Page 98 of Sean's Sunshine
Ellery looked at Jackson’s sister, hands open, palms up, as if begging her for an answer. “Can you believe…?”
“The actual fuck?” she asked them both. “Jackson, you need a new Kleenex. Your nose willnotstop bleeding. Henry, sit down and I’ll wrap your knuckles and find you another ice pack for your eye.” She shook her head. “And somebody had better tell us what in the hell went on.”
Henry and Jackson met eyes again, and Jackson was the one who said it. “Nothing happened.”
They smiled at Ellery and Jade, who stared back in outrage, and the word “impasse” permeated the room.
Three Hours Earlier….
“DO WEhave everything?” Jackson asked. “Baby gift?”
“Check,” Henry said, pointing to the package on the console of Jennifer the minivan.
“Subpoena in triplicate?”
“Check,” Henry confirmed, pointing to the folderunderthe baby gift.
“Cookies from the bakery at Midtown?”
“Chempk,” Henry mumbled through a mouthful of the cookie he’d stolen from the bakery box just as Jackson asked. “Wam half?”
“Oh my God, yes.” Jackson took the offered cookie from Henry and bit into it, trying not to let his eyes roll back in bliss. “Damn, that’s good.” Brown sugar, toffee, chocolate… what was not to love?
They took a few moments to enjoy their stolen cookies, and then Jackson was back on the case.
“Stolen schedule identifying Lindstrom’s, Craft’s, and the choir boys’ schedule so we can successfully avoid every asshole we’ve pissed off in the last two and a half months?”
Henry held up the highly marked-up document. “According to Jade, who has studied this extensively, we’re good. If we walk into the building and present our subpoena, the desk sergeant—our favorite new mother who we saved with ice cream this summer—will simply hand over the folder, accept the bribes, tell us she adores us, and we can leave. Eas—”
“If you say ‘easy’ I’m asking Jennifer to stop so I can kick your ass out of the car.”
Henry looked around and grimaced. This was one of the streets downtown where the homeless tents were a thick stratum around the businesses. There was a hierarchy here that didn’t extend to sympathetic PIs who had business keeping people out of jail. Getting kicked out of the minivan here was not a great idea.
“Understood,” he said, only a hint of panic in his voice. “No jinxing this. We’re too close.”
Jackson and Henry had been trying—one good deed at a time—to have a good working relationship with their local police force. Their favorite detective, Sean Kryzynski, had gone back to work a week before, and while they trusted Sean and his partner, Andres Christie, they didn’t want to put too much of a burden on their friends as they negotiated crime in Sacramento. They had Fetzer and Hardison in the flatfoot division, but they were near retirement, and, well, it would be good to have some more cops on their side.
SomePIs worked very well with their local po-po, but Jackson had history. Ever so much history.
Their one good lead—and it was a great one—was with the desk sergeant. Desk Sergeant Clara Kensington had been a godsend that summer when they’d needed to find out who had worked a case. Henry, picking up on how miserable she must have been at eight months pregnant in August, had endeared himself to the woman with a shameless use of ice cream and a little sports cooler full of popsicles. Win!
And today, when they had a judge-issued subpoena for the police files related to a case they were defending, Jackson and Henry were going tocapitalizeon that win by bringing the desk sergeant—newly returned from maternity leave—a present for her baby and a box full of delicious pastries.
And hopefully a lot of sincere goodwill. Henry had told Jackson after the last time that he felt like the woman was his own sister. He wanted to see baby pictures, dammit!
Clara—Sergeant Kensington—lit up visibly when Jackson and Henry approached her desk. She was a lovely young woman, probably not yet thirty, who wore her raven-wing-black hair in a double braid tucked into a bun. The look she gave Henry was particularly precious, especially when he said, “We have gifts and then business, but none of that until we see pictures.”
She looked shyly around, as though afraid to admit she even had a child. When she saw that no other cops were nearby—Jackson and Henry had chosen this time of day in particular because K-Ski told them it was often dead after two and before four o’clock in the afternoon—she reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She was calling up a picture, smiling softly to herself, when Carruthers—one of the cops from the old guard who had hated Jackson the most—strolled in from the back of the station.
“Rivers,” he grunted, and Jackson didn’t miss the way Clara hid her phone in her pocket when she heard his voice. “The fuck do you want?”
Jackson took a deep breath and was not surprised when Henry answered for him. “Why? Do you need to mop the floor with your face again?”
Jackson grunted. Oh, this was so not what they were here for.
Carruthers sneered. “Lucky shot. We were in a hospital. Who expects a guy to throw down in a hospital?”
“You were being shitty about another cop,” Jackson retorted. “Who expects a cop to be shitty about his brother in the hospital?”