Bone to Pick

by TA Moore

  “That’s not entirely true,” he said. “We know that the point of our suspect’s crimes isn’t murder. We know where he’s been operating, and we know that six years ago, he was working with an addict who got a dose of whatever he used on poor Leo. Which means she probably ended up in the hospital.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  OR THE pen. That would have been Javi’s second choice. It was Tancredi who brought him the file, but she didn’t know the subject of it. So that meant a call to the other ex-cop in town.

  “Alice Murney?” Sean said through the phone’s speaker. There was a blur to his voice. He was at least a couple of beers to the wind. “That’s a blast from the past. What does a hot-shit special agent like you, Agent Merlo, want with a sad little crack whore like Alice?”

  Javi took a swig of an energy drink. The liquid was cold from the vending machine and tasted like artificial blueberry and the bitter, flat aftertaste of taurine. He was using Frome’s office since the lieutenant had gone home for a couple of hours. So far he’d approved a press release on the search’s progress, which underlined their continued faith in Drew’s well-being, gotten an email about their suspect from Doctor Galloway—they were still waiting on the lab for the breakdown of the chemicals in Birdie’s corpse—and left an urgent message for Luna McBride to call him back from her university in Philly. She was one of the lost-and-found children. The other boy, the firefighter’s son, had committed suicide a year and a half earlier. Javi was tired, and his tolerance for bad coffee had worn out two hours ago. So taurine aftertaste was the go-to drink.

  “Six years ago she was pretending to be Birdie Utkin,” Javi said.

  There was a pause. When Sean’s voice came back, the blur was almost gone. He sounded sharp. “She wasn’t your snatcher, Merlo. Alice would have stabbed her own mother for a fix, but once she came down, she’d have turned herself in. Half the things we collared her on, she confessed to. She was a nice kid with a bitch of an addiction.”

  Javi picked up his suit jacket from Frome’s chair and pulled it on. “We think she was working for our suspect,” he said. “Do you know where I could find her?”

  “Now?” Sean said. “Probably in the ground. Like I said, bitch of an addiction. If she’s not dead, ask her mom? Not sure where Betsy’s living these days, but I could find out, if you want.”

  “I do,” Javi said. “Do you remember Alice being pulled in six years ago? She was picked up down around the Mercado on a disorderly conduct.”

  “I was a detective,” Sean said, putting the emphasis on the last word.

  “So you say.” Javi ignored the “asshole” that Sean snorted at him. “She’d have been tripping, hallucinating, and hearing things.”

  The pause was longer that time. In the background of the call, Javi could hear football on the TV and someone asking if Sean wanted the leftovers.

  “Yeah,” Sean said slowly. “I’d almost forgotten that. She was yelling abuse at everyone, accusing them of talking behind her back and taking her kid from her. It gave her the horrors all night long. In the end they had to send her to the hospital. Thing is, she didn’t even have a kid. Not one her medical records knew about.”

  Javi picked up his phone and flicked the speaker off. “When you get her mother’s contact details, let me know.”

  “Sure,” Sean drawled. “And don’t worry about owing me. The chance to enjoy your delightful company again is payment enough. Although, if you’re feeling generous, send your hot friend round with some good whiskey. He can leave the dog at home.”

  With a dirty laugh, Sean hung up before Javi could do the same to him. Javi curled his lip in a sneer and dumped the phone in his pocket.

  “Shows what you know,” he muttered. “He never leaves the dog at home.”

  IT WAS late, and Javi was tired despite the buzz of Red Bull jittering under his skin. So he should have been on his way home to quinoa salad leftovers and his own bed, not driving an hour through the city to find the street where the Filling Station had its parking spot for the night.

  Yet there he was.

  The powder-blue-and-white food truck was parked outside the Gas Station, a classy nightclub close enough to the bad part of town to give it a certain scandalous cachet. The old neon General Gasoline sign was the only bit of the original lot left, but it was in pride of place over the door.

  Javi stood in a line that was two-thirds giggly, altered-state clubgoers and one-third people who really wanted roast goat tacos at past midnight. The grinning teenager on the counter handed out Styrofoam boxes and paper bags of takeout with the confidence of practice. Some of them he just tossed out into the crowd, shouting the order as a heads-up for whichever customer had wandered away from their station.

  It was controlled chaos. Javi struggled with the urge to make it controlled order. All it would take was two straight lines of people, lining up at one side to order and the other for pickup. Tidy, efficient, and not in the way of everyone else on the street. Javi sidestepped around a tottering couple not paying attention to where they were going as they tried to Uber while tipsy.

  On the small TV set up on the corner of the counter, small men in brightly colored uniforms chased an even smaller ball across a field.

  “¡Eeeh puto!” one of the men at the front of the line whooped drunkenly as the goalkeeper got the ball. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled wetly.

  The slur made Javi itch. He wasn’t the only one either. A mutter of disapproval eddied through the crowd.

  “Shut up, dude.”

  “Fuck sake.”

  “There’s always one.”

  The teenager at the counter huffed a sigh. He stopped in the middle of dousing the tamales with western sauce, grabbed the remote, and changed the channel with a scrape of static. The footballers disappeared, and the familiar, earnest face of the local newscaster appeared instead.

  “…Amber alert is still ongoing for a missing local boy,” she said, mugging sadness with her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth. An out-of-date picture of Drew flashed on the screen, and the emergency number scrolled under it. “Drew Hartley has now been missing for over—”

  The kid flicked the TV to another news station. This time to footage of—according to the ticker at the bottom—the San Francisco band Crossroad Gin’s resurrection tour. The men on stage looked too young to have gotten to the reunion stage of their careers, but maybe when you were that pretty, things moved faster.

  The mundane chatter of his brain couldn’t distract him from the weight of the Hartley investigation. When Saul revived Javi’s career by inviting him to Plenty, he probably hadn’t imagined Javi would pay him back by failing to rescue his grandchild. The fact that Javi found Birdie Utkin’s corpse after all these years probably wouldn’t console Saul either.

  Maybe if it were guilt, it wouldn’t be so bad. But Javi couldn’t pretend he didn’t know it looked bad for his prospects. Not career ending, not yet, anyhow, but not good either. His first high-profile case since Saul’s death, his first investigation as the lead agent, and while he was confident it would end with their suspect in jail, that wouldn’t matter if they brought home a body to bury instead of reuniting a little boy with his family.

  The girl ahead of him got her order, ripped it open, and dug into the taco as she turned around. Sucking sauce off her fingers, she sidled around him. The kid behind the counter gave Javi an easy smile, offensively chipper for the time of night.

  “Hey,” he said, squinting at Javi in recognition. “Back again? What can I get you this time, sir?”

  He was young enough, and Javi was just about old enough, that the sir made him flinch inside a little. Ignoring that, Javi glanced over the kid’s shoulder at the specials scrawled in white and blue chalk on the blackboard.

  “Four tacos de tripa and four tacos de buche.”

  “Guess you’re hungry,” the kid said. “Good to see. It won’t be a minute.”

  He took the cash Javi handed him, sho
ved it into the apron tied around his waist, and passed the order down to the older man doing the carving. It took over a minute, but not by much, for them to finish the order and swing it over the counter in a heavy, damp paper bag.

  Javi tucked his hand under it as he took it and felt the heat of it against his palm. It smelled of sweet meat spiced with oregano and cumin. Like the stained Tupperware boxes his grandmother would bring home when she went to visit her friends and tipsily shared with him as she condemned his mother as a bad cook—which was the pot insulting the kettle, of course.

  It was comfort food, nostalgia masquerading as appetite, and he’d ordered far more than he could eat on his own. He pretended to weigh his options as he walked back to the car. He could freeze the food, he could give it to a homeless person, he could leave it to stink his apartment out with the smell of last night’s takeout—but he already knew what he was going to do.

  He was tired and frustrated, and his nerves were twisted so tightly he could feel his skin scraping against them. Fucking was a good way to unwind. Food was a good way to apologize for the “one good idea” crack without actually having to do the grunt work of regret. So why not?

  HE DID feel a bit bad for waking Cloister up. After all, Javi was the one who told him to go home and get some rest. Yet there he was, hammering on the tin side of the box until Cloister rolled out of bed and answered the door. Javi probably would have felt worse, but his cock demanded a lot of his attention.

  Cloister leaned one arm against the door and knuckled a yawn off his mouth with his free hand. His hair was bedhead scruffy, and all he was wearing was a pair of faded boxers he hadn’t noticed he’d pulled on backward. There was a layer of sweat clinging to his skin, caught in the smooth dips of muscle and asymmetrical knots of scar tissue over his ribs. His black ink looked very dark in the dim light.

  “Did something happen?” he asked. His voice was raspy with sleep, but he didn’t sound foggy or as though he were struggling to wake up. Just tired. “Did the kidnapper respond to Billy?”

  “Not yet,” Javi said. He held up the bag of food. It wasn’t quite as hot as when he started, but it still smelled good. “I thought you might be hungry.”

  Cloister picked the sleep out of his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “What time is it?”

  Javi looked up at the black, star-freckled sky and then back to Cloister. “Morning?” he said.

  That got him a snort, and Cloister stepped back from the door to let him in. The trailer was dimly lit by moonlight through the uncovered windows. From the tangle of blankets—and the black dog slowly stretching out into the available space—it looked like Cloister had been sleeping on the couch. The place smelled vaguely of wet dog and strongly of sweaty man. Not a smell Javi would want to live with, but he couldn’t deny the tug it sent through his stomach.

  “Do you even have a bed?” he asked.

  Cloister turned on the lights, which made Bourneville whine and shove her nose under a sheet.

  “I know you don’t eat in bed, Javi,” he said as he held his hand out for the food.

  He didn’t. It was disgusting. Javi handed over the bag of food and watched as Cloister unpacked, unwrapped, and set the tacos out on paper plates. Of course he had paper plates. Javi didn’t know why he expected anything else.

  His balls were aching and heavy, and lust poked at the back of his brain, but he kind of liked watching Cloister move. It was all economy of motion and no notion of self-consciousness.

  “The firefighter whose kid went missing,” Javi said. “He retired the year before, opened his own construction company.”

  Cloister raised his eyebrows and pushed Javi’s share of tacos and a glass of soda toward him. “Damn. Guess they get paid better than deputies. Maybe I picked the wrong career.”

  Right then the only thing Javi was hungry for was tawny skin and the salt-sweet tang of sex. His stomach, on the other hand, growled until he picked up a taco. The first absentminded bite reminded him he hadn’t had anything to eat since a snatched sandwich at lunchtime.

  “He’s doing well,” he said. He picked up one of the napkins that came with the order, folded it, and wiped tidily at the corners of his mouth. “Does a lot of work for Utkin.”

  “It always comes back to the Utkins,” Cloister said.

  There was a soft thud behind Javi. He glanced around. The black sprawl of Bourneville was gone from the makeshift bed. He looked down into soulful brown eyes and a dangling pink tongue. Bourneville wagged her tail slowly without taking her attention off Javi’s face.

  “Your dog wants something,” Javi said uncomfortably as he shifted sideways on the stool.

  “Okay, you didn’t have a dog. But did your parents not let you watch movies about dogs?” Cloister asked. He made it sound like a flaw, but Javi didn’t think there was actually anything in the dog-POV film oeuvre he was missing out on. “She wants your taco, but she’s not getting any.”

  “Is it bad for her?”

  “I live in a tin box,” Cloister said. “Feeding the dog spicy food would be bad for everyone.”

  He picked up his taco and cupped one hand under it as he lifted it to his mouth. It was weirdly distracting to watch him eat. Or maybe not. Cloister did have a nice mouth. By the time he dragged his attention back to his plate, he’d absently eaten another taco. He brushed the crumbs from his fingers and glanced at Cloister.

  “So I’ve bought you dinner,” he said as he leaned back and gave Cloister a lazy up and down. “Now it’s time for you to put out.”

  Cloister leaned over the counter and curled a hand around Javi’s neck. He pulled Javi into a kiss. Yes, Javi decided, Cloister definitely had a nice mouth. He caught the lower lip of that nice mouth between his teeth and bit down hard enough to make Cloister hiss, and then he laved the pinch with his tongue.

  Cloister pulled back and dabbed his tongue at the red graze on his lower lip.

  “Does that mean we’re dating?” he asked, all earnest curiosity.

  Brief panic bloomed in Javi’s stomach. It faded when Cloister’s smirk got away from him and conjured up a shadow of those ridiculous dimples. Javi shook his head.

  “Shut up,” he told Cloister. “And this time the dog doesn’t get to watch.”

  Cloister cracked up, and his dimples woke up at last. Laughter wasn’t a usual element of Javi’s sex life. He liked his encounters to be planned, intense, and mutually satiating—not funny. So he was surprised at how hard the rough growl of Cloister’s easy humor left him.

  He didn’t like surprises, so he dragged Cloister around the counter and shut him up with a rough, scraping kiss. The tickle of laughter lingered on his tongue for a second in the tilt of Cloister’s mouth and the hitch of his breath, and then disappeared under the hungry bite of want.

  Better.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THERE WAS a hook on the back of the bedroom door. Usually Cloister’s dress uniform lived there between outings, pressed and vaguely ominous in its dry-cleaning bag. Now it was crumpled on the floor, and both of Cloister’s hands were clenched around the hook.

  “Don’t move.” Javi had kissed the order into his mouth as he wrapped Cloister’s hands around the hook. Cloister hadn’t moved. That nagged at him like a pin in a freshly opened shirt and poked at him every time he almost lost himself in the flood of sensation that threatened to take his knees out from under him. Hot mouth, eager tongue, the damp chill of spit drying on his hard cock. It needled—enough to stop him losing himself in the slick pressure on his cock and the wet fingers kneading his balls—never quite enough to actually turn into movement.

  Cloister clenched his jaw, tilted his head back, and pressed his skull hard against the door. His breathing was ragged, and his body was stretched out long and lean against the wood. The muscles in his thighs clenched, taut under the skin as he braced himself.

  “Fuck,” he groaned. He arched his hips up from the door, and his shoulder blades dug into the wood as Javi worked
his tongue against the underside of Cloister’s cock. His balls felt like rocks, dragged up tight and aching between his thighs, and if he wanted, he could just let go of the hook.

  He didn’t.

  Javi drew back and let Cloister’s cock slide out of his mouth. It tilted up toward Cloister’s stomach, the head tight and shiny with Javi’s spit and a gloss of precome. Javi threw his head back and tracked up Cloister’s ribs to his shoulders and upraised arms.

  “Got over that problem with authority?” he asked.

  “No,” Cloister rasped. “Not entirely.”

  “You’re not moving, though,” Javi pointed out. He stood up. His shirt hung loose over his shoulders, and his cock pressed against the fly of his trousers—trousers that were probably too expensive to be kneeling in on an old carpet. Definitely too expensive to be pressing against Cloister with sweat and come staining the pale gray fabric. Javi slid a hand over his hip and cupped the curve of his ass in one hand. He squeezed his fingers into the firm flesh and muscle. His lips brushed Cloister’s cheek as he said, “Good boy.”

  Yeah. Cloister let go of the hook. No.

  “You’re a prick.” He grabbed Javi’s shoulders. “You know that?”

  Javi shrugged. “I think you’ve mentioned it. Once or twice,” he said. He flexed his fingers around the handful of Cloister’s ass, and he smirked. “Yet you still want to fuck me.”

  Hard to argue with that. Cloister kissed him instead and tightened his fingers on Javi’s shoulders as he crushed his mouth against his. He could feel Javi’s sharp intake of breath stealing the air out of his throat and the hard jut of his erection against his hip.

  Space in a trailer tended to be limited. It didn’t bother Cloister. Five years and his life in Plenty could still fit in a couple of bags if he needed it to. And sometimes it could be useful. One step forward—a half step backward for Javi—and the edge of the bed bumped against their legs. Then all it took was a shove. Javi landed on the mattress and flexed his fingers in the crisp white sheets. Then Cloister crawled on after him. He propped himself up over Javi’s sprawled body and balanced his weight on his arms.