She didn’t bother to wait for an answer. Cloister couldn’t blame her for that. If she knew him well enough to remember his birthday, she knew he wasn’t going to be asleep at six thirty in the morning.
“Could you come down to the impound yard?” There was a pause as she turned away from the phone and yelled, “Be quiet!” It made no difference, but she must have moved out of earshot, because the angry voices were muffled. “I want you to have a look at something.”
Cloister sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m still officially on sick leave,” he said.
“You’re still officially a witness,” Tancredi fired back. “There’s a pickup here that I think might be the vehicle that hit you, but I need a good reason to refuse to release it. Five minutes.”
She waited. Cloister ran through the logistics in his head. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Will that work?”
“Well, it’s better than thirty,” she said resignedly. “Just get here before the owner follows through on calling her lawyer. See you soon.”
She hung up on him. Cloister sat for a second as he tried to remember anything about the pickup other than how hard it was when it hit him. He had to have seen something. The street was dark, but his eyes had adjusted by then, and he had the flashlight. But his brain didn’t seem to have retained any of that. All it had was the size of the pickup and the shock of impact.
Maybe once he saw the pickup, it would jar something loose.
He dragged his shoes on and went back out. Javi had already tossed the toast and was about to throw the eggs in the trash. Bourneville took the scrape of a fork on china to mean the meal was over and she was allowed to look pointedly at the food again. She sat just outside the threshold of the kitchen and watched Javi intently as he worked.
“I assumed breakfast was done,” Javi said. He glanced at Bon and raised his eyebrows. “Can I give her some? I know you don’t like other people feeding her.”
“Strangers,” Cloister corrected him. “She’ll eat some eggs if you give them to her.”
Javi gave Bourneville’s jaw a dubious look and spooned some eggs onto a plate. He put it down on the floor.
“Bourneville?” Cloister nudged Bon’s shoulder with his knee to make sure she paid attention. “Take it.”
She huffed happily and trotted over to wolf up the dollop of eggs. The plate rattled against the floor as she nosed it around in circles in case she missed any. Her tail thumped Javi’s legs, and he cautiously edged away.
“I need to go into the station.”
“Me too,” Javi said. “I’ll drop you off”
Cloister gave Javi a surprised look. He didn’t care what people knew or didn’t know about him usually. He never had to. K-9 handlers didn’t tend to get promotions—he never really wanted one anyway—and assholes generally found easier prey than someone as big and mean-looking as Cloister. That didn’t hold true for Javi, and he preferred to keep his private life… private.
“Someone could see us?” Cloister pointed out.
Javi gave his hands a brisk scrub under the tap.
“You were hit by a car a couple of days ago,” he said. “I might not be as popular around Plenty as Saul was, but I don’t think anyone will see me giving you a lift and jump to me sexually preying on invalids.”
Cloister chuckled. “Is that what last night was?” he asked.
“Last night? No.” Javi walked over and hooked his fingers into the waistband of Cloister’s borrowed sweats. His knuckles brushed chilly against Cloister’s stomach as Javi pulled him in for a quick, coffee-bitter kiss. “If I recall correctly, you preyed on me.”
Cloister smiled against Javi’s mouth. “I like the sound of that.”
Javi bit the curve of Cloister’s lower lip and then let it slip from between his teeth as he stepped back. “Or maybe you prayed. Something like that.”
He walked out of the kitchen, and Cloister snorted and called after him, “Yeah, I used to get them confused when I was a kid too.”
FOR SOMEreason Cloister expected the pickup to be red, colored by the dream memory of a toy car he never had. Instead he stood on the impound lot, the stretch of uneven tarmac a heat sink as the temperature rose, and stared at a glossy coffee-bronze Chevy striped with polished silver chrome and streaks of dried mud.
At least if it were red, there would have been something familiar about it.
“Anything?” Tancredi asked hopefully as she looked up at him.
“I don’t know,” Cloister said. He walked around the pickup as he tried to recognize any details that matched between the rich man’s work toy and his memory of a dark shape. “Give me a minute.”
Tancredi fanned herself with a clipboard as she followed him, short curls fluffed around her ears. The heat had taken the starch out of the collar of her T-shirt, and it slouched limply over her collarbones. “It was towed in on Saturday morning. Someone left it parked illegally in the Heights, doors unlocked, keys in the ignition. They probably hoped that someone would get rid of it for them.”
