Page 71 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

The whole car shuddered when he said it. Jackson felt the air itself charge with sadness, trauma, and fear.

“Anything’s better than ending up like Caleb,” said the other slender boy, next to the boy at the window.

“What happened to Caleb?” Jackson asked, hoping that somehow these kids weren’t too traumatized to answer.

“None of us saw,” said the one girl—small, but well developed, as some girls had the misfortune to become in the sixth grade—who hadn’t spoken up yet. “We just….” That collective shudder again. “Mister, you ever heard the sound a watermelon makes when it’s dropped on the sidewalk?”

Jackson’s stomach rumbled weakly, and that empanada suddenly felt like a colossal mistake.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

“That’swhat happened to Caleb,” said the girl. “Those boys all tried to run away, and Jeddy here got hurt falling down the wall, and Caleb got dragged back by the ear. Retty was tearing him a new one in the courtyard and… andhewent back there. We heard Caleb screaming, we heard that sound, and the screaming stopped. Next morning me and Otto were dragged out to the courtyard to clean up the mess.” He heard her take a deep breath, like she was shoring up her courage, but when she let it out her voice was still broken. “It… it was blood and brains. I don’t know where the rest of Caleb was, but I know what we had to slop out of the concrete with a mop bucket.” He heard another sniffle. “Otto tried to get away, but… but sometimes, when you don’t got nowhere to go, you’re just as trapped on the outside of hell as you are on the in.”

His stomach twisted at that, and beside him he heard Cody make a sound like a quarterback taking a tackle. He was spared from having to think of anything to say by Alex’s phone call, telling him to drive around to the back of the hospital where pediatric emergency personnel were waiting to debrief and give aid, just as they arrived, but the girl’s words stuck with him.

ONE HOUR,two. What he’d started to think of as the “outside” kids were all admitted for everything from delousing to antibiotics, but some of the inside kids had burns, bruises, marks.

The girls each had a blistering case of gonorrhea, which made both Jackson and Cody absolutely homicidal.

Jackson waited until Andre Christie arrived via the back entrance—which still smelled of stolen cigarettes, becausehealth-care professionals had vices too—before he produced the wad of paperwork shoved into his jeans.

“And I didn’t get you anything,” Christie said, taking the sodden and sweat-drenched papers with distaste. A neat, dapper man in his mid-forties, Christie was madly in love with his wife and fiercely loyal to Sean Kryzynski. Jackson considered him a friend and an ally—and hoped that would be enough.

“Look,” Jackson said quietly. “I amworriedabout what will happen to these kids. It ishardto get kids away from their parents and into child protective services, and these kids weregivento an organization that tortured them in the name of… of….”

“Religion,” Cody supplied helpfully.

“If that’s religion, you’re Miss Piggy,” Jackson retorted, about out of fucks, and Cody choked on his own snicker.

“I amnot, in fact, Miss Piggy,” he said.

“And I’m not Kermit the Frog,” Ellery said, walking smoothly in at the most opportune moment possible.

“You say that,” Jackson conceded, drinking in Ellery’s slim, neat form wearing a pair of—oh myGod—Mike’s old sweats and blue flannel shirt? He looked good. His hair had been washed and was flopping across his brow, and his eyes were tired, but God…. So dear. “But you seem to have brought the wholeMuppetShowwith you.”

Ellery harrumphed and gestured to the group of men and women behind him, all of whom were dressed in what Jackson’s sister referred to as “bra o’clock” clothes—after bra o’clock, all that mattered was comfort and, for women anyway, there was no bra involved. “I brought the most qualified advocates in the city, so….” He gave a toothy smile to Andre, who handed the paperwork over to him with a meaningful glance at Jackson.

“Marry this man,” Andre said, giving him a smug smile. “He knows how to get shit done.”

Jackson let out a tired cackle and sent Ellery a grateful look. “I’ll consider it. I understand invitations are already out.”

“They RSVP’d last week,” Ellery said primly. “Them, the kids—I hope to throw one hell of a party.”

Andre gave a toothy grin and then regarded the cadre of advocates with the same gratitude Jackson had felt.

“The kids are in rough shape,” he said, and Jackson nodded in agreement, a wave of exhaustion washing over him so hard it almost made him nauseous. He was fine, for the moment, to just let Andre talk. “Their parents signed them over to an institution using illegal behavior modification practices to make them, uhm….”

“Not gay or trans,” Jackson supplied, and while some of the advocates appeared horrified, about half of them took it in stride, so Ellery had probably gotten to that part in the briefing.

“Some of the kids would like a reconciliation, provided the home is safe,” Cody supplied.

“But some of them were, like, ‘Hey, went from one beating to the next.’” Jackson let out a sigh. “It’s a mess. And it’s one we don’t have the power to fix—” The enormity of the situation swept him again, but now wasnotthe time.

“But how did you find out about it?” Andre asked. “I mean, I know you were looking into what happened to Henry, but seriously, what in the hell!”

So Jackson recounted how he and Cody had infiltrated the Moms for Clean Living headquarters, searching for something,anything, pointing to why Henry would have been shot by a woman wearing their merch. He managed to avoid talking about Cowboy—although Andre knew, he didn’t want pressure from the child advocates until the boy was safe—Jackson was honest about the documents he’d photographed. He wasn’t a police officer, and he didn’tneed a warrant to get evidence.When Andre asked him why he hadn’t just taken pictures of the induction paperwork, Jackson gave Cody Gabriel a sour look.

“Because some asshole decided to stage a jailbreak without my knowledge or consent,” he muttered.

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