Chapter 1 #2
“I get your point,” he admitted. The length of the long line unwound as he relaxed his fingers and puddled on the patchy grass next to him. Cloister shrugged. “But that’s the job.”
Gardner scowled, but Cloister’s deadpan reaction didn’t give him much to bluster against. He deflated, rolled his eyes, and muttered something along the lines of “just filling you in since you’ve been out,” and stepped back out of the way.
An exaggerated wave of his arm gave Cloister the permission to get to work… that he hadn’t actually needed.
First shift back, Cloister reminded himself as he reached down to give Bon’s shoulder a slap, maybe he should pace himself on being difficult.
The pat wasn’t one of Bon’s training cues, but it was habit enough that Bon had picked up on it. The minute his hand left her, she darted a couple of steps forward, stopped as she realized she didn’t know where to go, and paused to look around at him like that was his fault.
It was. Cloister rubbed dog hair off his hand onto the leg of his buff unpressed trousers and made a mental note to work on fixing that in future training sessions.
He called her back to heel with a firm “Hier” and headed for the porch where Madison had perched.
Bon paced along next to him, the bounce in her step all barely contained energy.
The back door of the house was muted green, probably from a HOA-mandated list of colors, with a glossy black key-code-enabled smart-handle. Cloister tapped the air next to it with the back of his wrist.
This time, Bourneville waited for her command, her eyes fixed on him.
“Such,” Cloister told her and stooped to offer his forearm.
Bourneville sprang forward, nails scratching the dinged-up wood of the porch, and reared up onto her back legs.
Her front paws hooked over Cloister’s arm, dust from her paws leaving reddish-brown stains on his sleeve, as she leaned forward to sniff along the handle intensely.
Her breath misted the glossy black plastic as her equally glossy black nose twitched.
Once she had the scent, she huffed and slid off Cloister’s arm.
She dropped her head and cast around on the porch, then scrambled back off the porch.
Cloister let the long line spool out as she cast back and forth over the grass, tail up and flagged as she trotted back and forth.
Once she’d locked into the scent, she shot across the garden and into the little plastic playhouse.
She gave a sharp woof, muffled by the Barbie-colored walls, and her tail thumped briefly.
Cloister glanced at Gardner, who grunted.
“Doesn’t mean anything,” he said as he shrugged stubbornly. “She heard the girl—the prowler went in there.”
Cloister cocked his head to the side as he absorbed that. He would have said something, but before he could, Gardner held up a hand to stop him.
“Yeah, I fucking heard myself,” Gardner said, glaring at him as he reached up to thumb his radio on. “You don’t need to rub in it. Dispatch, this is 2-14. K-9 has a trail.”
Cloister could hear Mel’s voice, familiar even when he couldn’t quite make out the words, acknowledge that as he headed toward the playhouse.
Bourneville backed up out of it as he got there—briefly ungainly—and dropped her nose to pick up the thread of scent.
She picked up speed as she gained confidence in the trail, pushing through the scrub of neglected boundary plants at the bottom of the garden.
When she reached the chain-link fence, she went up and over it in one smooth move. Cloister gave the line a flick to make sure it didn’t catch and followed her, one hand braced on the stiff bar at the top as he hurdled the obstacle.
As he put his weight on that arm, a sharp twinge plucked from his wrist down into the heart of his palm.
It made him wince, his fingers prickling with pins and needles, but he didn’t let it slow him down.
He ignored the ache as he landed on the other side of the fence, boots sliding in the loose dirt down into the gully behind the houses.
It was darker back here, away from the ambient light of the neighborhood. Cloister pulled his flashlight from his belt and flicked it on, just in time to catch Bourneville in the beam as she loped away from him along the draw.
He followed on her heels, flicking the beam of the flashlight from her tail down to the dust and loose rock footing underneath. Cloister tucked his chin down as he tapped his radio.
“K-9-23,” he ID’d himself. “Going west on the trail down the back of Buckthorn.”
Mel copied him.
Cloister let the radio link cut off and lengthened his stride to cut down the distance between him and Bourneville.
His attention was mostly on her and the uneven footing that threatened to roll his ankle, but a stubborn corner chewed over old patrol routes and maps as he tried to predict where the prowler was headed.
There was a small strip mall about a mile down the road, at the corner of Buckthorn and Meadow.
Cloister had gotten coffee there before, and a burger that had been bad enough the memory stuck.
There was a culvert at the back of the parking lot that would give easy access to the backs of the houses and give the prowler a clean getaway once he’d scratched whatever itch had him crawling around back here.
It’s where Cloister would have—
Before he could finish theorizing to himself, Bourneville turned sharply and went scrambling back up the steep side of the draw. Her back paws kicked chunks of rock and dirt down the slope as she dug her nails in.
Cloister broke stride for a second, chest heaving, to try and work out why the prowler would make his exit here. Not that it mattered, Cloister supposed as he shoved his flashlight back in his belt, he had.
And that meant Cloister had to as well.
He broke into a sprint that carried him six feet up the steep pitch of the hill before gravity caught him. As he faltered, he snatched at a scrubby handful of black sage. It held—just—and he dug the toes of his boots into the loose soil enough to scramble up to the next handhold.
By the time he got to the top, the twinge in his wrist had graduated to a dull, grating ache. He shook his hand to loosen the ache—didn’t help—and looked around.