Page 40 of Constantly Cotton
“And deer too,” he said happily. “I’ve seen a few, looking out the windows. And rabbits too.”
“Yeah,” Burton agreed, nodding. “I took pictures for Ernie.”
“You don’t have deer where you live?” Cotton asked curiously.
“We live in the desert,” Jason said. “There’s life there—more than people think—but a lot of it is hard life. Rattlesnakes, scorpions, jackrabbits that could rip you apart if you tried to catch them.”
“Teeny mice,” Burton said, nodding. “You would be surprised how many teeny mice there are. Ernie’s cats….” He paused and added, “My boyfriend has a million cats. It’s one of the first things I noticed about him that made me think he wasn’t a serial killer or something. It’s like I got us this nice house out in the middle of nowhere, and cats started a kitty exodus from all the corners of the earth just so they could show up at his doorstep and he could feed them. Anyway, so we’ve got fifty-dozen cats, and every now and then one of them will try to prove he loves Ernie best, so he’ll bring a teeny tiny mouse to sit on the mat at the front door. It’s so sad. There was this tiny mouse, going, ‘Hey, desert sucks, but I haven’t seen any rattlesnakes or scorpions today,’ andboom!There’s Ernie’s cat, who shouldn’t even fucking be there.” He shook his head. “I told Ernie this, and he started singing ‘Circle of Life’ in full Broadway tenor. I was impressed by his range, but I don’t think he got that cats are totally badass.”
“He got it,” Jason said. “You don’t like to admit that even though Ernie looks like an anime character, he’s got a streak of badass in him much like yours.”
Burton gave a sort of fond, proud grin. “I know it,” he said. “I just like to give him shit about the mouse population in Asschapped South of Hell is all.”
“You live in Asschapped South of Hell?” Cotton asked, obviously curious.
“Did we mention the desert?” Jason said mildly. “We sort of co-opted an old military base. Burton lives within commuting distance.”
“I have to stay at the base sometimes,” Lee admitted. “But I got this house—it was like somebody thought they were going to put up this big housing tract of these million-dollar houses, but who in the fuck was going to buy them, right? Like the man says, ‘You’re out in the middle of the goddamned desert!’ So they finished, what? Four? Five of them? And Ernie and I are the only people there.”
“Really?” Cotton stared at him.
“It’s amazing. There are four other perfectly good houses with their landscaping going to shit, but in between are the big vacant lots for houses that will never be built. There’s even a giant pit about two miles away into the desert for all of the building materials they didn’t want to cart across country, and another one for trash. I mean, I got this house for a song. I think the real estate agent wanted to have my babies, and he was way too old for that. It might have killed him.”
Cotton looked at Jason, and Jason wanted to duck under the table because he knew what was coming. “Why don’t you move out there?” he asked.
“Because he never leaves the base,” Lee snorted. “He haunts the place like a zombie ghost, waking up in the middle of the night to go, ‘This scumbag here! I think he’s trying to obliterate a small city/state in the Ukraine!’ And suddenly one of us gets woken up, and we know whatwe’redoing that week.”
Jason grimaced. “I get intel all day,” he confessed. “We keep an eye out for things that might point to one of our subjects going rogue someplace he doesn’t think he’ll get caught. Anyway, I’ll be in my room or the weight room or the pool, trying to relax from my fucking day, and all that intel suddenly has a train wreck in my head.”
“And then one of us gets our week ruined,” Burton confirmed.
“What are you sent to do?” Cotton asked, and Burton and Jason had a grim conversation with their eyes.
Finally Jason looked away and said softly, “Better he know me.”
Burton shook his head. “It’s not that simple,” he replied. Then, to Cotton, he said, “It depends. We would love to be able to take these guys in, reacquaint them with the military, give them some counseling, debrief them. They signed up for a program that they thought would make them better soldiers, and they were tortured and brainwashed and basically taught to strip away their humanity and go out and kill to achieve an end. Andthenthey were cut loose. When we got the guy who was doing this to them, they had nobody to turn to. Some of them went out to fulfil old missions, but political boundaries change, so even if what they’re doing is appropriate by military standards, they’re going to get into trouble. But these guys….” He shivered. “A lot of them aren’t even human anymore.”
“The Dirty/Pretty Killer,” Jason said out of the blue, and Cotton caught his breath.
“Oh my God.” Jason watched the color drain from his face. “Oh my God.” Jason grabbed his hand as he started to shake. “That was last year.”
Jason had done the math. Cotton had been off the streets for two years by then, but still, it must have hit him hard. The victims had all been young and beautiful, with just a little bit of street living on them. They’d turned a couple of tricks or done some drugs and were looking to score some more. Sometimes both. They’d recently started down the spiral where Cotton had probably been headed, and then they’d been murdered, brutally.
“Yes,” Jason said quietly. “He… let’s just say that after Jackson Rivers and Ellery Cramer brought him down, they followed his trail, and that’s how the lot of us met. That, as they say, is how that happened. So sometimes—not often—we can bring them in. But most of the time….”
“You have to stop them,” Cotton murmured. “Any way you can. I get it.”
Jason looked away. He should have known. He couldn’t make a case for them being real with each other if Cotton didn’t know, down to specifics, what it was that Jason actually did. He ordered the deaths of former covert ops soldiers, and he had to look inside some really twisted minds to do it. Cotton was embarrassed because he was bulimic, because he’d been a sex worker, and because he was still getting his life together.
The bone-deep shame Jason felt for being a killer who sentenced other killers to death was like a black hole, devouring what was left of his soul.
Cotton’s hand on his own was a blessing. “I wasn’t on the streets when the Dirty/Pretty killer was out there, but I could have been. It could have been me. I was there the night Henry looked Jackson up on the internet, before they started working together. He… he was stunned that Rivers lived through that. So someone who is making sure that another Dirty/Pretty killer is being stopped—that’s someone we need in the world, right?”
Jason shook his head, still not able to look him in the eye. “What should have been stopped was that he was made at all.”
Burton’s snort took both their attention. “Not even Ernie could do that, and he’s witchy as fuck.”
“You keep saying that,” Cotton murmured, obviously as glad of the diversion as Jason was. “What makes him witchy?”
