The Departed

immediately snapped her mouth shut and looked away. “What?”
    “You heard me. Are you okay?”
    On unsteady legs, she moved away. “What do you mean, am I okay ? Hell, why wouldn’t I be? I wasn’t the one who just got pulled out of the waterboarding experiment from hell, was I?” Absently, she bent over and straightened a flower arrangement, brushed a few dead flower petals from a marker. “Speaking of which, how is the girl? Is she going to make it?”
    Taylor stared past her, his gaze lingering on something in the distance. “More than likely. They…whoever put her in there didn’t seem to want her dead right away. She wasn’t in any danger of drowning for quite a while. They…well, I don’t have any men here but I talked to the locals. They found some weird wiring, timers—looks like things were set to do something later, but I’m not sure what yet. Somebody will talk, though. Or they’ll figure it out if they aren’t completely incompetent.”
    Dez thought of the boy she’d seen in the water fort, but she kept quiet. She needed sleep before she got any more involved in this and she knew how Taylor was.
    And she didn’t need to talk to anybody to think about what those timers might have been set for—flooding that bucket, maybe. Drowning her completely? Or something more sensational?
    Dez felt that rage burn hotter, brighter. “Bastards.” Something cool tickled her neck and she shrugged, stretched her shoulders. Looking back at him, she met his eyes, all but colorless in the dim light. “I can’t help you. There’s nothing for me to tell you. I just knew something was wrong.”
    “She’s alive. The living don’t call to you.” His voice was a quiet, steady murmur in the night.
    Meeting his gaze, she cocked her head. “No. They don’t.”
    “So who is he?” He looked down at the stone and she wasn’t surprised he’d pieced it together. He wasn’t the boss for nothing.
    Dez looked at the marker by his feet. “Somebody who’s not here anymore. He’s already moved on…and he can’t help you, either. He was only here long enough to help her.”
    * * *
     
    TAYLOR wondered if she was trying to make this harder on him or if it was just natural for her.
    Sighing, he crouched on the ground, mindless of his jeans as he studied the marker. It was new, pale gray marble from what he could tell in the dim light, shot through with something that made it shimmer.
    He read the date and managed not to flinch when he saw how old the kid was. Just a kid…only seventeen. “What did he have to do with it, Dez?”
    Silence was his only answer.
    Looking up, he saw her standing on the other side of the small graveyard, her arms crossed over her chest, her face lost in the shadows. Sighing, he scrubbed a hand over his face. “Come on, Desiree, help me out.”
    “Why?”
    He could just barely see the glitter of her eyes. “How about so I can keep your ass out of jail?”
    She snorted. “Nice try. They might try to throw me in jail for a few days and, hey, maybe they’ll succeed, but they can’t keep me there. I’ve got too good an alibi…unless they can come up with a way of convincing people I teleported that poor girl in there.”
    “They can still make your life hell,” he bit out. “I can make that go away. You going to help me or not?”
    “If they try to make my life hell for a few days, so what? I get a lawyer and deal.” She shoved her hands in her pockets and rocked back on her heels. “You can’t ride into small-town America, flash those shiny credentials, and think that makes everything okay, Jones.”
    “Or you can help me out and nothing happens. You’re not going to jail here, damn it.” Shoving to his feet, he spun away and stared off into the night. No, not here. He had enough nightmares here to haunt him for the rest of his life. Letting them try to put Dez in a jail that was no doubt full of old ghosts and older memories…no.
    She might be able to deal, but he sure as hell couldn’t.
    Behind him, Dez laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound, though. “And what are you going to do if they decide they want to lock me up for a while, slick? You can’t exactly stop them.”
    “I’ll tell them to yank their heads out of their asses, damn it,” he snarled, shooting her a dark look. And they’d listen. They wouldn’t like it. But they’d listen—he’d damn well make sure of it.
    Dez just shook her head. “You really still haven’t figured it out, have you,