Deadly Promises (Tracers #2.5)(79)

Gage cleared his throat. “Guess we needed this rain, huh?”

She gave him an amused look over her shoulder. Shit, had he really just teed up a conversation about the weather?

“It’s okay, I guess.” She got them two more brews and joined him back at the table. “Not a problem for the dig, but I doubt it will help our search-and-recovery effort.”

It was a good point. A very obvious one, too. And when he got back to San Diego, Gage really needed to hit the bars with his buddies and brush up on some of his conversation skills.

She was sitting beside him now, looking at him. The only light in the place came from a battery-powered lantern across the room, and she was half in shadow.

“Are you ever planning to tell me about this favor you owe my uncle?”

He untwisted the cap from her bottle and slid it to her. Then he twisted the cap off his. “What favor’s that?”

She tucked a lock of that auburn hair behind her ear and smiled. “The one that gives him the right to put you on seven days of babysitting detail?”

Gage took a sip, stalling. He rested the bottle on the table. “He can put me on any detail he wants. He’s my CO.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, but you’re off duty. You said you were on leave.”

Gage shrugged. “Once a SEAL, always a SEAL.” It was a lame answer, but that’s all she was going to get. He wasn’t about to sit here and rehash the worst night of his life. He wasn’t going to sit here and tell her how he’d spent the past three months fighting depression and how he could easily be out of a job right now if her uncle hadn’t intervened.

“O-kay. I guess it’s off-limits.” She looked away, obviously stung by the brush-off, and he felt mean. She checked her watch. “It’s getting late, anyway. I should get to bed.” She started to stand up and he caught her arm.

“Joe Quinn’s the best Texas hold ‘em player I ever met. You play?”

She looked at him as if he’d just asked her if she was terrorist insurgent. “Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“He taught me when I was, like, seven or something. I’ll kick your butt.”

“Doubtful.” He reached under the table and retrieved a deck of cards from his seabag.

“Oh, sure. Like I’m going to let you provide the cards.”

He made a show of peeling off the cellophane, relieved that the awkwardness had disappeared. “It just so happens I picked up these cards a week ago.”

“Where?” she asked.

“You always this suspicious?”

“Joe taught me to gamble, so yes.”

“O’Hare Airport.” He removed the jokers and shuffled the deck. When he was finished he let her cut the cards.

“What are we betting?” she asked. “I don’t keep cash around ever since the break-in. Oh, wait.” She popped up and disappeared into the back of the camper. He heard her shuffling around, and then she returned with four rolls of quarters. “Laundry money,” she said, dropping the rolls on the tables.

Gage dug a twenty-dollar bill out of his bag and traded it for two of the rolls.

He dealt. She picked up her cards, and a wicked smile spread across her face, as if he’d just given her a pair of aces. But he saw straight through her bluff.

He checked his cards. He’d play five or six hands with her. Ten, tops. He glanced across the table. Her tongue swept over her upper lip as she contemplated her cards.

Gage’s gut tightened. This was a bad idea. He should be doing recon right now, not playing poker with his CO’s niece.

He looked at Kelsey. He looked at his cards. And he knew, with certainty, that this wasn’t going to be his lucky night.





Six

The bones were buried in a shallow grave about thirty yards west of the highway. It wasn’t ground-penetrating radar or a metal detector or any other gadget that led to their discovery, but rather the eagle-eyed gaze of a seventy-two-year-old anthropologist.

“Nature doesn’t like straight lines,” Dr. Robles had said, after calling Kelsey over to have a look at the rectangular pile of rocks. They hardly stood out against the stony creek bed but Robles was right—on close inspection the arrangement looked man-made.

After it became clear what he’d found, Robles returned to the shade of the caves, taking most of the students with him. A few stragglers loitered behind, clearly more interested in recent bones than ancient ones.

Kelsey shut out all distractions now as she worked within the string boundaries she’d staked out around the site. After thoroughly photographing the area, she’d removed dozens of rocks, examining each for any sign of trace evidence before laying it aside. After just the first layer she’d begun to find scraps of rotten clothing and human bones: an ulna, a radius, several metacarpals. When the full arm took shape, she stood up and photographed it from multiple angles before moving on to the thoracic cage.

The sun blazed down. The minutes crawled by. She was at the digging stage now, and with every scoop of her trowel and swipe of her brush her sense of alarm grew. A leather belt. A scrap of rope. The tattered remnants of a pair of blue jeans.

A shadow fell over her, and she glanced up, expecting to see Aaron. Instead it was Gage, who’d spent the better part of the day on the hillside, watching God only knew what through his binoculars.