Page 23 of Ransom
"Ransom."
I looked back.
He was still leaning against the doorframe. "We going to talk about yesterday, or are we pretending it didn't happen?"
"Nothing to talk about."
"That right?"
"You got what you wanted. I got what I wanted. Now we've got a job to do." I held his gaze. "That's all this is."
I turned to go.
He caught me by the wrist.
He didn't yank. He didn't have to. He just closed his fingers around it and held. The contact went straight through me. I let him pull me one step into the room, because breaking his grip wasn't something I was going to do. We both knew it.
He shut the door behind me with his other hand.
Now we were on the same side of it. The bed was made. Soap-smell from his shower, and the little pot of pot-pourri on the nightstand. He still had my wrist. His thumb settled against the inside of it, right over the pulse, and he held it there like he wanted to feel what I was doing.
"That's a real pretty speech, Ransom." His voice had gone soft. He was looking right at my mouth. "You almost sold it to me. But I had your hand in my hair yesterday, and I know what your face does when you're lying to yourself. So you call this whatever you need to call it to get through the morning. I'll keep my mouth shut about it." His thumb pressed a little harder. "But don't stand here and tell me it's nothing. Because we both know it's not."
"Fuck you, Ranger."
"Ain't got time for that," he said and grabbed his hat off the hook. He smirked at me and leaned in close enough to feel how hard I was for him. "Ready to go when you are, darlin'," he said against my chin.
I shoved him back. He laughed like it was the funniest damn thing he'd ever seen. He was still laughing when I slammed the door in his face.
My shirt stuck tomy back between my shoulder blades where the sweat had soaked through. The asphalt was soft under my boots, soft enough that it gave a little when I shifted my weight, and the air tasted like dust and something sweet and wrong coming from the truck bed behind me.
He'd been two days dead in a hundred and four. The smell was the kind that crawled up into your sinuses and stayed there for a week. I kept my breathing shallow and my mouth open and tried not to think about what I was going to taste in my coffee tomorrow morning.
Ransom leaned against the truck ten feet away with his arms crossed and his hat pulled low. He hadn't looked at me since we'd left the ranch.
The Truth or Consequences morgue sat behind the funeral home, a cinderblock addition with bars on the windows and paint that had blistered off in sheets. We'd been waiting fifteen minutes for the sheriff.
A dust plume rose on the highway and grew closer.
The cruiser pulled into the lot and parked. The sheriff climbed out slowly. He had thirty pounds on him he didn't used to and the kind of mustache that said his wife had stopped having opinions on it about twenty years ago. He took one look at the tarp-covered body in the truck bed, and the corner of his mouth pulled down like he'd just bitten into something sour.
"Hear you got a body," he said.
Ransom pulled the tarp aside without a word.
Roy Castillo lay in the truck bed with his hands folded across his chest, his skin gone the color of old wax.
The sheriff stepped back. "Jesus. Judge Castillo?"
"Found him on Pae Saco land yesterday," I said. "Winston Valverde, Texas Rangers. I'm working the case." I pulled my badge and let him look at it long enough to count the points on the star.
He didn't ask which case file or which captain, or whether I had jurisdiction outside Texas. He didn't ask any of the questions a man could've asked. The badge was real and the star was bright, but he wasn't looking at the badge. He was looking at the body like he'd already heard it was coming and hoped it wouldn't.
"You got a medical examiner on staff?"
The sheriff pulled a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. "We contract with the state office up in Albuquerque. Send the bodies up, get the reports back in a few months. Sometimes six, depending. Budget cuts."
I looked at the body, the cinderblock building, the sheriff who clearly wanted to be anywhere else.
