School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,95

Jackson asked, but only half facetiously.

“Not this weird. So we have gotten two calls today from the US military down in So-Cal, if you can believe that.”

Jackson almost spit out his soda. Oh yeah, he and Ellery knew So-Cal. In particular, they knew tiny little pockets of the desert that held secrets and more secrets, and yes, some of them were military secrets.

“Stunning,” he said, his voice robotic in his own ears. “Go on.”

She obviously detected something odd about his tone because she continued, but slowly, as though afraid of what he was going to say or do. “So,” she said, “one of these calls is from a Colonel Jason Constance, and he says a civilian has intercepted a shipment of young immigrants who are just about sex-trafficking age for the underaged set. Someone has interviewed these kids. They are all from the Sacramento area, and he wants to know if he can return them to us, if we can find their families and place them.”

Jackson’s heart was pounding arrhythmically in his chest, and he wasn’t sure it had anything to do with the stress-induced heart murmur that had recently been repaired.

“Can you?” he asked, voice squeaking.

“We can!” she said. “We have an FBI interdistrict task force at our disposal for just such an eventuality,” she told him. “But that’s not the weird part. Do you want to hear the weird part?”

“Oh my God, I really do.”

“Okay, first of all, this guy is calling from what sounds like a school bus from hell. I ask him when he took charge of the children, and he says two days ago, in the afternoon. He says he took the kids to a medical professional to get them checked out, and then he’s had to change vehicles a couple of times because he was being tracked. I asked by who, and he said ‘The mob? The military? Take your pick. I’m trying to stay one step ahead.’”

“Jason Constance?” Jackson asked, because the name was familiar. He’d never met the man personally, but one of those little pockets in the desert housed a couple of friends, and he was pretty sure Constance was the CO to one of those people he regarded as a friend. In fact, earlier on in the year, Constance and Lee Burton—the friend—had been watching over Jackson and Ellery and Ellery’s mother in order to keep Ellery’s mother safe from a hit man. Jackson hadn’t seen them at the time—although he’d caught a glimpse of a thirtyish man with dark hair and big, sad brown eyes. They hadn’t spoken personally, but he and Ellery had known they were there.

“Colonel Jason Constance,” Mira corrected.

“Of course. Okay, that’s weird. When did he say he’d be here?”

“Tomorrow morning. He was going to find another vehicle and travel by night. I told him to head for the courthouse. He seemed to be afraid someone would take the kids away from him, and like I said, it sounded like he was driving the school bus from hell. Anyway, so we get that phone call, and then we get a call from Constance’s direct superior, who says that if we’re contacted by a Colonel Jason Constance, he’s acting without authorization of the US military and that he’s armed and dangerous, and we should not accept any shipments from him, no matter what kind of shipment he brought.”

Jackson went to take another sip of his soda and realized his hand was shaking. Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God. The last time he and Ellery had tangled with the military, they had almost died. Ellery had almost died. Jackson’s heart was going triple time, and he wondered if he should take some of the nitro left over from before his surgery, or if he was just having a full-blown panic attack.

But these were kids.

And that steadied him. He knew who he was. He knew who Ellery was. Neither of them were the kind of people to turn their backs on children.

“So someone intercepts these kids, and Constance wants to return them home, and whoever was up in the food chain wanted to do something else with them,” Jackson said. One of the things he did know about Constance was that he was in charge of a very secret, very important op. A rogue military leader had trained up a bunch of serial-killing psychopaths, one of whom had infiltrated Sac PD the year before. Constance’s job was to track them down and take them out—or imprison them—but