Shehuh’d and scribbled that in her pad. Then she looked at Cloister. “What about you, hon?”
Cloister sat back against the cheap vinyl booth, slung one arm over his dog as though she were his date, and squinted at the menu mounted on the back wall of the café. He absently scratched under Bourneville’s chin as he thoughtfully cocked his head to the side.
“The cinnamon hot chocolate,” he said. “Is the cheesecake special any good?”
Mabel twisted around as though she had to see the item written down before she could remember. “We’re sold out of that, I’m afraid. How about a slice of red velvet cake instead? Everyone loves that.”
“Just wrap that up, and I’ll get that to go,” Cloister said with an easy smile. “Thanks, Mabel.”
She chuckled and put her hand over the badge. “The owners gave these out with the uniforms,” she said. “My name’s Kimberly. I’ll go get you your drinks and something for your cute friend.”
With a last warm glance at Cloister, she turned and headed back to the counter. The rubber soles of her sneakers squeaked on the damp floor. Evidently the sodden mop propped by the door wasn’t enough to keep up with the rain outside.
Bourneville whined—a patheticow-wow-ownoise—and shoved her nose into Cloister’s neck. She thumped the underside of the table with her tail as she huffed mournfully and pawed at his arm until he showed her his cast. She sniffed it and then tried to apply her teeth to the edge of it.
“See,” Javi said. “Now you’ve upset the dog.”
Cloister rolled his eyes at him and saved his cast from Bourneville. “They wouldn’t let her into the hospital,” he said as he twisted his hand into her thick black ruff. “She was just worried.”
“She wasn’t the only one,” Javi said. The words came out harder than he expected and sharp with the sullen dregs of anger he couldn’t shake.
It made Cloister look at him askance over the table, but Javi couldn’t explain it away. He didn’t even know what he was angry at—that Cloister was hurt, that he cared Cloister was hurt, or that Cloister didn’t seem angry about any of it. Whatever it was, the sentence hung, prickly and awkward, between them until Javi pushed the subject back to Cloister’s story. “So you think the car hit you deliberately?”
He didn’t think Cloister was going to let him get away with it, but then Kimberly came back with their drinks and a plastic-wrap-covered slab of cake that could double as a doorstop balanced on her arms. By the time she doled them out, along with a handful of dog treats for Bourneville, the moment had passed.
“I think they tried to hit the girl,” Cloister corrected him as he pocketed the treats. “I was just in the way. No one hates me enough to try this hard to kill me.”
“You’re a cop. You’ve got to have made some enemies.”
Cloister shrugged and stretched awkwardly over the table to steal Javi’s coffee. “I find lost old ladies and chase down the occasional dealer,” he said. “Nobody likes the guy who set the dog on them, but the meth head who punched his wife’s front teeth out isn’t going to lure me into an elaborate trap. He’s going to piss in my gas tank. Ask me how I know?”
He pushed the cup of hot chocolate, its pile of cinnamon-sugar-dusted cream at a precarious angle, over to Javi’s side of the table. Bourneville diverted her attention briefly from the waiting treats to eye the cream. When it didn’t spill, she put her pointed nose on the table and stared at the treats as though she could will them closer to her tongue.
“You could have just ordered coffee,” Javi said.
“Or you could have just ordered the chocolate,” Cloister pointed out as he grabbed a handful of sugar packets from the overflowing bowl by the window. He took his coffee thick enough with sugar that it was practically cake. He fumbled one-handed with the sachets as he switched back to the night’s events. “There’s no way that anyone could predict I’d get called in to find Janet. If Collins had been on his own, he’d have just slapped a ticket on the car and called it a night. No. They wanted to finish the job on Janet. I was just in the way.”
“Nothing personal,” Javi said.
He was being sarcastic, but Cloister just nodded as he tipped sugar into his coffee. “Exactly. But that makes what happened to Janet attempted murder, or murder if she dies, and Frome would… prefer it weren’t.”
For the first time, Cloister’s voice hardened with something like anger. He just shrugged off his brush with someone’s bumper, but he didn’t want anyone to do that to Janet. Someone had done a real job on Cloister at some point. Maybe more than one someone.
The low bar Javi had set for himself to pass was not to add his name to the bottom of that list. It was why he should have made the call, made a friend. Instead he scooped most of the cream off the top of his cup and dumped it on top of Cloister’s coffee.
“The council’s funding review,” he said as he sat back and took a drink. It wasn’t bad hot chocolate—not as good as his grandmother used to make, with shavings of dark chocolate carved from the block she kept wrapped up in the fridge—but good. It could do with some chili.
Cloister nodded. “Hard to argue that crime has dropped when there’s a fresh homicide on the books.” He took a drink of coffee. “Hit-and-run looks better. He’ll make the right call when he sees the evidence, but right now he’s hoping I… misread the situation.”
“He should know better.”
Cloister gave him a tired, slanting smirk from behind the coffee cup. “Says the man who thinks drones can do a better job than me and my girl.”
He gave Bourneville’s ear a gentle tug. She tilted her head back and around to look at him. When he didn’t ask her to do anything, she went back to longing at the treats.
Javi snorted at him. It was harder to defend his position since he’d seen Bourneville in action on the Hartley case. She’d saved his life, but that didn’t mean he was going to give just yet.
“Drones don’t have bad days,” he said.
