Chapter 2 #2
“So what do you think of that?” she asked.
Cloister pulled his duty bag out of his locker and let it dangle from one hand; He gave the door a shove until he heard the lock click.
“Skunk?” he guessed.
“Not that,” Tancredi said. She wrinkled her nose. “Although, yeah. No. Gardner. He’s supposed to be here from Valley to patch a hole in shift coverage because we’re short-handed, but my situationship in records dropped me the nod that he used to work with IAU. What’s that about?”
That was a good question. Why would a detective from the Internal Affairs Unit end up in a patrol car in Plenty?
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Situationship?”
Tancredi sneered good-naturedly. “Please, you just wish you’d had the chance to call Agent Merlo that before you made it official and boring.”
“Maybe,” Cloister admitted with a flash of humor that quickly faded. “And maybe whoever is jerking you around with the PAT is doing you a favor? It might not be a bad career move to be behind a desk right now.”
“What do you mean?” Tancredi asked. When Cloister didn’t elaborate, she snorted and wagged a finger at him.
“Good try,” she said with a smirk. “But don’t pretend you know something I don’t.
Departmental politics have always gone right over your head, which takes some commitment from a guy who’s six one.
Now, if you don’t mind, I promised my kid we could have burgers for breakfast. Say hi to SA Merlo from me!
Let me know if he has any info on what’s going on. ”
She headed out, flicking a wave at him over her shoulder as she left.
Cloister absently rotated his still-aching wrist as he watched her go; then he glanced toward the showers after Gardner.
He heard the shower kick on and Gardner spit out a strangled curse as the first ice-cold water bomb hit him.
The boiler took a while to heat up. The day shift never noticed so much, but the boiler had had time to cool by this point in the evening.
Tancredi was right that Cloister had never cared about departmental glad-handing and back-stabbing.
The thing was? If Cloister was right, the call wasn’t coming from inside the house.
There just wasn’t anything he could do about it.
“And I’m six-three,” he corrected the empty air as he hitched his bag up onto his shoulder and headed after Tancredi. “For the record.”
Cloister cracked an egg on the side of the pan and spilled the contents out of the shell onto the hot metal. He gave it a quick scramble with a spatula and tossed the shell to Bon. She snatched it out of the air, crunched once, and swallowed.
Nearly a decade on night shift, on and off, and Cloister still couldn’t wrap his head around dinner at 5 AM. There was just something deviant about eating carbonara as the sun came up. Luckily, eggs were an anytime food.
While Bon waited expectantly for more cast-off snacks, Cloister picked up a chopping board and tossed the diced peppers and turkey chunks in with the eggs.
Outside, kids laughed and screamed as they chased each other around the trailers while they waited for their parents to run them to school or daycare.
Cloister turned the heat down. He left the eggs to finish cooking while he got a beer out of the fridge.
In theory, cracking a cold one at this hour should come under the same deviant umbrella as the carbonara, but it didn’t.
Too many mornings at the kitchen table while his stepdad had still been running on the night before.
He popped the tab, foam dripping up and down over his knuckles, and took a quick drink as he turned back to the pan.
The eggs had burned, edges crisp-curled and papery as smoke spiraled up from the pan. Bon put her ears back in aggrieved expectation a second before the fire alarm went off, the shrill blare of it bouncing off the walls of the trailer.
“Shit,” Cloister muttered as he pulled the pan off the heat. He set it to the side as he grabbed a dishcloth and flapped it energetically under the white module of the alarm, the bright glow of the “working light” playing over the white and blue patterned surface.
It stopped.
He stopped.
It started again.
Cloister tossed the cloth to his other hand, still flapping it, and opened the door to the trailer. He shoved it open so the catch caught and the smell of salt and high tide wafted in to do battle with smoke and burned eggs.
The fire alarm finally stopped again. This time, when Cloister tentatively gave up trying to clear the smoke, it stayed off. He flicked the towel over his shoulder and bent down to give Bon an apologetic thump. She shook herself, ears flapping, and gave him a reproachful look.
“I know, I know,” he said. “This never happens in Javi’s kitchen, but we don’t live there.”
Except they sort of had while Cloister had been recovering.
It hadn’t really been necessary in the first place—it had been a broken wrist; Cloister had fended for himself with worse—and Javi had never set a firm end date on the offer, either.
It had just felt like Cloister’s first day back at work was the natural place to wrap the arrangement.
There was no way to pretend it was just convenience after that. Either Cloister went back to his trailer, or he officially moved in.
Which Javi obviously wasn’t ready for, otherwise he would have said something. Not that Cloister wanted to move in—ability to fry eggs at will aside. They had only been dating a few months.
Should he want to move in?
Cloister teetered on the edge of that rabbit hole, but caught himself before he pitched headfirst down it. There wasn’t time. It was existential panic over his relationship status or sleep, and if he didn’t get his full hour and a half of restless shut-eye, he’d not be good for anything today.
“Would half my eggs make up for the noise?” he asked.
She cocked her head to the side with interest.
Cloister straightened up, brushed the dog hair off his hands onto his T-shirt, and lifted the cooled-down pan of lightly burned eggs from the stove. He split the technically still an omelet in half with the spatula, pushed the crispy mess into one of Bon’s bowls, and carried it outside.
The morning air was still cool—the heat of the day hadn’t fully kicked in yet—but still better than Montana would be in February. He set the metal bowl down at the side of the trailer and took a step back.
Strictly speaking, Bon should have stayed in her place until Cloister released her. Technically, she was still on her mat; she’d just combat crawled right up to the edge so she could watch him. It was dog-time, though, and she was on “place,” not platz. She knew the difference.
“Friss,” Cloister told her as he tapped the side of the bowl with his foot.
Bourneville jumped out of the trailer and fell on breakfast like she’d not eaten food before. The bowl scraped back and forth over the grass and gravel as she nosed after the best bits of the meal.
As the rest of the trailer park residents left for the day, Cloister sat on the steps and ate breakfast with his dog.
And his dog’s cat, he noticed. Scraps was tucked behind the wheel of the trailer, pale and scraggly. He’d made a point to come and drop food for the stray, even though he knew at least four other residents did too, but he thought she’d missed her dog.
The tide came in, water as blue as something from an illustration and clean as not much in his life was, as he picked chunks of egg and turkey out of the pan with his fingers.
“Couldn’t do this as Javi’s,” he pointed out to Bourneville as he sucked the grease off his thumb. “He’d have a plate.”