by TA Moore
“Damn it,” Cloister muttered.
He reached for his radio. “Dispatch. It’s Witte. Any chance Tancredi’s 10-57 has made her way back on her own?”
There was a pause, and then Mel’s familiar voice fought its way through the crackle of static.
“No. If there’s no sign on your end, call it a day and go back to your car. If Tancredi’s right, the girl will sober up and stumble home.”
Cloister pulled his hand down over his face and flicked away the water as he loped after Bourneville. It was a pointless gesture since the rain dripped back down out of his hair. He didn’t feel optimistic about his chances of finding Janet, but…. He thought about the selfie-ready driver’s license photo and the impractical neon faux-fur jacket she’d left in the car.
She was nineteen, and she was lost. It wouldn’t be any comfort to her that it was her own fault. If something happened to her, it wouldn’t help Cloister sleep either.
“I’ll give it five more minutes.” He reached Bourneville and crouched down to fuss over her. It wasn’t her fault she’d lost the scent. She pushed her head under his hand and huffed her disbelief of that. “She’s just a kid.”
“Five minutes,” Mel allowed with a sigh. “No more. There’s other calls.”
The radio cut out.
Cloister pulled Bourneville into a rough one-armed hug and scratched under her chin. “Good girl,” he assured her. “One more try.”
He gave her a last, affectionate thump on the shoulder and scrambled to his feet. As he flicked the beam of the flashlight around, he wondered what way would a nineteen-year-old go in the dark and the rain.
Something low and bigger than a cat reflected red eye-shine back from an alley. It was probably a racoon. There were coyotes in the area—there’d been an uptick in missing cats and litters of coydogs in the neighboring houses—but they usually gave Bourneville a wide berth. Racoons didn’t give a damn.
He went to the left. Every time Janet turned, it was to the left. Bourneville ranged in a loose arc around him as she searched for one last sniff of Janet. There were a few lights in the surrounding buildings, the last holdouts against the area’s collapse, and a few dusty curtains twitched on second floors. Around there it was enough of a burden for people to mind their own business. They gave other people’s a pass.
Cloister stretched out the five minutes closer to ten, but the trail was gone. Even Bourneville had started to flag, tail down and ears flat, and she kept looking back at Cloister for direction.
“I know,” he sympathized. “But it’s not your fault, Bourneville. You’re a good dog.”
She heaved a massive sigh and gave herself a shake. It made her coat stick up in messy, wet spikes and shook the length of the leash back to Cloister’s hand. He sighed and reached for the radio to tell Mel he was on his way back.
It wasn’t much of a scream—it was distant and strangled. If Cloister had been on his own, he might have dismissed it as part of the storm or a pissed-off bird. He’d been jarred away more than once by what sounded like mass murder and was just a couple of gulls in a fight over a fish.
Bourneville had better hearing. She whined and pricked her ears as she leaned into the leash.
“Wait,” Cloister said sharply. He didn’t know what had happened, and he didn’t want to send Bon in blind. She could scare Janet or get hurt herself, or both. Some of the buildings were just empty, but others were gutted.
He kept the tension on the lead as he closed the distance between them. Unusually for her, Bourneville ignored his voice and strained forward. The harness dug into her shoulders as she threw her weight into it to drag them both forward.
“Hey. No.” Cloister twisted the leash around his arm and anchored it under his elbow. It wasn’t easy to hold on to her. He was a big guy. The bones came from the Wittes—his dad’s family ran tall and mean—and running away from his problems kept him lean, but Bourneville was seventy pounds of muscle and no reserve. He hauled her back and gave her a shake to get her attention. “Fuss, Bourneville! Now!”
He’d trained her himself. She knew the English commands, but it was the German he used for work. “Heel” was a suggestion. “Fuss” was the word of God. Bourneville subsided obediently, but her attention stayed pinned out in the dark where the noise had originated. It was silent out there now, at least to Cloister, but something out there kept Bourneville on alert.
Cloister nudged her with his knee. She didn’t look around at him, but her ear flicked toward him to catch what he said. “Bring,” he said and let the tension off the lead.
It was what she wanted to hear, and she took off at a run. Cloister let her outpace him, but not by as much as usual. He stayed on her heels across the road and around a primer-colored truck left to rust on the dented rims of its tires.
The rain cut off as they reached the underpass, which was ripe with the smell of piss and spray paint. Rats scattered at the intrusion, fat bodies and skinny tails squeezed back into the shadows, and the covey of tramps huddled against the rain watched him with sharply unfriendly eyes. A halfhearted mutter of resentment spluttered out of them and then faded again.
Cloister couldn’t blame them. On another day he might have been down there to move them on, although no one ever had a good suggestion for where the dusty homeless should go.
One shabby bundle of shirts and newspapers huddled at the other side of the underpass lurched away as they approached him.
“There was a ghost here,” he croaked. His eyes were wild under a grease-felted cap of wiry gray hair, and he’d been beaten up recently. Blood crusted in the rough stubble on his jaw, and his nose probably hadn’t faced that way until recently. He pressed himself against the wet concrete, his face turned away. “I told her she was a ghost, but she didn’t believe me. Poor fucking ghosts, right? Thinking they’re alive. Maybe we’re the ghosts. Wouldn’t that be great? We’re the ones who really died. Pass the word and fill the goddamn glass.”
His legs gave out under him before Cloister had to do anything. The man sank down, his hand already out to grope for a bottle of dubiously labeled gin, and he started to laugh hysterically. On the way past him, Bourneville growled a rumble of warning just about audible in her chest.
Then they were out in the street again, and Cloister grimaced as the rain sluiced down over his face. He ducked his chin and wiped his face on his shoulder. Behind them, the homeless man still muttered his excuses into the wall.
Suddenly Bourneville wrenched his arm to the right and gave two clear, quick barks—her “found it” tell. It was a good thing Cloister hadn’t given up.
Janet Morrow lay in the middle of the road like someone had dropped her there. Her bright rag-doll red hair was sprayed out over the concrete, and her feet were bare. Cloister’s stomach twisted with the usual sour regret at being right.
It was the Witte luck. If you had a bad feeling about something, you were probably right, but never about anything good. It was never a lucky guess at the lottery or a feeling about a fast horse, just bad breakups and broken bodies in the rain.
Not Bourneville’s fault, though.
“Good job,” he praised her. “Best dog in the department. Platz.”
He added the hand gesture for emphasis—down—and Bourneville obediently flattened herself against the pavement. She rested her chin on her paws and focused on him as she waited for her next command.
Cloister jogged over the road and crouched down next to Janet. The red on the road wasn’t all her hair. Rivulets of blood had run out from under her head to mix with the rain. Her clothes were stained and torn, her shirt ripped open to expose pale skin and a jade green lizard tattoo that wriggled up under her grubby gray bra.
She hadn’t expected anyone to see that, Cloister supposed.
“Hey, Janet,” he said, just in case she could hear him as he pressed his fingers under her jaw to check for a pulse. “My name’s Deputy Witte. I’ve been looking for you.”
Her skin was the same t
emperature as the rain, and it was clammy. For a long second, there was nothing, and then Cloister felt the flutter of blood move through her throat. She was still alive. He sat back on his heels and thumbed the call button on his radio to get the update to the station.
“… need a bus to Ash Street in Delacourt.” He glanced around quickly for an easy landmark, and his eyes fell on the parking lot opposite. He squinted to make out the grimy sign in front of the empty shops. “In front of the Conroy Galleria. We’ve got a head trauma, signs of assault, and she’s nonresponsive. I’m—”
Bourneville barked again. It wasn’t communication this time. It was an angry, low-pitched volley that sounded like it came from somewhere deep in her chest. When Cloister looked around, he saw the pickup, its headlights off, racing down the street toward him.
“Hey.” Cloister stood up and waved his arms. The beam of the flashlight flashed over the windshield of the car and picked up the hooded silhouette of the driver. He yelled. “Sheriff’s Department. Stop. Back up.”
Instead the driver flicked the main beams on—like a ground-level flash of lightning that blinded Cloister—and hit the gas. The engine revved harshly under the hood, and the car picked up speed as it barreled down the road. Off to the side, Bourneville barked furiously, pinned in place by Cloister’s command.
The driver had seen him. If there was any doubt about that, it was banished when the vehicle course-corrected on the road so it would hit them straight on.
Fuck.
Cloister threw his torch at the windshield. It hit butt-first against the glass, right in front of the driver’s face, and cracks spider-webbed out from the point of impact to the corners of the screen. The driver flinched, and the car slowed down for a second as they took their foot off the gas. It wasn’t much, but it would have to be enough.
Before the driver could recover, Cloister crouched down and grabbed Janet by the arms. She was floppy as he hauled her up off the tarmac, and her head lolled back on her bruised neck. He wasn’t even sure if she was still alive, but it would have to be enough that she might be. He manhandled her up and tossed her limp body out of the road and onto the pavement. She flopped gracelessly as she landed, arms and legs bent awkwardly under her like a discarded doll.
Cloister threw himself after her and almost made it. Most of him made it. It could have been worse.
The edge of the grill clipped his hip and bounced him up onto the hood. His shoulder hit the window, and the side mirror caught his elbow and then broke against his thigh as Cloister rolled off onto the pavement. His head bounced off the curb with a hard, hollow crack, and his head filled with gray static and nausea.
He heard the car engine shift into idle as it pulled up to the curb. Then a door opened, and Bourneville gave a guttural growl that rattled around her chest and threw herself at the door. The weight of her against the metal slammed it shut, and she growled again and tore at the metal until the driver gave up and drove away.
She would chase it. Cloister clawed through the blur of pain and rattled brain to come up with the right command. “Komm,” he rasped out. His voice cracked on the word, and he tried again. “Bourneville! Komm!”
Bourneville’s nose was cold, and her breath hot as she snorted concern and confusion into his ear.
He didn’t hurt. Cloister had been there before, in the dull, stupid moment of shock, and he knew that wasn’t actually a good sign.
“Do me a favor, Janet,” he muttered. “Don’t be dead. Okay? Otherwise this was stupid.”
Nearly as stupid as the fight with Javi. Cloister didn’t know why his brain decided to rub that salt into his wounds right then, but he didn’t have the energy to fight it. It hadn’t been the fight, really, just the silence after it that dragged.
Oh, there it was. Cloister tilted his head back against the pavement and grimaced his eyes shut. It had started to hurt.
CHAPTER THREE
JAVI MERLO decided he wanted to be an FBI agent when he was nineteen—old enough not to harbor romantic illusions that the job would be anything like it was on TV. He did his research, withstood pressure from his family, who would rather their son aimed to be the youngest Mexican-American DA in Washington County, changed his major, and plotted his career path with the understanding that there would be more bureaucracy than gun battles.
Somehow he still managed to underestimate the amount of paperwork the Bureau required on a daily basis just for working there. It didn’t matter if you wanted to get married, get divorced, investigate a multinational drug cartel, or spend a week in France. There was an appropriate form you had to fill out first.
That it was mostly online these days only meant it was a pain in a different part of the neck.
Javi finished the transcript of his interview with a small-time drug dealer’s girlfriend—the black eyes hadn’t dented her loyalty, but the baggie of coke in her baby’s diaper bag was the last straw—and then stamped his digital signature on three wiretap requests. They went into the queue for approval, and Javi leaned back in his chair. He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced over at the narrow stack of paper and cardboard files on the corner of his desk. They’d been there for a week while he whittled down his actual workload to the point where he could justify time wasted on a favor.
He snorted at himself and reached for the first file. After the sheaf of digital documents he’d just worked through, it felt pathetically slim to be someone’s tragedy—just a manila folder and the bare minimum photocopied reports. It looked like Plenty PD had done their usual piss-poor job on the investigation.
Sometimes Javi was tempted to go back through the archives. He knew the San Diego Sheriff’s Department had cleaned house in town five years earlier, but he wanted to know when the rot had set in. Because even—he checked the date on the file—ten years ago, Plenty’s police department hadn’t even bothered to look like they tried unless there was something in it for them.
Javi chose to ignore the irony that he’d taken an interest in the case because it would give him a reason to call Cloister after their fight—or, preferably, for Cloister to call him. That would make it a lot easier for Javi to continue to play fast and loose with his “one-night stands only” rule. And it wasn’t as though Cloister had said he wanted more, just that Javi didn’t get to ditch him for a better offer.
It would probably have gone better if Javi had explained that Sean had a client who claimed to have witnessed a murder. Instead he got his back up and reminded Cloister that Javi’s life wasn’t his business. The “fine” Cloister spat at him as he left was the last thing they’d said to each other.
If he had to make the call…. Javi opened the folder and frowned at the badly printed photo stapled inside. When they first met, he thought Deputy Witte had a hero complex, that he needed to play cowboy and save the day. But Mrs. Kreusik had been eighty-four and terminally ill when she went missing, and her neighbors had filed the missing person report, not her stepkids. No one would care if she was found or not, but Cloister still wanted to bring her home.
It wasn’t healthy, but it was… kind.
Javi grimaced at himself. His sex life was a lot simpler when he thought Cloister was just a hot ass attached to an uncomplicated redneck.
Now he had to decide what was more important—friendship or fucking. If Javi made the first move, that would be the end of any more hookups with Cloister. You didn’t try to patch things up with a fuck buddy. That was for friends and boyfriends. Javi was no one’s idea of boyfriend material.
If he were—Javi closed the file and tossed it back onto the deck for another day—the “friend or fuck” question would probably be easier to settle.
Enough. It was too late to call anyone, even night owls like Cloister, and Javi had actually cleared his backlog of paperwork. He should go home before that changed.
Javi signed out of the computer and got up from his desk. Someone rapped on his door as he pulled his jacket from the back of his chair. When he turned toward the
door, he saw an indistinct figure on the other side of the glass, where admin had left the reception lights dimmed. It was unlikely that anyone who wasn’t meant to be there had gotten through the security downstairs.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened, and Deputy Tancredi hesitated on the threshold. “Agent Merlo,” she said. Then she grimaced and tried again. “Agent.”
“Deputy,” Javi said. He shrugged his jacket on and tugged it straight over his holster. “What brings you up here? Did you hear from the academy?”
She looked startled, as though he’d gone off script, although her ambition to join the Bureau was all they talked about.
“No. Not yet.” She ran her hand over damp frizzy hair to flatten it down. “I, um… don’t want to step out of line, Agent. It’s just… um… I thought you’d want to know.”
Javi’s stomach curdled with expectant tension as he filled in the rest of the conversation for himself. It was one he’d had before. He wasn’t in the closet, but he preferred discretion to PDAs in the hallway, and that encouraged the gossips who thought they had something on him. At least with Tancredi, he supposed she might actually think he wanted to know, not just be curious to see his face when he heard the slurs.
“If someone has a problem with my sexu—”
“No,” Tancredi blurted. Color bright enough to camouflage her dark spray of freckles spread up her face from her throat. “It’s not that. Or it is, but not— Deputy Witte was injured on duty. He’s alive. He’s not in danger, but I knew you and he…. I thought you’d want to know.”
Javi stared at her. He’d been so ready to get angry, his temper already revved up and prechilled, that it took him a second to shake it off. When it was gone, he was left with a bitter metallic taste in his mouth and a frustrated knot of emotions he had no desire to untangle.