Page 26 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

“We’ve just seen a lot of your clientele mixed up with this guy,” Adele said, indicating Jackson. “And you know what? I’m not going to judge. Nobody else was giving that kid soup and a place to sleep and not making demands on him. Your boy stays on the right side of the line, we won’t give him crap, are we understood?”

Galen nodded. “We are. But I’m still not going to point out which guy he is.”

Fetzer laughed a little. “Youarea good partner. Understood. So this kid hit on you, and you took him someplace safe. What happened to make it not so safe?”

And it was Jackson’s turn to talk again. This time he told them about what Cowboy had seen in the night and the mostly untold story of Shitbag Retty and the Twitty woman.

“Oh….” Fetzer let out enough of a breath to sound scared, and Hardison glanced at her.

“What? These Moms for Clean Living people—nobody takes them seriously, right?”

“Jimmy, does your wifeeverget you to go to church with her?” Fetzer asked sharply.

Jimmy managed to look abashed. “You know, Adele, with the kids out of the house, we don’t really… you know. We got better things to do on Sunday besides go to church.”

Fetzer—and Jackson—stared at him in surprise, and Hardison’s ears turned red.

“See,” Galen pointed out dryly, “sex really can save the world.”

Jackson and Ellery stared at him in horror, but Galen’s night had been as awful as theirs, and he refused to back down.

“Conceded,” Jackson finally said, and dammit, something in his soul lightened saying the word. “Jimmy, they might not have a lot of pull on you and your wife, but there’s a lot of….” He wanted to say “good.” Oh, he really did. But “good” people shouldn’t be swayed so easily to hate other people, should they? “Gullible,” he said after a noticeable pause. “There’s a lot ofgulliblepeople who really do think that reading a book about a gay kid or a kid who’s Asian or Latino or Black will make themlessWhite andlessChristian. These organizations prey on thatgullibility—”

“Ignorance,” Ellery and Galen spat together.

Jackson gave them a look and then againconceded.And felt better for it.

“Ignorance,” he said. “And they use people’s fears against them. Our young friend wasn’t talking about a safe place for LGBTQ youth—he was talking about the kind of place where they pray it away.”

A whole treatise on fatherhood and acceptance could have been written on Jimmy Hardison’s glance around the room this time. “This is a safe space now,” he said, glancing at Fetzer. “And you trusted us in it. So you trust us not to fuck up dealing with these yoyos. What do you have in mind?”

Jackson let out a breath and outlined his plan to interview the kid’s mother before skulking around the Stepford Dragon compound to see “what could be seen.”

Fetzer wrinkled her nose. “That’s it? That’s your plan?”

Jackson scowled at her. “I may have to improvise,” he told her, wounded. “Not even Ellery knows everything I’m gonna do, you know.”

She humphed. “Listen,” she said after a moment. “You know we can only do so much. We can pursue this Retty person—and the boy’s description was pretty thin—and we can look for someone called ‘Twitty’ who likes to dress like June Cleaver in slacks, but until we interview your boy, we’ve got nothing on them. Jimmy and I can’t stop you from looking, but we can’t help you either. But Icantell you what constitutes a reason to intervene. If you get a chance to talk to the kids in the compound—and no, I won’t ask you how—ask why they stay and if they’re afraid of punishment if they leave. Ask if they get fed, what their daily regimen is. There’s no laws against making kids pray if the place is billed as a religious school.” She turned to Ellery. “Is it?”

“On my to-do list,” Ellery told her promptly.

She nodded. “No laws against making kids pray, but there’s laws about not feeding them, not letting them sleep, not letting them pee—anything that reeks of kidnapping, that will get our toe in the door, and Jimmy and me can ask for a warrant.”

“Or fraud,” Ellery said, and Jackson saw his sharkiest, most toothy smile, the kind that made bad guys shiver.

Fetzer nodded. “Hard to do with a church, but as far as I know, this is just a ‘special interest group,’ so we might make it stick. But yeah. Your instincts are good as always. I’d say that’s a place to investigate.”

Ellery nodded, looking suddenly thoughtful, and he glanced at the clock. “Actually, that gives me an idea. If you will all excuse me?” He was pulling his phone out as he walked away, and given that it was almost human time on the east coast, Jackson figured he was calling his mother.

Fetzer broke into Jackson’s thoughts by saying, “Okay, that’s my good deed for the night. But how about you? You got anybody to go as backup?”

Jackson liked the woman, but he thought seriously about kicking her.

But before he could crank himself up to do it, she dropped a gift from heaven in his lap. “What about that Gabriel kid?” she asked. “You know, the one who testified back in November? I always thought he got a raw deal. What’s he doing these days?”

Jackson blinked. “He’s managing a trailer park and keeping his nose clean,” he said, but inside, a part of him was doing a touchdown dance.

“He miss being on the job?” Hardison asked. “He was a big deal UC, you know. I mean, yeah, he tasted the candy, but that happens undercover. Forced retirement—that was rough.”

---