Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
“You’re out, you’re in,” Tancredi said. Her curls bounced as she shook her head. “I can’t keep track. What’s the next step? Shake it all about?”
Cloister signed off on the Bite Report form and handed it over. He might be willing to break Kincaid’s olive branch in two if it came to it, but not over this. He didn’t want their suspect out on the streets either. Not again.
“I don’t think I can muster a shake right now,” he said. “Do you know if Boyd is on duty?”
Tancredi gave him a dry look from under her eyebrows. “Not Gardner?” she said. “What’s the plan? Going to try and use a bit of masculine charm to turn her head? You know she’s a cop before she’s a woman?”
Cloister rested his elbow on the counter and rubbed his wrist absently. The ache felt like scorched grains of sand caught in the joint, hot and grating when he rotated the joint. He dug his thumb into his palm, trying to push the ache up into the smallest space he could manage.
“I know Gardner’s IA before he’s a cop,” he said. “I have also never flirted with a woman, and pretty sure I’d not be good at it.”
Tancredi snorted.
“Please. I have heard you talk to Bourneville,” she said.
That made Cloister give her a dubious look.
She ignored it as she crossed her arms, fingers curled into her elbows, and looked down the hall.
A couple of members of the admin staff were on their way out of the break room, wiping their hands from lunch.
There was a polite trade of nods. Tancredi waited until they had gone back into the office to swing her attention back to Cloister.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she said.
“The last thing I need is anything that’s going to delay me being put back on active duty, and you…
it doesn’t matter if you talk to Boyd first. It will still get back to Gardner, and the last thing you need is to get back on IA’s radar.
SSA Kincaid might have lost interest, but that doesn’t mean they have.
The sheriff’s department has a lot riding on being the solution to corruption in Plenty.
The last thing they want is doubt cast on that. ”
That was true.
Cloister made himself let go of his wrist. It wasn’t helping anyhow. He pushed back off the counter.
“I can find her on my own,” he said.
Tancredi made a disgruntled noise. “She’s at Bertinelli’s,” she said. “At least she was just before you walked in. She texted to ask if I wanted anything. So…the way the lines are there, you can probably still catch her.”
“Thanks.”
Before he could walk away, Tancredi reached over the counter and grabbed his sleeve.
“I know you don’t like politics,” she said, “but you need to listen to me. You’re on thin ice, Cloister. People talk. They like you, but…people talk, and Kincaid gave them a lot to talk about. Your dad’s a criminal?”
“Yeah, he runs a biker gang,” Cloister said. He gave his arm a tug, and Tancredi reluctantly let go. “You can look him up. And apparently my mom runs a Weight Watchers group, so she’s probably online too.”
It was just something flippant to say, but it was actually true. He’d not seen his mom since he joined up— she’d never been on social media much—but now he could probably find pictures of her shilling weight loss in a church hall somewhere in their hometown. If he looked.
“Very funny,” Tancredi said, rolling her eyes. It caught Cloister off-guard for a minute, but he supposed it did sound like a lie. She let go of his arm. “I’m just saying…be careful. Worst comes to worst, I can move in with my mom and get my realtor’s license—”
“You’ve thought about that?”
“I’ve had to,” Tancredi said, self-consciously flexing her hand. “I’ve got a kid. When they didn’t know if I’d get full use of my hand back, I had to think of backups. What have you got?”
Cloister shrugged as he stepped back from the counter. He gave Tancredi a brief salute with the file.
“I’ve got a dog,” he said. “She’s more employable than you, me, and your kid put together.”
“Ijust swap out the meat for beets,” Boyd said.
The rookie was still in her civvies, but still looked like a cop in slacks and a collared T-shirt.
She rubbed the back of her neck as she glanced over the counter to watch the staff work on building the sandwiches.
“Get extra sauerkraut. At some point, I figure they’ll just put it on the menu. ”
Cloister pulled his wallet out to pay for his order, thumbing out a crumpled twenty to hand to the lanky teenager in the Bertinelli’s T-shirt behind the counter.
“Nothing for Bon today?” the kid asked as he keyed the order in. He leaned over the counter to give Bon, freshly washed and at Cloister’s heel, a smile. “I can get the cooks to strip a bone for her?”
Bon’s tail gave a quick one-two thump on the ground in response.
“Not today,” Cloister said. “She’s on a diet.”
It was easier than explaining that she was already riled up enough from taking down the prowler. He wanted her cortisol levels to even out back at baseline, not spike them again with another reward. Other trainers might handle it differently, but he found it kept her more leveled out.
The kid gave him the patented “you’re mean to that dog” look that half of Plenty’s servers had in their back pocket, and added something to the order with a furtive jab of a button.
Cloister resigned himself to a neatly wrapped packet of scraps and Bourneville’s “you’re so mean to me” look as he took his change.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just go somewhere else?” he asked as he put his wallet back in his pocket. “It’s Cali. You should be able to find a vegan cafe.”
Boyd heaved a sigh. “Yeah, but this is my thing,” she said. “Gardner says that since I started getting Mel sandwiches, I can’t stop or she’ll give us all the shit calls, and now everyone else wants in too.”
“Does Mel give me the shit calls?” Cloister asked.
Boyd grimaced as a handful of juicy sliced beef was slapped onto a buttered log of bread and looked away. She nodded at Bon.
“You have the dog,” she said. “That’s your thing. Tancredi brings the baby in for Mel to see sometimes. That’s her thing. Everyone pays their way. I just…got sandwiches.”
It wasn’t exactly how it worked, but Boyd would learn that on her own eventually.
“So tell me what happened that night when you took our guy in,” Cloister said to pull the conversation back on track. “Why did he get cut loose?”
Boyd rubbed the back of her neck again and shifted her weight uncomfortably. She gave the sandwich-manufacturing line a hopeful look, as if her order being called might get her out of this conversation.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “It wasn’t my call.”
Cloister reached down to rub Bon’s ears absently. “Whoever’s call it was got my dog hit by a wrench,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the server’s eyes widen in horror and shifted to give him a reassuring smile. “She’s fine.”
The server didn’t look convinced. There wasn’t much Cloister could do about that. He looked back at Boyd and gestured for her to move away. She did, with the foot-dragging reluctance of a kid.
“There’s also a federal agent in the hospital,” Cloister said. “I’m not going to be the last person who asks about this; I am probably the most reasonable.”
Boyd lifted her hand to her mouth to chew on her already-ragged thumbnail.
“Am I really going to get in trouble?” she asked.
“I won’t know,” Cloister said. He glanced down at Bourneville and gave her a nudge with his knee. She sighed but did the necessary as she got up, padded over, and pressed her weight against Boyd’s thigh. “Not unless you tell me what happened.”
Boyd reached down without thinking about it to pet Bon. She winced as she felt the lump on the dog’s skull and pulled her hand away.
“Is she really OK?”
“She’s got a hard head,” Cloister said. “She’s fine.”
Boyd glanced over at him. “I heard you got shot.”
“Mine’s even harder,” Cloister said. “Why did you let that guy walk?”
Boyd folded both her lips between her teeth as if she was holding the words in. She finally blurted them out in a confidential mutter.
“I didn’t,” she said. The words getting out made her shoulders relax like it was a physical relief. “Gardner did. And it didn’t make any sense, but…I’m just a rookie.”
“I’m not,” Cloister said. “Go on.”
“You won’t tell him I told you?”
“Not unless I have to.”
Boyd twisted her mouth and chewed on her ragged nail some more, but finally gave a quick, firm nod to herself.
“Guy wasn’t talking,” she said. “He said he was a sovereign citizen and we had no jurisdiction over his comings and goings, and then he clammed up. So we ran his prints, right?”
She stopped to look expectantly at Cloister. He nodded.
“Right,” Boyd repeated. There was blood on her nail at this point.
She pulled her hand away from her mouth and grabbed a napkin to dab at it.
“So they come back, and he’s in the system, but he’s got no priors.
It’s from an enhanced security check, from his job.
So Gardner asks me to go get him a coffee, I come back, and he’s cut the guy loose.
I don’t know why. He had the whole story about the foreclosure and the sister, and I don’t fucking know where he got that from. ”
She stopped abruptly to take a breath, shaky, as if the words had gotten away from her. Her hand drifted toward her mouth again, but she stopped herself and tucked her thumb out of the way under her fingers.
“I should have said something. I know that,” she admitted. “But I figured the guy obviously wasn’t well, and maybe Gardner just cut him slack. We all know someone who could have done with some slack. And then there’s a Fed missing, and you’re suspended, and I figured…bigger fish to fry.”
“You were wrong,” Cloister said.
Boyd huffed out a not-exactly-a-laugh. “Yeah,” she said with a twist of her mouth. “You think? But what do I do now?”
Cloister reached into his belt for his notebook and handed it over.