Fishlets
A Brief Fishlet Interlude that Is Absolutely Positively Not in Canon
IYKYK
I’m pretty sure if there was anybody yet to be offended by my politics, they’ve already bailed from my reading list. I’m sorry — I tend to be opinionated, and sometimes it jumps out. In this case, I needed to write a catharsis for myself, because while I am fat and slow and arthritic and too old to run around doing shit like Jackson, I still have the heart of a juvenile delinquent, and I had to fight the urge to stomp my little foot and scream, “It’s not fucking fair!” at the moon this November. It turned out, while I was writing a catharsis for myself, I wrote one for so many other people.
This makes me happy.
We all need to howl at the moon sometimes.
P.S. — The surprise hero of this one was John, who, as we saw in Black John, was a bit of a goofball with a heart that hasn’t completely matured, but only in the best of ways.
Amy Lane
“YOU’RE GOING out?” Ellery asked plaintively.
Jackson leaned over Ellery’s shoulder and kissed his temple. “I’m sorry, baby. This… I just can’t sit here and watch this on the TV. You know I love you, right?”
“Of course,” Ellery said. That Jackson loved him had never been in doubt.
“Then let me sulk and take my bad mood out by baying at the moon, okay?”
“Okay.” Ellery sighed. He personally planned to watch wildlife documentaries and listen to REM’s Eponymous until the urge to cry and scream gave him room to breathe.
Jackson’s pocket buzzed, and he didn’t bat an eyelash, just kissed Ellery’s temple again, patted his shoulder, and left.
Ellery wasn’t fooled a bit. Jackson’s pocket had buzzed just before he’d stood up and stalked to the kitchen to put on his shoes and pull on his most ragged hooded sweatshirt.
Something was afoot. Something Jackson felt like Ellery wouldn’t approve of.
Jackson was usually right about things like that, but Ellery had no idea how this particular idea would manifest itself.
Ellery heard the door slam, and then his pocket buzzed twice. He frowned and pulled out his phone, surprised to see texts from Jade, Galen, and Lance.
Okay, I give. What are those assholes doing?
Ellery, could you be so kind as to tell me where my significant other might have gone?
What has Jackson sucked him into now?
Ellery blinked. Oh dear.
He made a group chat that he was worried he might have to use more often than he’d ever planned and texted, I have no idea where they went , but given the state of politics right now , I’ve got a very bad feeling about this .
Jade: Fuck me. I’m calling K-Ski.
Galen: Oh dear God. I’m tracking his phone.
Lance: No, seriously, Ellery, what do you think they’re up to?
Ellery: You know, I think Jade has the right idea.
Jade: If they get into trouble, Ellery, we’ll need you.
Ellery: I’d like to say no jury in the world would convict them but….
Jade: Yeah. Holy fuck, I thought there was more intelligence in this country.
Galen: As long as our significant others don’t add to the stupidity, I shall be content.
Lance: There’d better not be blood.
“JESUS, JACKSON, why are you always bleeding !” Henry tried to fuss over Jackson’s knuckles as Jackson—piloting Jennifer—squealed away from the crime scene, erm, scene of the altercation, erm….
“Holy shit, boy,” Mike muttered, looking behind him, “what in the hell did you do?”
“Way more damage with that portable air compressor and those tools you brought me,” Jackson said happily. His knuckles stung, and one of his assailants, erm, victims who’d caught him behind the trucks as he’d worked, had managed a solid clock to his jaw, but the adrenaline pumping through his veins—through all of their veins—was way better than that bitter, acidic syrup of despair that had overwhelmed the four of them while being gobsmacked by the state of politics on television.
“I haven’t had that much fun since I did coke,” John said with some satisfaction. “I mean, apart from Galen, and running the business and being Uncle John to all those screaming toddlers… but, you know. Delinquency. It’s a rush!”
“Oh God,” Henry muttered, trying not to laugh. Lance’s old boss was a helluva nice guy for a porn mogul, but seriously.
“John,” Jackson said, sounding pleasant. “If we get pulled over by the police, don’t speak.”
John cackled, and Jackson wondered if he’d heard those words before.
“Seriously,” Mike said, smacking his ballcap—thank God he leaned toward his home sports teams now and not the hated red hat he’d recently burned in protest. “You three worked mighty fast. I’m most impressed.”
“The trick,” Jackson said, spotting the wrecks in his rearview mirror just before they rounded the corner that would get them away from the, uhm, incident, “was to figure out which truck was leaving that lot first and taking it apart thoroughly. Everything else was just physics.”
John cackled some more. “My favorite class!”
Mike stared at him. “Boy, are you still high?”
“I’ve been sober four years,” John said indignantly, and then he deflated a little. “But you know, I did do a whole lot of coke for a long time—maybe this is a flashback.”
“I’m so gonna tell Galen on you.” Henry’s laugh was a little strained, but if Jackson knew his boy—and at this point, he and Henry had been through enough shit that he did—Jackson figured he was riding his own adrenaline high. “But I haven’t had that much fun since me and Mal went out and tipped cows!”
“That’s a myth,” Mike—who had grown up in rural West Virginia and would know—protested. “You can’t tip cows over!”
“Tell that to the multiple fractures in my leg,” Henry grumbled. Then he added, “But the cow was on a hill, and I think Mal had dumped a shit-ton of beer into its feed before we went out to try.”
Jackson—who had heard this story—grimaced. “You went out and tipped a drunk cow onto your leg,” he said. “And I trust you with my life why?”
“Jackson,” Henry said with patience as Jackson tore through the midnight-quiet streets of the city, “do you have any idea what you just got us to do? There has got to be felony mischief and destruction of property charges waiting for all of us if we get caught.”
At that moment, everybody’s phone buzzed.
Jackson couldn’t grab his—he was driving too fast as it was—but around him he heard a collective groan.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
“Well,” Henry said, “I think we may have escaped charges—”
“But I’m pretty damned sure we’re all caught,” John added.
“Fuck me,” Mike muttered, and Jackson had no choice but to keep his foot on the pedal and the pedal to the floor.
SEAN KRYZYNSKI and his partner, Andre Christie, were having the worst fucking night.
Of course election night was going to be bad enough, but given who was winning… oh Lord. It was a nightmare. Petty theft, vandalism, assholes with a three-year-old’s vocabulary telling any cop they ran into that it was okay, there were no cops now because they’d all become defunded.
Sean and Andre were so tired of explaining that “defunding the police” didn’t work the way everybody thought it did.
And now… well, what the hell did you call this ?
“Okay,” Sean said, his notepad at the ready. “Sir, could you explain what happened?”
The older guy he was talking to had a face chain-smoked to leather, and maybe three teeth. He could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty, and his wispy ginger/gray hair stuck out from under the hated red hat in clumps.
“Well, we were on the corner here, just waving our flags,” the guy said, pulling hard on his ever-present cig, “like it’s our God-given right in the constitution, no thanks to you commie fuckers tryin’ to stop us—”
“Nobody’s trying to stop you, sir,” Christie said, sounding bored. “So you’d all parked in the back lot behind us and were here on the corner, protesting—”
“We was celebrating!” snapped another man—bald, with a long, graying ZZ Top style beard tucked in the stretchy waistband of his khaki shorts. “Weren’t we, Shep?”
“Tha’s right,” Shep told him. “Me and Curly and Moe—”
Next to him, Sean felt Andre’s whole body tense up, and they eyed the bald guy with the beard down to his waist and the scrawny guy with long black bangs in his eyes and then exchanged glances.
“Curly, Moe, and Shep,” Andre said, with absolutely no inflection in his voice at all. “Keep going.”
“Well, we was out here celebrating our righteous victory,” Shep continued, “and some guy—first we thought he was one of us, cause he had the hat and all, but he walked up and threw the hat on the ground. Said he’d worn this eight years ago and learned so much more about the world, and he was fuckin’ ashamed of the hat and ashamed of the choices and ashamed of us !”
Sean and Andre exchanged another glance. “And then what’d he do?” Andre asked, at the same time Sean said, “Wait, what’d this guy look like?”
“He had this young face,” said Moe, who was twenty-five at the most. “And this white hair, which was weird. And these bright blue eyes. And he had an accent… like a good ole boy accent.” Moe paused for a sec. “Was purty,” he said upon consideration.
Sean blinked and tried to keep his eyes from widening. Couldn’t be. Right? He’d met a guy like that a couple of times, but… really?
“And then he covered the damned hat in lighter fluid and set fire to it!” Curly raged and pointed his finger at a smoldering heap of what used to be nylon and cardboard.
“Wow,” Sean said, rather impressed. “So he’s the one who damaged your, uhm, vehicle?” He stared at the street in front of him where the remains of the giant truck lay on its side, bits of exhaust pipe and various flags all scattered around it as its engine hissed and smoked and died.
“Naw,” Moe said. “But we weren’t too pleased with the guy who burned his hat, so we were giving him what for, and then, well, Curly here got really pissed and took a swing and….” He wrinkled his brow. “And this other guy popped out of nowhere like the goddamned thing on the box of Lucky Charms.”
“A leprechaun ?” Andre asked, stunned.
“Yeah!” Moe told him, absolutely baffled. “He was redheaded and not too tall, and Curly went after the guy with the white hair, and the leprechaun kicked him in the back of his knee, and he went down .”
Sean swept his eyes up and down Curly’s squat, stout frame and noticed the road rash on his knees and palms. “I see,” he said. “So J—the redheaded guy took apart your truck.”
“No,” Curly said, scowling. “But these two fuckers’d dissed us and we couldn’t let that stand, so we took off chasing them, and then our friends over there—” He pointed to another crowd of assholes who looked just like Curly, Moe, and Shep. “—started screaming because a blond-headed fella had run by and stolen their banners.” He grunted. “He threw them on the fire with the hat.”
“The smell was prodigious,” Moe told him soberly.
“Good word,” Sean noted, although he’d stopped taking notes as the story itself took shape. “So what happened to the first two guys you were chasing?”
“Well, they… uhm….” Shep wrinkled his brow. “I guess they got away, because we went after that blond fella, and he….”
“See,” Moe said, “he went ’round that pet store there, and then he disappeared.”
“Disappeared,” Curly said. “We couldn’t catch him.”
“So what happened to your trucks?” Sean asked. All three of the men had bloody foreheads and were cradling their wrists—the three-truck accident hadn’t been his imagination.
“Well, it was weird,” Shep said. “We all came back here and stamped out the fire, and then this brown minivan pulled up alongside us and the guy driving stuck his head out and screamed, ‘Come and get me, you cousin-fucking morons!’ and we had to go.” He nodded, and Curly and Moe all nodded too.
“So he hung out there at the corner, and we all jumped into our trucks, and then he took off and we followed,” Shep said. His excitement dimmed, and he appeared crestfallen. “And then my baby… she fell apart at the seams. The tires came off, and the exhaust ports toppled, and we went over like a tipped cow, and….” He gave Moe and Curly unhappy looks.
“We was drivin’ in formation,” Moe said staunchly. “We done it plenty of times.” Then he glared at the pileup of trucks in the middle of the road. “And I practically drove over poor Shep.”
“And I plowed into the back of Moe,” Curly said unhappily. “You know, I thought them trucks was better made than that. But it was every damned one of our welds shattered like plastic. It was no damned good at all.”
Sean and Andre had both frozen, stock-still, at the mention of the brown minivan. “So,” Sean said. “This minivan. Did you guys catch the license plate?”
“Naw,” Shep said, spitting. “Ain’t that what cameras are for?”
“You shot out the cameras,” Andre said. “When you claimed this corner to electioneer on. Remember? We have you on tape.”
“That wasn’t me,” Shep said automatically.
“On camera,” Sean said through gritted teeth. “Do you remember anything else about the minivan?”
“Yeah,” Moe said glumly. “I think the other three guys who’d given us such a bad time were in the back, laughing.”
Sean rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, we’ll see what we can do,” he said.
As he and Andre were striding toward their department-issue vehicle, Andre said, “Really? Are we really going to see what we can do?”
Sean muttered, “Let me give them time to get their stories straight first, okay?”
“Fair,” Andre said. He sighed. “You know, if I’d been twenty years old tonight, I bet I could have taken the bumpers off too.”
“Oh yeah,” Sean told him. “And I definitely would have stripped off the chrome rims.”
ELLERY GOT the text from Billy and was obliged to pass it on.
Everybody was home tonight. Everybody. Was fucking home. Nobody went nowhere. Like me. I went fucking nowhere, when I wish I’d been out with everybody else. Don’t leave me out of shit because I’m with the cop now. He can bail me out of jail same as everybody else. But it doesn’t matter because EVERYBODY WAS HOME.
Ellery stared at the text and then forwarded it to his new text group.
Jade: I’ll kill him.
Galen: I’ll maim him first, then kill him.
Lance: I won’t kill him. But he’ll wish I did.
Ellery: However you commit murder, remember two things. Number one: We’re angry too.
Jade: And number two is EVERYBODY WAS FUCKING HOME.
Ellery: Because they were.
And then he got up and poured himself an extra glass of wine and waited for the rumble of the minivan in the driveway.
An hour later—because apparently he had to drop everybody off—Jackson opened the door, and Ellery’s reason escaped through the door like a startled cat.
The House on American River Drive
Ellery: Are you crazy? Do you realize what could have happened?
Jackson: You would have bailed me out. That’s what you do.
Ellery: Bailed you out from what exactly? What were you doing that you absolutely positively have to be home when we’re questioned tomorrow?
Jackson: Heh heh heh heh heh
The Duplex off Elvas:
Jade: What the fuck were you doing out there? Do you think you’re above the law now?
Mike: Aren’t you happy I was burning my hat?
Jade: ….
Mike: Sweetheart?
Jade: Yeah, sort of—but are you crazy?
Mike: Certifiable. Wanna hear how good Jackson is with a power tool? Henry too! I was impressed!
At the Tiny House in Midtown:
John: Galen! Ouch!
Galen: Does that hurt?
John: Yes! Ouch! Would you stop hitting me with your cane?
Galen: No!
At the apartment complex that also houses the flophouse:
Henry: Lance, I’m back!
Lance: You never left.
Henry: I’m sorry?
Lance: There’s going to be cops here tomorrow—you never left.
Henry: Okay, I never left. Want to hear what I never did when I never left?
Lance: I don’t even want to know you never left!
Henry: Okay, okay, okay—I’ll tell you tomorrow.
And Back on American River Drive:
Ellery sighed, realizing his harangue of Jackson’s recklessness was falling on deaf ears. With a sigh he collapsed on the couch and took a gulp of wine, patting the seat next to him.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Fine. You’re proud of yourself. Do you feel better now?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said with a sigh, leaning against him. “Definitely.”
“You can’t go out and commit acts of vandalism and destruction of property every time you get pissed in the next four years. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Jackson murmured, leaning his head against Ellery’s shoulder with such profound weariness. “But… you know….”
“Yeah,” Ellery said, getting it. “Sometimes, you gotta howl at the moon.”
“Awooooooo!” Jackson said, his head getting heavier on Ellery’s shoulder. Ellery realized that the unthinkable was going to happen.
God. Odds were pretty good there would never be cops at their door for this incident, but even if there were, Ellery would consider the whole debacle fair if only, just this once in what was sure to be a shitty four years, Jackson could get some sleep.
Jackson’s soft breathing made Ellery wonder if maybe Mike could show him how to use the power tools with the air compressor. He was going to need a way to sleep as well.