She squinted to get a better look in the murky light.
That was odd . . . it almost looked like the rifle hanging from his shoulder beneath the duffle bag had drifted up and was pointing at her. It had to be a trick of the flashlight beam bouncing off the concrete at her feet. Lifting the torch, she aimed it toward his side and the offending rifle, which was quite visibly hovering there—in midair—pointing directly at her. With a stifled shriek she jerked hard to the right, colliding with the wall.
He stopped hard, and turned, the duffle bag scraping against the concrete. “What’s wrong?”
“That wasn’t funny!” she snapped, aiming the flashlight at his face. Her heart skipped a beat, only to take two in rapid succession. Groaning beneath her breath, she fought to get her breathing and heart rate back under control. “Is that thing loaded?”
Of course it isn’t loaded. There’s no way he’d point a loaded gun at you!
Then again, it wasn’t like him to point an unloaded gun at anyone either. What’s gotten into the man?
Her heart stuttered, then resumed business as usual.
With a deep, tension-releasing breath, she relaxed.
“What are you talkin’ about?” A scowl slammed down over his forehead, and his eyes looked burningly blue.
“The rifle,” she shot back. “I don’t appreciate the joke.”
“What joke?” His voice rose to as close to a shout as she’d ever heard from him.
“Pointing the rifle at me. It’s not funny. If anyone should know how dangerous aiming a gun at someone can be . . .” She trailed off to glare.
He froze, his expression falling perfectly still. A fraction of a second later an explosion of pure rage lit his face. The blue of his eyes burned so bright they looked almost incandescent.
“Pachico!” he roared, turning in a slow circle. “Goddamn you!”
Pachico?
The name—somehow she knew it was a name—echoed in the tight confines of the channel. She puckered her forehead, repeating the word beneath her breath. It was so familiar, lingering there at the back of her mind. She knew it from somewhere . . .
And then it burst into her head like the flashlight beam had illuminated a deep, dark, repressed memory.
Pachico . . .
A bald head wrapped in a bloody bandage . . . a long face . . . muddy brown, resigned eyes . . . a huge knife sticking out of a thin chest. A thin trail of crimson trickling down a white dress shirt . . .
Pachico.
The man Jillian had killed at Wolf’s Sierra Nevada home six days earlier. The man whose body had been cremated courtesy of a helicopter-to-house missile. Six days? Good lord, it felt like sixty.
She shook her head in disbelief. Pachico was dead. So why was Rawls bawling the man out. Because that’s what the tone of his voice sounded like. Not to mention he’d swung around as though searching for the culprit. He was reading someone the riot act. Only the man he was searching for was dead. Very, very dead.
A chill winnowed through her, and it had nothing to do with their current predicament—running for their lives, twenty feet beneath ground.
“Why are you shouting a dead man’s name?” The question tumbled out as her flashlight beam fluttered over his face.
It seemed to take a second for her query to register, and then his face went blank again. But she knew the answer.
“A ghost? You’re seeing ghosts?” It was the only thing that made sense. The only reason he’d be yelling a dead man’s name.
This was his problem? His hallucination? A ghost? He was seeing dead people? Every single comedic rip-off of The Sixth Sense reeled through her mind. Hysterical laughter bubbled up her throat and tried to escape out her mouth.
Except . . . there wasn’t an ounce of levity on his face. Instead, it looked frozen, almost fragile. Which was crazy when describing a six-foot-four hunk of muscle and strength. But yeah, he looked vulnerable, as though the wrong reaction from her could shatter him into a billion pieces and nothing would ever be right between them ever again.
The urge to laugh vanished.
“That’s what’s going on, isn’t it? You’re seeing ghosts.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to call them dead people—even though that was what they technically were. “Talk to me.”
Blue eyes scanned her face, lingered, and the intensity softened. “Ghost. Singular.”
She nodded, trying to maintain an open expression, even though every synapse in her brain had warped straight into denial. Ghosts? Seriously? “Pachico?”
It made sense that if he were suffering from a psychotic break, his delusions would center on the last person he’d tried to save, only to helplessly watch die.