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The hat had helped.
Then, as she readied to talk about the mine cave-in, damned if Jo James didn’t start looking all female and vulnerable after all…despite how her story began.
“During summer break after college, I worked as an underground blaster in a New Mexico coal mine,” she admitted. “I calculated quantity of explosives to tons of rock, loaded and tied-in blast patterns. Stuff like that.”
“Damn.” Zack sat back in his chair. “I’m impressed.”
She narrowed her eyes, suddenly less vulnerable. “I grew up with brothers, Mr. Lorenzo. I’m not exactly a frail flower. Anyway, it’s good money. Surface blasting pays well, underground blasting even better.”
“And I said I’m impressed. So what happened?”
“The insurance companies blamed it on an earthquake. I’m not sure what to believe. One minute I was walking along with Frank and Gil—and the second foreman, Diego—in the third-level tunnel. The next, we all just…stopped. Dead-still. It was eerie.” She swallowed, hard. “We looked at each other, without even knowing why. And then…”
She shrugged, fidgeting with an unpainted fingernail, looking vulnerable again. And small. She was small—Zack had finally noticed that today. The sheriff didn’t walk small or talk small. But when she’d stood directly in front of him, at the door, the top of her white cowboy hat had barely reached his collarbone.
He felt more comfortable when he thought of her as tough. As it was, when he prompted her—“And…?”—he felt like a bully.
“And…” She narrowed her eyes, as though to recall the events as accurately as possible. Maybe she was tough after all. “I heard bits of dirt trickling onto our hardhats, and then the world exploded into this blast of dust, too dark to imagine….”
He thought maybe he would shudder like a wet cat. Instead he suggested a less immediate description. “It caved in.”
“Yeah,” she agreed gruffly. Her blunt lashes lifted long enough for her to meet his gaze with something like gratitude.
Her eyes were blue. Pretty. Definitely a woman’s eyes.
They both looked back at the table. “It was dark when I regained consciousness. Mr. Lorenzo, have you ever been underground with the lights out? The dark’s so thick, it’s as if you’ve been swallowed. You feel the weight of all that…that rock above you. I was trapped under something heavy, it turned out to be Gil—I think he must have thrown himself on top of me. I turned on my helmet-lamp and got loose and tried to help him, but…” She stopped again.
“He died,” Zack finished.
“And then Frank, and farther down the shaft…”
Great. Resenting his chivalrous impulse, he still tried to nudge her past that particular catalog of corpses. “Did you find anyone alive?”
“Diego.” But she didn’t look happy about that, either. “Just Diego. And he was badly hurt, though he pretended not to be. He kept insisting that the Safety Response Team would be pulling us out any minute. Then we both heard something. I turned to look—with the helmet light, I could only see one direction at a time—and it was Frank. His fingers were…they…”
And she curled and uncurled her own small, solid fingers, to illustrate. Even without long nails or polish or rings, her hands were clearly female, too. Strong, but small.
“Rigor mortis?” Zack suggested hopefully.
“Except he got up. His neck was broken, and his skull was crushed. He shouldn’t have been able to get up, but he did. I told you that I probably imagined it….”
It occurred to Zack that, if he wasn’t watching Josephine James tell this, he might agree. Even after four years of learning to see this stuff, looking for answers. Maybe she was making it up, or had imagined it all. The line between reality and perception was thinner than most folks admitted. And yet…
He didn’t think so. Her face was pale, her jaw set, her eyes really still like she was focusing on the memory. “So at first I thought, Hey, Frank’s okay! Stupid, I know, but…I really wanted him to be okay. I went to him and took his arm, told him he needed to lie down and wait for emergency response. But his hand felt funny…fake. And his eyes were blank, blank like I’ve only seen on road-kill. It wasn’t Frank, anymore. And he…it tried to bite me….”
She took a deep breath, still pale but otherwise determined. “I pulled loose and grabbed a pickax, and I told it to stay back, but it came at us—at Diego—so I swung. And…” Again, she shrugged. Clearly, she’d made sure Frank wouldn’t be getting up again, friend or not.
Tough broad.
“I think I would’ve thrown up,” she said, “but then Diego shouted a warning, and Gil grabbed me, so I…stopped him, too. Then I just sat there with Diego, waiting, talking about stupid, everyday stuff. He seemed worse, but I heard digging, so I knew we were being rescued.”
Zack took a deep breath as he made more notes, then frowned at a thought and looked up at her. “Newspaper said you were pulled out unconscious.”
Josephine James met his gaze evenly, “I was wrong. The digging wasn’t them coming to pull us out.”
Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Zack stood, started to pace. “You had to fight more?” This was why women weren’t supposed to do dangerous stuff. This was why they should stay safe at home, like his mother and Nona did.
Like Gabriella should have done. She’d died at home, but maybe if she hadn’t been going out, without him knowing…
“One, mainly,” the sheriff insisted. “We had a strange driller working with us that summer—everyone called him Tio. Rumor was, he was some kind of mayombero, into the bad magic. Some of our crew quit rather than work for him. He wasn’t the one doing the digging, but I realized he was in control of them.”
Them. “More zombies?” Zack asked, standing still now.
“If that’s what they were. If it even really happened. They were things, not people. Not alive. I somehow knew Tio was the one who wouldn’t let them die. Don’t ask me how, but I did. I started to fight them off, and Diego managed to get up and stand in front of me, trying to protect me. I thought he’d recovered enough to help. But I was wrong about that, too.”
Merciful God. “He died.” And turned on her.
“I wasn’t thinking real clearly by then, but I knew I had to stop Tio. Even then I didn’t completely believe what he was doing, but there were so many….”
“But you were just a girl.” Zack sank onto the bed at the idea of it. He felt sick. He hated hearing stories like this, watching innocents—women—suffer, unable to reach back in time and help or protect them.
But damned if Sheriff Jo’s chin didn’t come up, if the agony didn’t ease from her gaze in place of grim pride. “A girl with explosives in her pack.”
“You blew them up?”
Jo kind of liked the way Zack Lorenzo stared at her—awed. Maybe finally telling the story, after so many years, robbed it of some of its power. Maybe having someone believe her was what did it. But suddenly, instead of the nightmare owning her, Jo owned the nightmare. She had survived, after all. No matter how awful, even if it had been real—and had it?—she’d survived.
“I didn’t blow them up, exactly,” she clarified. “I dodged through the tunnel they’d come in, and I blew the wall.”
Then she’d lost consciousness, buried in rubble. She hadn’t expected to survive—not the blast, not the toxic gas that explosives emit after detonation, not the…zombies. But miraculously, she’d come-to in the hospital, her older brother asleep in a chair beside her. Since he’d been in D.C. before the accident, she could only imagine how long she’d been out. At first she wondered if she was in an asylum, but no.
Nobody but her seemed to realize that the corpses had died twice.
Sitting here with Zack Lorenzo, the rest of the details—an uncle somehow killed while helping with the rescue, a reporter who appeared while she was still dopey from painkillers—finally eased, far more than when she’d just told herself she’d imagined it all. Jo didn’t believe she was done with the nightmares, of course. But maybe, just maybe, she might sleep for real, now.
For the first time since she could remember.
Except, of course, that there was a big Chicago detective sitting on the only bed in the room, his weight making it dip. His bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought about a man and a bed in the same moment…Diego, she guessed. She wasn’t sure she appreciated the awareness that fluttered deep in her stomach. She didn’t trust the sharpness of her breath. It felt dangerous in its own right.
Was it possible that she could ever handle dangerous again?
Lorenzo rose from the bed and came back to the table. She took another deep breath as he passed her, big and warm and solid. Some risks were probably better than others. And he didn’t feel dangerous, just the awareness of him did.
Zack Lorenzo still felt remarkably safe, for a stranger.
When he sat on his plastic chair and began scribbling, she waited for him to glance up at her, wanting to see his eyes again. She couldn’t remember what color the detective’s eyes were. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze deliberately.
“I don’t think I even used the word zombies, the reporter did,” Jo admitted, reaching for the partially eaten piece of pie he’d pushed away from him earlier. He’d offered it once, after all. And he didn’t seem to want it. “I could’ve been delirious.”
“Yeah,” he muttered through his note-taking. “Right. You sound like the real flighty type.”
Since he said that sarcastically, she took it as a compliment. She also took a bite of pie, and it tasted wonderful, sweet and syrupy. She actually ventured a question. On the off chance they were both sane, after all. “But zombies are from Haiti, right? Or maybe Louisiana. Not the southwest.”
“Uh-huh,” Lorenzo agreed, still scribbling. When he finally looked up, it was all business. Business with deep, brown-green eyes. “There’s theories about whether real zombies were ever dead or maybe just drugged. Some scholarly types even talk about philosophical zombies…living people who just go through the motions, without thinking anymore, you know? But you’re right. None of that seems to fit with this Tio guy you described. Wasn’t Tio one of the Jackson 5?”
“That was Tito,” she told him, pleased. Who else listened to old ’70s music, anymore?
Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s a relief. So think back. Could he have been into voodoo?”
She swallowed another bite of pie and decided to at least pretend this was possible. Why not err on that side, for once? “Nope. If anything, it was something like Santeria.”
Lorenzo blinked at her. “You couldn’t have mentioned this earlier in the story?”
It impressed her that he knew what Santeria, a form of Cuban witchcraft, even was. Her grandfather was a scholar of this kind of stuff, but most people… “I’m just guessing. Tio wasn’t Mexican, and I’ve heard that a lot of the Brujas have a bias against mixed bloods.”
Zack rubbed a hand down his face, then squinted at her. Something about uncertainty on a face as rugged as his looked downright endearing. “Any chance you know someone around here who could tell me more about local Santeria or Brujeria?” He considered that. “Someone relatively sane?”
Her first urge was to call him crazy. But when she pushed past that urge and thought about it… “Ashley Vanderveer, the nurse practitioner at the Almanuevo clinic.”
The one where the boy’s body had gone missing.
“Peachy.” When he saw the question in her face, Lorenzo added, “I already tried her, asking where the corpse wandered off to, but she wouldn’t talk to me. Said I’d have to hurt myself—and that it wasn’t an invitation.”
Jo laughed. She’d always liked the new nurse…though to be honest, she guessed Ashley wasn’t really new. She’d been running the closest medical facility to Spur for two years now. It was a sign of how strictly Jo had kept to herself, that she’d never pursued that possibility of friendship. “Well, she might talk to me. Or us,” she conceded quickly, at Lorenzo’s widened eyes. Definitely brown-green.
“Us,” he repeated. Like he didn’t want her to help.
“You don’t think I can just go home and forget that all this…this whatever’s-going-on is going on, do you?”
That she could go back to that half life? Sure, it was safe. But that’s all it was. And she’d thought she’d stopped them. On some level she’d really thought…
He stood. Wow, he was a big guy. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think. It’s my job, not yours.”
“Arguable.”
“This isn’t your jurisdiction. Mayberry is your jurisdiction.” Which was true, sarcasm aside. But Almanuevo wasn’t exactly his jurisdiction either.
Jo stood, too—not that it made a big difference—and folded her arms. “You’re the one who said I could help.”
“By telling me your story, in case there’s any connection. You did, and I’m thinking there isn’t.”
“You also said Ashley won’t talk to you.”
“Yeah, well maybe I just need to turn on the Lorenzo charm.” When she lifted an eyebrow at him, he looked mildly hurt. “Hey, I can be charming!”
“Look,” insisted Jo. “I’m still not sure what to believe. But if there’s any connection between those missing persons and what happened at the mine, I am not letting it go until I find out more. I can either work with you, or on my own. Your call.”
Now he folded his arms. The pose looked impressive on him; probably more than on her. “I don’t want to distract myself baby-sitting you while I’m going after whatever this is, okay?”
Baby-sitting? Luckily, she felt too good to hit him. He looked so serious—and annoyed—that she grinned instead. “And how many monsters have you blown up, tough guy?”
It degenerated into a staring contest, which Jo won. Lorenzo’s eyes were a lot easier to resist when he was being this obnoxious. And watching them kept her gaze off his body.
“Fine,” the detective spat. “Fan-freakin’-tastic. Lemme shower and we’ll go talk to the nurse. Finish the damned pie.”
That last sounded like an order, so Jo resorted to equal familiarity.
“You need a shave, too.” She didn’t just feel good, she felt cocky. Alert. Awake, after having been asleep for far, far too long. Willing to try a risk or two—maybe with him.
Breathing.
Lorenzo began to move a hand—and not to check his jaw—but lowered it self-consciously before disappearing into the bathroom. He’d probably been raised not to flip off ladies.
Jo felt more stunned than if he had. She slowly sank back into her chair. The man was wearing a ring. How long had she been out of the dating world, that she hadn’t even looked until now?
A wedding ring.
She heard the shower come on in the bathroom and forced herself not to think about a big, swarthy, naked Zack Lorenzo. Wet. She tried not to look at the shadowy, rumpled bed.
The man was married. Maybe to the Italian girl pictured in his wallet. Some risks, you couldn’t pay her to take.
Jo told herself that it didn’t matter; they were investigating missing persons, not flirting. In fact, it was probably better that he was married. Safer. It meant she could stay casual with him. It meant she didn’t have to worry about messy romantic complications. The last man she’d been interested in had died and then tried to kill her. In that order.
For the first time in years, she let herself admit that.
But when she phoned Deputy Fred, to let him know she’d be out the rest of the day, Jo felt disappointment dull the bright edge that her life had taken on a few minutes earlier. Because of a man. One she’d barely even been attracted to.
It pissed her off.
Good thing she had something worthwhile to do…even if it might yet prove a little insane.
Chapter 3
It felt weird, showering with the sheriff in the next room.
Hell, it felt weird thinking of Jo James as a sheriff. In Zack’s world, most sheriffs were overweight, balding and—oh yeah—men. He might not agree that’s how it ought to be, but it’s what he was mainly used to. It even seemed safer.
If he didn’t like women, that would be one thing, but he did. Grandmas and toddlers, housewives and businesswomen. That was his problem. He liked women enough that he couldn’t stand by to see one hurt. And if Jo James insisted on “helping” with this investigation, stirring up powers she couldn’t see or believe, the odds were on hurt. Zack didn’t need that responsibility or the guilt of failing at it.
Again.
Having a lady sidekick, even for the few days he was in Almanuevo, wasn’t going to help. It would just distract him.
So he lathered up and rinsed off and did his damnedest to think of Jo James only in terms of her professional role, rather than her small build. Or how crossing her arms plumped her breasts under the plain blue T-shirt she wore. Or how the hip-holster for her revolver—talk about your Old West cliches—emphasized the curve of her hips. A revolver, despite that most law-enforcement officers carried 9mm automatics like his.
Tomayto, Tomahto. It wasn’t like she needed quick reloads or stopping power in greater metropolitan Spur. But distractions were distractions.
She was female.
