Buried Secrets (13 page)

“No.” Every man she ever wanted, ever kissed, was
not
go
ing to end up dead from protecting her, damn it. Even if she had to kick them into submission to make them quit it!

Please let me have to kick him into submission….

The moment seemed to stretch into a torture of waiting—waiting for the sniper to shoot, so that she could return fire at the resulting flash. Waiting for Zack to come to, or maybe even to die. Just waiting.

She'd been doing too much of that lately, hadn't she?

Jo's revolver felt like an extension of her right hand. With her left, she covered Zack's wound and pressed, to try to slow the bleeding. Even with the streetlamp out, she felt like a target out here, but she didn't have any more hands.

Her breath rasped angrily in and out of her lungs. Hooray for breathing, right?

Then a bungalow door opened onto the parking lot. “Hey,” called a sleepy voice. “Did anybody else hear gunshots?”

“I'm Sheriff Josephine James,” she shouted, despite the risk of making herself a target. Better her than him. “Go back inside, shut and lock your door and call the operator! A man's been shot—ask for police and paramedics. Everyone stay inside and away from the windows, and turn out your lights. Okay?”

Please say okay. Please.
She remembered from her training how often help didn't get called because everyone thought someone else would do it. Someone had to say okay.

“Okay,” echoed the original voice—which would've relieved her more if another window of the car above her didn't explode under another rifle shot.

Jo fired back. Three bullets gone, two left. Only an idiot carried all six chambers loaded. She guessed Zack wasn't using his weapon, which carried more rounds. Still, this was
not
good. “So much for magical protections,” she muttered—and strangely, smelled incense.

Then Zack groaned under her sticky-wet hand. “Ow?”

And breathing meant something after all.

“You macho son of a bitch.” Jo slumped against the side of the car, fighting angry tears. “You'd better stay alive.”

Another rifle shot, loud impact. Jo smelled gasoline.

“Good…plan,” groaned Zack, pushing off her sticky hand and levering himself onto his hands and knees.

“We have to get back to the room. Can you walk?”

“What, you can't carry me?” He made a strangled sound that in some cultures might signify amusement. “'Course I can walk.”

Kicking him into submission was starting to sound better and better. “That's one reason I never become a fireman, Lorenzo. Height requirements.”

“Fire
person,
” he corrected smarmily, with a groan.

“Firefighter,” she countered. Even when he
tried
to be politically correct he had a hard time of it, didn't he? He was also having a hard time sitting up, even with her left-handed tugging. Normally, she would tell him to lie still. But as long as they were out here, they invited more gunplay.

And possible gasoline explosions.

“C'mon.” Somehow she got an arm around him, helped haul him up. His weight on her shoulders almost drove her to her knees.

Almost.

But at least it left one hand free to squeeze two last, wild shots toward the darkness as they staggered together, like a broken-down version of a three-legged race, to his motel room.

As soon as they pushed through the door Jo fell, half-dropping her partner onto the shag carpeting.

“Crap,” he muttered with a groan, while she kicked the door closed. “Way to walk into an ambush, Sheriff.”

“Keep it up,” she growled at him, half to hide the extent of her relief that he was still talking.

Then again, Diego had talked almost to the end, hadn't he?

On her knees, she strained upward to switch off the light. She slid the deadbolt home and latched the chain lock.

“I'm kinda distracted,” he grunted back. “There's blood dripping into my eye.”

“Lie still, will you?” A glance at the bed, faintly lit from the bathroom alcove in back, reminded her of why it was just as well she hadn't gotten him that far. Thumbtacks. At least the pillows were safe; she grabbed one, adjusted it under his head.

He grabbed her arm, made her go still. “I'll be fine, Jo.”

She could suffocate on how badly she wanted to believe him. “I'll get towels, then I'll call the police.”

“Hand me the phone, I'll call 'em.”

“It's not 9-1-1 out here,” she warned, heading for the back, staying low.

“That and a two-plex. This is one freakish town.”

Ice still floated in the ice bucket, which they'd filled for their sodas. That and the towels allowed Jo to manage some basic first aid on Zack's head where, she hoped, he may have only been grazed. She used a spare blanket from the closet to drape over him, to protect against shock. Only then was she able to make a full report to the Almanuevo sheriff's office without her voice shaking. All habitual. All by rote.

And in the meantime this man she'd been working with, and holding, and kissing, passed out again. He lay there with blood soaking into the pillow and the shoulder of his button-up shirt, hurt, maybe dying, all because he'd risked himself to protect her. The idiot.

Her having the gun, the badge, the training—none of it made any difference to him, did it?

She couldn't do this again, Jo thought wearily, settling down beside him and reloading her revolver, then waiting. Waiting for another attack. Waiting for help. Either one would distract her from the weight of responsibility, of déjà vu.

She'd meant never to do this again.

Even if it meant no more kissing, no more friendships, no more recreational breathing—she just wasn't doing it.

So she sat there on the shag carpeting of Zack's motel room, one hand holding her revolver, the other pressing a compress against Zack's still-bleeding head, and she waited.

As soon as she finished this night out, she wasn't doing this ever again.

 

During a more lucid moment Zack said, “You're welcome.”

Jo said, “Bite me.”

“What?” Okay, so scrunching up his forehead hurt like hell, but—
what?
“Why are you mad?
I'm
the one who got shot.”

“By stepping in front of me like you're my bodyguard or something. I'm not about to thank you for that.”

Well
there
was gratitude for you. And to think, he'd actually kissed her. Actually, in a twisted way, he still wanted to kiss her. Maybe then she'd thank him….

The thought made him smile, which hurt, so he passed out.

It probably wasn't such a good sign that he kept sliding in and out of consciousness. A Journey tune drew him back into awareness, along with the encouraging thought that Jo James was messing with his pants. When his eyes opened, Zack realized the room's door was open, the lights were on, and people were moving around. Damn—had the shooter gotten in?

Then he recognized Ashley Vanderveer kneeling beside him. “He'll need some stitches, and we'll have to watch him for a concussion. He must've hit the concrete pretty hard.”

“No kidding,” he muttered, still wondering why he'd heard Journey. Where was Jo?

“Hey, you're back with us,” greeted the nurse practitioner with an encouraging smile. “Good for you.”

“Where's Jo?” When he finally saw her, he realized she was talking on a cell phone.
His
cell phone. That explained the Journey riff.

“—says he should be fine by morning,” Jo was explaining. “I'll call if anything changes. You really don't—I'm sure it's not— Well, I guess that's your decision. Mmm-hmm.”

“Great,” muttered Zack while she hung up. “Cecil's coming here, isn't he?”

“'Fraid so,” said Jo, snapping the phone back onto his belt clip. Ah. So she
had
messed with his pants.

He hadn't even realized he was on a gurney until Jo, Ashley and a couple of Almanuevo cops lifted it to full height and rolled him out the door, toward an old-model ambulance. Between that and the three police cars—what he suspected was the whole Almanuevo fleet—the parking lot was a blur of red and blue flashing lights. They hurt his head, but not as badly as the thought of someone taking potshots at him and Jo. Speaking of which—

He caught Jo's hand and scowled at her. It was a surprisingly
soft hand, for such a capable lady. “Did you tell me to bite you? What kinda language is that?”

But she didn't rise to the bait. “Look, Ashley's going to keep you at the clinic tonight.”

“Screw that. There's someone out there with a rifle.”

And, clearly, a death wish.

“Yeah, well the locals can handle that just fine,” insisted Jo as they slid him into the back of the ambulance with what felt like way too many unnecessary bumps. “Rest, will you?”

Her asking it made him a little more amenable. “Fine. But we're going out in the morning.”

“Maybe,” cautioned Nurse Vanderveer herself, shutting the doors between him and Jo.

He made himself try to relax. The locals wouldn't screw this up…would they? The sniper hadn't been throwing magic at them, after all. He'd been shooting what seemed like perfectly normal rounds from a perfectly normal rifle.

But he'd also been aiming at either Zack or Jo. So maybe they
should
hang back. Except—

As the ambulance pulled away from the Alpha Inn, Zack stopped relaxing, because through the rear window he could see Sheriff Jo, arms folded, talking with one of the other cops as she watched his and Ashley's departure.

She was staying behind?

I
n the midst of what, for Almanuevo, had become quite a manhunt, Jo's cell phone rang again. A nice, normal, digital ring, not some '80s' tune.

“I swear I'm going to turn this off,” Jo said, by way of answering. No need for niceties like
Hello
or
To Whom Am I Speaking?
She knew damn well it was Zack, calling from the clinic.

“Well, if you'd get your butt over here where you'd be safe, I wouldn't have to keep checking on you.” He sounded sulky.

Jo guessed that was an improvement from the first three calls, when he'd just sounded pissed. Either he was losing steam—Ashley may have given him something for pain—or Jo was getting used to him. Or both. From the way things had headed not so many hours ago, she'd been getting used to him just fine.

Whether she should, or not.

“Where I'll be safe?” She looked across the rocky stretch of desert by the hotel, stark under a halogen floodlight, and shook her head. Between cops and volunteers, there had to be at least fifteen well-armed Texans within shouting distance looking for
the shooter. Most were damned good shots against snakes, too. “What makes you think I'd be safer there?”

It surprised her that he didn't answer.

“Zack, I said I'd come by as soon as I'm finished here, and I will,” she offered, trying to sound less snappish. The man had been
shot,
after all. “I won't be but another hour or so. Let me know what you need me to bring from your hotel room.”

“There's nothing I can't get in the morning,” he grumbled.

“Then let me do—” She saw one of the deputies, by yet another waist-high stack of rocks, waving his flashlight to signal the rest of them. “Oops. Gotta go.”

“Why?”

“They found something.” Jo started that way. “Bye.”

“What've they found?”

She'd left her hands-free headset in the truck, foolishly thinking she'd only need it for driving. “I can tell you better once I see for myself. I'm turning off the phone now.”

“Wait—”

But she'd disconnected and turned off the phone.

“It looks like this is where he was firing from, ma'am,” explained the deputy, as Jo reached the boulder in question. She hardly had to glance at the spent shells to nod agreement.

“Musta waited here awhile, too.”

She crouched, to better see what he meant—and got a strange, prickly feeling at the back of her neck. Someone had carved a symbol into the weathered sandstone. It didn't look like anything specific, but it felt like something. Strongly.

Magic,
she thought, with no more proof than her instincts.

Stepping back so that the other officers could take a look, Jo reluctantly turned her phone back on. It rang immediately.

She answered it. “Lorenzo, stop bitching and tell me if you've seen this symbol before.”

 

By the time Jo drove up to the clinic it had to be four in the morning. The police had no suspects, but they had rifle shells to fingerprint and trackers waiting for dawn. And they'd taken pictures and rubbings of the symbol on the rock.

It had helped that Zack talked Jo through using the digital camera from his motel room.

She pulled her Bronco into the sandy parking lot, stopped it in front of a spiky cluster of yucca, killed the engine. Then, for a minute, Jo just let herself sit. She wasn't used to this much companionship. She needed the quiet.

The desert got a kind of a hush about it, this early in the morning. It wasn't true quiet, what with the wind, coyote yips, owl hoots. But it was the kind of hush that made individual problems seem insignificant. It was that quiet, muffling perspective that had drawn her to West Texas in the first place. It soothed her, somehow. Balanced her.

Maybe the vortex tour guides weren't all that wrong, after all. If magic
was
real…

She'd enjoyed being part of the manhunt, tonight. Once she knew Zack would be okay, she'd
liked
it. Yes, there was darkness in the world. Someone tried to kill them—had come too close.

And maybe would have hit her, if not for Zack.

Jo didn't like thinking that way. She hadn't asked him to take those risks. She sure didn't want to feel grateful for it.

But in the hush of the morning, she guessed she did feel grateful. Which just scared her all the more—and circled back inexorably to what she'd been thinking.

Yes, there was evil in the world. But being around the entire Almanuevo force tonight, and the volunteer trackers, and the ladies with coffee from the Ambrosia Café…it reminded her that there was as much good as evil out there. By drawing away from the one, maybe she'd drawn too far away from the other.

Which would be more heartening, if not for the dogs. Texans knew hunting dogs, but the hounds brought in tonight had proven useless.

They'd sniffed the shells, the symbol, the candy wrapper caught in a bit of cactus—and they couldn't find a trail. It was almost as if the dogs
wouldn't
track. One of them had acted downright scared, head down, tail tucked.

“I've never seen 'em this way,” their handler, a local rancher, had insisted sheepishly.

Several of the deputies agreed. “Damnedest thing.”

Literally, maybe? Zack was right. The shooter had been more than your garden-variety sniper. He may have come after them with a mundane weapon, but he wasn't mundane evil. He was magic.

Jo really was hunting honest-to-God magic. And the police force of Almanuevo just wasn't prepared to fight that.

But two people inside this clinic were.

She glanced around to make sure the lot was clear—clear except for the parked ambulance and Ashley's Jeep—before she got out of the Bronco, shouldered her duffel, and headed to the building. She found herself touching her revolver as she walked.

It reminded her of Zack Lorenzo's paranoia, that first morning in his motel room. And it wasn't enough.

Ashley leaned out of the break room at Jo's first knock, her fine blond hair sleep-tousled, and came to let her in.

“He's asleep,” the nurse practitioner whispered, relocking the door. “Finally. Thanks for keeping him distracted earlier.”

Jo shrugged. “I really didn't know how to use the camera.” She still wasn't sure if she'd done it right, wouldn't know until he plugged it into his laptop and downloaded the pictures. But it had been worth a try. Zack might have a lot of gee-whiz toys, but they were useful ones.

“I'm camped on the sofa,” Ashley said. “Standard operating procedure, with an overnight. There's a spare couch, if you want, or you can take the other hospital bed, in with him.”

Thankfully, she didn't make any clever quips about the romantic possibilities therein. Jo had never been good at sexual double-entendres even on a good night's sleep. Tonight, she was just too tired to deal.

“I'll go check on him,” she murmured.

Ashley nodded and padded back into the break room.

Jo ventured into the main back room, full of shadows and ominous-looking medical equipment…some of it secondhand, but advanced enough to save lives all the same. Almanuevo boasted two hospital beds, separated by a curtain which, at the moment, was drawn back.

Zack Lorenzo lay asleep in one of them. The other, four feet from him, lay empty and inviting.

Uncertain, Jo lowered her duffel bag to the floor. She'd packed anything from his hotel room she'd thought he might need, whether he admitted it or not. The laptop. The camera. His shaving bag. That alone had felt weirdly proprietary. The idea of sharing a room, even a stark room like this…

She remembered how he'd kissed her, and shifted her weight. Then she stepped closer to Zack's bedside. Looking at him while he slept felt proprietary, too. It also felt safer.

Zack had a bandage wrapped around his head, like one of the Sons of Liberty. His dark lashes smudged into the shadow under his eyes. Even in sleep, his face wasn't exactly handsome. Rugged, yes, and bristly. His lips looked soft, definitely kissable. Even unconscious, he was sexy as hell. But nothing about Zack had the polish it would take to pull off handsome.

Only when he smiles.

Jo backed slowly away from the bed and from her sudden urge to touch his face, to let him know she was here, to whisper good night. Had she forgotten what it felt like when he'd fallen? What it felt like to try to stop his blood with her bare hands?

What it felt like to risk tearing her soul in half?

She'd promised herself—never again. So she should sleep in the break room. Except…

She hesitated, framed by the doorway.

Except then he would be alone. True, the room seemed secure—one door, no windows. But still. They really weren't just fighting evil. They were fighting
magic
evil. Even after a week of interviewing more kinds of magic users than she'd realized existed, Jo didn't wholly understand what kinds of risk that entailed. Did Zack even have the
Bruja's
charm bag on him?

Jo lowered her shoulders, sighed, and sank all the way down to sit on the linoleum, her back braced against the doorjamb between the room and the hall. She could see the break room from here, so she could keep an eye on Zack and Ashley both.

If things stayed quiet, she could sleep a bit, sitting up.

 

Zack woke with one hell of a headache. “Crap,” he muttered, raising a hand to touch his head. Was he wearing a
hat?
And why was someone holding on to his wrist?

Then Ashley Vanderveer murmured, “Shhh,” and he saw her and the clinic ceiling, and he remembered what was what. His head was bandaged. She was taking his pulse. Helluva night.

“Why
shhh?
”

“Jo's asleep.” And Ashley inclined her head at the doorway.

Zack levered himself up on his elbows to see what she meant; the sheriff lay curled on the floor, her head tucked on one jean-jacketed arm, dead to the world. He shook his head at the picture she made. “Oh,
that
looks comfortable.”

“I offered her the bed,” Ashley insisted. “Open.” And she slid a thermometer into his mouth before he could point out that to accept the bed, Josephine James would have to admit that she wasn't Superperson. Or she would have to trust him. He wasn't sure which she would find tougher.

What makes you think I'd be safer there?
That had been a low blow, especially since keeping her safe had landed him in the medical ward in the first place. If it weren't for him, Almanuevo's finest might have been scraping bits of Sheriff Jo into their evidence bags, the night before.

Somehow, that thought didn't keep Zack mad; it just made him woozy. Especially since he was the one who'd sought out Jo and her zombie stories in the first place. If not for him, she'd be safe in Spur. He'd gotten lucky, last night. It didn't mean he could always protect her.

And if he couldn't protect her, he should keep his distance, no matter how good the kissing had been. How good she'd felt in his arms. How much he'd liked holding someone again. Not just someone.
Her.

“98.6,” announced Ashley softly, and whipped out a penlight. “Let me check your pupils.”

“This is gonna take all morning, isn't it?”

“If you hold still a few more minutes, you get stickers.”

Okay, so Nurse Vanderveer was growing on him. “Could you at least get her a blanket?”

“One patient at a time.”

By then, Jo was already taking one of those deep breaths that usually signaled a person waking up. She squinched her face up funny before yawning, too. It was cute.

“So far, so good,” said Ashley, stepping around Zack to unwind the gauze headband and check out his four measly stitches—apparently head wounds just bled like crazy. The bullet had barely grazed him. She'd been as worried by the knot on his head, from his fall onto the asphalt, as by the wound.

Then Ashley spread her hand over the wound and just held it there a few minutes, breathing deeply. It felt warm.

“Hey, James,” called Zack softly. “Sure you don't want a nice pile of scrap iron to sleep on, next time?” Would it have killed her to take the bed beside him? It had metal railings to keep him out and everything.

“I…” Jo yawned again. “I had to keep an eye on things.”

Nice story. You keep telling yourself that.
“It works better if you don't close them both at the same time.”

“He's
got
to be feeling better,” deduced Jo, opting for the ever popular talk-about-him-like-he-wasn't-there tactic of annoying him. But she also stood and stretched, arms above her head, neck arched back. The stretch elongated her waist and raised her breasts under that incredibly soft green T-shirt; he knew how soft from last night. Both breasts and shirt. That made for enough distraction that Zack didn't bother protesting.

“Good as gold,” agreed Ashley, moving her hand just before the heat of it grew uncomfortable. But she wasn't as cute.

“You mean the kind of gold that feels like my head's about to fall off?” Except it no longer felt that way, not as much. What kind of juju had Nurse Vanderveer been working?

She smiled when he slanted a suspicious glance her way. But she was also flexing and shaking out her hand. “I can prescribe a heavier painkiller, but you wouldn't be able to drive.”

“Or shoot things,” agreed Jo.

Strength in numbers, he guessed. “I'll survive.”

To prove it, he sat up and slung his legs over the edge of the bed. At least Ashley hadn't made him wear some stupid hospital gown. She'd put his shoes somewhere, though.

“Whatever you're hunting, take a day to rest,” Ashley advised as she left. “You were
shot,
you know,” she called.