The growl cut off instantly, and Bon pricked her ears back up. She let go of Collins’s arm and backed up two steps, tail up and ready to wag and attention on Cloister as she waited.
“Good girl,” he told her as he pulled her favorite throw toy out of his pocket. He tossed it in the air, and she jumped up to grab it. It got a shake, and then she flopped down on her stomach to chew on it assiduously. Most of her toys lasted a week. Luckily they were mostly made from Cloister’s old T-shirts braided into a rope. “Good girl, Bourneville.”
Cloister reached down and offered Collins a hand up.
“Shit,” Collins muttered as Cloister hauled him back to his feet. “I mean, I think I did. Jesus.”
Over on the fence, Kit’s trainer laughed. Cloister slapped Collins on the back.
“Did it help?” he asked.
“No!” Collins wiped his mouth on his sleeve and made a disgusted face as he realized it was covered in dog drool. He clumsily pawed it off with a gloved hand and looked over at Bon as she chewed and wagged her tail happily. “Don’t you need to pen her up or something? Until she chills out?”
“She’s fine. This is fun for her.” Cloister tugged the heavy jerkin straight over Collins’s shoulders. “Thanks for volunteering. Bon’s been bored with me on desk duty.”
Collins exhaled through tight lips. “I don’t like dogs,” he said, his words clipped as he caught his breath. “Last month I lost a suspect because he cut through a yard with some fuck-off junkyard monster in it. Gotta get over it.”
The story, when Tancredi told it, involved a midsized terrier mongrel, but Cloister let that pass unremarked. It wasn’t easy to face something that scared you. Cloister knew that better than most. He’d spent most of his life not facing a couple of hours.
“Anytime you want to play chew toy, just let me know,” he said. “I want to go and check on Tancredi to see how she’s doing. Do you want to do some work with Kit and Jenks?”
Collins looked over. “Looks like a nice dog?” he said as he pulled off the hood. His hair was sweat soaked underneath and matted down to his scalp. “But I was joking about shitting myself. I’d like to keep it that way.”
He limped off the field, and one of the other padded-up deputies loped in to take his place. While Kit got a boost over the fence, Cloister went over to clip Bon’s lead back on.
“You look like the nicer dog,” he told her. “Collins was raving.”
She sneezed and dropped the drool-sticky T-shirt rope on his foot. He picked it up and shoved it back into his belt as he headed toward his truck, and Bourneville waited at the passenger side until it opened so she could jump up and get clipped in. She yawned and flopped down for a nap while he circled around to get in his side.
He checked the clock as the dash flickered to life and the radio static spat out for a second and then tuned back into the local station. Denis down in Records had said he’d search out the files Javi requested, after a complaint about the lack of detail, but it would be another hour at least. Two was what Denis claimed, but he always padded his estimates so people didn’t start to expect too much.
Plenty of time for a flying visit with Tancredi.
“I know you want to go in too,” he told Bourneville as he reversed out of the spot. “But it’s not work, so I’ll tell Tancredi that you send your best.”
Bourneville tilted her head to the side until her ears were at a ninety-degree angle, as though she couldn’t believe that.
“I know,” Cloister told her. “It isn’t fair. You’re probably cleaner than most of the people there, but those are the rules.”
She sighed and put her chin on her feet. She watched him with her bright amber eyes from under her shaggy bangs as he drove. Cloister made a mental note to take her for a trim soon. His phone rang twice as he drove, the noisy siren rattle of it loud in the back. When it rang a third time, he stopped on Main Street and twisted around to grab it from where it had slid down the back of the seat.
“Wi—”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Witte?” Frome snapped down the phone. “I will admit that you were right about Janet Morrow’s case being more than it looked, but that does not give you leave to overstep your bounds or misuse—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cloister said.
He heard Frome inhale and then exhale sharply on the other end of the call.
“You just had Denis pull my old case files,” Frome said. “So either you’re trying to undermine me in regard to the Macintosh case, which I don’t appreciate, or you’re trying to find out dirt on your competition. I’m not a fool, nor am I blind. I know that you have a relationship with Agent Merlo.”
Cloister blanked on how to deal with that. He’d never particularly hid that he was gay or whom he dated… when he dated… but had he ever actually talked about a relationship before? The closest would have been the revised birds-and-bees talk he had with his stepdad after he came out as gay, and he couldn’t remember actually saying anything then either.
He bypassed the comment about his relationship entirely and focused on the files.
“It was a follow-up on the Macintosh case,” Cloister said. “Stokes hadn’t mentioned this fight to us in the previous interview. It was your arrest?”
“No one got arrested,” Frome said. “It was two drunks who got in a brawl, and there was no need to take it further. If you think I treated that call any differently because it was Andrew Macintosh’s son—”
