Bone to Pick

by TA Moore

  He ripped the top page off the pad and held it out. Javi took it from him and glanced at the scrawled writing. It was a phone number and address. Javi raised an eyebrow. Not how he usually got a man’s number, but….

  “I’ll talk to him,” he said and tucked the page into his pocket. “You can let me know when you’re bringing Reed down for an interview.”

  When he left, the woman in the Batman sleep shirt was outside again. This time she was crying in her car, a beat-up old Ford with bags of clothes and a sleeping bag shoved into the backseat. Homeless. Part of the growing population in Plenty, where there was a lot of work to be had but nowhere to live unless you had enough for a two-story house with a pool and solar panels.

  Javi knew that if she’d called in a missing child, there would have been no kid gloves for her. Life wasn’t fair, but he supposed she already knew that.

  Chapter Four

  JAVI HEADED out of town. The candy store had closed, he noticed on his way by, and a Starbucks had moved into the space like a hermit crab. Javi ran his tongue over the back of his teeth and tasted burned coffee and the fuzz of cheap creamer. About time they got a good coffee shop in town.

  Maybe he’d grab a cup later. For the moment, he followed the signs that pointed the way out to Plenty’s unprepossessing shoreline—more shale than sand—and the trailer park where Deputy Witte was living the stereotype.

  To think Javi believed he was being insulting when he called the big blond deputy trailer trash after their last argument.

  The Sunnyside Trailer Park played host to tourists during the summer. There wasn’t a whole lot to see in Plenty—the quaint Main Street, a winery that did tours up in the foothills near the Retreat, and a cave system on the beach that was mostly underwater and never had seals in it—but it was close enough to actual tourist destinations to serve as a stopover.

  At this time of year, rows of lots stood empty. The rest of the lots were filled with the longtimers’ trailers, complete with low fences and summer-bleached garden furniture. Most of them were construction workers or field hands, seasonal labor at the farms and building sites that surrounded the town. There were a few drifters too—people who rolled aimlessly into town and hung around doing odd jobs and petty crime until they had a reason to leave.

  Javi pulled in under the peeling wooden sign and parked in the half-moon lot next to a pickup that stank of old fruit pulp. A couple of kids chased each other around the trailers, stripped to swimwear and with the dark, year-round tans of beach dwellers. Skinny, shaved-down dogs barked at their heels and twisted between their legs.

  Javi got out of the car, and the kids stopped what they were doing. They side-eyed him in his suit and then ran away before he could ask them anything.

  Helpful as always. He tipped his shades down his nose and checked the address Frome had given him.

  Lot 275. Old silver Airstream. Can’t miss it.

  That was true enough. Javi looked up, and his eyes fell on the big silver pill parked at the far corner of the park, right next to the drop down to the beach. It was dented with pockmarks along the front and had a white plastic fence that marked off a patchy square of garden. Javi tucked his phone in his pocket, headed across the rutted lot, and tried to ignore the sweat as it ran down the back of his neck and the wind as it scraped his skin.

  Up close, the trailer was spotlessly clean and echoed oddly when Javi climbed the dimpled steel steps and rapped on the door. No answer. Not even from the dog. Javi went to step back and caught himself before he tripped down the narrow stairs as his heel caught on the edge of the step. He probably should have called first. It just seemed easier not to.

  And maybe he wanted to see Witte again, a sly little voice in the back of his head jabbed. Just to remind himself how irritating Witte was, of course. The voice sounded an awful lot like him when he was being clever in interrogations. Javi could see why it bugged people.

  He fished his phone and the square of notepaper out of his pocket and pulled up the messages app to text Cloister. Halfway through call the office, a rough voice, pitched to carry, interrupted him.

  “Slumming it, Special Agent?”

  Javi turned around and saw Witte making his way up the stairs from the beach.

  A pair of faded jersey shorts hung low around his hips, and he’d slung a wrung-out T-shirt around his neck. He was tanned the color of whiskey, and his hair was wet and honey streaked, dripping onto his shoulders. Ink scrawled up over his ribs, but the pattern was shattered by a burst of pale white scar tissue.

  Javi’s mouth went dry. So that’s what a bad decision looks like in the flesh. “Any news about the kid?” Witte asked as he stopped at the top of the steps. He pulled the T-shirt from over his shoulder and wiped his face on it. The dog shoved between his knees and sat down on his feet, tongue lolling out over sharp white teeth as it panted.

  “Not yet,” Javi said. He lifted his hand to block the sun and squinted. “Can we talk inside?”

  Witte stared at him for a second with his eyes narrowed. Then he shrugged and waved his hand at the trailer. “Sure. Let yourself in. Door’s not locked.”

  Javi nudged the door open, stepped over the threshold, and ducked his head to avoid the frame. The trailer smelled better than he expected, and every surface was scrupulously clean and uncluttered. Not his idea of a living space, but he supposed it could be worse.

  “We were the first two at the scene last night,” Javi said. He glanced around as he moved out of the way of the door. There was a scuffed-up MacBook on the kitchen table and a stack of books lined up along the window. An empty pot was shoved into the corner of the counter next to the microwave—the smoking gun of plant ownership for cops. He turned around to face the door as Witte hunched through it. “We’re coming up empty-handed at the moment, so I thought reviewing the initial search might help.”

  “Sure,” Witte said. He scratched his shoulder absently as he shrugged. “Just let me clean up a bit. Bon Bon, stay.”

  The crack of command curled under Javi’s balls and squeezed, making him bite the inside of his cheek in irritation. Witte wasn’t his type. Javi liked smart, well-read, academic types—elegant hands and easily led. Not six feet of brooding, blond, aggressively straight California redneck who looked like he cut his own hair.

  Witte wasn’t pretty. He wasn’t even handsome. With that jacked nose and the harsh Dust-Bowl Germanic lines of his face, he was barely holding on to rugged with his fingertips.

  So whatever it was about Witte that got under Javi’s skin, it wasn’t attraction.

  Which was good, since Witte had ducked into the trailer’s cubicle bathroom and apparently didn’t believe in closing doors all the way. There was just enough space to catch movement, bare lines of hip, and the wet slap of a washcloth. But that wasn’t the point. Voyeurs didn’t peep because they wanted to see a naked person. It was the illusion of intimacy….

  And, Javi reminded himself as he looked away, the only thing he wanted less than a trailer-park deputy was actual intimacy. He sat down at the booth-style kitchen table and realized that, while he had not been watching Witte, the dog had been watching him. It sat with its tail tucked around its feet and stared.

  Javi looked away—he was sure he’d read somewhere that you shouldn’t make eye contact with dogs—and found his attention back on that distracting gap of door.

  “Was there anything you saw up at the Retreat the other night that seemed out of place?” he asked. The reminder of why he was actually there made guilt pinch. There was a child missing, his friend’s family was under suspicion, and he was distracted by muscles and a tight ass. Irritation sharpened his voice. “Something you missed or left out of your report?”

  Witte jabbed the bathroom door open with his elbow and stepped out, absently clutching a hand towel at his hip. He’d washed off most of the sweat, but sand still clung to his shoulders and knees. A scowl hinted around the corners of his mouth, making his eyes narrow.

  “Are we t
rading notes, or am I defending my work?” he asked.

  “Do you have something to hide?” Javi asked.

  He regretted the words the minute they were out, but that was always too late. Witte had made him uncomfortable, and there was an unhappy little gremlin at the controls in his brain that wouldn’t settle until he returned the favor.

  They missed the mark this time. Witte just shrugged.

  “Course I do,” he said. “That’s why we have union reps. Do I need mine?”

  “No,” Javi said. “You need pants but not a rep. Sorry. I’m tired. No one to send me home.”

  For a second he thought the apology wasn’t going to be enough. Then Witte shrugged and disappeared into another room. Still didn’t close the door behind him.

  “I do dogs, not detection,” Witte said. “I’m not sure what you want.”

  To fuck. The answer popped into Javi’s head with such clarity that for a second he wasn’t sure if he’d said it out loud. It was only the lack of reaction from Witte that convinced him he hadn’t. The thought still lurked in his head, though less of a word and more a cluster of sensations—heat, hands, the clench of an ass around his cock.

  Witte still wasn’t his type, but apparently that didn’t matter. He wanted to fuck him anyhow, and he was never going to. Even if Witte didn’t look like the poster child for straight jocks, Javi didn’t fuck where he lived. It made his life messier. So he gathered up the whole tangle of lust and shoved it into the back of his brain, out of sight and out of the way.

  He cleared his throat and focused on more appropriate answers. “Was there anything about the family that struck you as off? That didn’t seem… genuine?”

  Witte came back into the main area of the trailer, tugging an old Disney T-shirt down over his chest. His jeans were worn white along the seams and pulled tight across his thighs.

  “I thought you said they were good people,” he said.

  “I did,” Javi said. “I think they are. What if I’m wrong?”

  The tic of Witte’s mouth betrayed that he’d been there himself. He glanced down, absently buried his fingers in the dog’s thick ruff, and finally shrugged one shoulder.

  “I’m off today, anyhow,” he said. “Do you want to go up to the Retreat, and we can walk through it?”

  It was a generous offer. Javi was grateful, but at the same time, the easy grace of the gesture rubbed him the wrong way. He wasn’t sure why. It could just be the unflattering fact that it made it harder to feel superior to Witte.

  Sometimes Javi was such a prick it was hard to share his head with himself.

  “I’d appreciate it,” he said.

  He might be a prick, but he did have manners.

  Chapter Five

  CLOISTER PULLED off the road at the feedlot. It had just opened, and workers in khaki T-shirts were loading up pallets and wrestling wire buckets of produce to flank the doors. He stopped at the back of the lot, next to a Buick with a spray-can paint job. Bourneville barked enthusiastically at birds. She clearly enjoyed the novelty of being in the car when she wasn’t working.

  “I figure this is where Drew was going, or thought he was going,” he said as he nodded at the vending machines lined up against the wall. Bright plastic curves advertised M&Ms and Arizona Iced Teas, although they didn’t glow as seductively as they did at night. “A lot of the kids sneak down here to get snacks or soda… or pay someone to go and get them booze, but ten’s probably a bit young for that.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Probably not,” Cloister admitted. “Either way it’s a popular spot. Deputies get called out all the time to ferry the kids back up the road, but they cut across.”

  He pointed toward the Retreat. Javi looked that way, visibly spinning a compass in his head. “The same way that Drew went when he left the cabin.”

  “Morocco,” Cloister corrected him and quirked his mouth around the mockery. “But yeah, I think so.”

  “Think?”

  “Not my beat,” Cloister said. “I get called out for missing people and raids, not kids loitering at the vending machines. There was a path, though, and it went around the obstacles and bushes, not over. Adults go over, Special Agent Merlo.”

  That got him a withering look. “Javier. Or Javi. You make the ‘Special’ sound like it has air quotes.”

  “That’s what I was going for,” Cloister said. He swung the car around and headed back to the road.

  “So I’m just to keep calling you deputy?”

  Fair enough. “Cloister.”

  “Really?” Javi asked. “I thought that was a nickname because you were religious. I didn’t know your mother hated you.”

  Cloister did a rolling stop at the exit. There weren’t enough people on the road to merit a full stop. Sometimes being a cop made you worryingly blasé about traffic laws.

  “It was her maiden name,” he said. “She didn’t hate me till later.”

  There was a pause for a second. Cloister could feel Javi studying his profile. He rolled the name over his mental tongue to try it out. It was shorter than “Special Agent,” anyhow. Eventually Javi went, “Huh,” as though he’d worked something out, and changed the subject.

  “That’s not something the parents would know,” he said. “At home, maybe. But a camp where they’re spending a week or weekend a couple of times a year? They’re too busy making the most of their free time and the yoga workshops to map out the children’s time. The whole point of going somewhere like the Retreat is that it’s a safe environment to let the kids run around in nature.”

  “Maybe Drew was on his own when he left the cabin?” Cloister suggested. He had to struggle to resist the urge to bring his mother up again. The whole point of being disconcertingly frank with people was to make them uncomfortable, not to make them think they knew something about him.

  “Then who gave him the soda?” Javi asked.

  Cloister hung his arm out the window. The metal was hot against his arms, the wind hotter as it sanded dust against his forearm. The radio that morning warned about forest fires.

  “You said the lab results weren’t back,” he said. “He could have just taken a drink with him.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Javi turn to look at him. “Then why did you lose his trail at the road?”

  Maybe there was a good reason for that. But if there was, Cloister couldn’t think of it. He grunted and shifted gear.

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “It’s like fishing,” Javi said. “You have to throw out a lot of lines before you get a bite.”

  Cloister took his eyes off the road for a second and gave Javi a dubious look.

  “You fish?” he mocked.

  “Not much these days. My uncle used to take us out on the boat when we were kids, fishing for marlin.” Javi paused. “You?”

  The question hung in the air like one of those lines Javi had been talking about. Baited and waiting for Cloister to fall for the hook with a story. Or it was, he reminded himself, just someone making conversation by talking about family. That wasn’t a sore spot for everyone.

  “We got our food in the store.”

  Javi went, “Huh,” again. It made Cloister shift, and tension pulled tightly across his shoulders, but he tried to ignore it. It wasn’t as though there were any secrets. He might avoid talking about his family, but if Javi was that interested, the whole mucky story was recorded in black and white in his various records. His juvenile records should have been sealed, but he knew better than to believe that mattered to the Feds.

  “Did you have a lot of friends when you were a child?” Javi asked.

  Change of topic or more prying? Cloister took a deep breath of dry, hot air and tried to react like a sane person.

  “No,” Cloister said.

  “Me neither. I wonder if Drew did.”

  IT WAS in the eye of the beholder. What was a fuck-off scary, big black dog to Bozo the Meth-head was a cute puppy to a bunch of kids. Gi
ven permission to be friendly, Bourneville was in her element. Her ears had been petted, her tail tugged, and she had chased balls. She flopped down over Cloister’s feet and gnawed on an old tennis ball while he talked to one of her new friends.

  Children liked him. He’d never been sure why, but it was the same effect his stepdad had on them. Kids and dogs loved Vincent Witte. Everyone else had more sense.

  “Did you know Drew?” he asked.

  Millie wrinkled her nose and glanced at her worried-looking mom and got an encouraging nod in answer. All the parents looked worried. At the trailer park, kids ran around all day with no supervision. Up here none of them were allowed out of the reach of a parent’s arm. Millie heaved a sigh and pushed her glasses up her nose.

  “We were friends last year,” she said, “but not this year.”

  “Oh?”

  She rolled her eyes. “He said he doesn’t play with girls or little kids anymore,” she said. “He called me specky.”

  “You didn’t tell me that, Millie,” her mother said.

  “I didn’t care,” Millie said sagely. “He was just stupid. He said he had a girlfriend now, but he was ten.”

  Older-than-her-years Millie had no more stories. Three kids later Bourneville delicately accepted a bacon chip from the sticky hand of a toddler named Sean. His brother petted her the way kids did, like he was playing drums on her shoulder. His dad kept saying “gently” and giving Cloister apologetic grimaces. It didn’t bother Bourneville, but she was clearly contemplating sticky toddler fingers, and Cloister tapped her hip to remind her to behave.

  “He wanted to go, but his brother wouldn’t take him,” Sean said. He scratched the end of his nose and picked off scorched skin to reveal newborn freckles underneath. “You’re going to find him, aren’t you? Like on TV.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Cloister said.

  At the same time, Sean’s dad said, “Of course he will. I told you he won’t be far.”