Devil's Bargain

Jazz felt a definite creep along her back. The place was deserted. It even smelled deserted. A soft-drink machine glowed and hummed at the far wall, but the lights were at half power, and the kids’ area at the far side of the room with all its grimy, battered plastic toys lay silent and abandoned. The deputy grunted softly and flicked on a switch; fluorescents snapped on overhead, blindingly white.

“Where?” Borden asked. He looked informal. She couldn’t figure it out for a second, then realized that his tie was missing. Were they expecting him to hang himself? Or her to strangle him with it? Granted, the second part of that wasn’t out of the question.…

The deputy gestured widely toward the cubicles. There were six of them, all doors gaping open. All empty. “Whichever,” he said. “Go on in. Press the button when you want out.”

Meaning that once they were inside, the door locked behind them. Jazz forced a smile and headed for cubicle number one. It didn’t feel too bad until Borden crowded in with her, and then it was instantly too small, his heat too vivid against her skin. Their knees bumped as they tried to jostle their cheap plastic chairs for position. He muttered an apology as he elbowed her. She glared back.

They both froze for a second as the lock snapped shut behind them, and their eyes darted into a shared gaze. In his, Jazz read the same undertone of panic and frustration she felt. She deliberately forced herself to relax, nodded at him and folded her hands in her lap.

They sat in silence, waiting. The Plexiglas was scratched and warped, muddy with fingerprints. Some woman had kissed it at some point and left a smudged hooker-red imprint; Jazz itched to clean it. And if I want to clean it, she thought, this place really must be filthy.

“Jazz,” Borden said.

“What?”

He was looking down at his right hand, which was curled into a loose fist on his knee. The top two buttons of his shirt were open, cotton hanging loose and limp around his long throat, and the skin there looked exposed and sleek and vulnerable. “I got angry with you, before. I’m sorry.”

Her lips parted, but nothing came out. She just stared at him.

“You need to quit doing this to yourself,” he said. There was a strange tension in his voice. “Hurting yourself. Jazz, you keep putting yourself in danger, and there’s no reason for it. You throw yourself in the way of every speeding truck hoping to get run over, and sooner or later, you’re going to—”

“You think I’m suicidal?” she asked, astonished. His loose fist tightened.

“I think you blame yourself,” he replied. “For McCarthy either being i

She felt anger fill her up like boiling water. “Look, Counselor, you don’t know me, and I don’t need your Psych One-oh-one crap about what I do or don’t feel. You don’t know Ben McCarthy, you don’t know anything about—”

“What makes you think I don’t know Ben McCarthy?” he interrupted, and met her eyes. Held them. “What makes you think I don’t know you?”

She had no defense for that. She resorted to pure fury, to reaching out and grabbing a handful of his jacket lapel and pulling him closer, but then the heat from his body washed over her and the smell of that warm, edible cologne, and the gentleness in his eyes…

“Jazz,” he said, and she’d never heard anyone say her name like that, with such infinite tenderness. “If you hurt me again I’m going to have to hurt you back. So please. Don’t punch me, okay?”

She felt herself flush. “I’m not—I wasn’t going to—” She let go of his jacket, but they were still too close together, alarmingly close, and her heart was racing so fast she could barely feel individual beats. “Back off, Counselor.”

“You use that like a shield,” he said. Still low and calm. “My title. You can use my name, you know.”

“Borden—”

“I’ve got another one.”

“Fine, James. Back the hell off.” But it didn’t sound right, even to her ears. It sounded weak and fragile and oddly uncertain. “Don’t do this to me. Not now.”

He was so close his breath was stirring the hair around her face. His eyes were tired and bloodshot, his freshly shaved face pale with exhaustion.

His smile, when it came, looked wounded. “Do what? Worry about you? Care what happens to you?”

“James—” It slipped out before she could stop herself. Counselor and Borden, those were things she flung at him to keep him at bay. James was a name that felt intimate on her lips, and from the sudden flash in his eyes, he knew it. “I don’t need your help.”

“I know,” he said, and it was almost a whisper this time. “You never need anybody’s help.”

It was utterly insane, but she couldn’t stop herself. She moved forward, a bare three-inch lunge, and kissed him. She felt him tense in surprise, then deliberately relax, and those lips she’d been staring at for the past long minutes were warm and baby soft and damp against hers, and the heat she’d been feeling that she thought was anger was turning into something else, a white-hot flare that burned down her spine and melted bone along the way. She started to pull back, but then Borden’s lovely manicured hands slid up her arms and ruffled her hair and cupped the back of her head and, oh, my Lord, his mouth opened and his tongue, his tongue like hot velvet stroking her lips, then sliding inside…

Somewhere on the other side of the Plexiglas came the harsh clang of a metal door slamming open.

Jazz gasped and jumped back, shaking, tingling all over, staring at Borden, who looked just as stu

She swallowed hard, looked away and moved as far from him as it was possible to get in the narrow confines of the tiny cubicle. She heard him pulling in deep breaths, and out of her peripheral vision making fussy, nervous movements, smoothing his jacket, his shirt.

I can’t believe I did that.

It already seemed like a strange daydream, and she might have convinced herself it hadn’t happened at all, except that she could still taste him, still smell him on her skin and, oh, that felt so…good.

“Later,” he said quietly.

“In your dreams,” she shot back. Unsteadily.

“Yeah, I’m almost certain that will happen, too.”

On the other side of the barrier, she heard jingling metal. Shuffling shoes. And then saw a shocking orange blaze of a jumpsuit—Jazz thought irrelevantly that Ben McCarthy was wearing the same color, right now—sidle awkwardly into the frame of the window.

The legendary Max Simms had arrived.

Where McCarthy filled out his prison garb in flat planes and intimidating angles, Simms was entirely different. Slender, lost inside the ill-fitting outfit, with giant blue eyes and wispy white hair and a face that looked gentle and sensitive and old before its time. He stood maybe five foot five, at most, and his shoulders were stooped like an arthritic ninety-year-old. It looked like his restraints weighed more than he did.

He fixed those mild blue eyes on Borden, who had risen to his feet, and nodded. Borden returned the gesture and settled back on the very edge of his chair…and then Simms turned his attention to Jazz.

It was like having all the air sucked out of the room. Like being in the center of the brightest spotlight in the universe, a beam so bright that she felt one instant away from combusting, so bright that there was no hiding in any corner because there were no shadows left, anywhere.

Simms blinked, mild as milk, and settled into a plastic chair that a deputy thumped down on concrete for him on the other side of the glass. He rested his elbows on the table and flicked on the old-fashioned intercom on his side of the barrier.