Page 73 of Fish in a Barrel
“About three blocks,” Sean told him, looking at the address. “Let’s do your little errand—what exactlyisyour little errand, by the way?”
Jackson grimaced. “Oh God. Seriously. You would not believe me if I fuckin’ told you.”
At that moment they were passing the corner of Fair Oaks and Walnut, and Jackson had Billy turn left. A few houses down on Walnut, parked in the driveway of a nice little house with rainbow banners on the front lawn and freshly painted windcatchers, was Jackson’s CR-V.
“Wait,” Sean muttered. “Isn’t that your car—the one Elleryjustbought you, because the Tank was totaled?”
Jackson let out a sigh. The Tank—a highly modified Infiniti QR-X—had been destroyed in their last little adventure. Sure, Ace and Sonny said they could fix it up, but it would take a while, and Jackson and Ellery told them not to make it a priority. They had a living to make. Although he didn’t miss the thing’s noise or its gas consumption, he was fully aware that he and Ellery might not have survived that car crash if they’d been in anything else. Ellery had bought Jackson a new vehicle—the CR-V in front of them—on what was probably the last of the insurance company’s sufferance.
When the CR-V had been damaged—through no fault of Jackson’s at all—Jackson had turned in desperation to Joey, who ran a housecleaning business and fixed cars on the side.
And that led him to the thing he was about to do, which he hated himself for.
He looked at the rear end of the CR-V and saw that all of Joey’s admittedly decent body work had been squashed into powder once again, much of that powder littering the driveway in a patter of red, yellow, and clear glass.
He let out a sigh. Yeah. Nobody was going to getanythingfrom the insurance company if Jackson didn’t go in there and bend a rule or two.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, reaching for the handle of the sliding door on the side of the minivan.
“Mm, no,” Sean said, lips quirking up. “I think I’ll come with you.”
“I’m not staying behind,” Billy said, parking in front of the house. “I’m super curious.”
“You guys….” But before Jackson could finish his whine, Jennifer the minivan opened both side doors and died.
Jackson grunted and patted the back of the passenger seat. “You sure you want to ride with us, sweetie?” he asked. “I’m, uhm, sort of rough on vehicles. It’s, you know, almost a curse.”
The glove compartment popped open, and Jackson took the hint.
“Uhm, Billy, if you could grab the pink slip there? I, uh, gotta go trade cars.” With that he let himself painfully out of the back of the car, and Sean did the same from the other side, using Billy’s hand to steady himself. As soon as they’d both cleared the vehicle, the doors slid shut and the lights flashed, for no reason whatsoever.
“Oh Jesus,” Sean muttered. “Jackson, are you sure about this?”
“One hundred percent!” Jackson said cheerily, making sure his voice carried to the car. As they neared the house on the walkway, he lowered his voice. “You gotta say nice shit about the car. Jennifer has KO’d suspects, and whenever Henry’s shitty about her, she slams his hand in her doors. I’m talking full bodily harm here—you guys understand?”
To his relief, they both nodded like they believed him, and then they made the sign of the cross, which made him realize that both the cop and the porn star had started out as good little Catholic boys, which made him laugh.
He pulled himself together enough to ring the doorbell and was surprised at how happy he was to see Joey’s sister, Sandra Kingston, on the other side of the door.
“Jackson!” she said, smiling painfully. “Oh, honey, I’d hug you, but….” She pointed to her neck, which had a classic seat belt bruise across the clavicle, emerging in purple. She also had a bruise on her head. “God, it’s been the shittiest day.”
“Yeah, aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he asked. Sandra’s position teaching at a local high school was a source of family pride.
“It was an in-service day,” she said unhappily, letting them in to a sweetly decorated little suburban ranch-style.
The living room featured a cluttered children’s corner, where baby toys and toddler toys all fought a war against containment, and an art table where a barely school-aged child had left a masterpiece of blue-and-red blobs to dry. In deference to the coming holiday, paper cutouts of cartoon monsters were taped around the walls in the living room and the kitchen, and a centerpiece in the kitchen was a playful plastic skull filled with wrapped chocolates.
“Scotty had just gotten the kids off to day care and school because I didn’t have to leave until later,” Sandra explained, “and I was getting ready to back out of the driveway. I swear to you, Jackson, I hadn’t passed the sidewalk when—bam!—that fucker took out the right rear quarter panel. He was up on the sidewalk! He left tire tracks in the lawn! I got out of the car and—well, I was pissed. I was like, ‘The fuck you doin’,puto!’ Which if you ever talk to my students, I will deny saying to my grave. Anyway, he took one look at me….” She shook her head. “I watched his eyes go up and down, and he sort of raised his upper lip and said, ‘Good luck proving it.’ And then he got in his black fucking dented Mercedes and drove away.”
Jackson frowned. God, that was ballsy. “Did you get a license plate?”
She gave a fierce smile. Sandra was a pretty woman with an oval face and Joey’s curly black hair, but unlike Joey, she had the sense God gave a mountain goat. Still, they adored each other, and while Joey had never been more than a fling for Jackson, the two of them had been good friends for nearly ten years.
“Oh I did. Wasn’t too hard, either. One of those fancy license plates. I don’t understand what it means, but I got it!”
She held out a kitchen notepad with block letters written on it.D8 WA DA.
Jackson raised his eyebrows. “Oh wow.” The guy couldn’t be that brazen, could he? “Okay, so Sandra? I’m not going to sell you the car right now—I’m going to write a note that says you’re my permittee. Then I’m going to give you Ellery’s insurance company, in case your insurance company needs it, and you’re going to call them and see what you can do to not have this end up on Ellery’s deductible.”
