School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,131
given a whole new perspective on how hard Jackson must have worked to stay home for seven weeks.
God, he thought fondly, that man really did love him.
Loved him enough to get him crutches so they could help Andre Christie escort Sean Kryzynski home.
Jackson had—without any prompting from Ellery—made a bunch of small microwavable meals and packed them in plasticware so they could stock Kryzynski’s refrigerator. The two of them arrived at the hospital in time for checkout, and followed Christie to Kryzynski’s apartment, blissfully downstairs, so they could make sure he was settled in.
The place looked like it had been hit by a tornado.
“Uhm,” Jackson said, looking at the piles of DVDs on the floor and the clothes all over the bedroom. “Is… I mean you look like a fully functioning adult.”
“Goddammit, Jesse,” Kryzynski muttered. “Jesus. He broke up with me. In the hospital.”
“I thought firemen were the good guys,” Christie said, upending the DVD shelf and starting to put them back.
“Well, he was, mostly,” Sean grumbled, allowing Jackson to settle him on the couch and prop up his arms with pillows to make breathing easier. “All except that ‘I’m not out of the closet, and I’m not prepared to deal with heavy emotional shit when I can’t tell anybody all my feels’ part.”
“Asshole,” Jackson said succinctly. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“Andre, is my Baby Driver DVD in there?”
Andre grunted. “Nope. Neither is Inception or Fight Club.”
“Fuck,” Sean muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Ellery was the one to say it. “Sean, do you have anybody to stay with you this week? You’re going to need some help, you know.”
Sean looked away. “I… I called my sister in Turlock, but her boss wouldn’t let her go.”
“Fuck,” Ellery muttered just as Christie said, “I can stay a couple nights until you’re back on your feet.”
“I’m on it,” Jackson said. He grabbed his new cell phone and ducked out of the room, coming back in about ten minutes with a really pleased expression on his face.
“What?” Sean asked, eyes closing as Jackson got busy helping Christie clean up. “What is that look?”
“It’s no worries,” Jackson told him. “I got you sort of a live-in helper. You have a guest room, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Got a bed?”
Sean grunted. “It has a bed, yes.”
“Good. Because we, uh, made this kid’s living situation a little crowded with an unexpected roommate earlier this week, and this way he can have his own bed.”
Sean narrowed his eyes like he was trying to put two and two together. “Wait a minute….”
“Henry will be driving him over in the next two hours. As soon as he gets here, we can leave you to get some rest, and Ellery and I are going to go see another patient.”
“What other patient?” Christie asked with interest.
“Avi Kovacs just woke up in intensive care at Mercy San Juan,” Jackson said smugly.
“Who in the fuck is Avi Kovacs?” Sean asked, confused.
“Well,” Christie began, “remember how, right before you got skewered like a piece of meat, some asshole tried to steal a file from the goddamned public defender’s office?”
Sean gave a long blink. “Oh my God. He’s been in a coma for a week?”
Jackson nodded. “Yup. And I’m betting he’ll be so surprised at how much the world has changed.”
“Gonna tell him about Ziggy?” Christie asked. “And Baldwin Schroeder?”
Ziggy had died in surgery. Ace’s knife had been pretty close to his heart, and his collision with Ellery’s door had driven it home. By the time the surgeon realized he’d been bleeding into his chest cavity, his heart had stopped, and the world was short one more bad guy and up a couple of questions about the whereabouts of Dima Siderov and what remained of his organization. The apartment complex had been eerily vacant over the past week. Only the innocent and bewildered were left to call the place home. Some of the vacated rooms had been full of drugs and guns, but no cash, leaving the police to speculate that Dima might have gone somewhere else to start over.
Ellery and Jackson weren’t so sure.
Baldwin Schroeder and his little brother—a member of the Capitol Valley High swim team, which had been practicing the day Jackson and Henry had been shot at—had both been in the SUV Ziggy had been riding in, the one that Burton had taken out with his first shot.
Baldwin had been the driver shot, but his brother, Klaus, had been left alive. There was nothing to charge him with besides suspicion of gang activity, but once his hospital stay