Chapter Thirty
BOURNEVILLE GAVEtwo piercing barks and raked at the door to the shed. It was old, and the dry-rotted wood crumbled under Bourneville’s nails, but the padlock screwed into it was brand new.
“We’ve found something,” Cloister yelled. He loped through the scrub of half-grown saplings and hopped over a foot-wide groove in the ground that, in wetter years, probably held water. Bourneville barked at him again. She backed away from the door and circled the structure with her tail wagging eagerly as she sniffed, barked, and raked each wall.
By the time Cloister reached the shed, she was back at the door. She pressed her nose against the crack and whined fretfully as she waited for him to open it. He grabbed the padlock and wrenched as hard as he could. Half the screws tore out of the wood and dropped splinters and sawdust on Bourneville. She shook her head and sneezed but didn’t move. Another wrench, and the lock came away in his hand.
He dropped it, and Bourneville pushed the door open with her nose before he had a chance. She wriggled through the gap and barked again. Her tail thumped against the walls. Cloister pushed the door open the rest of the way and ducked inside.
Drew Hartley lay on the floor. He was flushed, his hair sweat spiky and his eyes sunken, and he wasn’t moving. Not even with Bourneville barking in his ear. There was a big bottle of water next to him, but it was empty.
“Ruhig,” Cloister told Bourneville. “Shut up, girl.”
She obediently stopped barking, and he absently praised her as he crouched down. People ran around outside, yelling orders and commands through the trees. It felt very distant as Cloister leaned over and tucked his fingers under Drew’s chin to take his pulse.
It was slow, but it was there.
Relief made Cloister sag. He slid his hand back to cup Drew’s skull for a second. “You’re going home, Drew,” he said.
“IT WASthe Santa Anas that set him off,” Cloister said. He sat on the bench of the ambulance as it bumped and shuddered its way along the backroads. “They were bad that year when his family died.”
Javi lay on the thin white sheet, his jaw clenched and an IV plugged into the crook of his arm. There was gauze over his eye, and bruises had started to bloom on his ribs and jaw.
“I knew it,” Javi said. “The car?”
“Same one,” Cloister said. He paused and corrected himself. “Same make and model, anyhow.”
“And the boy?” Javi opened his good eye enough to squint at Cloister. “How’s he?”
“Alive.”
Javi closed his eye again. “There’s a lot of leeway there.”
The ambulance hit a bump, and Cloister reached over to steady Javi on the bed. He pressed down on Javi’s shoulder as the driver yelled an apology back to them.
“Sorry,” Cloister said after a second. He took his hand back. “Drew was drugged and dehydrated, but he didn’t seem hurt otherwise. The paramedics seemed optimistic, but until he wakes up….”
He shrugged his helplessness.
“And you?” Javi asked. “You found the missing boy. You’re going to be the hero of the moment.”
There was a faint, resentful edge to Javi’s voice that made Cloister feel awkward. He didn’t have any ambition. He was a man of simple tastes—he liked dogs, finding people, and the occasional beer. But people who did have ambition never believed that.
It wasn’t as though it even made him feel any better, finding Drew. It never did. He was glad Drew was unhurt and was going to get to see his family, but it didn’t lift any weight off Cloister. Tonight he wouldn’t sleep any better.
There was probably a way to explain that, but it seemed hard. Cloister reached down and petted Bourneville instead, and she curled up around his feet. “She did the heavy lifting. Maybe she’ll get the key to the city.”
Javi snorted. He lifted the hand that wasn’t tethered to the IV and ground his knuckles into his forehead hard enough to leave dents in his skin. It took him a minute to breathe through whatever drug-cocktail peak he’d just reached. Once he did he let his arm go slack over his forehead.
“At least Mr. Utkin will know he was right about his daughter’s boyfriend.”
The bumps and sharp corners of the back roads turned into the stop-and-start progress of the center of town. Cloister stood up as much as he could with the low roof and checked out the back window.
“Nearly at the hospital,” he said.
Another grunt.
Cloister turned back and studied the long sprawl of Javi’s battered body, the scrapes and bruises. He hardly knew him, and Javi had made it clear he didn’twantCloister to get to know him, but he would have liked to.
