Screamed ‘Kidnapper’ and run for the minivan anyway?”
Cody Gabriel started laughing helplessly, and Jackson found he had a few chuckles to spare. Unconsciously he straightened. If he could laugh now, he could make it through the next few hours, right?
“We woulda thought of something,” Cody said, and they continued on the debrief before Ellery’s army dispersed among the kids, taking the paperwork Jackson had smuggled in his pants with them.
“I should have taken pictures of that,” Jackson muttered, half to himself. His attention was wandering—he couldn’t seem to yank it back.
Ellery entered a text, and a moment later every advocate in the place was pulling out their phones to take pictures of the stack of paperwork they’d grabbed.
Jackson had no doubt in a few minutes Ellery’s phone would be blowing up with the evidence they’d need to study that night.
For the moment—just the moment—they’d done all they could do.
He wasn’t sure where the yawn started—somewhere between his balls and his toes, probably—but it managed to work its way up past his knees, which grew suddenly weak, rumbled in his stomach, which was a mess anyway, and climbed into his throat and his brain and his eyes.
By the time the yawn was done with him, Andre, Cody, and Ellery were all staring at him.
“Jackson,” Ellery said quietly, “it’s eight o’clock at night. We’ve been up more than thirty-six hours.” He gave a polite little yawn that barely showed his pointy teeth. “It’s time to call it a day and wake up to do it again tomorrow.”
“Sure,” Jackson said in the middle of another yawn. “I just have to take Cody home.”
“Cody, do you have parking for the minivan?” Ellery asked.
“I do,” Cody told him. “Think she’ll let me drive her?”
“She was pretty good to you at the end of the day,” Jackson said, digging out the keys. “I think she appreciates people who are good to kids. And she might remember you from when we met. So yeah. Drive safe.”
Cody grinned. “My own car is getting an overhaul—this’ll be like a treat. I’ll be real nice to our lady, you hear?”
“I hear,” Jackson said, laughing softly to himself.
Christie shook his head. “I don’t even want to hear it about that fucking ca—”
“Shh!” Jackson and Cody both hissed, holding their fingers to their lips. “Don’t jinx it!”
“Oh God,” Christie said, shaking his head. “Fine, Gabriel, go. Where can I find you?”
“At Jackson’s house, tomorrow around—”
“Ten,” Ellery supplied, no bullshit.
“Fine,” Jackson snapped. “But first, I’m going to go upstairs and tell Henry about the kids.”
There was a moment for everybody to digest that, and then the other three men smiled.
“He’ll love to hear it,” Christie said, some relief in his tone. “I’ll go up and add some details when you’re done.”
It was great in theory, but Ellery—who had admitted to copping an hour of sleep on Jade and Mike’s guest bed before Jackson had called him, and who had also gotten sleep the entire week before—needed to steer Jackson up to the ICU because that yawn had sucked Jackson’s last reserves right out of him.
Henry was awake when they walked in, and as Jackson told him about the rescue of the kids from the Stepford Dragon compound, he let out a weak chuckle.
“Damn,” he said, his eyes closing in spite of his best efforts to stay awake. “Teach me to get shot. All the good shit happens when I’m out of the running.”
“Good reason to get better,” Jackson told him soberly.
Henry smiled, his eyes closed, and said, “Don’t replace me while I’m out, okay?”
“Cody’s not mean enough to replace you,” Jackson told him honestly. “He needs to find his own Henry—I’ve got the one I want.”
“Good.”
He fell asleep, and as Ellery stood to guide Jackson down to the car, they glanced up to see Dex in the doorway, tired but pleased.
“He’s the fourth kid of five,” he said softly. “It means everything to him that you said that.”
Jackson’s eyes burned, and he cursed Henry’s brother for always saying the brave thing, even though it was also the raw one.
“Well he’s the first partner I ever had whom I trusted to have my back,” Jackson said. “I mean, Cody Gabriel is a good man, but your brother had to fight for that position. I’m not giving it away anytime soon.”
Dex nodded. “Good. Get some sleep. Somebody will be here with him all night. We’ll keep you in the loop.” He sobered. “His fever is getting up there. He may be here for another few days to fight off infection.”
Jackson was suddenly awake and wide-eyed with worry. “We’ll cross our fingers,” he said earnestly.
“You do that,” Ellery said. “I myself will pray.”
Jackson startled and remembered the last time he ’d prayed.
Ellery had been in surgery, and Jackson had been in the bottom of an emotional well so deep it had taken Ellery’s mother to pull him out of it.
Maybe he’d gotten less pissed off at the powers that be since then?
“I will too,” he added.
Dex nodded, and this time his smile was a little watery. “Couldn’t hurt to remember how,” he said.
And with that there was nothing else for it but to bid him good night.