Page 54 of Trigger Happy

That kiss? It wasn’t real.

What am I doing? I pull away, letting my legs slip from around his tapered waist. “The cave. We should…”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t look happy about me swimming off, so he maneuvers me until I’m on his back, clinging to his slick neck.

“Bold move for someone who could easily choke you,” I say.

“Bold of you to assume I’d complain about that.”

I can see the scars crisscrossing his skin, and I think about every slice of blade it took to make them, imagining someone carving into his body to make him bleed. A cold, icy rage settles into my veins at the thought of someone hurting him, but then he swims us into the cave, and, my god, it’s stunning. Calcium drips from the ceiling in pale stalactites with steam curling around the cone tips. It’s so beautiful it’s almost worth all the dog-paddling.

“I wonder what Bobbi got up to in here,” I say, my voice reverberating in the cavern.

“Cave-diving?” His deep voice bounces across the rocks.

“Geocaching?” I say. Geocaching, geocaching, geocaching, it echoes.

“Waterboarding?”

“Echoey, orgasmic sex?”

It rebounds all across the cave, filling my mind.

“Nice to know where your head’s at.” He sets me onto a slick outcropping of limestone. “What now?”

I stand carefully on the slippery surface. “Let’s search the cave. You take east, I’ll take west.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He gives me an exaggerated salute. “And what am I looking for?”

“Anything that doesn’t belong,” I say, wringing out my hair. “Severed heads, footprints, a survival cache Arch stashed here labeled Apocalypse Prep.”

“Aye-aye.”

We split up.

The cave is deeper than I realized, and I quickly lose sight of him. I comb through every crevice, crawl under overhangs, turn over rocks until dirt forms little half-moons under my nails. Thirty-six minutes later, the only thing I’ve found is a rock shaped like a starfish.

I’m about to call it when Lawton shouts, full of wicked glee, “Get your ass over here! I’ve got something.”

“Only if you ask nicely!” I echo back, already following his voice through the cave.

“All right. Get your fine ass over here!” he says. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

28Lawton

Poor thing. Someone plucked out all her teeth,” Sabrina says, staring down at the dead body.

I crouch lower. “You think whoever did this wanted to steal the DNA evidence, so the cops couldn’t identify the woman?”

“Or they wanted to keep the teeth in a jar as some sick memento,” she says like this is just another Saturday. But my Saturdays typically start with a coffee, not a bald, toothless corpse covered in calcium crust like a… I try to think up the word.

“What’s that fish they serve in fancy restaurants?” I say.

She blinks. “Sometimes, I have no idea how you get from point A to point B.”

“You know,” I continue, taking off my boot to dump out the pebbles stuck inside. “The one with the salty crust? You like gourmet shit, you’ll know it.”

She thinks on it. “Sea bass?”