“Not yet,” he told her.
Javi extracted himself from the journalists and strode over to Cloister. “I need a local officer to take point on an interview.”
“You’d be better off with Tancredi,” Cloister said. “She’s sharp.”
“I don’t need sharp. I need…” Javi paused and chewed over the word choice. “…approachable. I’ve already cleared it with Frome.”
Approachable? Cloister wasn’t sure he appreciated that description. For most of his life, looking like the guy most likely to throw a punch had helped him avoid having to throw any punches. He caught himself scowling and pulling his eyebrows down in his best off-putting brood. Javi looked unimpressed.
“I guess I don’t have a choice, then,” he said.
“It was your hunch,” Javi said. He glanced down at Bourneville and frowned. “We can take your car too. It already smells of dog.”
The dull, guilty feeling that had been gnawing at Cloister since he rolled off Javi’s couch took its teeth out of him. He pushed himself off the wall and held his tongue on the questions he wanted to ask. The media already had too many theories about the case. They didn’t need any more.
“SO YOU’REnot straight,” Javi said. He’d rolled the window down and laid his arm along the edge of the door. Black-lensed sunglasses hid his eyes. Glancing over at him, Cloister wasn’t sure that being able to see his eyes would help. Fucking Javi hadn’t made him any easier to read.
“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,” he said as he swung his attention back to the road. A crow sat in the road ahead of them, pecking and pulling at sun-dried roadkill. Whatever it was had been there long enough and gone under enough tires that all he could say for sure was that it was once brownish in color. The crow waited until it was dangerously close to joining its dinner before it took off and half flapped and half hopped to the side of the road to wait for them to pass. Bourneville ruffed at it through the back window with her “I’m in the work car, so I gotta behave, but I see you” bark. Cloister reached back one-handed to give her a pat. “I can see how you got into the FBI.”
He didn’t need to look at Javi to know he was being glared at. He could feel it on the side of his face.
“I never said I was straight.”
“You never said you weren’t.”
“That’s because that would be weird,” Cloister said. He tugged the hem of his shirt. He’d changed into the spare gear he kept in the car, but it covered over a morning’s worth of dust and sweat. It itched. “What did you want me to do, pull you aside in the middle of a manhunt and say, ‘By the way, I like cock’? Besides, if you thought I was straight, what exactly did you think was going to happen last night?”
There was a pause, and then Javi snorted. “Ninety percent chance of an ugly scene, 10 percent chance of ‘I was bi all along,’” he said. “Either way, I’d get to stop wondering what you’d do if I stuck my cock in you.”
The mirror at the Rottsdown Road blind turn caught the sun, and the flash of reflected light made Cloister squint. He took the turn and slanted another look at Javi once the road straightened out again.
“I’m a redneck and a police officer,” he said. “What if I’d pulled a gun?”
Javi snorted.
Cloister wasn’t sure if he should take that as an insult or not. Maybe it was because he was “approachable.” He sneered at that idea from inside his head.
“For the record,” Javi said, “it won’t go beyond me. If you aren’t… out, I mean.”
“I’ve been out since I was fourteen and my stepdad caught me masturbating over a Colin Farrell photospread in a magazine.”
“Awkward,” Javi said. His voice sounded careful—the tone you took when you weren’t sure if you were poking a raw spot or not. “Did he… react badly?”
“Fucker laughed at me,” Cloister said. The old indignity still stung, but that wasn’t entirely fair, not to his dad. “No. I had my problems with him, but he never gave a crap about me being gay.”
“You’re lucky.”
Cloister laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Not often,” he said. “So I guess I was owed something.”
That seemed to dry up the conversation. For the next half mile, the only sound in the car was Bourneville panting in the back. The suburbs grew up around them as they drove. Dusty scrub and lizards gave way to artificially verdant patches of lawn and neighborhood watch signs.
“So, if you aren’t in the closet,” Javi said, sounding like he resented spitting the words out, “how come you made yourself scarce this morning?”
He sounded like he didn’t want to ask, and Cloister didn’t particularly want to answer. There were a load of reasons why a man crawled off a sofa after two hours’ sleep and let himself out, from a lifelong problem with affection to a need to take the dog out for a crap.
“Your couch is uncomfortable,” he said instead, picking the most innocuous truth. “Besides, admit it, you were relieved. If you had any more commitment issues, a flag saying ‘no strings’ would have popped out of your cock when you came.”
“I don’t have commitment issues,” Javi said.
