Chapter 17 #3
“No surprise there,” Elise said. “Green Pastures. They’re a mortgage servicing group and…
casting no aspersions…I don’t work with them.
No one I’d work with does. I’m not saying they’re shady, but I wouldn’t argue if someone else did.
I know they have been foreclosing on a lot of houses in that area recently, and next thing you see them up for sale at a nice markup.
I do know they work with State of Mind. They were one of the testimonials in the company’s pitch packet.
These are all the contact details I got when I signed up for my package.
I had to pay for five houses, just to make this one look like it was seized from drug dealers in a raid. ”
Cloister took the envelope with an absent “Thanks.” He didn’t claim to be a detective, but it was hard to miss this connection. He couldn’t exactly get all the pieces to fall into place neatly, but it was something. “I owe you one.”
Elise rolled her eyes and waved that away with a dismissive swipe of a manicured hand.
“Darling, you saved my daughter’s life,” she said. “If you wanted this house, I would screw the owner harder than his wife is going to in the divorce.”
State of Mind Security closed early on Thursdays.
There hadn’t even been a cleaner there that Cloister could make awkward eye contact with.
So he’d given in to the inevitable and gone home.
He had to eventually. It happened in every case when you hit the wall and had to step out of the worst day of someone’s life to buy gas or order some Chinese food.
It never felt good, but it was the only way to do the job.
Somehow, though, Cloister’s running-on-dregs autopilot had dropped him off at Javi’s door instead of his own.
He sat on the doorstep, head tilted back against the sleek door, and rubbed Bourneville’s ears as she rested her chin on his knee. Her eyes were soulful as she looked up at him with the unspoken assumption that he was maybe an idiot who’d lost his key.
“I gave it back,” Cloister told her. “Because we don’t live here.”
She pressed her chin harder against his knee and heaved a huge, rib-swelling sigh that Cloister translated as “idiot.” To be fair, in hindsight, he regretted making a big deal out of giving the key back. The heat of the day had already dissipated, and the chill made his wrist ache.
He idly rotated it, grimacing to himself as the joint protested by stabbing pain down into the heel of his hand. It was hard to explain how something could hurt and go dead at once. His little finger managed it.
There was a pack of painkillers in Javi’s kitchen. Cloister could practically feel the blister-pack pop in his fingers…if he’d only just hung onto the key one more day.
He had just started to wonder if he had enough gas left in the tank to get up and head back to his trailer.
Before he had to decide, a black cruiser with smoked windows pulled up to the curb.
There was a pause, and then the door opened to let Javi out.
Behind him, in the driver’s seat, Kincaid leaned over to make eye contact with Cloister.
“Deputy Witte.” He glanced down. “Bourneville.”
She grumbled at him, a low rattle of not-quite-a-growl in her throat. Cloister nudged her with his knee.
“Still doesn’t like me?” Kincaid said, raising an eyebrow.
“Does anyone?” Javi asked.
Kincaid’s eyes narrowed, and his smile tightened a notch. “The people that matter,” he said. “The ones that don’t…who cares what they think.”
Javi closed the car door. It wasn’t quite a slam, but it was forceful. He stood there until the car drove away, then took a deep breath. It hitched his shoulders the same way Bourneville’s sigh had swelled her ribs. As he let it out, he turned and walked over to Cloister.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as he offered a hand. “I didn’t know you were planning to come over tonight.”
Cloister eyed it for a moment as he weighed the pain he was going to feel against explaining that he’d hurt himself. He picked pain and the warmth of a familiar grip as Javi hauled him up off the ground.
“Neither did I,” he said. “I should have called first.”
“You don’t need to,” Javi said.
Except for the first time in a while, Cloister felt like he did.
That could be his own issues, though. It wouldn’t be the first relationship he’d let his insecurity undermine.
So he swallowed the need to pry and nodded after the car instead.
“What was that about? Since when do you and Kincaid ride share?”
Javi started to answer, but hesitated. His mouth tightened for a second, like he tasted something sour, then softened into a wry smile.
“Like it or not, he’s my boss,” he said. “I have to play nice.”
“You just told him no one liked him,” Cloister pointed out. He reached up to brush his thumb over Javi’s cheekbone with easy affection. Javi snorted softly as he tilted his face briefly into Cloister’s palm.
“Sometimes ‘nice’ is hard,” Javi admitted. He stepped away as he got his key out to open the door. As he pushed it open, he glanced at Cloister. “Maybe I should get one of those biometric locks. Then all you’d need to get in is your thumb.”
Cloister snorted as he started up the stairs. He tripped and nearly slid off a step as Bon squeezed between his legs and raced up to the top in three long, loping strides.
“With my luck, someone would cut off my thumb,” he said.