Page 74 of Fish in a Barrel
She nodded like people asked her to deal with bureaucracy all the time. Well, schoolteacher. Maybe they did.
“So after you get the insurance worked out, I’ll come back and we can swap pink slips. I’ve got no problem trading cars with you, but as soon as we do, everybody’s insurance goes bye-bye, and you’ll have to pay full price to get the rear end fixed. Can we do that?”
She nodded. “God yes. Bless you, Jackson. I’m so sorry about the dent. My kidsreallylove this car. The Town & Country….” She leaned forward like she was going to tell a secret. “They seem to think it’s haunted.”
“Go figure,” Jackson said with a straight face. “I have no idea where they get that.” He gestured with his chin. “Get me some paper and a pen, and then I’m gonna make a call to Ellery. I, uh, think we can get a line on your scumbag.”
She served them all snacks first. Billy’s face as he was torn between accepting or rejecting hospitality—particularly Mexican hospitality, complete with horchata and pan dulce, which she claimed to have been practice batches before Halloween—was almost comic. He’d obviously been raised to respectmamisof all ages, but he had that fierce dietary regimen, and oh, the delicious decadence! Jackson and Sean dug in with no compunction whatsoever, and after a tortured glower, Billy took a few tentative bites. Watching him melt—both with the sweetness of the pastry and, Jackson suspected, Sandra’s sweetness as a mami—was a thing of beauty.
Jackson ate a couple of bites, washing them down with horchata, and then excused himself, wishing he could be there for the whole meal.
“You’ll come back and finish this,” Sandra said. “You’re still scrawny, Jackson, and Joey was totally freaked out when you had your heart attack. Snacks will do you good, and so will something without caffeine!”
“Your brother’s a rat,” Jackson replied mildly. “I adore him, but he’s a rat, and we both know it.”
She shrugged. “What’s to do?” she asked. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to eat.”
Jackson wrinkled his nose at her, a trick from his single days. “Business first, darlin’. I think I can get your car repaired.”
“That’s very sweet,” she said. “But if you can’t, you know, Joey can do it for free.”
Jackson’s eyes narrowed. “I have no answer to that. I’ll be outside.”
His back hurt, and he hadn’t realized until he’d been eating that he was overdue for his pain pill and his antibiotics. He thought he had some ibuprofen in the glove compartment, but he didn’t want to alert Sean and Billy because, God, was he tired of people worrying about him.
And also… he wanted to scope out the area.
Three blocks away, Billy had said, and the blocks were small, residential places. He could probably see three blocks away while sitting in the passenger’s seat when he was on the phone to Ellery.
He rifled through the glove compartment first and found the secondary stash of ibuprofen, thanking Jennifer for holding it for him, because he was that superstitious. Then he called Ellery.
Connections Made and Missed
“HEYA,” ELLERYsaid, picking up on the first ring. He had a client interview in ten minutes and had spent the past hour searching through Trey Cartman and Charlie Boehner’s phone records, trying to find a connection between the two. Contrary to what the TV shows made it look like, it wasn’t easy, even for someone used to scanning information quickly, and Ellery always ended up printing out the records, using highlighters, and then looking up the similar numbers. As much as he wanted to be done with this task two hours ago, he was grateful Jackson had pulled him away.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Client interview in ten. You did the dossier last week. Don’t worry, I’m prepared.” Jackson had lectured Ellery frequently about letting Jackson do the background work on the clients before the interview. The one time—one—that they’d walked into a situation blind, they’d encountered one of the average, everyday monsters who frequently made the evening news. He’d been angry because his girlfriend’s infant daughter had overdosed on the drugs he’d kept in the house, and had wanted Ellery to get him off on all charges, including beating his girlfriend into the hospital as she’d grieved the loss of her baby.
Jackson’s nightmares had gotten worse for a week after that, and Ellery had sworn that never again would they walk blindly into a situation like that.
“Glad to hear it,” Jackson said, and while Ellery could hear the smile in his voice, he could also hear some thoughtfulness too.
“What’s up?” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, relaxing them from the strain of scanning all those numbers.
“So I got a call from Joey’s sister’s house. Seems some dirtbag hit her car this morning, and she was hoping for our help. She was in the car, getting ready to back out, when the guy went up on the sidewalk and bounced off her rear quarter panel. She left the car where it was hit. Ellery, this guy wasn’t even close to the road. Now here’s the thing. The guy gets out of the car, looks her over, sees the little Mexican soccer mom, and says, ‘You’ll never get me to pay that,’ and then takes off. Problem is, she got his license plate number, and I need AJ and Crystal to run it, so let me give that to you before I keep going.”
Ellery’s eyes flew open. “Wait. Wait. You’reatJoey’s sister’s house? What happened to Sean and Billy coming by and ‘guys hanging out’?”
“They’re here with me. Seems Sandra’s house is only about three blocks from Charlie Boehner’s apartment building, if you can believe that bullshit.”
Ellery took a very careful breath. “What a coincidence,” he said hoarsely.
“Yeah, I don’t believe in coincidences like those. Not when the car that hit hers is a black Mercedes with the license plate D8 space WA space DA.”
Ellery had begun writing the letters down as soon as Jackson started speaking, but he didn’t need to finish.
“Jackson, that’s Trey Cartman’s Mercedes. You don’t even need to run those plates. I’ve seen that car.”