He shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to try and drive stick, but I got here okay. I’m fine, Tancredi. You don’t need to mother me.”
She wrinkled her nose and pushed her hair back from her face, blunt fingers busy as she tidied the knots back into her braid. “I barely like mothering my own kid,” she said. “And he’s awesome, so don’t flatter yourself. I just wanted to check that…. Where are you headed?”
Cloister pushed Bourneville’s head out of the way and climbed into the car. “Hospital,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like Janet’s going to get many visitors.”
He started the engine. Tancredi took a long step backward, folded her arms, and tucked her fingers unhappily into the fold of her elbows. She shook her head. “Witte, Frome told you to drop it.”
“Yeah.” Cloister said as braced his cast against the wheel. “I heard.”
CHAPTER SIX
CLOISTER LEFTthe car windows open. He was confident no one was going to steal it. Bourneville stood in the back seat, her water on the floor next to her, and waited for him to take her with him.
“I think you’d make people feel better,” Cloister said as he reached in and scratched under her chin. “The authorities disagree. I won’t be long. Stay. Be good.”
She huffed and lay down. Her tail twitched against the old patched pleather in the hope that it was just a test and he’d change his mind. Instead of her, he grabbed the packet of Tylenol off the front seat and dry-swallowed two of them on the way into the hospital.
The reception area looked like a spa. It was all white tiles, glass, and walls painted a shade of pink that some consultant had probably said would be soothing. It reminded Cloister of the sickly, sticky antibiotics he used to get as a kid whenever he was sick. There was hardly anyone there—just pockets of people who looked either exhausted, traumatized, or completely confused about where to go.
Cloister knew. He might do his best to keep himself out of hospitals, but that didn’t mean other people didn’t end up there. One meth dealer who’d sampled some bad product had run straight into a plate-glass window and through it and picked himself up for another lap of the neighborhood. Then there were the hikers he escorted back out of the desert with broken ankles and dry water bottles. He supposed that one day he’d get inured to the place as innocuous visits outweighed old traumas, but not so far.
He limped down the hall to the ward and stopped one of the nurses.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Janet Morrow?” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and flashed the star. “Deputy Witte.”
The nurse—Luke Ivan, from his ID tag—checked the badge and then looked Cloister over, from his dog-hair-covered jeans—Bon had been particularly generous today—to the stitched knot on his forehead. Once he’d taken it all in, he raised his eyebrows.
“I didn’t know the sheriff’s department did dress-down days,” he said skeptically.
“They don’t,” Cloister admitted. He never was a good liar. “I was the one who found her. I—”
“Got hit by a car, sneaked out before the doctors had finished with you,” Ivan finished for him. A faint smirk curled his mouth when Cloister gave him a startled look. “Oh, we’ve all heard that story. You just made me twenty dollars by not dying in the night.”
“You’re welcome?”
Ivan flashed a thin, dry smile and pointed. “Ms. Morrow is down there. Room 141. Your colleagues are already with her.”
That was news. Cloister frowned, but before he could ask any questions, Ivan gave him a brisk nod and loped away down the hall to intercept a solemn young doctor in scrubs and redirect him two doors down.
Cloister had his hand half-lifted to fire off a question to Mel before he remembered he was out of uniform—no radio, no gun, no idea who was in Janet’s room when he knew Frome hadn’t sent anyone.
“Shit.”
He broke into a jog as he dodged around the people and equipment in the hallway. An old woman in a dark pink nightgown huffed as he went around her, her softly pleated face furious as she barked “No running in the halls” after him. He threw an apology back to her as he skidded to a stop in front of the door and opened it a crack.
“… I’d appreciate a heads-up on the report—” The familiar voice paused and then sharpened as Javi snapped, “Yes, what is it?”
Cloister pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped into the room. The bed was hidden from view with a sterile blue privacy curtain. It was thin enough that Cloister could see the silhouette of someone on the other side as they moved around the bed. Javi stood in the corner of the room by the one narrow window with a view of the parking lot. When he saw Cloister, he frowned with a flash of irritation that soured his sharp, handsome face.
“Special Agent Merlo,” Cloister said awkwardly. “I wanted to check on how Janet—Ms. Morrow—was. I didn’t expect there to be anyone else here.”
It felt awkward, as though he were talking to a stranger and not the man he’d fucked for two months—or even the friend who shook him awake every twenty minutes last night. There were other things Cloister wanted to say to Javi, like thanks for last night, for once he probably hadn’t been fine on his own, and sorry for the fit of temper at the crack of dawn. What the kiss meant. He didn’t know if he wanted to ask that, but he probably needed to.
Cloister knew how easy it was to convince yourself that a scrap of affection meant something more, that you could thrive on it like a kid with fifty dollars in his pocket and two months until he could enlist, convinced gas station coffee and hot dogs was a healthy diet. People took what they could get and convinced themselves it was all they wanted. It was better to be clear where you stood.
But this wasn’t the time or place for that conversation. There was a doctor who didn’t need to know their business and a dying girl who made Cloister feel selfish for worrying about himself. So he let the words settle at the bottom of his mind and waited for Javi to say something.
After a second, Javi tucked his phone into his jacket pocket and stepped away from the window.
