Bone to Pick

by TA Moore

  Tranquil looked like he’d been slapped.

  “Is there anything you can tell us,” Tancredi asked as she swept up the photos and tapped them together.

  It looked like Tranquil was going to answer. He looked up with his mouth open and his eyes desperate. Then he shrugged and shook his head.

  “I don’t know him.” He dragged one hand down his face. The skin stretched under his fingers like it had lost all its elasticity. “I don’t think I’ve known him for a long time.”

  Tancredi looked up at Cloister and gave a slight helpless shrug. They weren’t going to get anything useful out of Tranquil right then. If he did know something, the revelation of the accusations against his son had driven them out of his head.

  “Does he have any friends?” Cloister pressed without much hope of getting an answer that would help. “Anyone he’d talk to?”

  Tranquil shook his head. He bent forward, braced his elbows on his knees, and buried his head in his hands. There wasn’t time to try to coax him back. Cloister opened the door and went into the reception area. Crime-scene techs had swarmed the area to take samples and bag the splash of puke on the floor.

  “Witte,” Frome said. Nothing else.

  Cloister stalked outside and to his car, and the wind shoved a breath of hot, dusty air up his nose. He pulled the door open and let Bourneville jump out. She flattened her ears and clamped her tail as the wind hit her. It pushed her fur the wrong way, into knotted rosettes.

  “Witte.” Tancredi had followed him. She held her hand up to shield her eyes. “They’re going to send out helicopters from LA—with infrared. We’ll find them.” There was a pause, and then she added, “Him.”

  Cloister hooked the leash onto Bourneville’s harness and gave one tightly folded ear a quick tug. He didn’t know what Tancredi thought was going on between him and Javi—anything from secret marriage to unrequited crush—but it was probably better than the truth.

  “Tancredi.”

  “You look at him like the way I looked at sushi when I was pregnant,” she pointed out. “Can’t miss it.”

  Cloister ignored her remark. “Hector—Matthew—knows that he’s in the weeds.” He kicked the door shut and clicked his fingers at Bourneville. She stuck to his heels as he headed for Javi’s car. The fact that there’d been no attempt to move the car wasn’t a good sign. The techs had already popped the doors.

  “Do you even have anything with Merlo’s scent on it to follow?” Tancredi asked.

  “I will in a minute.” Cloister told Bourneville to sit, and he opened the car. The discarded shirt would be on the passenger seat or tossed into the footwell behind the driver’s seat. But Javi had folded it, bagged it, and stashed it in the glove compartment. Even better. The scent would be preserved. “If I don’t find them, the helicopters will.”

  Even Tancredi’s freckles looked disapproving, but she let him get on with it. Cloister crouched down and called Bourneville to heel with a snap of his fingers. He bent over and pressed his face in her rough, sweaty coat for a second. She smelled of dust and the Cheeto reek of sweaty dog, and her sides heaved against his face as she panted. For once it didn’t make him feel better.

  It was his fault. Just like last time. The guilt was an oppressive, smug stain in the back of his brain. It smothered all the justifications he tried to field. It didn’t matter to the guilt that Javi didn’t want to be anything to Cloister—neither his lover nor his responsibility. It still knew he’d let Javi down and lost him. Just like last time.

  “Good girl, Bourneville,” he said as he leaned back. The plastic bag was folded instead of sealed, hot and stretchy under Cloister’s fingers. He pulled it apart and presented it to Bourneville. She eagerly pushed her nose into the ball of cotton, sneezed, and rooted around at it until she found a rich fold of sweat and skin cells. Her tail came up and wagged enthusiastically against the wind as she caught the scent. “Find Javi. Suuch.”

  Bourneville barked sharply and lowered her nose to the ground. She leaned into the leash as she followed the scent from one tuft of grass to the other where the scent was caught in the dirt. The track led in a straight line from the car to the reception desk.

  Her nails clicked on the wood as she padded through the door and worked her way around the room. Cloister wound up the slack of the lead and balled the strap around his fist like a gauntlet to keep her out of the marked-off evidence areas.

  “Witte,” Frome said. He put enough snap in his voice that Cloister couldn’t ignore it without being obvious.

  “Sir?” He braced himself to argue that Bourneville would give them a head start—that any advantage was better than nothing.

  “Take Tancredi. I don’t want to end up with another officer missing.”

  One strand of the tension that was tangled through Cloister’s shoulders relaxed. He nodded to Frome and turned his attention back to Bourneville. She had her feet up on the couch—there were dusty paw prints all over the pale cushions—as she stuck her nose under the cushions. The puke got an interested sniff, but Cloister pulled her back before her black nose could knock over one of the yellow tags.

  “Pfui,” he snapped. “Back to work, Bourneville. Suuch.”

  She grunted at the insult, shook her head to make her ears flap, and got back to work. The scent trail took her back out of the reception area and down the porch steps. She dragged him between a storage shed and the laundry and through the short alley, which was a wind tunnel as the gust whistled through it. A sharp right took them behind the big hall where the ATVs were parked up, and then she course corrected back onto the narrow, foot-worn path.

  This time she was sure of where she was going. Her tongue flapped out of the corner of her mouth as she made a beeline down a hill toward a scrubby stand of trees that bent in the wind. As Cloister got closer, he picked out a flatter sheet of green flapping between the branches. It was a loose tarp, tangled up in ropes.

  “What is it?” Tancredi asked as she slid to a stop next to him. Her hair was twisted into dusty knots, and she had to stop to bat a wad of leaves—freshly torn from the tree—away from her face. “Or what was it?”

  Cloister crouched down and grabbed the edge of the tarp. He flapped it up and peered underneath. There were heavy-duty tire tracks in the dirt and oily, irregular stains. The tarp had the sweet, sickly smell of gas.

  “Matthew had an ATV hidden out here,” he said.

  Tancredi puffed out her cheeks in a frustrated sigh. “By now he could have gone thirty miles? Forty.”

  “More, maybe,” Cloister said. “I don’t think he cares too much about safety right now.”

  He clenched his fist around the tarp and felt his stomach sink with dismay. If the foot trail was interrupted, their chances of tracking—

  Bourneville suddenly barked and threw herself against the leash. She paced back and forth at the end of the two meters of braided nylon. There was something there. Cloister loped over to her, and she took advantage of the sudden slack against her collar to dart forward a few inches. Then she stopped, dropped her nose, and huffed at the patch of ground.

  “What’s that?” Cloister asked as he reached her. “Good girl. What have you found?”

  He bent down and saw the irregular puddle of blood dried into the dirt. Fear—that old, whistling shadow in the back of his brain—was his first reaction. His second was almost heady relief.

  “Maybe Merlo was able to injure his kidnapper,” Tancredi suggested hopefully. But she didn’t sound convinced.

  “Whoever it is, I hope they keep bleeding,” Cloister said. He caught Bourneville’s collar and tugged her over to his side so he could unhook it. Eagerness trembled through her muscles as she waited. “She can track this.”

  “You hope,” Tancredi said.

  Cloister snorted and let go of Bourneville. She took off toward the trees, her body stretched out like an arrow and her ears pinned to her skull with speed.

  “Hope is for lottery tickets, Tancredi.” He broke i
nto a run and tossed the words back over his shoulder. “I know my dog.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  THE NOISE scattered Javi’s wits. He was conscious and could move again—although his body felt like it was filled with clay—but every creak or breath around him rattled around his head in a distorted, atonal echo. It made it hard to concentrate.

  He was folded up uncomfortably in a small space with his thighs cramped and an ache slowly building from the small of his back to his shoulders. It was hot. The air parched his mouth on the way in and didn’t seem to fill his lungs. When he shifted position, his shoulder and feet hit hot metal.

  Javi closed his eyes and kept his breathing steady. It wasn’t a “small space.” It was the trunk of a car. That was a fact, and he could deal with it. When he brought his hands up to wipe his face, the plastic cuffs around his wrists scraped against his chin. He worked his way onto his back, but his knees didn’t fit, and his eyes stung as he blinked into the dark.

  He could hear himself blinking.

  Panic tried to crack its way out of his chest. He closed his eyes—not that it made a difference—and dissected the experience. The GHB had caused the dizziness and heaviness in his body and the spray of vomit he could feel cooking sourly under his head. Bath Salts were making him panic with increased heartbeat, a flood of endorphins, and paranoia. The needle scratch on repeat in his head, like a horror-movie soundtrack, was an auditory hallucination caused by the drugs. He wasn’t losing control. There was nothing to control. It was just chemistry.

  “Matthew,” he said. His voice felt raw, as though he’d been screaming, and it sounded like nails on a chalkboard against the inside of his skull. Javi pressed his hands flat against the metal over his head. The pain of the metal branding his hands gave him something to focus on. “Matthew, we want to help you.”

  Something smacked against the trunk. It left a dent in the metal, and the harmonics of it rumbled through his chest until he felt like he wanted to puke again.

  “You’re lying. No one wanted to help me or my sister or my mom. You blamed us. We should have done this. We should have done that,” Matthew said. He hit the trunk again and again and made it groan like a cracked bell. “All you care about are them. Rich kids. Spoiled kids.”

  “Like Birdie?” Javi managed to ask. He was bathed in sweat, soaked with it, and it was getting warmer.

  “Yes. No. I loved her,” Matthew said, his voice doubtful. The car creaked and shifted as a weight lifted off it. “But she was going to leave me. She thought she could just go away and that was it. Like it didn’t matter? I couldn’t let her do that, so I showed her, and then… I didn’t want to hurt her. That was an accident. Death by misadventure. Nobody’s fault.”

  “You didn’t mean to hurt her,” Javi repeated agreeably. If he kept his eyes closed, it was better. He felt his way around the trunk in an absent effort to map each rivet and solder mark. “I see that now. You haven’t hurt anyone else.”

  “No,” Matthew said. There was something odd in his voice. “That was what was wrong. Nobody got hurt, not really. They didn’t see what I’ve seen.”

  Javi was getting used to the sound in his head. He pressed his fingers against the trunk until his nails dug into the rust. Flakes of it dropped onto his face.

  “What did you see, Matthew?” he asked.

  No answer.

  “Matthew?”

  No answer, and the sound of his own voice had a Doppler effect on the hallucination. He squeezed his eyes shut and banged his skull back against the broken plastic under his head.

  Javi took a deep breath of sour, hot air and squirmed around onto his other side. He could see a thin bar of dim light where the trunk closed, and he could make out the shape of the taillights.

  He felt his way around the lock and traced the open areas of metal with his fingers. Strange thoughts clawed at the back of his head. He tried to ignore the pulse-racing notion that it was Matthew out there, crouched by the side of the car as he listened to Javi try to escape. He finally bumped into the stacked rounds of the lock mechanism. The metal was bubbled with rust and disuse, and the lock rod extended to the left. It was clotted with old grease, and he yanked on it. Nothing happened, and for a second, he could actually see the scarred, glitter-eyed kidnapper with his face pressed against the side of the car. Javi’s breath was ragged despite his best efforts, and he could feel panic like a ball of static under his skin. It would have been easy to accept defeat, but he tried again instead.

  This time the trunk lid popped open. Javi clumsily dragged himself up. His body was still tranq heavy and his muscles cramped, but he hauled himself over the lip. It wasn’t much cooler out of the trunk. He landed hard on a packed-dirt floor, rolled onto his back, and sucked in fresh air. Overhead he could see the high, slatted ceiling of a barn and the harsh red glow of heat lamps.

  Grow barn, he realized. They were in the old Retreat grow barn. Matthew had parked his car in the middle of it, where the rows of plants would have been bathed in heat. There was no time to dwell on that. He rolled onto his side and pushed himself up on his knees. Nausea roiled in his stomach like slurry, as though it had an actual weight. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around to take stock. Matthew wouldn’t be gone long.

  Javi got his feet under him—they were bare, he noticed, although thankfully the rest of him wasn’t—and levered himself awkwardly to his feet. The zip cuffs would have been worse if Matthew had cuffed his hands behind his back, but they still threw his balance off. He dealt with that next. The cuffs were already tight, but he was able to grab the end between his teeth and work the lock around until it was between his thumbs. Little curls of torn skin came with it, and the effort left him dizzy and breathless. He shook his head, tried to make the lingering dizziness go away, and brought his hands in hard toward his stomach. A sharp pinch of pain and the cuffs snapped.

  He peeled them off and tossed them aside. The itch of blood seeping back into his swollen fingers made him curse under his breath. He rubbed the feeling back into his hands roughly as he looked around the barn. Other than the car and the grow lamps, there was nothing much to see. The rusted framework of a disused irrigation system sagged overhead, and there was a small desk and an old laptop set up in the corner. No sign of Drew Hartley.

  The humming from the heat lamps and the sound of the wind outside drilled into Javi’s ears. He just wanted to lie down and wait for it to go away, but there wasn’t time for that. He spat to get the taste of old puke out of his mouth and limped toward the front of the barn.

  The door was made of old, weathered white wood, dry as a bone, and creaked open with a nudge. Outside he could see a rusted-out pickup sitting on its rims. Weeds grew up through it in fat green bunches. A shiny red ATV that Matthew was struggling to cover with a tattered old canvas tarp. The wind snatched at the corners of it and whipped his legs with the cords, raising welts where it hit bare skin.

  Javi’s Glock was stuck into the back of Matthew’s jeans, black and bulky. The visual reminder that he’d let himself be taken unawares, drugged, and disarmed made Javi cringe, but the fact it wasn’t in Matthew’s hand was an opportunity. He tracked his eyes past him to the gap in the trees and the heavy, “too new to belong to the farm” gate. A quick glance up to the sun affirmed that, unless he’d been out a lot longer than he thought, it was more or less the right direction to go if he got out.

  Javi took a deep breath, shoved the door open, and braced his arm against it as the wind tried to slam it shut again. He staggered into a run. The hard-rutted dirt dug into his bare feet, and he tackled Matthew from behind. It was graceless and undignified, but if Matthew got his hands on the gun, Javi would end up back in the trunk again.

  The impact of his body against the Matthew’s slammed them both into the side of the ATV. He grabbed the gun, the grip hot against his palm, but before he could pull it, Matthew threw his scarred head back. His skull cracked against Javi’s cheekbone. The black flash of pain ma
de Javi lose his grip. The gun hit the dirt, and Matthew lunged after him. He clawed his fingers as he tried to reach it. Before he could, Javi tackled him again.

  The scuffle ended with them both on the ground, where they punched and gouged at each other with brutal enthusiasm.

  Javi caught a punch to the ribs that shocked the breath out of him, but he managed to get on top of Matthew. The bony, stooped posture that Matthew adopted was deceiving—he was all wiry muscle, and he fought dirty. He grabbed Javi’s face and tried to dig his thumbs into his eyes. Javi tilted his head back enough so the dirty thumbnails gouged at his cheekbones. Then he got his fingers around Matthew’s throat and squeezed.

  The sharp jut of the Adam’s apple under his palms gave, and the tendons strained under his grip. Desperate, whooped breaths hitched Matthew’s body as he gave up on Javi’s eyes and clawed at his hands instead. Broken nails tore the skin in welted, bloody lines.

  Javi squeezed harder and smacked Matthew’s head on the ground. Matthew went limp under him, and Javi slowly loosened his grip and sat back.

  “Stay down,” he rasped.

  Instead Matthew whipped him across the face with the knotted end of a rope pulled out of the tarp. It caught the corner of Javi’s eye, and he lurched away with one hand clapped to his face as blood filled his vision.

  He rolled over, and dirt scraped his bare shoulder as he tried to scramble back to his feet. Matthew got up quicker. Seen through Javi’s one good eye, he was a blurry figure as he staggered over and kicked Javi in the stomach. There was nothing left in his stomach to come up, but he retched painfully anyhow.

  “I knew you didn’t care,” he yelled. His boot caught Javi on the hip with a sharp jolt of bone pain, and his voice screeched eerily around the inside of Javi’s head. “I knew it. All you care about is them. They killed my family, and all you care about is them. The rich. The greedy. The—”

  There were a lot of things that went through your head when there was a strong possibility you might die. It had happened to Javi before, once or twice, and the general outline was always the same. Family, regrets, the wish that you’d told that one person that you really hated them. This time the thought that he should have kissed Cloister again slid through quickly.