School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,65

neatly lettered card. “You’re not working for Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson and Cooper anymore?”

Jackson shook his head. “No, Ellery formed his own firm. It’s Cramer and Henderson now.”

“Ellery Cramer? Didn’t you and he help catch Tim Owens back in November? I seem to remember that being a big deal. How’d he get you to leave Pfeist?”

Jackson smiled at her and waggled his eyebrows.

It took her a minute. “Uh… oh. Ooh!” She nodded, as though impressed. “So he’s your Happy Ever After,” she said. “I was wondering who it would take to get you. Well chosen, sir. Ellery Cramer’s a good guy.”

“The best,” Jackson said, loving to hear Ellery spoken about in the best of terms. He looked at Tage and smiled. “So you go with Mira here. Sleep on the couch in the lunch lounge. I’ll be back. Can you handle that?”

“The bathroom is attached to the lounge,” she said. “You should be safe and secret.”

Tage yawned again, and Mira took his arm. “Come along, baby. Let’s get you to bed.”

“Motherhood suits you,” Jackson told her as she walked away.

“I’ll call you if anything happens,” she told him over her shoulder. “Now go!”

Big Fish Walking

THE BAILIFF looked more like a thug than her husband did.

Stout, with square shoulders and a double blond braid wrapped around her head, “S. Mayer” was Suzanne Mayer. They’d lucked out when Ellery had asked about her—she was normally located in the courthouse, but the judge she worked for hadn’t been hearing cases that day, and as a Sacramento County Sheriff, she’d taken an extra shift as an officer on duty for security. It had taken Arizona Brooks two calls to realize the woman was one floor down. When Siren and Arizona called her in, she’d sat, arms folded, her ruddy face as flushed as her husband’s had been the day before.

“So,” Arizona said, her tone that “we’re just friends here” pitch she used to lure people on the stand into saying something incriminating. “You’re not in trouble, Suzanne—”

“Sure,” Suzanne grunted. “I believe that.” She looked from Ellery to Siren to Arizona, one corner of her mouth lifting in a sneer.

“Do you have a problem with us?” Arizona asked, her own hands staying neatly folded in her lap. Arizona was a slim, fiftyish woman with Scandinavian cheekbones, cropped gray hair, and merciless gray eyes. She and Ellery had butted heads on more than one occasion in the courtroom, and neither one of them walked away unscathed. But she respected Ellery for wanting justice, and he respected her for respecting the law—as often as they’d butted heads, they’d also worked for fair and equitable plea bargains, and she’d helped him and Jackson more than once when she thought her office was serving politics more than it was serving people.

“I got a problem with two queers and a—”

“You can stop right there,” Arizona snapped, and Ellery recoiled from Suzanne Mayer’s obvious gloat. It didn’t matter whether she’d gotten the word out or not, the racial epithet hung in the room as clearly as if it had been uttered.

“I think,” Ellery said carefully, “that we’re going to need a detective in here. Those weren’t the words of an innocent woman. Arizona, can you get her boss in here and snag the nearest cop?”

“Lieutenant Chambers out of the first is in-house giving testimony in another case,” Arizona said thoughtfully, and Ellery made what he hoped was meaningful eye contact.

“How about Andre Christie. He was pulling hospital duty yesterday. I bet we could have him here in ten minutes.”

Arizona lifted her eyebrows. “If you think he’d want the case, call him,” she said.

Ellery nodded, pretty sure he had the contact number Sean had given them the day before. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll step out and do that,” he said smoothly. He looked at Suzanne Mayer with a smug expression he cultivated for people he would never defend in court. “You know, I’m one of the best defense attorneys in the city,” he said. “Too bad you just pissed me off.”

And then he walked away. His old firm—the one that he had treated very professionally when they’d let him go because he and Jackson kept doing things above and beyond their pay grade—was still very friendly with him. He happened to know that Pfeist, one of the founding partners, had a brother whose firm handled most law enforcement defense cases in the city.

A gay brother.

And while lawyers were told to defend their clients without passion or prejudice, they were also allowed to