Page 10 of Constantly Cotton
Jackson nodded one more time. “Yeah. By the time you got to Sacramento, Ziggy’s guys and Alexei’s guys were trying to stop you because you and those kids could tell not just the DA and the authorities, but also all of organized crimedom what was going on.”
“So that explains all the bad guys when I got to town,” Jason muttered. “Fantastic. I was wondering.”
“Well, yeah.” Rivers made a curious stretching gesture, like he was trying to work all the space between his neck and his ass, and Henry let out a huff of exasperation.
“Jackson, would you like an ibuprofen today? You’re talking about that shit like you weren’t involved.”
Rivers gave a grunt. “Yeah, sparky—I’ll take some painkillers. I’ve got about another hour here before Ellery needs me home or he’ll have my head.”
“Both of you?” Jason asked, horrified. God. These men!
“Long story,” Rivers told him, waving it off. “But here’s the thing. That’s what happened tous. And that’s why you were surrounded by mobsters and Burton needed to save everybody’s asses as you drove in. What we need to know is what happened toyou. Your wounds were old, Jason, and it took you a helluva long time to get here.”
Jason nodded. Now that he wasn’t wondering about his welcome to Sacramento, with the chaos of car accidents and people in SUVs chasing him and the kids around with semiautos, he could concentrate on what had happened tohim.
“Well, originally,” he told the people hovering around his bed, “I’d planned to get in about noon the day before. We pulled off to rest. I was getting punchy, and by that time I was driving a medical shuttle that… uhm, somebody from a hospital in LA let me borrow.”
“Jai’s boyfriend,” Rivers filled in dryly. “We all know who George is by now. Okay, so you stopped and got the kids checked out and fed. George told us that. Then you left—we thought for Sacramento.”
“Yes, but when I got the shuttle from the hospital, my CO, Barney Talbot, was already there. I had told Sergeant Anton Huntington, my chopper pilot, to be straight with whoever asked him questions after he got me my original transportation. He told Talbot where I was heading and then told me that Talbot was on my tail. So I figured getting back on 5 or the 405 was going to get me caught. Instead, I go up around the mountains toward Lancaster, and the road is slow and twisty, and by the time I got to right before Palmdale, it was nearly two in the morning. I pulled off underneath an overpass to nap, and about two hours later, I woke up hearing an SUV.”
The story came back to him completely then, and his heart started beating a little faster, the fever sweat he hadn’t been able to shake drenching him again.
As an operative, he’d faced worse situations many times.
But never,never, with a busload of kids.
“We were attacked,” he said, remembering the giant shadow of the looming SUV. “I woke up just as they pulled off the road. They strafed the side of the bus with semiauto fire and got me, because I’d had the kids lie down on the floor. I assumed it was the mobsters the kids were supposed to go to in the first place.”
“Well, they were probably Kovacs’s guys at the beginning,” Rivers said, nodding. “So you got hit through the bus?”
“Yeah, but worse than that.” They’d been on a tight, winding road, in a sparsely populated area. He remembered swinging the bus around and using it as a cudgel, feeling the tires going off the road but knowing in his gut that if the people in that other vehicle pushed him off the road and forced him to stop, he and the kids would be doomed. They’d end up shoved in a sand dune somewhere, a mass grave nobody found. “The bus got hit. It was starting to die, so I got desperate. I fired through the window and took out the driver. They swerved away, but everybody in the SUV was armed. I took a side road to fuck knows where and pushed the medical transport until it coughed and died.” He let out a sigh, his entire body sheened in sweat, that moment of complete desperation washing over him. To his surprise, strong fingers grasped his own, calming him down a little, and he managed to breathe enough to keep going.
“We all got out of the bus. I had the kids wrap up bottles of water in their medical blankets. We got out of the bus and started walking. I….” He wasn’t proud of this. “I called Huntington back—bless the kid. I told him we needed mass transpo and directions. He… he said he’d track my phone, but he told me he wanted to wait. He had the feelinghewas being traced. They were afraid he was helping me. I told him I didn’t want to get him in trouble, and I remember what he said….” He’d hated hearing that note of fear, of betrayal, in young Anton Huntington’s voice.
“He said, ‘Colonel, the coms unit caught chatter from our people. They’re not sure who, but someone higher than us at another HQ was complaining because they were supposed to get money from the sale of the kids. They were going to give Kovacs guns.’”
“You monitor your own coms?” Henry asked, and Rivers looked surprised, like this hadn’t occurred to him.
“We’re tracking down government-trained serial killers,” Jason said bleakly. “We monitor fucking everybody.”
The people in the room shuddered, but that grip, that kindness-affirming grip on Jason’s hand—that didn’t ease up one iota.
“So someone was giving the mobsters directions?” Rivers confirmed.
“Yeah. That’s what Huntington and I figured.” Jason gave half a laugh. “So now that I’ve involved my transport sergeant in something that may or may not end his career, he turns around and involves our sat-com guys. He gave me directions overland, and I’m talkingoverland. Around farms, around sandpits, through saguaro. We saw rattlesnakes. I shit you not. And those kids—man, they were troopers. We had the food George gave us and as much water and as many protein bars as we could carry. We slept during the day, because we found some shade and an irrigation ditch, and then walked again in the evening when it got cooler. We had to stop again in the dark of night—I was afraid of the rattlesnakes, of tripwires—there were some militia camps out there that were fucking armed that we had to skirt.” He shuddered. “It was supposed to be a ten-mile walk, but we probably went twenty-five. Took us a full day.”
“Where were you heading?” Henry asked, sounding enthralled.
Jason gave a laugh. “Remember that bus we were driving?”
“Johnson’s Independent Church of the Christian Republic,” Rivers recalled in horror.
“Yep.” Jason gave a dry laugh and started coughing. To his surprise, Cotton spoke up for the first time.
“Lance, he’s getting tired. We need to let him rest.”
Jason finished coughing, looked across the bed, and realized that Cotton was the person holding his hand, and his eyes were fastened on Jason’s face, not because of the story he was telling, but because he was worried for Jason’s health.