Javi tried to straighten up and nearly tipped over instead. His head was thick, stuffed with wool, and it seemed to take a very long time for information to make its way along his nerves. Everything felt slow. The ground suddenly bounced up toward him, and it took far too long for him to register the crack of his knees on wood.
“What did you give me?” he asked. Or tried to. The words sounded odd.
“I think you know,” Matthew said. When he wasn’t pretending to be someone else, his voice was a husky tenor. He walked over—the sound of his boots on the floor was painfully loud in Javi’s ears—and crouched down. “A higher dose, though, and some GHB. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Fuck.
Javi tried to get to his feet, but Matthew caught him under the arms. His breath, up close, was sour, and now that he’d taken his sunglasses off, Javi could see his pupils were blown.
“You wanted to know where Drew was,” Matthew pointed out.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
THE PHONErang twice, and someone picked up. The sound that came down the line was more of a grunt than a greeting, though. Cloister leaned against the door of the bull pen and kept one eye on the main entrance as he tucked the phone against his ear.
“Bo, you still owe me?” he asked the grunt.
“You know I do. Hold on,” she said.
Fabric rustled, and a woman’s voice said something querulous in the background. After a minute and the click of a door shutting, Bo came back on the line.
“What do you need? Please tell me it’s a wingman for another trip down to Mexico?”
Cloister snorted. Last time he went over the border with Bo was an experience he wasn’t in a hurry to repeat. A busload of college students had taken the wrong turn and rolled the bus on a back road. The ones who weren’t trapped or injured had decided to hike back to the road. Except it wasn’t in the direction they thought it was. The two of them—along with the border patrol agent with them—had the job of tracking down the hikers. And those kids managed to go surprisingly far in entirely the wrong direction.
“No. You ever work with a firefighter called Ben Scanlon?”
“Work with him, no. I’ve seen him around, though. He still drinks with us. Why?”
“He might know something that can help with this missing-kid case.”
“The Hartley boy.” It wasn’t a question.
A flint clicked and sparked, and Cloister heard the deep inhale against his ear. “In your line of work, don’t you need your lungs?”
“Not since they put me on desk duty.” The exhale was long and slow. It bought time for Bo to think too. “Is he a suspect? Because I won’t be able to back up anything I tell you on the stand.”
“He’s not a suspect. We’ve got a request in for his personnel file, but before it arrives, I just need to know if he’s a stand-up guy or—”
“Like I said, he still drinks with us,” Bo said. “Scanlon is old school, hard-nosed, but fair and all that. He still has friends out here. The guys he trained back in the day always buy him a drink. He’s made no bones about the fact he doesn’t like women firefighters, and I keep my distance, but he’s never gotten directly in my face about it.”
“Do you know why he quit?”
Instead of answering, Bo took another delaying puff on the cigarette. As Cloister waited, he saw the main door open and a wiry bald man with a lot of beard walk in. He said something to Andy on the desk, who pointed him to the bench. While the man sat down, Andy glanced back at Cloister and nodded.
There he was.
Cloister pushed himself off the door and turned the phone over on his shoulder for a second. He glanced back into the bull pen and caught Tancredi’s attention. “We’re up.”
She hopped to her feet and shuffled all the reports she’d been reading back into their file. Cloister put the phone back to his ear in time to catch Bo’s irritation as she realized she’d wasted words on a dead line.
“Sorry,” Cloister said. “Speak of the devil. What did you say?”
“He jumped before he was pushed,” Bo said. “Never did anything that put anyone’s life directly at risk. But he turned a blind eye. He did some favors. You know how it goes.”
“Okay. Thanks, Bo.”
She grunted and hung up. Cloister turned to Tancredi, who had just pulled the pen out of her hair. She raised an eyebrow at him expectantly.
