by TA Moore
“You tried to kill Galloway.”
“Not me,” Hewitt said sharply. “I’ve never killed anyone. All those years on the force, and I never had a fatality on my record. That’s why I didn’t just kill Macintosh back then. I never thought I had the nerve to actually do it, not in cold blood. That’s why I sent Macintosh. He was cold-blooded enough to do it. But I guess that all that booze had taken the edge off Mac the Knife.”
“And Frome?” Cloister asked. “He’s your friend.”
Hewitt did the mute mouth click again, as though he’d rather not think about that yet.
“You do what you have to. Someone has to take the blame,” he said. “He took my career, the promotions I should have had. So maybe it’s fair. Better him than me, in the end.”
Cloister spat sweat off his upper lip. “Not exactly going to work now, is it?”
“I think I can make it work,” Hewitt said reasonably. He swung the gun up and stopped Cloister in his tracks as he stepped forward. “You know, I don’t think it’s going to be as hard as I thought it would be to murder someone.”
As he tightened his finger on the trigger, Bourneville lunged over Janet’s wheelchair, her paws raked over the girl’s cheap T-shirt nightgown, and she latched on to Hewitt’s wrist. Without the padded sleeve of a bite suit, her teeth sank straight into meat and down to bone. Stunned, Hewitt gave a high-pitched squeal and pitched forward as Bourneville’s weight dragged him down.
He took the already battered and misused wheelchair with him, and all three bodies hit the ground. Janet sprawled out, stiff as a doll where she was splinted into plaster casts, and the other two scuffled on top of her.
“Get it off me,” Hewitt yelled. He flailed blindly, and his fists connected with Janet’s back as often as Bourneville’s padded back and shoulders. “Frome’ll die if I don’t tell you where he is! Dead as fucking Macintosh!”
Cloister scrambled forward and grabbed Janet. She whimpered and clung to him with weak fingertips as he dragged her out of the crushed chair. Her eyes were unfocused, blank and bruised, and she obviously had no idea where she was, but she was awake. The end of her braid caught in the broken spokes of the chair, and she moaned as it yanked at her scalp.
“It’s okay,” Cloister told her. He shifted her weight to one arm and leaned back in to untangle her.
The thick knot of hair was almost free when Hewitt managed to land a kick to Bourneville’s stomach. She whuffed as the air was knocked out of her, and her grip on Hewitt’s wrist loosened enough for him to yank it free. Blood poured from the lacerated joint, and bone was visible through the torn meat as Hewitt swung back and coldcocked Cloister with the butt of the pistol.
It caught Cloister right on the seam of bruise that still stained up into his hairline. The unexpected pain almost blinded Cloister with a hot pulse of red that screwed back into his brain like an auger. He fell back in dazed confusion, and red dripped down over his vision as the split stitches in his scalp peeled loose.
Hewitt kicked the broken chair at Bourneville and scrambled to his feet. He fell back onto the Merc’s hood and clumsily traded the gun from one hand to the other. Cloister wiped the blood from his eyes just in time to see Bourneville gather herself to lunge at Hewitt again.
Panic washed over Cloister in a sick wave that hurt more than his head. He knew how fast Bourneville was, and how fast a bullet was. This time she wouldn’t be quick enough. Cloister tried to call her off, but he couldn’t get the words out in time.
She jumped, and Cloister squeezed his eyes shut. He heard the gun go off and Bourneville bark a sharp little sound.
Coward, he thought bitterly.
“Don’t shoot the dog,” Javi said. “I don’t even like dogs, and I know that makes you an asshole.”
Cloister opened his eyes. His face was all blood again. He wiped it away on the back of his cast while Bourneville, whole and uninjured, did her best to crawl into his lap and lick it clean for him. Her tongue went up his nose and into his ears until he finally managed to grab her narrow muzzle and push it aside.
He looked up at Javi.
“Thank you,” he said,
Javi held his hand out. “Next time?” he growled as he yanked Cloister unceremoniously to his feet. “Wait.”
Cloister thought he had a concussion. He swallowed bile as the pain rolled around inside his head like a marble. Then he pressed the heel of his hand against his brow bone. “Is he….”
Hewitt groaned before Cloister had to finish the question. His arm hung from what was left of his shoulder, but he was still breathing. More importantly, so was Janet. Cloister went back down clumsily onto his knees and tucked his arm under her shoulders to help her sit up.
“Where am I?” she wailed. Her voice was dry and small, parched after days of unuse. She tried to touch her lips with her fingers and then stared at her plastered forearms. “What…. I don’t remember. What happened?”
“It’s okay,” Cloister said. He patted her shoulder. “You’ll be okay.”
Javi tapped the radio attached to his vest and barked a command to “Get some doctors down here. The underground structure. Yes, again.”
EPILOGUE
“THIS IS ridiculous,” Frome said. He lay back against starched white pillows and closed his eyes. “Half of the sheriff’s department is either laid up or laid out. I don’t have time to stay in here. I have work to do, fires to put out, bad press to mitigate.”
Javi stood at the window and looked out at the swarm of reporters on the steps of the hospital. There was a certain bleak irony to the fact that the replacements for the corrupt Plenty PD had their own bad apples that the reporters seemed to enjoy.
“If I were you,” Javi said, “I’d take advantage of a few days in bed.”
They had found Frome handcuffed and unconscious in the back seat of his own car, under a tarp and a picnic blanket. It turned out Frome’s head wasn’t as sturdy as Cloister’s, and he had a fractured skull to go along with the goose egg on the back of his head.
“I still can’t believe it was Hewitt,” Frome said wearily. “We were friends. He was my partner. I felt sorry for him.”
“Everyone did,” Cloister said. “That’s why any time records on Macintosh got pulled, someone gave Hewitt a heads-up. They thought they were encouraging him to have faith that Macintosh would finally be brought to justice.”
“Instead we almost got Galloway killed,” Frome said.
Javi turned away from the window to look at him. Despite his complaints that he was wasting his time away from work, the bedside table next to Frome was piled high with reports and paperwork. He had his laptop balanced on the narrow shelf of the bed next to him and his half-finished press release preserved in Word.
“I don’t think she’ll hold a grudge,” Javi said. “It looks like Janet Morrow will be okay. Eventually. I heard Stokes has offered her a job once she’s back on her feet.”
Frome nodded. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. The thin skin wrinkled under the pressure. “I suppose in a way you were right,” he said. “It was a hate crime. Just—”
“Not the sort that comes under my purview,” Javi finished for him dryly. He still didn’t know how his involvement in the case would play out—in the positive column or as another black mark. If he had a head start on it and a good day, he could convince himself it didn’t matter. He knew he’d helped save the lives of a young woman and a talented dog.
“Any sign of Jessie and the oldest Macintosh boy?” Frome asked.
Javi shook his head. “Still in the wind,” he said. “Once they told Hewitt that Janet was coming back here, my guess was they realized he was going to need to clean house. We’ll find them. This is a harder world to disappear in, and they don’t have any help this time.”
“My report will say how invaluable your help was,” Frome told him. “We’ll have to see how much that’s worth after this.”
Javi nodded and glanced back out t
he window. “I should go. It will take me a while to get through my press gauntlet. I’m glad Hewitt hadn’t gotten around to killing you yet, Lieutenant.”
“Me too,” Frome said. “Good luck.”
Javi didn’t tell him that he didn’t need it. In the eyes of the press, for the moment, at least, he had come out ahead. First he saved a small child, and now he’d protected a vulnerable young woman. He had perhaps one more high-profile case to go before they turned on him.
THREE HOURS later Javi let himself into his apartment. He was pleasantly surprised to find Cloister still there, the long, unnecessary length of him sprawled over the couch. Now that Cloister could stand up and not list slowly to the left, Javi supposed he didn’t really need to stay over anymore.
Bourneville, stretched out along Cloister’s side, her head tucked under his chin, grunted acknowledgment that Javi had arrived. It made Cloister look around and grin.
“I saw you on TV,” he said. “I think the reporter from CNN likes you.”
“Which one?”
“The one who couldn’t take their eyes off your crotch.”
“Which one?” Javi repeated with a smirk as he stripped off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. The wine bottle on the table caught his attention. It was meant to. The bottle was placed neatly in the middle of the table like an exclamation mark. “What’s this for?”
He picked it up by the neck and raised his eyebrows as he read the label. It was one of his favorite vineyards.
“That depends,” Cloister said. He extricated himself from under Bourneville and walked up behind Javi.
“On what?”
Cloister kissed the hollow behind Javi’s ear. Pleasure quivered down Javi’s nerves and gave his cock a heads-up twitch. “Remember the first time I invited myself over?” Cloister asked. He let his hand wander down over Javi’s waist to his lean hips. “I brought chicken and said if it had been a date, I’d have brought wine? Well, I brought wine.”
“And if I don’t want it to be date?” Javi asked.
Cloister stopped his hand on Javi’s hip bone. “Well, then it’s wine to drink alone, because I haven’t got any beer left at the trailer.” He bit a row of kisses from Javi’s ear down to his collarbone. “No hard feelings.”
“Of course not,” Javi said. He set the bottle down. “I need to talk to you first.”
He felt Cloister’s mouth stretch into a smile against his throat. “Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
Javi wanted to say yes. He did. Instead he pulled away and walked over to the window where they’d first had sex. The handprints had been washed away, but he could monitor Cloister’s reflection in the glass.
“It’s about what happened in Phoenix,” he said.
“I don’t need to know,” Cloister said.
“You should want to know,” Javi said. “You should want to know what sort of man you’re buying good wine for.”
“I don’t want a lot of stuff,” Cloister said. He looked down at his feet and scratched his head. “I guess I never thought I deserved it, not just for being the one who didn’t disappear. But I want that birthday drink, and I want you. Phoenix isn’t going to change that.”
“Maybe it should,” Javi said. He’d kept it to himself for so long, kept it out of sight and out of mind for as long as he could, that it felt like a huge story. Now that he’d started, he could only think of a few sentences. “We had a witness in Phoenix—big corruption trial—and they got cold feet about testifying. Our whole case was going to collapse, and suddenly it was on me to talk him around… because he was attracted to me. Except this time it wasn’t good enough to just talk him around. So I fucked him.”
Bourneville came up to push her nose into his hand. Javi gingerly petted her narrow, sharp-boned head, her fur like velvet under his fingers.
“He loved you,” Cloister said.
“He did. I didn’t love him. I tried to convince myself I did afterward, but I didn’t,” Javi said. “One night he wanted to come and see me, to have me reassure him that testifying was the right thing. It wasn’t protocol. He shouldn’t have been there, but there had never been a problem. Except that night I wasn’t there. We don’t know who was, still, but they killed him. I didn’t love him, but I did like him, and it was my fault.”
It didn’t feel any lighter to have that off his conscience. There was no relief from that old guilt, just new worry that Cloister would realize what he was. At best Javi felt distantly glad to have gotten it over with.
“Is that everything?” Cloister asked.
Javi found Cloister’s reflection in the glass. It wasn’t a good enough image to let him read Cloister’s expression, but he could pick out the familiar lines of it. “The agency has assigned a new supervisory agent to the Plenty substation,” he said. “SSA Joel was the one who found Paul that night and got him to the hospital. I doubt her opinion of me has improved in the last few years.”
Kincaid was stuck in his throat. Maybe later after a drink… or three.
Silence hung in the apartment for a second, and Javi watched Cloister pick up the bottle of wine from the table. Then Cloister whistled sharply between his teeth.
“Bon. Fetch,” he said.
Javi flinched in surprise as sharp, cold teeth closed gently around his wrist. Hot breath panted against his skin as Bourneville pulled him away from the window. She wagged her tail proudly as she dragged him over to the table, dropped his hand, and looked up expectantly at Cloister.
“Good girl,” Javi said.
She gave him a puzzled look, head tilted to one side and then to the other, but decided to accept it. With a low, grumbled noise, she padded back over to the couch and flopped out.
“That guy in Phoenix,” Cloister said as he handed the wine to Javi. “He thought you were worth the risk.”
“I wasn’t,” Javi said.
“That’s not up to you,” Cloister told him. “The wine’s yours. Do you want me to stay too?”
Javi cupped Cloister’s chin in his hand and pulled him down for a slow, lazy kiss. At least it started that way.
More from TA Moore
Digging Up Bones: Book One
Cloister Witte is a man with a dark past and a cute dog. He’s happy to talk about the dog all day, but after growing up in the shadow of a missing brother, a deadbeat dad, and a criminal stepfather, he’d rather leave the past back in Montana. These days he’s a K-9 officer in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and pays a tithe to his ghosts by doing what no one was able to do for his brother—find the missing and bring them home.
He’s good at solving difficult mysteries. The dog is even better.
This time the missing person is a ten-year-old boy who walked into the woods in the middle of the night and didn’t come back. With the antagonistic help of distractingly handsome FBI agent Javi Merlo, it quickly becomes clear that Drew Hartley didn’t run away. He was taken, and the evidence implies he’s not the kidnapper’s first victim. As the search intensifies, old grudges and tragedies are pulled into the light of day. But with each clue they uncover, it looks less and less likely that Drew will be found alive.
Divorce lawyer Clayton Reynolds is a happy cynic who believes in hard work and one-night stands. He also believes that being an excellent lawyer means he never has to go home to the miserable trailer park where he grew up and that volunteering at a women’s shelter will buy off the conscience that occasionally plagues him. So when Nadine Graham comes in with a broken arm and a son she desperately wants to protect, Clayton can’t turn down their plea for help.
Taking the case means appealing to investigator “Just Call Me Kelly” for help. That wouldn’t be so bad if Kelly weren’t a hopeless romantic… and the hottest man Clayton’s ever met.
Kelly has always had a crush on the unobtainable Clayton Reynolds. He agrees to help, even though he has enough on his plate with the motherless baby his widowed brother left him to care for.
As Nadine’s case turns dan
gerous and the two seemingly opposite men are forced to work together, they discover they have a great deal in common—but solving the case and saving Nadine’s life might cost Kelly everything.
Just another day at the office.
For some people that means spreadsheets, and for others it’s stitching endless hems. For Jacob Archer a day at the office is stealing proprietary information from a bioengineering firm for a paranoid software billionaire. He’s a liar and a thief, parlaying a glib tongue and a facile conscience into a lucrative career. He just has one rule—never get involved with a mark.
Well, had one rule. To be fair, though, Simon Ramsey is dark, dangerous, and has shoulders like a Greek statue. Besides, it’s not as though Jacob’s even really stealing from Simon… just his boss and his brother-in-law. Simon didn’t buy that excuse either after he caught Jacob breaking into the company’s computer network.
That would have been that—one messy breakup, one ticket to Bali booked—but it turns out that the stolen information is worth more than Jacob thought. With his life—and his ribs—threatened, Jacob needs Simon to help him out. Or maybe he just needs Simon.
A Wolf Winter Novel
The world ends not with a bang, but with a downpour. Tornadoes spin through the heart of London, New York cooks in a heat wave that melts tarmac, and Russia freezes under an ever-thickening layer of permafrost. People rally at first—organizing aid drops and evacuating populations—but the weather is only getting worse.
In Durham, mild-mannered academic Danny Fennick has battened down to sit out the storm. He grew up in the Scottish Highlands, so he’s seen harsh winters before. Besides, he has an advantage. He’s a werewolf. Or, to be precise, a weredog. Less impressive, but still useful.
Except the other werewolves don’t believe this is any ordinary winter, and they’re coming down over the Wall to mark their new territory. Including Danny’s ex, Jack—the Crown Prince Pup of the Numitor’s pack—and the prince’s brother, who wants to kill him.