2
Jackson slow blinked and swallowed, suddenly seeing how self-deprecation, self-annihilation—all of the painful, twisting his guts shit that he put himself through on a regular basis, up to and including his memories of that terrible night when he and Kaden had called child services, could be offensive to this kid.
As far as Danny and Enrique and Otto were concerned, Jackson had made it . He hadn’t just “made it out,” he was doing the thing they’d just been tortured for, and getting married in a park on a sunny day in June—which had been his only requirement for a wedding—was the dream they’d dared not dream.
It was his job to make it a worthwhile dream, until they had their own Ellery to cling to.
He managed a little bit of swagger and a wink. “Do you think I’d be marrying a troll?”
Danny, who had been on the verge of tears, stopped on a gulp, and next to him, Enrique snickered.
“You saw him last night,” Aileen said softly. “He came in with the rest of my team, remember?”
“Flannel-shirt guy?” Enrique asked dubiously.
“He usually wears a suit,” Jackson said, keeping his voice firm. “And he’s kickass enough to pull Aileen and her team out of their, uhm, pajamas—”
“Oh, they know about bra o’clock,” Aileen said dryly.
“Okay,” Jackson said, sending her a grin. “He managed to pull five professionals to the hospital after bra o’clock. And he did it for you.” He sobered. “How kickass is that?”
“This place ain’t bad,” Enrique said. Then, his voice aching, “How long can we stay?”
Jackson and Aileen met eyes. “As long as you need to,” Jackson said. “Assuming we can get some supervision for you all.”
“Nilas and Geordie are over eighteen,” Danny said on a shrug.
Nilas and Geordie, who were both at the “wiping the counter” stage of cleaning up, stilled.
“Yeah,” Nilas said carefully, glancing at Geordie, “but we’re convicted felons over eighteen. They, uhm, might not trust us with you guys.”
“Sex crimes?” Enrique asked, like this was only passing consideration.
“No!” they both replied, stung.
“Well, then….” Enrique waved his hands. “I mean, that’s better than the last two places I stayed, and my mom’s house before that. You’re fine.” He turned to Aileen and Jackson. “They’re fine. We can stay, right?”
Jackson shrugged. “Aileen is the one who needs to cross t’s and dot i’s,” he told them. “She knows I’m fine with whatever you all need. Now, I hate to rush you all, but….” He looked pointedly to the clock on the mantel, a mental list of the things he needed to do and the people he needed to visit before he and Cody had to leave for Sonora.
“Yeah, yeah….” Danny said. “What can we tell you about Retty and Twitty.”
“And Piper,” Otto muttered, from near his elbow. It was possibly the first thing he’d said in the last few minutes, and Jackson glanced quickly at him.
“And anything you can tell us about the people at the Moms for Clean Living,” he said grimly. “Including Piper.” He paused and remembered Danny’s point about “fronting.” Sometimes it helped to state the obvious.
“You guys were given a raw deal,” he said softly. “I mean, the people at Moms for Clean Living served you up a giant shitburger, told your parents it was ground beef, and threw you in the trough to eat that shit for weeks . And they hurt your friend Caleb. And my friend Henry, who you guys haven’t met, but he’s awesome.”
“As awesome as Cody?” Danny asked, giving Cody an appreciative look.
Jackson watched Cody’s ears tinge red and thought about the man’s heroics the night before. It would figure there would be a teeny bit of a crush going on there.
“Yes,” Jackson told him seriously. “I have nothing but awesome friends.”
Cody snickered. “If I didn’t know that was true, I’d say you were flattering me.” And then he sobered. “And to help Jackson’s awesome friend, we need your guys’ information. Can you help?”
The three kids nodded soberly, and Jackson heard Cody let out a breath.
It occurred to him that the easy part of his morning was over.
“SO,” CODY said to him nearly an hour later, “what’d we learn?”
Jackson grunted, feeling wrung out. “A couple things,” he said, maneuvering Jennifer in a neat three-sixty as he left his old neighborhood. “First of all, Retty was the kids’ nightmare, but she was the company’s dog. We sort of knew that already, but the kids confirmed it—and the extent of it.”
“And she’s not that bright,” Cody said.
The kids had tales of tricking her—sneaking food in, stealing her windbreaker, which she wore with a sort of obnoxious pride.
“Like it made her a cool kid,” Danny had said in disgust.
“And she’s a sadist,” Jackson added. Retty had been the classic example of shit rolling downhill. From what the kids said, the other women would be shitty to her, ordering her to do the grunt work—blackmailing mothers, recruiting kids, intimidating anybody who got in their way. And Retty would turn around and share that sadism with anybody below her, which usually meant the kids themselves.
“So she’s got enemies,” Cody said. “But….”
“She’s disposable.”
They both grunted in agreement.
“And she rode herd on the escaped kids, even after they escaped,” Jackson said thoughtfully. Because that had been interesting. Otto had been the one to point it out.
“Retty would give us jobs,” he’d said quietly. “Throw food at us from her car and tell us to go do things. Talk to this kid or that kid. She had a list. She wanted to know who sucked dick―”
“Or dove in the wrong muff,” Enrique added, a sardonic twist to his lips.
“We were her spies,” Otto said. He looked away, and Jackson felt a terrible pang in his chest. “She’d… hold food in front of our faces and make us do things—trick kids into coming into the house, trap kids, get information….” His voice trailed off, and Jackson wondered whom Otto had betrayed for a hamburger because his stomach had been gnawing away at his conscience, at his personhood, like a rabid weasel. “We… we ratted out other kids so she’d feed us.”
“You did what you needed to, to survive,” Jackson told him, waiting until the boy met his eyes.
Otto nodded once and swallowed, and Jackson had wondered how long it would take to untangle the secrets harbored in that thin chest.
“I told her,” he whispered. “Where Caleb was hiding, after he and Cowboy escaped. She….” His voice broke. “I hurt my leg falling out of the window when we tried to escape, and she had medicine for it, and she wouldn’t give it to me unless I told her where he was hiding.” He wouldn’t look at Danny and Enrique. “My leg hurt so bad,” he said on a sob. “And I didn’t know… didn’t know she was going to… to make him make that sound.”
“Otto….” Jackson didn’t know how to comfort him.
“And then when I could, I escaped, but I didn’t know where I was. I was out, but she always fed us just enough to keep us coming back….” He put his face in his arms then and sobbed, and Aileen had given Jackson a speaking glance and taken the boy back into one of the bedrooms to work with him.
Jackson’s heart hurt for the kid. Food or loyalty. Integrity or pain. Hard enough choices for a man to make, but for a kid who’d had his identity broken down for weeks beforehand?
He hoped Aileen had a cure for self-hatred in her child advocate’s bag of tricks, because Otto would need one.
“Also,” Jackson went on, hoping to shake the terrible sadness of a stick-thin, barely adolescent boy named Otto. “We know that, as suspected, Twitty answered to a higher power.”
Next to him, Cody made a disgusted sound. “One she… how did Enrique phrase it?”
Jackson breathed out through his nose and quoted, “She would have sucked his dick through the phone if she could have.”
And Enrique had been their font of information on that front. Enrique’s superpower, Danny had told them bitterly, was his ability to pass for whatever adults needed.
His parents had thought he was straight until they’d caught him with the neighbor’s boy, and he was very good at looking like he had his head down and was doing menial tasks in the office when, in fact, he was picking up all sorts of “stupid, gross information.”
As Danny called it.
Information like the fact that Valerie Trainor still talked to her ex-husband like Renfield talked to Dracula. And he still called her “Mel,” which meant she went by three different names in the compound.
Jackson, who knew Ellery and his mother would spend part of their morning poring over all of the documents he’d sent Ellery the night before, had made a mental note to text Ellery to keep their eyes open for a combination of all three names—Melanie, Valerie, and Twitty—along with Schmitt, Trainor, and Schnarf, in any combination.
And Schmitt’s aliases too.
The thought of that made Jackson’s head ache fiercely, but then, it was supposed to. These were not honest people. The more names, the more LLCs, the more properties and charities and businesses and organizations they owned, the more chances to launder, sucker, and process money without ever getting noticed.
But that wasn’t all they’d learned.
Gannett Hoover’s wife was a “whining, puling bitch” who, according to Schmitt, needed to “get with the program.”
Retty was in hot water for whatever had happened to Caleb, and Piper Lutz had been assigned to “reorganize” the “off-campus residents.” Which was why Piper had been so hot to recruit Otto for Molotov cocktail hour.
And, Enrique knew, Piper was in trouble now because Otto had not returned.
“I wonder,” Jackson had speculated as Enrique spoke, “what kind of hornet’s nest is going on back at the Moms for Clean Living mansion.”
The two boys snorted with pure meanness, and the sound did something to heal Jackson’s soul a little.
“Who do you hope is getting chewed out the worst?” he asked. He was expecting to hear Retty, Twitty, or even Piper named, but the answer surprised him.
“Those two jagoffs who keep coming in to bother the girls,” Danny snarled. “Fuckers. The women know too. I heard that Piper twat laugh about ‘heterosexuality hour’ when the guys came up. I hope they get their heads broken open like cantaloupes, just like Caleb.”
The silence at the table was electric.
“Otto thinks Retty did that,” Jackson said softly.
“Otto was hiding behind the building and didn’t have a fucking second-story-window view, did he?” Danny retorted bitterly. “Not that Retty wouldn’t have fucking done it—don’t get me wrong. She talked about splitting our heads open all the fucking time. But the two guys—Jo-Jo and Teddy—they’re not as afraid of Gannett Hoover and that… that fucking enforcer he brings with him when he comes. The one who gropes Twitty all the time and then looks at her like she’s shit.”
And hello, Conway Schmitt.
“They didn’t want Caleb hurt?” Jackson prodded. Part of him wanted to caution Danny about his language, which was stupid, because Jackson remembered swearing like he breathed, particularly when he was a bitter fourteen-year-old, but part of him was almost gratified.
He had used the F-word like most people used “the”—but it had purged some of his anger, some of his hatred for the world at large, when he had. He hoped that if Danny got the opportunity to pour some of that poison, that toxin, from his system, he’d free up his heart to grow strong and pure.
Both boys being so angry at Jo-Jo and Teddy for abusing the girls was a good sign. The girls had been kind to them, sneaking them food when the boys had gotten in trouble, talking to them—even singing to them—when they’d been locked in the closet. Danny and Enrique were grateful for simple human kindness, and furious that it had been paid back in filth.
Good kids, Jackson thought sadly. All of them: The girls, the boys, and the two trans-folk who had been difficult to spot because of the shitty, thin cotton scrubs they’d all been forced to wear. Kids trying to find their identities—only to find that their identities were despised by their parents and stripped away by their captors.
“Caleb was pretty,” Enrique said when Danny proved strangely silent. “Caleb… he had this look. Like an angel. Cowboy showed up, took one look at the lot of us, and said, ‘Oh no, fuck this,’ and Caleb took one look at Cowboy and….” He and Danny met eyes, and Danny glanced away.
“It’s funny,” Danny said gruffly. “I didn’t follow them out the window because I was pissed that Caleb stared at Cowboy the way I knew I stared at Caleb. But… but once Caleb got caught and… and made that noise”—and now his voice broke—“I didn’t care how he looked at Cowboy. I just… I just wanted him alive to look at me any way he could.”
Jackson’s heart cracked, shattered, turned to dust, and for a moment he was grateful because that meant he wouldn’t need it anymore. He could do this job without a heart, and nobody would ever know.
But the shock of numbness faded, and his chest ached, and apparently a powdered heart could still beat and still hurt, and this kid was walking around with a pain in his soul that no young person should ever endure.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Jackson said.
“I know it,” Danny snarled, still staring at the now-clean kitchen.
“No, you don’t,” Jackson told him, and his chest was suddenly too tight, and he hated himself for what was going to come out because who wanted to burden a kid with this but… but…. “You think you know, but you don’t. My friend Henry got shot two nights ago, keeping Cowboy safe from Shitbag Retty. I wasn’t there—none of us knew anything about what you guys were going through, about Retty, about any of this shit. But I’ve been telling myself that it was my fault. My fault, because Henry was my trainee, my work partner, my friend , and I dragged him into all sorts of shit because….” Jackson let out a strained chuckle. “Well, because he wanted to go,” he said, his voice thick. “And he wanted to help people, and he wanted to make sure Cowboy and the nice lady taking care of him were both safe. But he got shot, and it felt like my fault—”
Danny met his eyes. “It wasn’t,” he said gruffly. “Shitbag Retty would have done that crap for free.”
Jackson felt a small smile creeping around the corner of his mouth. “I know that now,” he said. “Because of you and Enrique, and, well, a whole lot of other people who will be justifiably pleased if that woman drops off the face of the planet.” He sobered. “But you need to know that, just like Otto, you were in an impossible situation. Getting fed, having a place to sleep? That’s not small potatoes. Not wanting to risk that to follow Cowboy? That was a judgment call. You’re not the reason Caleb….” He didn’t want to say “died,” but he was starting to think there was no other way. “Made that noise. You’re not the reason he didn’t come back. The people who put you guys in that situation are the reason. You were just doing the best you could.”
Danny put his face in his arms and wiped his cheeks on his bicep before meeting Jackson’s eyes. “Is your friend gonna be okay?” he asked.
Jackson thought about his next stop at the hospital. “I hope so,” he said. “We’re going to see him next.”
“What about Cowboy?” Enrique asked. “You said he got away?”
“Yeah,” Jackson told him. “Cowboy’s in a good sitch for the moment. We….” He sighed. “We wanted to keep him out of the system for a while.”
“Why?” Enrique asked, and Danny gave him a pitying glance.
“’Cause he was probably sucking dick for food,” he said before looking at Jackson. “You don’t want that shit down in writing.”
“The system has its drawbacks,” Jackson admitted. “And the people who helped him out aren’t exactly police favorites either.”
Danny and Enrique exchanged titillated glances. “What? Did he get saved by, like, thieves? Like in those books? Blood and Bone ?”
Jackson laughed. “You like to read?” he asked, hoping to get Danny off the scent before he found himself spilling about Johnnies and the whole enchilada.
“Yeah,” Danny muttered, suddenly dispirited again. “That’s how I got in trouble at home. Old man thought books were for faggots.”
“Well, lucky you,” Jackson said. “We believe in paperbacks here. Nilas and Geordie can show you to where the bookshelves are, and if you tell me the name of your favorite series—”
“Me too?” Enrique asked, feeling like a kid for the first time. “Because there’s this robot assassin thing that I was hot for going around school.”
“Absolutely. You guys get with Aileen to make a list—sky’s the limit.”
“Otto too?” Enrique asked eagerly, and Jackson could hear the same thing in his voice that Jackson himself felt. Something small and happy. God, these kids needed it.
“Otto too,” Jackson told him. He glanced up at Nilas and Geordie. “You guys too. Geordie, get out—” He was going to say “pen and paper” because, well, he was over thirty, but Geordie had his phone out.
“On it,” he said, fingers a blur.
“Send it to me ASAP,” Jackson said. “I’ll have them sent as soon as I get the list.”
“Cool,” Geordie said, taking Jackson’s vacated seat.
Jackson and Cody had left then, after checking on Aileen, who was still comforting an exhausted Otto, but their information gathering had left its mark.
“God,” Cody said now, sounding as wretched as Jackson felt. “This group of people is pure fucking corruption, aren’t they?”
“Oh yes, they are,” Jackson said grimly.
“Where we going now?”
“First to visit Henry,” Jackson told him. “You can go grab us some sandwiches if you want. I’ve got about half-an-hour’s business in the hospital—gonna say hi, give him an update, and then gotta go visit my friend in the morgue.”
“Morgue?” Cody asked, sounding hesitant.
“Yeah.” Jackson let out a breath and told Cody something he’d only discussed with Ellery so far. “Yeah. I had… well, let’s just say I’ve had a bad feeling about Caleb since I talked to Cowboy about him two nights ago. And the more people I talk to, the more I think….”
“He can’t be the only one,” Cody said softly.
“No.” Jackson took a deep breath. “These fuckers have been in our town for a year and a half. Cowboy’s been on the streets for about a month, which means Caleb ‘made that sound’ about a month ago. Where’s the body?”
Cody blew out a breath. “You checked the morgue?”
“Yup,” Jackson told him. “And they haven’t had anything like that nearby, so….”
“So it’s got to be out of the county,” Cody followed. “Where do you think it is?”
“Sonora,” Jackson said. “Because that’s where Gannett Hoover’s estate is, with what probably amounts to vast amounts of acreage. And it’s probably not the only one.” And with that he walked Cody through their line of reasoning about Conway Schmitt, Gannett Hoover, and the unholy alliance of Moms for Clean Living and the politician who lived in Gold Country with a D by his name and everything but a Nazi flag in front of his house.
And Conway Schmitt, aka Newton Dwayne, aka The Creeper Thug Who Would Not Fucking Leave.
“So,” Cody said slowly when he was finished, “when those two assholes who abducted Shitbag Retty said ‘she’s the package now,’ that means….”
“It means I wish we knew somebody with a cadaver dog,” Jackson said grimly. “Because I don’t think you and me are going to have to do a thing to hold Retty accountable, but her body sure will make for some nice evidence of political corruption.”
Cody grunted. “Well, shit,” he said. “On the one hand, that sounds a little ghoulish.”
Jackson grimaced. “It does.”
“But on the other hand, it couldn’t have happened to a shittier person.”
“No, it could not have,” Jackson agreed. His heart was bruised and raw from the last two days. From the worry about his friend, from the opening of old wounds, and from the raw, painful reality of a bunch of kids who could as easily have been him. That core of empathy in him felt like it had been pounded and stretched and pounded and stretched until it blanketed everybody involved in this case with a thin layer of his sorely abused heart muscle.
To stretch it to accommodate the woman who’d shot Henry through a wall, who had taken children from their homes on false pretenses, who had dangled hamburgers in front of their faces until they betrayed their friends….
He could feel that muscle unraveling like a frayed cloak, great gaps in his well-being disintegrating as he tried to be kind to the woman who had cost so many so much. It didn’t seem to matter that she was a flunky, probably as emotionally abused as the kids held captive in their sick little religious scam. What mattered was, unlike Otto or Danny or Enrique or the terrified girl trying to protect her two friends the night before, Retty had forsaken everything human that had once mattered about herself and used it to hurt other people.
He just didn’t have one more fuck to give.
“What if she’s still alive?” Cody asked.
Well, maybe one fuck. “Moral dilemma solved,” he said optimistically.
“We can always hope,” Cody agreed, and they headed for the hospital for the umpteenth time in the last three days.