Page 126 of Fish in a Barrel
“Sure. Sure, that’s the problem. How that guy got our number.”
Jackson breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, and apparently the sound alone was enough to warn Ellery off the subject.
“Which I will ask Jade about immediately,” Ellery finished pleasantly. “Message received.”
“Good.”
But it wasn’t the end of it. He knew it couldn’t be. Nothing was ever that easy.
“SO,” HENRYsaid, his voice ringing with that same insincere, pleasant quality that had laced Ellery’s voice on the drive to the office. “What ugly sphincter-eating cockroach crawled up your orifice and died?”
“Fuck off,” Jackson growled, taking a sip of his coffee. He’d tried a smoothie back at the office, but it wasn’t going to work. Apparently the only way to combat the thing growing in his stomach was more acid.
“No, really.” Henry’s eyes moved restlessly across the ugly little suburb in Citrus Heights. Sandwiched between the slightly more urban Carmichael and the picturesque, moneyfied Fair Oaks, Citrus Heights had adorable little rainbow neighborhoods with nice lawns and inclusive signs and happy flags, and it had war zones where the kids in the rec centers had to dive for cover at least once a week because of nearby assholes with guns.
This was one of the latter; they’d seen the white-supremacist graffiti on their way into the mostly Black and Brown neighborhood and had gotten the idea that they were on the right track for who killed the young Mexican graduate student who had been helping at the rec center. Unfortunately, a transient with a shopping cart and a dog happened to be more visible than the Proud Boy who actually did the crime, and enter Ellery Cramer and pro bono work he would agree to do.
They were on the lookout for a bald twentysomething with a beard down his chest, a tiny Swastika tattoo behind one ear and a cigarette behind the other. Just to talk to him, right?
Just talk.
Jackson thought about the client that morning and wondered how much talking he could do before Henry pulled him off the guy.
Oh, he was in an ugly mood.
“I don’t see this guy,” Henry muttered. “And we’ve been staking out this place for the past hour. School has ended, parents have picked their kids up from the center—I think he’s hiding out.”
“Smartest thing he’s ever done,” Jackson muttered. Then, oh God! There he was. Six feet tall, ginger beard, oversized black jeans pulled low down his ass from the semiauto stuffed in the back. Jackson was out of the rental minivan and down the street before uttering a word. He heard Henry at his heels, but only in a peripheral way.
“Tab Miller!” he called out. “Tab Miller? I’ve got some questions for you!”
The guy turned, a sneer on his face, his bare chest showing off black-line tattoos in the October chill. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m a friend of Craig Munoz. Does that name ring a bell?”
Tab’s jaw hardened, and his hand went to the gun in the back of his pants, and then Jackson charged and leaped.
He came to himself when Henry hauled him up by the armpits with the help of two uniformed police officers, one of whom moved in to cuff Miller.
“He killed Munoz,” Jackson panted, wondering how long he’d just sat on the guy’s chest and beaten him into the pavement. His jaw was swollen, and he tasted blood, so Miller must have gotten in some blows too. That made him feel better somehow. He didn’t pick on the helpless. He didn’t beat up the innocent.
“I know,” said one of the uniforms, a fair-faced, blue-eyed boy. “He confessed while you were beating the shit out of him. Not sure if it will stand up in court, but it’s enough to confiscate the gun and compare ballistics.”
“Get Randy Caufield out of jail,” Jackson mumbled. “Into a program. He… he needs to be off the streets.”
“That depends, Mother Theresa,” said the cop at his shoulder—older, female, Latina. “Are you going to stop beating random people on the streets and let us do our job?”
Jackson opened his mouth to retort that if they’d done their jobs in the first place, Ellery’s services wouldn’t have been needed, but Henry hauled him away, still sputtering, while he was trying to brain words.
He found himself shoved into the passenger seat of his own car—well, his own rental—before he could protest… well, everything.
“Why are you driving?” he asked as Henry pulled away from the scene, leaving four squad cars and an ambulance in the dust.
“To get us out of there before you got arrested,” Henry retorted. “I ask you again, what crawled up your ass?”
“You don’t want to know,” Jackson told him. They were probably the most honest words he’d spoken all day.
“Of course I do!” Henry snarled. “Look at you! You’re bleeding all over this great haunted minivan. You weredyingfor a fight. You didn’t say five words to me in an hour, and then you were hauling ass out onto the street to fight with our suspect. And you may have a few bruises, but I use the term ‘fight’ loosely. You were going tokillthat guy. And as shitty a human being as I think he is, I don’t think he’s who you want to kill right now!”