Buried Secrets (4 page)

“Yeah.” He took another big bite of his sandwich, then mut
tered through it, “But it has a smaller airport. Lousy selection in car rentals.”

She shook her head as she took a sip of coffee, still ignoring the pie. The way her stomach cramped up at the very thought of telling her own experience, she meant to continue ignoring the pie. “Still, you can't think that this kid—these missing persons—are the walking
dead,
can you?”

She wasn't sure which she wanted more—for him to say no, and keep her safe, or yes, and prove her sane. Besides, it wouldn't prove her sane. It would just make him another flake.

Lorenzo shrugged. “Guess I won't know until I meet up with one of them. But it's my job to think outside the box, so on that outside chance…”

That was her cue. He'd told her his story; now he wanted to hear about the zombies…or what could maybe have been, but surely weren't, zombies. Part of Jo wanted to trust him, maybe to be believed or, better yet, to have everything explained at last. But if it turned out he couldn't believe her either…

“Can I see your P.I. license again?” she asked.

With exaggerated patience, he leaned to the side in his chair, fished his wallet out of his jeans' tight back pocket, and handed it to her. It was still warm with his body heat.

She wished she knew what a real State of Illinois private investigation license should look like. She also wondered who the pretty Italian girl displayed next to it was. It looked like a high-school graduation picture.

“Anything else?” Lorenzo asked as Jo handed back the wallet, and she shook her head.

“The cave-in,” she began hesitantly, and he slid his pad loose from beneath his lunch. “There's so much I can't be sure even really happened. How much do you want to know?”

He groped through stray papers until he reclaimed his pen. “As much as you're willing to tell me—whether you're sure of it or not.”

So she did.

 

She hadn't looked scared once, not even during his undead-frat-boy story, and that one still made Zack's partner, Cecil Tay
lor, shudder like a wet cat. Zack liked that about Josephine James. He liked feeling he didn't have to sugarcoat what he did. He could almost stop thinking of her as a woman and just think of her as a law-enforcement colleague. For whole minutes at a time.

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?”