School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,60

doing. I just….” He knew that human trafficking got a decent budget; they might have the resources to protect Tage. “Call it a hunch, maybe, that we can get someone to take care of him there.”

Ellery nodded and gave him a brief smile. “Your instincts are pretty good,” he said, taking a deep breath of the morning air. “Don’t stay too long in the car.” The day promised to be hot, but the late-summer morning was surprisingly mild. Jackson figured they had about ten minutes before the car became a convection oven.

“Deal.” Jackson watched him walk away and then waited until the kid took a breath while devouring the breakfast burrito.

“Tage, I’m going to ask you some questions. There’s no one here to listen, and nobody has to know where I got the information, but we need something to go on here before I walk into that building and start looking for our bad guy information highway. Can you help me here?”

Tage nodded. “The boy who was killed—No Neck?”

“James Cosgrove?”

“Yes, that is his name. He has cousins who live in my building. There was another boy there. He… he hangs out with the high school students, but he is not one of us.” Tage grimaced and took another bite, chewed and swallowed it quickly. “He is Russian, though. He visits the cousins in the building all the time.”

“Cosgrove isn’t a Russian name,” Jackson remarked, but Tage shrugged.

“People emigrate, they change names, they get married. My name is Norwegian because my mother saw a movie. I don’t know what to tell you.”

Jackson grinned. “Hunh. That’s good to know. Someone was asking me about that. So No Neck has cousins who live in the building. Does Ziggy know them?

Tage looked uncomfortable. “Yeah—No Neck didn’t particularly like Ziggy, but I got the feeling his cousins did. How’d you guess?”

Jackson shrugged. “We try not to be super shitty lawyers,” he said. “So Ziggy used No Neck as an in?”

“I guess so,” Tage said, chewing thoughtfully. “Just before school let out, everyone was getting all excited about graduation, about summer, and suddenly Ziggy is everywhere, asking people to parties, gossiping about who was hooking up with who. But always after school. I watched once as one of the teachers actually threw him off campus after school. I think the teacher told all the security guards to look out for him, because he started hanging out by the little store on the corner by the school. He’d catch up with people there.”

“But you saw him in and out of your building?”

Tage nodded and, finally slowing down, took another reluctant bite. “No Neck’s cousins aren’t good people. Americans make a lot of movies about the Russian mob, but they never get how everywhere a thing can be when it’s in your community—even in little bits. You drive down certain streets in our neighborhood and there are Russian and Ukrainian businesses everywhere. Maybe only one is mob, but if your parents use any of those businesses, go to those churches, they know the mobsters. They may be afraid of them, they may tell you to stay away from them, but they never defy them. It’s too ingrained. It’s like….” He chewed more thoughtfully. “Like one of my friends at school is Black, and he’s so used to racist shit happening that sometimes I’m the one who’s shocked, you know? Like certain teachers who say ‘those kids,’ and they don’t mean me, they mean my friend, even though we get the same crappy grades and spend the same amount of time playing video games, you know?”

Jackson nodded. He’d grown up thinking of Jade and Kaden as his family, and the same thing still happened to him. He could never understand why people would be afraid of Kaden, the gentlest man he’d ever known, or would underestimate Jade’s wicked intelligence because they were African American. And every time it happened, it left a wound in all of them—the kind of wound that made Jackson and Jade more determined to work for justice in the legal system. The kind of wound that had sent Kaden out of the big city. The injustice was still there where he and his family lived now, but it wasn’t systemic. Ugly, but not built into the legal system and, as Tage had noticed, the education system too.

“So you’re saying it’s systemic. Everybody expects it to be there because it always has been.”

Tage nodded. “So when my parents realize my brother and sister have been taken,