Cloister pushed himself up off the table.He felt stiff with his reluctance to actually back down.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, ignoring JJ’s quiet “don’t say anything else.”“SSA Joel was part of an investigation into my dad’s club?My brother’s disappearance?Fraud at mom’s Weight Watchers class?”
“No,” Kincaid said.He flipped the file closed and held it in his hand as he stood up.“She was investigating your boyfriend, Agent Merlo.”
JJ’s hand tightened on Cloister’s shoulder in an unnecessary warning.Cloister just looked at Kincaid across the table.
“You’re a small man, aren’t you,” he said.“Not just short.Small.”
Kincaid’s face darkened with a flush of real, unexpected anger.He reined it back in quickly and gave Cloister a thin sneer of a smile.
“No need for personal attacks, Deputy Witte,” he said.
Cloister didn’t agree.He turned on his heel and stalked out of the interrogation room.
Javihadtextedhim.
Had to go to work.Call me.
The annoying thing was that Cloister wasn’t even mad about that.Javi was in the middle of a missing person investigation.That took priority.Cloister would have made the same call.He just wanted to do something right now, whether it was pick a fight with his boyfriend, or run, or go and find out if it was actually as satisfying as he thought it would be to punch Kincaid in the face.
“That could have gone worse,” JJ remarked.
Cloister ignored him as he grabbed Bourneville’s lead from the kit board and stalked through the kennels to Bon’s pen.She was waiting for him at the door.Her nose was poked through the wire, upper lip wrinkled back from her front teeth, and she whined eagerly at him.
The other dogs in residence—Cloister recognized the dust and caramel colored Malinois, but not the two labs—barked and wagged their tails at him as he walked down the aisle between the pens.The noise echoed off the bare walls.Out of the corner of his eye he saw JJ pull his hands and elbows in to his body, shying away from the pens even though he had plenty of room.
“You’re fine,” Cloister told him.“You’re with me, and they know me.They’re just bored.”
JJ pleated his lips in an unconvinced smile and flicked a patch of fawn fluff off his jacket.“And hairy.”
Cloister snorted.
“Is this you about to do something stupid?”JJ asked.“Or is this how you regulate yourself instead of whiskey?”
The question made Cloister pause as he reached for the lock on Bon’s door.He’d not have put it that way.He just liked dogs.Always had.When he’d been a kid it hadn’t mattered how bad things had gotten with his mom, his stepdad’s dogs had always been there.Dogs had always been straightforward.So…
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” Cloister said.
He flipped the latch to open the door.Bon shook herself vigorously, hair and concrete dust left to float in the air, and pranced out on her toes.She wound herself between Cloister’s legs and whipped his shins with her tail in her excitement at being released.
“It was two hours,” Cloister told her as he bent down to grab her head in both hands and scrub her ears.“Not a month.And I know Hudson was in here to spoil you.”
Lies, Bon assured him as she took advantage of his position to stick her tongue up his nose.Her breath smelled of fish, so he wasn’t entirely sure he believed her.Cloister pushed her head affectionately and straightened up.
“How bad is it?”he asked.
JJ raised his perfectly manicured eyebrows.“Dogs work faster than whiskey,” he remarked.“Good to know.And as I said, it could have been worse.”
“That implies it could have been better.”
JJ’s phone beeped.He checked the message briefly and flicked his attention back to Cloister.
“Well, I wouldn’t have advised you to imply the investigating officer has a small dick–”
“I meant his character.”
“Sure,” JJ said.“That’s what I have on my dating profile, too.‘Looking for a man packing a big…character.’”
