Page 115 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

Then Ellery felt another buzz in his pocket and frowned.

“Hold up a moment,” he said and fished out his phone. “It’s a text from Jackson.”

Retty and another woman dumped in the second mine site. Something’s going down. OMW!

Ellery forwarded that to his mother, Galen, and Gerald Manning, hitting the Send button right as the door opened.

JACKSON WASrunning too hard, the pack jouncing on his back, to do the math. He knew that the mine cap was probably five kilometers from the back edge of the property, and as he and Cody had jogged up the ramp of packed earth from the mine chamber to the sunlight, they’d caught sight of ATV tracks in the mud at the entrance to the mine.

The tracks went off in the direction of the Gannett Hoover property, forming a path that looked as though the vehicles had been out in this area alotover a prolonged period. On the one hand, it made it easier to traverse, and Jackson felt as though they were making good time, but on the other?

It meant that somebody—probably the two henchmen who had come to fetch Retty—had been hacking a trail to the mine caps as quickly as possible.Jackson didn’t want to know whatwas at the third mine cap, but he was reasonably sure it wasn’t a moving body at a body dump.

All he knew—all hereallyknew—was that Ellery, Jade, Lucy Satan, and Galen were all walking into a hornet’s nest that wasalready buzzing.

“Know what,” Cody panted next to him, “I been thinkin’?”

“Tell me,” Jackson said, and that whole physical fitness thing he’d been doing since his heart attack the year before seemed to be paying off in a big way today because he wasn’t even winded.

“How freaked out do you have to be to dump a body that ain’t a body yet.”

Jackson grunted. “Same. What the hell is going on in that house?”

At that moment, they heard the rumble of a two-stroke engine, with an excited cacophony of muted voices. The path they were jogging down wove itself through wooded areas and around a particularly winding slough, and as the sound of the engine—probably a motorbike or ATV—grew closer, Jackson nodded toward a stand of trees on the other side of the path itself. He and Cody made for the trees, finding shelter behind one of the copious granite boulders scattered around the area like marbles and was currently being split in two by an old and mighty oak.

They crouched behind the boulder, peering around the tree itself to see where the noise came from, as the sound of the engine—engines—drew nearer.

“Wow,” Cody muttered, squinting up at the tree that was literally cracking the boulder in two.

“What?” Jackson asked. While they were still, he fished water out of his pack and shared a bottle with Cody.

“See here? This is why I never bottom.”

Jackson stared at him, then stared at the tree in the rock and then stared at him again. “Who, pray tell, is the oak tree?”

Cody snorted. “Theyallare. I don’t know who started the myth that a man has to have a twelve-inch cock to scare the shit out of someone, but I’m saying, at this point butt plugs make me clench up.”

Jackson swallowed, feeling his ears flush for reasons that had nothing to do with running through the backcountry. “You know, I now know things about you I never ever wanted to.”

“Yeah. I should have had a gay friend a long time before this, you think?”

“I’m bi,” Jackson muttered, disgruntled. “That I fell in love with a man is Ellery’s bad luck.”

“Fair. I’m just saying. I’ve only had a couple of men friends before now, and I have questions. So many questions.”

Jackson fought the urge to laugh, and he peered over the boulder, barely making out two ATVs struggling along the path through the trees.

“When this is over, I’ll hook you up with Henry—he mentors a bunch of porn kids who may not know their belly buttons from a lint trap, but what they know about sex will blow your hair out your ass.”

Cody nodded sagely, as though that was the only fair solution. “I would beverygrateful,” he said earnestly, and then Jackson was shushing him as the ATVs finally jounced into sight.

The one in front was piloted by one of the two men who had come in to grab Retty from the rehab facility, and Jackson would guess that his thinner buddy with the long stringy hair was driving the one hauling the trailer.

The trailer hauling three frightened kids wearing the same pink pajama things as the kids Jackson and Cody had rescued the night before.

“Well, shit,” Cody said, dropping his pack.

Jackson’s was already on the ground, and he scanned the earth under the tree, looking for… for….

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