Fish Out of Water Read Online Free

next door?” Kaden interrupted, but the look Jackson shot him wasn’t annoyed.
    “He’s not racist, K, just old.”
    “Yeah, he’s an old racist ,” Kaden grumbled. “Seriously, Jacky, did you hear him arguing against Kobe Bryant being one of the greatest ever?”
    “It was at my house over Thanksgiving, dumbass,” Jackson said, rolling his eyes. “You two had to be threatened with a potato gun—and your own wife did the threatening. You remember that?”
    Kaden flashed a nostalgic smile. “Heh. Yeah. Rhonda was pissed .”
    “She should have been. You were all up in his face when he was trying hard to be your friend. He was playing with your children—he won’t even talk to his own kids. Just because he doesn’t like your pick of basketball players doesn’t make him a racist. And you have a daughter , K—do you really want Kobe Bryant to be a hero? Mike’s a good guy.”
    “He’s not going to be so good when he gets evicted because you gambled his home on me,” Kaden said, and Ellery made a quick reassessment.
    He’d assumed that Kaden had gotten distracted because—like a lot of Ellery’s clients—he was in denial of how much trouble he was in, but that wasn’t the case at all.
    “Not a gamble, K, ’cause you’re not going to run. And you know what? Even if you did run, I’d rather get an apartment than know Rhonda and the kids were out on the street.”
    The man who looked Jackson Rivers in the eyes was obviously capable of meeting reality. “They’re going to be on the street anyway,” he said. “If I can’t work during this bullshit, we can’t make payments.”
    Ellery didn’t blurt out “Pro bono?”—but he wanted to. He must have made some sort of noise, though, because Jackson sent him a glare that was probably meant to shrivel Ellery’s manhood, root, stalk, and berries. Ha! Little did the man know he put on Kevlar undershorts in the morning.
    Figuratively, of course.
    “Your sister’s moving in,” Jackson said, pulling Ellery back from the shoring up of his self-esteem. “She’ll help Rhonda with the payments until you can. Don’t worry, K, your people gotchu.” Jackson glanced back at Ellery. “You got anything else to say?” he demanded.
    Ellery glared at him. “You know I do. The bail hearing is tomorrow, first thing in the morning. I need something to give the judge besides just who’s going to help with the payments.”
    “I’m not going to run,” Kaden said. “I’ve got a wife and two kids and a fuckin’ dog who thinks I invented the morning crap. I own a house and part of a business. I’ve lived my whole life in this city. I’m not a flight risk, and I didn’t kill no fucking cop!”
    Ellery sucked air in through his teeth and looked at the anemic file, which featured the single crime-scene photo. That alone was weird, because there shouldn’t have been a photo in the file at this juncture anyway. Even if he normally did have photos at this point, the fact that there was only one bothered the crap out of Ellery. Jesus, a hundred CSIs in Sacramento, and they get one lousy photo and some even blurrier pics of fingerprints? Something horribly wrong was going on here.
    But the image bothered him more than the lack of evidence. The image was of Kaden slouched down against the counter of the gas station franchise he owned a piece of. His eyes were closed, and a trickle of blood leaked from under the black stocking cap he’d been wearing.
    A SIG Sauer P229 handgun lay near his outstretched hand, pointed in the direction of the police officer who lay sprawled dead with a hole the size of Texas in his chest. A blood pool spread luridly over the floor.
    “Now see,” Ellery said delicately, “we may be able to get you out on bail, but I think it’s that last part that we’re going to have trouble with.”
    When he looked up from the brief, it was not Kaden’s hard look of resignation that punched him with the most grit. No—it was Jackson Rivers’s