School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,129

He groaned, because everything hurt, and checked on Ellery.

Ellery was lying on his side, his wrist on one pillow, his knee on another. His eyes were closed, but he was muttering in his sleep, squirming.

“Ellery,” Jackson mumbled. “El. Wake up!”

Ellery glared at him through slitted eyes. “My hair hurts,” he said succinctly.

“Mine too. What’s wrong?”

Ellery whimpered. “I have to pee.”

Jackson let out a weak laugh. “Okay, then. Me too. I’ll go first and come back and get you, how’s that?”

“Deal.”

They finished their tasks with a lot of hopping and swearing and a little bit of laughing, and Jackson got him back into bed with pillows propped up behind his back and the remote control for the TV mounted on the wall.

Jackson limped to the shower and took a quick one, dressing in basketball shorts and one of his favorite disintegrating T-shirts. He looked up from pulling it over his head when he heard his phone vibrating on the chest of drawers.

“Rivers,” he said shortly, looking at Ellery.

“So, did you enjoy that nap?” Christie asked. “Because I could use a good nap. Was it a good one? Tell me, so I remember what sleep feels like.”

Jackson looked at the maze of cracks on his ruined phone. “I see no messages from you. For all I know, you spent the last ten hours facedown on your mattress.”

Christie let out a broken laugh. “I wish. I can’t even believe you two. ‘Yeah, hey, we got a tip about something going down at these two vacant stores. You may want to check that out.’”

“Uhm, for the record, our tip was from your people. I mean, Fetzer and Hardison told us that might be a place to check out, but, you know, shit went down.”

“Yeah, well, Fetzer and Hardison can get commendations. I don’t know what to give you two besides pain-in-the-ass awards.”

“Commendations? What did you find?”

“An auction house,” Christie said. “With locked rooms in the back for girls, many of them underaged. It’s taken hours. We’re still processing them. Chambers finally sent me home because—” He cleared his throat. “—I had a few choice words for her and how her beat cops apparently hadn’t checked this part of their beat for almost a week.”

Jackson blinked. “Ty Townsend was arrested five days ago—that’s a very coincidental time frame.”

“Yeah, you were right about that. Ziggy Ivanov had the usual beat cops who scoped this place out arrest Townsend to keep them away from an auction night. Apparently Lindstrom and Craft had gotten calls or tips from their CI a couple of times since—”

“To keep them away from that area,” Jackson said.

“Yeah. And we had cops canvass the neighborhood, and boy did the neighborhood have some shit to say. Apparently there were a couple of ginormous fucking parties here that they used to cover the sale of the girls. So you and your boy busted up a human trafficking ring.”

“Did we find the CI?” Jackson asked shortly.

There was a hesitation on the other end of the line. “No,” Christie admitted, reluctance tinging his voice.

“Do we know where Dima Siderov is?”

“Also no.”

“Do we know how Ziggy or the mysterious informant got their intel on which two cops to bait?”

“And no,” Christie snapped. “Goddammit. Like, goddammit! We saved lives today, Rivers! There were fourteen kids on that bus and over thirty girls in that godforsaken vacant store. You can’t save the world in two days. You have to be glad you survived a day like this one and go on to work some more.”

Jackson grunted. “I’ve heard that before,” he said, hating to admit that.

“Yeah, from whom?”

“My boyfriend.”

Christie gave a weak chuckle. “Well, he is the brains of your operation. Take care of him.”

Jackson looked over to Ellery, who was flipping through channels dispiritedly.

They’d survived another one, and Christie was right. The best they could do was live to fight another day.

“That’s my best job,” Jackson said fondly. Ellery looked up from his channel flipping and gave a warm smile. He looked peaked, Jackson decided. He needed food. “Thanks for the update,” he said into the phone. “Now seriously, you really should get some sleep.”

Christie yawned into the phone. “So sayeth my wife,” he said happily. “I’ll catch you later.”

“You too.”

Jackson rang off and threw himself across the bed, catching Ellery by surprise with a kiss on the cheek.

“How you doing?” he asked, resting his chin on Ellery’s shoulder. “Ready for another pain pill?”

“Yes,” Ellery said, because macho posturing was not part of his makeup. “But I need something