by TA Moore
“You could have just ordered coffee,” Javi said.
“Or you could have just ordered the chocolate,” Cloister pointed out as he grabbed a handful of sugar packets from the overflowing bowl by the window. He took his coffee thick enough with sugar that it was practically cake. He fumbled one-handed with the sachets as he switched back to the night’s events. “There’s no way that anyone could predict I’d get called in to find Janet. If Collins had been on his own, he’d have just slapped a ticket on the car and called it a night. No. They wanted to finish the job on Janet. I was just in the way.”
“Nothing personal,” Javi said.
He was being sarcastic, but Cloister just nodded as he tipped sugar into his coffee. “Exactly. But that makes what happened to Janet attempted murder, or murder if she dies, and Frome would… prefer it weren’t.”
For the first time, Cloister’s voice hardened with something like anger. He just shrugged off his brush with someone’s bumper, but he didn’t want anyone to do that to Janet. Someone had done a real job on Cloister at some point. Maybe more than one someone.
The low bar Javi had set for himself to pass was not to add his name to the bottom of that list. It was why he should have made the call, made a friend. Instead he scooped most of the cream off the top of his cup and dumped it on top of Cloister’s coffee.
“The council’s funding review,” he said as he sat back and took a drink. It wasn’t bad hot chocolate—not as good as his grandmother used to make, with shavings of dark chocolate carved from the block she kept wrapped up in the fridge—but good. It could do with some chili.
Cloister nodded. “Hard to argue that crime has dropped when there’s a fresh homicide on the books.” He took a drink of coffee. “Hit-and-run looks better. He’ll make the right call when he sees the evidence, but right now he’s hoping I… misread the situation.”
“He should know better.”
Cloister gave him a tired, slanting smirk from behind the coffee cup. “Says the man who thinks drones can do a better job than me and my girl.”
He gave Bourneville’s ear a gentle tug. She tilted her head back and around to look at him. When he didn’t ask her to do anything, she went back to longing at the treats.
Javi snorted at him. It was harder to defend his position since he’d seen Bourneville in action on the Hartley case. She’d saved his life, but that didn’t mean he was going to give just yet.
“Drones don’t have bad days,” he said.
“Neither does Bon.”
“Drone pilots don’t get hit by cars.”
Cloister gave him that one with a laugh that he cut short with a grimace as he tilted his head back against the booth. There was a pallid cast to his face, a hint of gray under the tan at his temples and under his cheekbones, and a tightness at the corners of his mouth. It was enough to drag Bourneville’s attention away from the treats, as she pawed at his elbow and whined.
“Sure you don’t want to go back to the hospital?” Javi asked.
“No. I’m fine.” Cloister scrubbed the strain from his face with a rough pass of his hand. “Last time I was in the hospital, the nurse dosed me with sleeping pills without telling me.”
“I can’t say I haven’t considered it,” Javi joked dryly. He preferred to sleep alone, preferred cool sheets and his own space, but when someone was there when you closed your eyes, it was disconcerting to wake up to their absence. “Did it work?”
Something haunted scraped through Cloister’s eyes, and he smiled thinly as he rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand.
“I still have nightmares,” he said. “I just can’t wake up.”
Javi had his own nightmares. Some of them were fun-house horrors dragged up out of his memories, and others were nonsense—angry clowns and naked exams. None of them dogged him like Cloister’s did, but the thought of being stuck in them still gave him a chill.
“Okay,” he said. “No pills in your beer, and no hospital. Just don’t make me regret it, Witte. Don’t die.”
Cloister laughed and then winced and sucked his breath in through his teeth as he hugged his ribs. He nudged Bourneville until she scrambled down out of the booth, and then he carefully slid out after her.
“I thought you didn’t like promises.”
He leaned over stiffly to leave a couple of bills under the plate, grabbed his cake, and limped toward the door with Bourneville at his heels. Javi glared after him. He needed to stop giving people the opportunity to use his words against him. It never felt any better.
“Have a good evening,” Kimberly singsonged as she looked up from her phone to watch them leave. She pitched her voice to follow them out the door and into the rain. “Hope you feel better soon, sweetheart.” Javi swung his jacket up over his head against the rain and glared at Cloister’s back as they headed for the car.
“I’m not going to die,” Cloister said after a second.
“I know,” Javi said as he got close enough to the car for the doors to unlock. “I’m going to stay with you and make sure you don’t.”
Cloister opened the back door of the car for Bourneville to clamber in. The heavy black bulk of her was surprisingly compact as she curled up on the old towel he’d tossed down.
“You don’t need to,” he said tiredly as he half fell into the passenger seat.
“What I don’t need is Lieutenant Frome thinking I got you killed,” Javi said harshly. It didn’t fool him—he didn’t even think it fooled the dog—but it made him feel less exposed. “So just up and appreciate the sacrifices I’m making on your behalf.”
“You’re a good friend,” Cloister mocked as he closed the door.
Javi wished that were true. Life would be a lot easier. Right then the closest he could get was being the one person in Cloister’s life who was angry that he’d been hit by a car.
CURTAINS TWITCHED in a trailer park too. Suspicious faces peered through grubby, salt-glazed windows as Javi helped Cloister limp along the rutted, uneven path. A skinny man in a sweat-stained T-shirt, his work-tanned face and arms five shades darker than his chest and shoulders, sat on the steps of his trailer and drank beer as he watched them stagger by.
“Friendly people, your neighbors,” Javi said.
Cloister snorted. “Do you even have neighbors?”
Technically. The owner of the restaurant across the road had a unit in the building for when he came to town. That was once a month, though.
“That isn’t the point,” Javi said.
Bourneville cut around his legs as they reached the battered silver bullet of Cloister’s trailer. She scrambled up the steps and pawed the door open to let herself in.
“You really do come from a very small town, don’t you,” Javi said. “One day you’re going to get robbed.”
Cloister shrugged. “Not happened yet,” he said. “And to be honest, it would cost more to fix the door if someone had to break in than it would to replace anything I own.”
It was hard for Javi to argue with that as he followed Cloister into the trailer.
Coffee and a bowl of no-brand cereal kept Cloister awake for fifteen minutes, his usual insomnia for another thirty. Eventually he let sleep win and crawled into his bed for a nap. Javi set the timer on his watch to twenty minutes and looked down at Cloister’s body, the ridiculously long, elegant sprawl of it over clean, rough sheets. He’d kicked his boots off but hadn’t bothered with anything else.
The dog’s bed probably cost more than Cloister’s.
“What?” Cloister asked as he opened one eye a crack to peer up at Javi.
“I’m trying to decide if you live like a college student or a divorced dad with a bad lawyer,” Javi said as he unbuttoned Cloister’s jeans and pulled them down his long legs.
“Or like a drifter.”
“Is this role-play?” Cloister asked with a crooked smirk. He helped kick the jeans off over his feet and sat up to drag his T-shirt off on his own. His cock lay limp between his thighs, and Ja
vi irritably squashed the flash of misplaced lust that tugged at his gut. “Usually people pick something a bit more glamorous.”
He left the T-shirt tangled around his cast and flopped back into the pillow. Somehow the bruises and scrapes that stained his body looked worse in the dim light from the bathroom than they had under the bright hospital bulbs. At a distance from the immediate relief that Cloister wasn’t dead, Javi could imagine how easily he could have been.
“You don’t have to stay,” Cloister said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Just go to sleep,” Javi told him as he freed the T-shirt and tossed it into the laundry. “I’m not going anywhere. Not tonight.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ALARM went off at five in the morning. Usually Cloister had been up for an hour—or hours—by then. Worst-case scenario, he was half-asleep as he tried to chase that “good night’s rest” people talked about, and the blare of the siren was a welcome excuse to give up.
He never realized what a godawful noise it was when you were actually asleep.
Cloister kicked sweat-tangled sheets down the bed and dragged himself out from under the clammy weight of exhaustion. It turned out that the only thing worse than insomnia was someone who poked you awake every twenty minutes to make sure you were still breathing. He should have just promised Javi not to die instead of being a smartass.
The alarm was still on as Cloister sat up and swung his legs off the end of the bed. His head swam sickly with the sudden movement, and he had to close his eyes for a second to let it settle. Lack of sleep, he wondered dryly, or being hit by a truck? Maybe it was both.
He roughly rubbed his eyes—even the blear behind his lids was bruise colored—and finally went to turn the alarm off. It took him a minute. The muscle memory that let him slap it off in passing was lost under sore bones and the damp cotton wool that packed his brain. None of the buttons he pushed or flipped seemed to do the job.
Outside the bedroom, Bourneville started to bark and paw at the door hard enough to rattle it in the frame.
“The hell with it,” Cloister muttered. He yanked the cord out of the socket, and the alarm whined itself down into silence. It went back on the nightstand, and Cloister raised his voice, or tried to. The first time he attempted to speak, the words got caught in the stickiness that clogged his throat. He coughed and tried again. “Bon. Quiet. Down.”
She made nearly the same reproachful whine into silence as the alarm clock had, and then he heard the thud as seventy pounds of well-muscled German Shepherd flopped down onto the floor of the trailer. It still wasn’t quiet. That was one of the benefits of the trailer park—there was always a dog barking at a seagull or a baby who didn’t care what time it was as it wailed for its diaper to be changed. Background noise. At least he knew he wasn’t the only one awake.
When Cloister was a kid, they lived way out on the outskirts of town, but there was always something going on. The clank and curse of his stepdad as he worked on his old project bike, the sharp, barked alerts from the dogs whenever the sheriff turned onto their drive, and the clink of beer bottles and laughter late into the night when his stepdad’s friends came around.
Back then Cloister never had trouble sleeping. He used to have to ward it off, to try to stay awake long enough to hear his uncle Drake’s story all the way through, until finally his stepdad would come and tell him to go to sleep or his eyes would dry up like raisins. It was only afterward, when the bunk over his was empty and everyone kept their voices down from pity, that he spent his nights awake. When there was no other sound in the house, the sound of his mom praying for God to bring his brother back and take him instead carried through the floor.
Cloister shied away from that memory as he pushed himself off the bed. It had been decades—and she hadn’t really meant it. He knew that, or at least she hadn’t meant him to hear, and he was a grown man, not a lost little boy. Sometimes—some days—that didn’t seem to matter. This time of year, it was always easy to pick at those old hurts and draw blood… easier than not.
His jeans lay in a knot on the floor where he’d stepped out of them the night before. The thought of bending over to grab them made his head hurt and his ribs throb. He grabbed the sheet off the bed instead and fumbled it one-handed around his waist as he headed over to open the door for Bon.
She scrambled to her feet, graced him with a curt morning bark, and padded pointedly to the door. Her tail slowly swept back and forth as she waited. She had a morning routine whether Cloister had been hit by a truck or not.
“I suppose I’d be a creature of habit too if I couldn’t open the bathroom door myself,” Cloister muttered as he limped over and pushed the door open for her. She shot down the stairs into the small garden, where the low fence was more to keep the local kids out than keep Bon in.
The rain had stopped during the night. In its wake the air had a damp, fresh taste, and a year’s worth of dust and salt had been washed off the trailers. It was the cleanest they’d been in years, even though the rain had exposed the dents and scrapes the dirt had hidden on some of the older ones.
A pale-orange cat slunk from under a trailer to take a drink from a puddle. It had belonged to some family from Nevada who thought it would be a good idea to bring the cat on a road trip. They called it Fluffy or Fluffers, at least until the dad dragged the sobbing four-year-old away by the arm and the family left for Disney.
Everyone assumed the coyotes would get the cat—or if not them, one of the hawks that sometimes floated down to the shore to pick territory fights with the gulls. The gulls usually drove them off, but people had lost little dogs or chickens before. And Fluffers was obviously an indoor cat with soft pink toe pads and gingery Siamese markings. That was a year ago. Fluffers had lost the dark-ginger tip of his tail and a chunk from one ear, and his coat had roughened and bleached in the salt air. He wasn’t tame anymore, but he was still alive and more lean rather than skinny.
Cloister hitched up the sheet securely over his hip and leaned against the doorframe. He watched as the pale cat twitched its mangled ear and looked up as it heard something. Water dripped from its long white whiskers as it waited to see how to react.
Some things thrived when introduced to a new environment. The cat had. Cloister had. He breathed in and felt his ribs cramp, the bruised tendons tight between the arch of “maybe cracked but not broken” bones.
Janet Morrow hadn’t been so lucky. Maybe she thought that a semirural California town was safer than the streets of New York. Or she just took a shortcut down the wrong street at the right time for some pervert.
The only one who might be able to tell them that was Janet… if she made it.
Cloister had been hit by a car and walked—rolled—away with a broken wrist and enough cuts and bruises to piss his sort-of-ex into talking to him again. It would have been worse if he hadn’t had his bulletproof vest on, but he was still lucky. Janet had come off worse. The doctors weren’t willing to tell him anything but platitudes—she was stable, she was in the best place, it was too soon to tell—but he overheard them talking about bleeding on the brain and internal injuries. They used words like extensive and unresponsive.
Bon had noticed the cat. She whined and stood on her back legs to look over the fence, her front paws hooked through the slats. She wagged her tail frantically as the pale cat looked up and over, and her back feet did an excited dance in the sandy mud. The cat stood up, stretched thoroughly from tail to ears, and slunk away back under the trailer. Disappointment made Bon’s tail droop, and she looked around at Cloister as though he could do something about it.
“The cat doesn’t want to be friends, Bon,” he said. “Accept it.”
Bon gave him a dismissive flick of her ear and went back to staring at the spot where the cat had been. She loved cats, and it was a source of constant disappointment that most didn’t feel the same way toward her. The stray had a special place in her affections, but it wouldn’t have any of it. Domestication had burned Flu
ffer once, and now it knew it was better off on its own.
At least they found Janet. If they’d turned back when it made sense to do so, whoever was behind the wheel of that pickup would probably have taken her out into the desert. People went missing out there on their own, just out hiking without a good plan, and weren’t found for years. If someone wanted to hide a body, it was a close place to do it. This way, at least if Janet was going to die, she wouldn’t be alone, and her family would have a body to bury.
Him and the cat…. Bon was the only one who’d miss them.
Cloister shook his head in annoyance and pushed himself off the door to get dressed. That was enough of that. He gave himself some slack to be a difficult bastard this time of year, but he drew the line at wallowing. People would miss him. He wasn’t a hermit, and he wouldn’t be left for the gulls to pick clean.
Maybe no one’s life would be ruined if he died, but he didn’t want that, anyway. It was too much responsibility to be loved that much.
THE TIP of Tancredi’s tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she put the last touches to the rat-possum-racoon she’d drawn on his cast under her name. The Sharpie scraped over the plaster as she colored in the pink hearts that floated wonkily around its head.
“I should be glad the station doesn’t have glitter gel pens, shouldn’t I?” Cloister said dryly.
“Oh yeah,” Tancredi said as she capped the pen. She stepped forward and cocked her head to the side as she studied her work for a moment and then gave a satisfied nod that bounced a stray curl over her forehead. “I would have gone hog wild with a glitter pen.”
Cloister twisted his arm around to look at the scribble right side up. “Is that supposed to be Bon or some sort of get-well racoon?”