Santiago walked back into his own home frowning. A phone that wasn’t his phone was vibrating against his desk.
Damn woman was always leaving her phone someplace she wasn’t.
Unable to resist temptation, Santiago picked it up and saw the name of the ex-fiancé. Derrick.
He was going to pick it up, but fate intervened, and the line went dead. Seemed a cooler head was forced to prevail.
The phone vibrated again and he picked it up, because why the fuck was this guy calling Lauren anyway? He’d made his choice, now he needed to grow some fucking balls and live with that shit.
The phone disconnected again and not fifteen seconds later rang again.
“Sheriff Stillwater here.”
“Uh, is Lauren in trouble?”
“Lauren’s not available…Derrick. This is Derrick isn’t it?”
“Yes. Why is a cop answering Lauren’s phone?”
Santiago sat down at his chaos-free desk and propped his feet on it, crossing his ankles.
“She left it at my place this morning, and I’m answering because of the obnoxious number of times you’ve called. If it wasn’t clear before, let me make it clear to you now. She doesn’t want to talk to you, and she doesn’t want to hear from you. The time for all that would’ve been before you fucked her sister.”
Santiago didn’t know why he was angry on her behalf, but he was.
“I understand why she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me, but I’m not calling about me. I have urgent news for her. And tell her, for the love of God to pick up her phone.”
Santiago hung up without responding.
Stripping, he walked to the lake shore and dove into the waters.
To know Lauren was to not to know peace. The woman was an unchecked firestorm, and he felt the call to throw himself head long into her flame, death and consequences be damned.
Santiago stopped, treading water, and did a 360, his heart slamming against his rib cage. Something had happened to his vision. The world leached of color and took on sepia tones.
The sun was dull. The sky, land, and water all looked like they’d been painted with a sodden brush tinged with old, dried blood.
Habit compelled Santiago to sink to the depths of the dark waters, to drop like a 250-pound stone and let the earth and sky right themselves. Then he felt movement in the current, barely a ripple, but he felt it.
Something cold slid against his leg.
Gritting his teeth, a low, throated growl that precipitated physical battle rumbled through him.
A hand gripped his ankle, and he knew it wasn’t the hand of a living being. It was an echo, a spirit reaching for life. Santiago sunk, fully submerging himself, and listened to the water’s movement. Sinking deeper, the naked pale body of a man, bloated and fed upon, observed him in grotesque greeting.
Cody Earl Dagney.
The man had been missing for about two months.
Sinking deeper still, because bodies didn’t float in place vertically this way, he saw where his waist was bound by a metal chain that disappeared in the depths.
Propelling himself back up to Cody Earl’s face, Santiago said a prayer for peace and retribution.
You were a good man,he thought, surfacing.You didn’t deserve that kind of ending.
Swimming back to the shore, he wasn’t surprised that the world was vibrant and filled with the sounds of life. A day offreviewing files and eating cake made just for him wasn’t in the cards.
His job was to get justice for the living and the dead, which meant it was time to get back to work.
