Page 1 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

Fish Food for Thought

“DAMMIT, FUCK,he’s gonna get you, Henry, dodge!”

“To the left, to the left, get your gun—your gun, Jackson, not your grenade launch—oh.”

“Ha! There we go! Die, motherfucker,die!”

“Whew, wow. Okay, yeah.” Henry Worrall threw his X-box controller onto the arm of the leather couch with relief. “Well done, my brother. I’ll believe you next time when you say you got it.”

Jackson Rivers, Henry’s PI mentor and friend, set the game to practice, but he didn’t shut it off, and he studiously ignored Henry’s sigh.

“You should always believe me when I say I’ve got your back,” Jackson said, giving Henry what he hoped was an animated smile.

Henry wasn’t fooled. “God, Jackson—have you slept atallthis week?” he asked, sounding helpless.

“Have you?” Jackson shot back, and he felt a wave of petty satisfaction when Henry winced. But Henry’d had a year to learn how to be a real boy, and apparently he’d passed Jackson up on the emotional honesty scale in that time.

“I’m worried as fuck about Randy,” he said dispiritedly.

Justhearingit said out loud helped ease the tightwire of stress between Jackson’s shoulder blades.

“Burton says there’s no sign of the guy,” Jackson admitted with a sigh. Abruptly, he was tired, which was an improvement over the manic tired-not-tired that had possessed him since their friend had been spirited away by friends in the military after a close brush with a killer. And not justanykiller, itturned out. Aspecialnutcase, nicknamed “BJ” by the covert ops unit assigned to track him down. Apparently this guy got off on catching—and killing—people in the act. He loved to thrust a knife between the ribs of the persongivingthe blowjob, and then cut the throat of the personreceivingthe blowjob. So far, he’d killed at least five women and six men that they knew about—and he would have killed Randy but, well, Randy wasspecial.

Jackson maintained that Randy’s job as aJohnniesmodel in adult films made him particularly impervious to shame. Randy hadn’t frozen when the 7-Eleven clerk, shamelessly taking advantage of Randy’s naivete and love of a good Slurpee, had died in the act. Instead, he’d screamed in the killer’s face and taken off running. Fortunately he lived in the flophouse—an apartment that housed a number of guys in the same line of work—and it was right across the street from the convenience store. As far as anybody could figure out, Randy had run fast enough to disappear into the apartment complex before the killer could even recover from what had to be a terrifying bray in his face as he was achieving his own climax, so to speak.

Henry, who admittedly knew Randy better, said that Randy was so loud and so spazzy and so pure of heart the gods simply stuck their hands from the heavens and took hold of the killer, proclaiming, “You shall not pass!”

Either theory held validity, as far as Jackson was concerned. Randy, for all his quirks, was a sweet kid. He needed to do some growing up (not physically, please, he was six five as it was) and get hold of his many neuroses, allergies, and divergences, but underneath all the noise was a gentle giant who wanted to do goodso badly.He was the first in line to take over a roommate’s chores or to go fetch a favorite treat or to lend a book or an article of clothing or an ampule of lube. (Life in an apartment full of young adults who had sex for a living had its own rules.) Ifanybody deserved to go hauling into the ether, pants around his ankles, to avoid the icy claw of death, it was Randy.

Which was why Jackson had called his contacts in the south with the serial-killer hunters to come take Randy somewhere safe. But getting Randy to safety and assuring themselves that the killer was out of the way and wouldn’t track down Randy’s brothers in the flophouse were two different things. Henry lived in the same building, and Jackson, Henry, and AJ, another law firm employee, had made sure the security setup from thelasttime something like this had happened was still securely in place.Everybodywas wired for sound now—the kids who lived with Randy; Henry and his boyfriend, Lance, who lived in the same complex; Jackson; his fiancé, Ellery, a founding lawyer at the law firm; and Galen, Ellery’s partner—everybodyhad a cell phone that would alert if a rabbit so much as sneezed in their area. And given that there was a cantankerous neighbor who lived upstairs and liked to stomp loudly on Henry’s ceiling when she thought somebody was enjoying too much life, that had pretty much ensured Lance and Henry had enjoyed zero alone time since Randy had been taken away.

So that was oneverygood reason for Jackson’s sleeplessness, but he and Henry both knew that wasn’t it. Jackson was pretty good at danger—had gotten damned used to it in fact. This wasn’t the first time somebody they knew and cared about was in trouble, and the fact that Jackson was on a first-name basis with a bunch of the serial-killer hunters in the covert ops unit probably said something uncomfortable about Jackson’s personal life. But the most uncomfortable thing about his personal life, he thought irritably, was that for one reason or another, it had ceased to be personal.

Fact was, Jackson hadn’t slept well in over a decade, for a lot of very good reasons, from betrayal to fear for his person to regret to terror for the people he loved. The hell of it was,Jackson had been workingreallyhard to at least be functional, and Ellery had been on board with his efforts. He still spoke to a counselor of sorts every week, and he’d been opening up to his friends and family more since Ellery had come into his life. He wanted to be a real boy almost as much as Randy did, he thought sardonically. But Randy simply had some growing to do. For instance, maybe taking a blowjob in trade for his birthday Slurpee hadn’t exactly been prudent. But for Jackson?

The answers were a little less simple.

“Jackson?” Henry asked gently. “Are you having second thoughts about the wedding?”

Jackson actually laughed. “No,” he said. “When it gets really bad, I wake up and think, ‘I’m getting married in June,’ and that actually calms me down. I don’t use it too much, though. I need something in my heavy-duty arsenal.”

Henry made a sound—a pained sound—like he knew something Jackson didn’t, and when Jackson glanced at him, he was massaging the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t give me that shit,” Jackson said bitterly. “We all play mind games with ourselves to function. You know that as well as I do. I’m sure you’ve got a list of yours.”

This time Henry grunted and picked up his remote control, began scrolling through his character options for a new skin. “Very perceptive. Let’s see. My ex-boyfriend will be released from custody in two months. That keeps me up at night.”

“I’ll add it to the list,” Jackson said grimly. Henry’s ex was an abusive toxic nightmare, and his role as Henry’s brother-in-law had pretty much trapped Henry into an eleven-year stint as an unwilling mistress. Henry’s effort to break away from the guy had resulted in a lot of torn knuckles on Henry’s part and a stint in military prison on behalf of Henry’s ex.

“Naw,” Henry said, a twisted grin in place. “He’s my boogeyman—let me fight him. Most of yours arefarmore colorful.”

Jackson grunted again, but this time in appreciation. He and Henry had started out at odds, but when Henry had lost the chip on his shoulder and Jackson had learned to apply his fully functioning empathy toeverybody,even rednecks with attitude as it turned out, they could be more than friends. They could be tighter than brothers; they could bepartnerswho functioned so well together sometimes it was like Jackson loaned out his brain so Henry could take over.

Henry was giving him a way to talk, and Jackson needed to appreciate it.

“I’ve let people down in my life,” Jackson said simply. “Not on purpose, and certainly not for lack of trying. But….” He swallowed. “When you’re about to get married, that’s the sort of thing that haunts you.”

Henry nodded and kept sorting through the costumes on the screen. “Same,” he said softly.

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