Evelyn Vaughn - Buried Secrets

“Look, Mr. Lorenzo, I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to talk to you. If you’re still in the area, I mean.”

The area. Yeah. Right. “I’m still in the state, anyhow. You want I should drive back down there?”

“No,” she said quickly, then paused. “It’s a small town, and I don’t want questions. I’ll drive up and meet you.”

“You know,” he pointed out, “as many car accidents are caused by exhausted drivers as by drunks.”

“I’m a good judge of my own limits.” He’d heard that before. It was usually a lie.

“I’d make better time,” he insisted.

“I’m sure you would. Where are you staying?”

Stubborn, wasn’t she? “The Alpha Inn. Room 7.”

“I’ll be there by lunch.” And she hung up, which Zack found annoying, even though he generally did the same thing.

“I could be there by breakfast,” he muttered, and went back to his note-taking so he could maybe catch a nap before Little Jo moseyed on into town.

A nervous woman. Great. Even the well-rested ones were trouble.

He hoped she had something worthwhile to tell him.

Relieved to have that decision made, Jo managed a quick nap on the cot in the jail’s cell before she left Fred in charge for the day. She couldn’t help remembering that the last person to stretch out on that cot was one rangy, thirty-something Chicago P.I. Despite having changed the sheets, she imagined that she could smell the faint scent of aftershave. Or was that just the whole “breathing again” business?

Either way, she slept better.

She drove her old Bronco into Almanuevo a little after 11:30 a.m., marveling at how quickly the once-deserted little town had risen from the dead. Was it even five years since some real-estate developers started marketing the area as an Eden for psychic enlightenment? Not that it wasn’t pretty in its red-rocked, desert-y way—Big Bend National Park lay several hours south of them and the Guadalupe Mountains almost as far to the north. But when the closest metropolitan area was El Paso, how could Jo not be surprised by Almanuevo’s success?

And it was, against all probability, succeeding. Billboards advertised vortex tours, psychic readings and even a dude ranch that offered everything from chakra alignments to rattlesnake roundups. The signs were set too far back to shade the two-lane highway as she drove into town, her windows open to the unseasonably warm March sunshine. But they were entertaining.

She knew the Alpha Inn, with its pitted parking lot and faux-adobe bungalows. It was one of the oldest businesses in town. Its first incarnation had been as the Tumbleweed Motel, before interstates had put the original town out of business. Jo spotted Lorenzo’s black Ferrari, a rental with New Mexico plates, and she parked her battered blue Ford beside it.

God, she was tired.

For a moment, right after she killed the engine, she let her head fall back and wondered what the hell she was doing here. The sensation felt very much like panic, but at what? The story she finally was going to tell?

Or the man she meant to tell it to?

Since she never allowed herself to panic, Jo grimly shook it off and got out of the truck, sand crunching between her boots and the warm, worn asphalt. At least her cowboy hat—stained white straw, for summer wear—kept the worst of the sun off.

She knocked on door #7. Then she waited, squinting even through the shade of her hat brim and sunglasses. She noticed the drapes were closed.

She knocked again, harder. Nearby a snake of some kind flowed off a flat rock and into the desert. Jo thought she might just fall asleep on her feet out here.

Then the door swung open, and she found herself surrounded by a burst of air-conditioned coolness and nose-to-hairy-chest with the P.I.

Lorenzo had obviously just woken. His thick, dark hair was messy, his shirt was halfway open, his jeans partly unbuttoned, and he was barefoot. For a long moment, Jo just stared—breathing again. She forced her gaze slowly upward. From the small, gold medal nestled in his chest hair to his throat, his shadowed jaw, finally his intense eyes squinting down at her against the glare of Texas sunlight. The awareness that whispered through her from his proximity surprised her. It was another sensation she didn’t generally allow herself to feel.

When Lorenzo covered a wide yawn and waved her in—“Nice hat”—Jo entered his cool, dark cave. She didn’t like caves.

Yet it was so unlike anyplace she expected a man who drove a Ferrari to stay that she found herself grinning. “Pink Formica?”

He snorted. “You got something against Formica?”

But her attention had moved on to the rumpled, king-size bed. It looked particularly inviting, more than this morning’s cot had, and Jo hid her own yawn as she took off the hat and sunglasses. “It’s kind of dark in here,” she hinted.

“Oh yeah. Sorry.” Lorenzo flipped on the lights.

Accepting that as the best she’d get, Jo sank into one of the hard plastic chairs by the paper-strewn table. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“No problem.” Belatedly, Lorenzo buttoned his jeans, then sprawled with his odd, lumbering grace into the other chair. He dwarfed it. “I’m gonna send out for lunch—you want anything?”

She tried not to look at the bed, wishing she didn’t feel so…so alert, around this man. “Almanuevo has delivery now?”

“Not exactly.” He smirked at the rotary phone as he dialed, as if something about it amused him, then said, “Yeah, this is Lorenzo at the Alpha. Send me the usual, and….”

He widened his eyes, waiting on her.

“Just coffee,” she insisted.

“Toss in a slice of apple pie and an extra coffee. Yeah.” And he hung up. “Delivery in Almanuevo is me saying I’ll give five bucks extra to whoever carries my order across the street from the Ambrosia Café. Sometimes it’s a waitress, sometimes it’s another customer.” He shrugged at the quirks of small-town life. “So you thought about what I said yesterday?”

“I thought about the cave-in,” she admitted.

“Want to tell me about it?” It wasn’t exactly concern, but she appreciated his pragmatism. Concern might make her want to cry, or say something embarrassing, and she didn’t need that. Lorenzo found a legal pad buried amongst the pile of loose pages on the desk and fished a pen out of the mess as well.

Jo hesitated. She hadn’t told anyone what she’d seen—thought she saw—since the reporter, and she’d been doped up on painkillers at the time. Since she’d been quoted as an anonymous source, she doubted even her brothers knew she was the one who’d started the rumor about zombies.

A laptop computer sat on the kitchenette bar, plugged into a phone jack, and paperwork covered the table. But did she really mean to recite the whole, unbelievable story to a stranger from Chicago?

She was here to make the dreams stop, that was all.

“You changed your mind again,” guessed Lorenzo, sagging back in the chair and looking ceilingward.

“I’d just like to know more about why I’m telling it,” Jo challenged. She’d been more comfortable in her jail. Now in his motel room, his messy bed sprawled beside her and his chest hair staring her in the face, she felt distinctly out of her league.

Like the world had started vibrating at a faster speed. But to hear some folks talk, maybe that was just Almanuevo.

He seemed to consider the request, then shrugged. “Right. I can handle that. What I do, Miss James—”

“Ms. James,” she corrected easily. “Or Sheriff.”

He stared at her, then tried again. “What I do, Mzzz. James, isn’t the usual private investigation stuff. I do that too—cheating spouses, skip-traces on bounced checks, crap like that. A guy’s got to make a living, no matter how well-off his partner is. But our specialty is the weird stuff. Cults. Curses. Ghosts.”