The pause was longer that time. In the background of the call, Javi could hear football on the TV and someone asking if Sean wanted the leftovers.
“Yeah,” Sean said slowly. “I’d almost forgotten that. She was yelling abuse at everyone, accusing them of talking behind her back and taking her kid from her. It gave her the horrors all night long. In the end they had to send her to the hospital. Thing is, she didn’t even have a kid. Not one her medical records knew about.”
Javi picked up his phone and flicked the speaker off. “When you get her mother’s contact details, let me know.”
“Sure,” Sean drawled. “And don’t worry about owing me. The chance to enjoy your delightful company again is payment enough. Although, if you’re feeling generous, send your hot friend round with some good whiskey. He can leave the dog at home.”
With a dirty laugh, Sean hung up before Javi could do the same to him. Javi curled his lip in a sneer and dumped the phone in his pocket.
“Shows what you know,” he muttered. “He never leaves the dog at home.”
IT WASlate, and Javi was tired despite the buzz of Red Bull jittering under his skin. So he should have been on his way home to quinoa salad leftovers and his own bed, not driving an hour through the city to find the street where the Filling Station had its parking spot for the night.
Yet there he was.
The powder-blue-and-white food truck was parked outside the Gas Station, a classy nightclub close enough to the bad part of town to give it a certain scandalous cachet. The old neonGeneral Gasolinesign was the only bit of the original lot left, but it was in pride of place over the door.
Javi stood in a line that was two-thirds giggly, altered-state clubgoers and one-third people who really wanted roast goat tacos at past midnight. The grinning teenager on the counter handed out Styrofoam boxes and paper bags of takeout with the confidence of practice. Some of them he just tossed out into the crowd, shouting the order as a heads-up for whichever customer had wandered away from their station.
It was controlled chaos. Javi struggled with the urge to make it controlled order. All it would take was two straight lines of people, lining up at one side to order and the other for pickup. Tidy, efficient, and not in the way of everyone else on the street. Javi sidestepped around a tottering couple not paying attention to where they were going as they tried to Uber while tipsy.
On the small TV set up on the corner of the counter, small men in brightly colored uniforms chased an even smaller ball across a field.
“¡Eeeh puto!” one of the men at the front of the line whooped drunkenly as the goalkeeper got the ball. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled wetly.
The slur made Javi itch. He wasn’t the only one either. A mutter of disapproval eddied through the crowd.
“Shut up, dude.”
“Fuck sake.”
“There’s always one.”
The teenager at the counter huffed a sigh. He stopped in the middle of dousing the tamales with western sauce, grabbed the remote, and changed the channel with a scrape of static. The footballers disappeared, and the familiar, earnest face of the local newscaster appeared instead.
“…Amber alert is still ongoing for a missing local boy,” she said, mugging sadness with her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth. An out-of-date picture of Drew flashed on the screen, and the emergency number scrolled under it. “Drew Hartley has now been missing for over—”
The kid flicked the TV to another news station. This time to footage of—according to the ticker at the bottom—the San Francisco band Crossroad Gin’s resurrection tour. The men on stage looked too young to have gotten to the reunion stage of their careers, but maybe when you were that pretty, things moved faster.
The mundane chatter of his brain couldn’t distract him from the weight of the Hartley investigation. When Saul revived Javi’s career by inviting him to Plenty, he probably hadn’t imagined Javi would pay him back by failing to rescue his grandchild. The fact that Javi found Birdie Utkin’s corpse after all these years probably wouldn’t console Saul either.
Maybe if it were guilt, it wouldn’t be so bad. But Javi couldn’t pretend he didn’t know it looked bad for his prospects. Not career ending, not yet, anyhow, but not good either. His first high-profile case since Saul’s death, his first investigation as the lead agent, and while he was confident it would end with their suspect in jail, that wouldn’t matter if they brought home a body to bury instead of reuniting a little boy with his family.
The girl ahead of him got her order, ripped it open, and dug into the taco as she turned around. Sucking sauce off her fingers, she sidled around him. The kid behind the counter gave Javi an easy smile, offensively chipper for the time of night.
“Hey,” he said, squinting at Javi in recognition. “Back again? What can I get you this time, sir?”
He was young enough, and Javi was just about old enough, that the sir made him flinch inside a little. Ignoring that, Javi glanced over the kid’s shoulder at the specials scrawled in white and blue chalk on the blackboard.
“Four tacos de tripa and four tacos de buche.”
“Guess you’re hungry,” the kid said. “Good to see. It won’t be a minute.”
He took the cash Javi handed him, shoved it into the apron tied around his waist, and passed the order down to the older man doing the carving. It took over a minute, but not by much, for them to finish the order and swing it over the counter in a heavy, damp paper bag.
Javi tucked his hand under it as he took it and felt the heat of it against his palm. It smelled of sweet meat spiced with oregano and cumin. Like the stained Tupperware boxes his grandmother would bring home when she went to visit her friends and tipsily shared with him as she condemned his mother as a bad cook—which was the pot insulting the kettle, of course.
It was comfort food, nostalgia masquerading as appetite, and he’d ordered far more than he could eat on his own. He pretended to weigh his options as he walked back to the car. He could freeze the food, he could give it to a homeless person, he could leave it to stink his apartment out with the smell of last night’s takeout—but he already knew what he was going to do.
