“THIS ISridiculous,” Frome said. He lay back against starched white pillows and closed his eyes. “Half of the sheriff’s department is either laid up or laid out. I don’t have time to stay in here. I have work to do, fires to put out, bad press to mitigate.”
Javi stood at the window and looked out at the swarm of reporters on the steps of the hospital. There was a certain bleak irony to the fact that the replacements for the corrupt Plenty PD had their own bad apples that the reporters seemed to enjoy.
“If I were you,” Javi said, “I’d take advantage of a few days in bed.”
They had found Frome handcuffed and unconscious in the back seat of his own car, under a tarp and a picnic blanket. It turned out Frome’s head wasn’t as sturdy as Cloister’s, and he had a fractured skull to go along with the goose egg on the back of his head.
“I still can’t believe it was Hewitt,” Frome said wearily. “We were friends. He was my partner. I feltsorryfor him.”
“Everyone did,” Cloister said. “That’s why any time records on Macintosh got pulled, someone gave Hewitt a heads-up. They thought they were encouraging him to have faith that Macintosh would finally be brought to justice.”
“Instead we almost got Galloway killed,” Frome said.
Javi turned away from the window to look at him. Despite his complaints that he was wasting his time away from work, the bedside table next to Frome was piled high with reports and paperwork. He had his laptop balanced on the narrow shelf of the bed next to him and his half-finished press release preserved in Word.
“I don’t think she’ll hold a grudge,” Javi said. “It looks like Janet Morrow will be okay. Eventually. I heard Stokes has offered her a job once she’s back on her feet.”
Frome nodded. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. The thin skin wrinkled under the pressure. “I suppose in a way you were right,” he said. “It was a hate crime. Just—”
“Not the sort that comes under my purview,” Javi finished for him dryly. He still didn’t know how his involvement in the case would play out—in the positive column or as another black mark. If he had a head start on it and a good day, he could convince himself it didn’t matter. He knew he’d helped save the lives of a young woman and a talented dog.
“Any sign of Jessie and the oldest Macintosh boy?” Frome asked.
Javi shook his head. “Still in the wind,” he said. “Once they told Hewitt that Janet was coming back here, my guess was they realized he was going to need to clean house. We’ll find them. This is a harder world to disappear in, and they don’t have any help this time.”
“My report will say how invaluable your help was,” Frome told him. “We’ll have to see how much that’s worth after this.”
Javi nodded and glanced back out the window. “I should go. It will take me a while to get through my press gauntlet. I’m glad Hewitt hadn’t gotten around to killing you yet, Lieutenant.”
“Me too,” Frome said. “Good luck.”
Javi didn’t tell him that he didn’t need it. In the eyes of the press, for the moment, at least, he had come out ahead. First he saved a small child, and now he’d protected a vulnerable young woman. He had perhaps one more high-profile case to go before they turned on him.
THREE HOURSlater Javi let himself into his apartment. He was pleasantly surprised to find Cloister still there, the long, unnecessary length of him sprawled over the couch. Now that Cloister could stand up and not list slowly to the left, Javi supposed he didn’t really need to stay over anymore.
Bourneville, stretched out along Cloister’s side, her head tucked under his chin, grunted acknowledgment that Javi had arrived. It made Cloister look around and grin.
“I saw you on TV,” he said. “I think the reporter from CNN likes you.”
“Which one?”
“The one who couldn’t take their eyes off your crotch.”
“Which one?” Javi repeated with a smirk as he stripped off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. The wine bottle on the table caught his attention. It was meant to. The bottle was placed neatly in the middle of the table like an exclamation mark. “What’s this for?”
He picked it up by the neck and raised his eyebrows as he read the label. It was one of his favorite vineyards.
“That depends,” Cloister said. He extricated himself from under Bourneville and walked up behind Javi.
“On what?”
Cloister kissed the hollow behind Javi’s ear. Pleasure quivered down Javi’s nerves and gave his cock a heads-up twitch. “Remember the first time I invited myself over?” Cloister asked. He let his hand wander down over Javi’s waist to his lean hips. “I brought chicken and said if it had been a date, I’d have brought wine? Well, I brought wine.”
“And if I don’t want it to be date?” Javi asked.
Cloister stopped his hand on Javi’s hip bone. “Well, then it’s wine to drink alone, because I haven’t got any beer left at the trailer.” He bit a row of kisses from Javi’s ear down to his collarbone. “No hard feelings.”
“Of course not,” Javi said. He set the bottle down. “I need to talk to you first.”
