School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,22
get cleaned up so we can visit. You may know the man—he’s a cop.”
Jackson had texted Jade, and she held the door open for them as they approached. Jackson noticed that the doorknob had been dusted, and he looked at Henry.
“You got ’em?” he asked.
“Got ’em.” Henry held up a perfect photograph of a neatly powdered black print on his hi-res camera phone. “Waiting for you to log in.”
Jackson had learned how to lift a fingerprint in the academy. Although it was a task more often handled by the local forensics team, Jackson hadn’t wanted to be left out. He’d taken classes in using the database that housed criminal fingerprints on file and had urged Ellery to buy the equipment capable of taking Henry’s picture and converting it to a biometric scan. He’d passed the knowledge on to Henry, a lot of it by phone as he’d recovered and Henry had taken on some of the PI duties at the firm. He was anxious to get back into the seat and help again, but first he had to—ugh!—get all of Sean Kryzynski’s blood off his body.
“Password is Billy Bob Wants His Balls Back. Capitalize every word and put exclamation points in between them, with a five at the end. Are there extra clothes still in the drawer?” he asked as Henry ran off to start the process.
Jackson started keeping an extra set handy in his early days, when he and Ellery had both worked at the area’s biggest criminal-defense firm. Even though he hadn’t been on the street in seven weeks, he was pretty sure he still had some old clothes in Jade’s office.
“Ugh. Yes. I was going to make you take them home and replace them with something decent,” she muttered.
Jackson took a deep breath and tried to remember his new-and-improved Jackson resolution, and part of that involved not wearing clothes rotting off his body out of sheer perversity.
“I wasn’t supposed to be back,” he told her, rummaging. He found them, folded neatly, behind six reams of copy paper and a case of pens. “I’ll try to remember some of my newer stuff when I come back in tomorrow.” He looked up and found everybody staring at him. “Yes,” he snapped. “I’m coming in tomorrow. Kryzynski’s in the hospital, and someone tried to break into our office, and we’ve got a seventeen-year-old kid in jail about to be tried as an adult and another kid whose life might be ruined because someone was trying really hard to make it so. This is no time for me to extend my vacation.”
Ellery gave a reluctant nod. “Fair,” he said. He grimaced. “I don’t suppose we can ask you to be careful?”
Seven weeks of recovery, but Jackson hadn’t been the only one recovering. Ellery had been pulling his tattered faith and hope for Jackson back around his own heart, trying to sustain himself for living with Jackson and all his copious damage.
“Of course you can,” he said gently. “I’ll have Henry with me. You heard him at lunch today. Man, that kid’ll make sure I eat right, take my vitamins, don’t walk into any gunfights. I promised you all.” He looked at Jade and Henry and even Galen, who was leaning on the doorframe to his office, taking in the show. “Life just got good. Don’t want to check out yet.”
He remembered Kryzynski, squeezing his hand with a pain in his chest not unlike the thing that Jackson’d been recovering from for seven weeks. “But that doesn’t mean we’re getting any sleep until we know who did this to our friend.”
“Truth, brother,” Henry said gravely.
Jackson nodded and turned toward the bathroom. God, he needed a breath to himself.
And he needed to wash the goddamned blood off his hands.
Two Fish, One Pond
JADE HAD canceled everybody’s afternoon appointments because she was a powerhouse of efficiency, and Ellery wouldn’t have been able to afford her if she hadn’t been devoted to Jackson.
When Jackson emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, wearing a tattered black T-shirt that read My Way or My Way in bright pink letters, and a pair of jeans so transparent they were mostly indecent, everybody else had set up in the conference room, and Ellery was passing copies of the files and the police reports around the table.
“Jade has scanned copies of these and sent them to Crystal, and she’s giving them to our old firm—”
“Feisty, Llama, Hamster and Clopper,” Jackson inserted, and Ellery rolled his eyes for form. The actual name