Page 69 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

A thing he thought smugly to himself until he slid behind one last hedge on the corner and ran into a solid body, theoolfof the collision as quickly hushed by the body he’d squashed as it was by himself.

Therancidbody he’d squashed.

Oh God. He stared down and found that yet another child, Cowboy’s age, but this one female, was staring back at him, her eyes wide and terrified, darting to the street and then back to Jackson in the shadows.

Jackson held his finger up to his lips and breathed deeply, The girl—thirteen, fourteen at the most—let out a long breath with him, and he nodded.

“Come with me,” he whispered. “I’ll get you out of here.”

The girl glanced behind her shoulder, underneath a holly bush, which made Jackson’s skin shrivel at just the sight of it, because the dark leaves, glossy with rain, were exquisitely pointed on each terrible end.

They must be so scared.

There were two other young people down there, androgynous with dirt and fear, all of them wearing thin sweatshirts with the Moms for Clean Living logo barely visible on their shoulders.

“Them too,” Jackson murmured. “Follow me.”

He realized the girl was shaking.

“A warm place to sleep,” he all but begged. “A bath. Clean clothes. Food. We won’t make you go back home if you don’t want to, and we’re definitely not giving you back to those monsters in that place.”

He watched the girl—God, she was tiny—swallow.

“What would we have to do?”

“Tell the truth,” Jackson said softly. “Scream it. Tell the fucking world. I don’t even know what they did to you guys in there—I don’t have details. But if you all were willing to run away, to live like this, then it had to be bad.”

She shivered, hard. “We’re all so cold,” she whispered. “So cold.”

He didn’t want to scare her; he couldn’t evenimaginethe level of trauma. “C’mon, sweetheart. I’ve got a minivan, and I can get you to child services and away from this place.”

She nodded and started to cry. “I want to go home so badly,” she said, her voice breaking. He held out an arm, and she burrowed in. Everything she was wearing was sopping wet.

“We’ll see if we can do that.” He remembered those parental permission forms. “I can’t promise, but we can at least see.”

She nodded against him, and he glanced out toward the well-lit street, where their pursuers seemed to have disappeared.

“You ready?” he asked, glancing at the kids behind his new friend.

He got hesitant nods, but at least they were nodding.

“Follow me.”

It had almost beenfunwhen he’d been running through the underbrush in the dark by himself. A game. What would happen if they found him? His life would be a little harder, he and Ellery might have to get a little bit trickier, but really, what could they do to him? Call the cops on him? He had enough contacts in the department now—and enough cred—that he could probably avoid a night in jail. Hell, just thethreatof Ellery would be enough to make most cops back down.

But it wasn’t so fun now. They were, what? Half a block away from getting these kids to freedom? Every slither through the bushes made his heart pound, and every cough, sneeze, or gentle moan made it stop.

These three kids were sick, he realized.Verysick. He’d been thinking about calling CPS, but he thought that maybe he should take them all to the hospital instead and have the pediatric administrators call after Jackson described the situation.

Hospitals had armed guards in the front, and Jackson had the proof that these children had been in the care of people who had mistreated them tucked right over his balls.

And although he hated to admit it, it was time to call the police.

HE WASsweating in the cold humidity by the time they got back to the minivan, grateful for the pool of darkness they’d left the thing in. There werenostreetlights on this side of the block, andwhile it might have made the giant blankness of the grounds creepy as hell, it also meant that the women—probably used to thinking of men as predators—were sticking to the lighted side of the street. He was busy lowering the back seat to let the kids scramble in when Cody ran up to the back fence from the inside and catapultedhisfirst stray to the top.

“What in the hell?” Jackson said, before adding to the girl he’d been talking to. “There are blankets in the back. I think all three of you are going to have to squish on the back seat.” He paused and took a double take at the number of teenagers Cody had brought with him. “On each other’s laps,” he added. “Hurry.”

With a growl he hustled to the fence and helped the first kid—an undersized boy of around thirteen who might never hit his growth spurt—down from the fence, and then a tall, gawky teenaged girl with a buzz cut, and then another, and then another. Around the time Cody boosted his last teenager up—a chubby, deconditioned young man who kept apologizing with every heartbreaking breath—Jackson could hear shouts. They’d been spotted. He helped the young man down with a muffled “oomph” and urged him to the minivan, wondering if they’d managed to find a way to squeeze all eight—eight—kids into a back seat that only fit four.

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