by D. D. Ayres
Lattimore snorted, the first emotional response Cole had ever witnessed from him. “Your way of handling things could be the reason Officer Jamieson’s cover was blown.”
Scott’s jaw worked for a second. “Actually, sir, I’m certain it was. There’s an X on the lower right-hand corner of the newspaper article Ms. Collier was sent. It was a message meant for me.”
“But Scott, if he’s after you, why not out you instead of me?”
Scott didn’t look at Cole, afraid his fear for her would show. He spoke to Lattimore. “X won’t try to take me down until he’s wrecked everything important to me. But I’m not waiting for that to happen. I’ve been working with my former handler to get to X first. I should have told you sooner.”
“Can you be certain he has no direct interest in our present U/C operation?”
“Not certain. But since it’s not about him, my best guess is he doesn’t give a shit. X just wanted to humiliate me, through my partner.”
“Sir?” Cole waited until Lattimore’s attention shifted to her. “Shajuanna was only interested in the fact that I’m a law officer who befriended her under false pretenses. Even she didn’t ask why. Every interview she’s given stresses the fact that she thinks I was sent in to trip up her husband for crimes concerning his prior conviction. Puppy drug smuggling isn’t on her radar.”
Lattimore sat still for a long time, not looking at anything in particular. Finally he slipped his fingers under his glasses to rub his eyes. “We have a lot of resources and manpower involved in this task force. More than you know about. It was possible we had a leak here, on the back end. I needed to be sure that wasn’t the case.”
Cole let that sink in. Scott had warned her there were warring political factions at work for a man in Lattimore’s position with fierce internal defenders and enemies, pro and con. The fact that the director thought it was possible they’d been betrayed by someone in-house was positively chilling.
Lattimore adjusted his glasses and gave the pair before him a tight smile. “Thank you for your candid answers. We’ve had worse outcomes, and more spectacular failures. Believe me. If we can verify that the task force’s purpose remains unknown, our efforts will continue unabated on a different front.”
Cole was grateful he didn’t actually say the words “without you.”
He stood up and offered Cole his hand. “Thank you for your work and dedication, Officer Jamieson. DEA depends on officers like you to do difficult work.” He paused, looking at Cole with a very serious expression. “I know you are in a very difficult situation at the moment. But all of this will pass. You’re a fine officer. You were able to infiltrate our target with remarkable ease. It’s been good serving with you. Now if you will follow my assistant to the appropriate room, we can begin the debriefing.” He glanced at Scott. “Agent Lucca, a private word.”
Cole glanced back at Scott before she left. He looked tough, unapologetic, and ready for anything.
When she was gone, Lattimore turned to Scott. His eyes were silver behind his glasses and a vein had popped out on his forehead. “What the hell is all this about a man called X? I want details. Names, dates, everything that’s happened.”
* * *
“Screw that.” Scott clicked off the TV and tossed the remote away. He’d watched five innings of a ballgame before deciding it was the slowest-ass game on the planet.
Scott and Cole had spent three grueling hours answering and reanswering questions from various task force members. They had been cross-checked against each other’s statements separately, and then cross-referenced against the reports they had turned in weekly while undercover. It was necessary but it was an antagonistic process and sometimes just short of insulting. Once or twice it had crossed that line. But they had each stuck to their stories, omitting only certain previously agreed-upon events of that night in the alley.
He and Cole had returned to their rented apartment to pack. But neither of them had much energy for that at the moment.
In fact, Scott hadn’t heard a sound coming from Cole’s bedroom in over an hour. He thought she must be asleep. Now, he wondered if she wasn’t just hiding.
He got up and crossed to her open doorway.
She was at the window, staring off into the middle distance as if the parking lot beyond was the most interesting sight she’d ever seen. But he knew she wasn’t examining the parking lot, or anything else beyond the glass. She was all inside herself. Sadness was coming off her in waves he could feel. Hugo was at her feet, splayed out so flat it seemed as if he’d been run over. He was hurting because she was.
He didn’t know what to say. He just knew he needed to get her out of here. “You ready?”
She didn’t look back. “I didn’t think … I didn’t think.” Her second sentence was a complete thought.
Scott leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb and waited. Even if it took her another hour to get out the next sentence, he’d wait. She needed to say things. The least he could do was bear witness to her pain, even if it tore at his gut.
“I should have been prepared.” She traced a finger over the glass before her. “You told me what might happen. Still, I thought…”
“You could be a hero.”
He saw a corner of her mouth jerk up for a second. She liked it that he’d called her a hero, without adding the -ine. Good. Something he’d done right today.
He left the jamb and moved toward her slowly. “Are we going to talk about it now?”
After a moment she nodded but she didn’t look back at him.
He came up behind her and lifted his hands to frame her shoulders. But she flinched before he even made contact, just as before, so he let his hands fall to his sides.
“You can’t ever know how these assignments will end, Cole. You think you know how you’ll feel and how you’ll handle it. But the truth is, whether it goes right or terribly wrong, you can’t know ahead how you’ll handle it.”
“How did you handle it?” Her voice was so small he almost missed the question. The question was a kick in the stomach. He never really had talked about it. Not with his parents. Not directly with his anger management group. But he owed her the truth. He’d dragged her into this. He owed her a pound of his flesh.
“When my undercover operation blew up in my face, it just about did me in.”
She glanced at him, surprise in her expression. “What happened that night?”
Jesus. What didn’t happen?
He set a shoulder on the wall nearest her, angling his body toward her. “You really want to know?”
She nodded.
“That night—” He paused to see if she would flinch at the mention of the night that tore them apart. She didn’t even shift her feet. But her focus remained on the window.
“That night was a Pagan initiation. Orgy or public sex. Those were my choices. I chose the latter. Thought at least that way I could control what I would be forced to do.” He ran the back of a hand over his mouth. “Look, you don’t want to hear this.”
“I do.” She didn’t turn to him.
Maybe it was better that way. If she was looking at him he doubted he could utter the words she wanted to hear. Yet he needed to tell it in context. Then maybe she’d understand, at least a little.
“I won’t burden you with everything that happened during the year I was trying to earn my way into the bastards’ organization. I did some things, and saw a lot more bad shit that I still have nightmares about. You’re warned about it, but still.” He paused a beat to let that anguished wave of guilt roll through him.
“Now that you’ve been undercover you have a sense of how it is when you hang out with suspects. After a while they go from being scumbags you want behind bars to being ordinary human beings. Most of them.”
Sociopathic personalities like X weren’t exactly human to his way of thinking. At least, they weren’t knowable. Even within the Pagans men like X stood a little apart. X was something he was still going to have to deal wit
h.
She frowned. “So you became friends with the Pagans.”
“Not exactly. There were almost daily experiences to remind me that I wasn’t dealing with people who honor the normal social contract.”
She glanced at him, her expression unreadable. “Are you going to tell me what happened that night?”
He didn’t have to ask which night. Bad-shit night. The worst.
“I was being initiated into a chapter of the Pagans. We were about to do a drug deal with a Russian cartel out of Philly and they needed a full complement. Actually, we were to provide the muscle, be the enforcers. This was the kind of hookup my work was about. I was getting in at the beginning, and then.” He shrugged. “It’s the little things that can trip you up. Someone called the cops.”
“The bartender of the place whose parking lot you had commandeered called my precinct.”
He glanced at her. “I swear I didn’t know we were in your precinct. We’d been riding and drinking all day. I’m not sure I could have told you what day it was by the time I had my pants around my ankles and that woman was—handling my junk.”
She hunched her shoulders but her voice was determined. “Go on.”
“You know the next part. Arrests were made. There were drugs on the premises. Folks went to prison after that. X did time. My extraction ‘cover’ was that I was wanted in another state and that I was extradited west for outstanding warrants. End of undercover operation. End of my career. End of our marriage.”
She shrugged. “At least you got bad guys off the street.”
“No, you and your precinct pals got bad guys off the street. I lost my U/C operation and offed my marriage. For nothing.”
“What did you do after I left you?”
Died inside. But she didn’t need to hear self-pity loser shit from him now. “Higher-ups said I had to be off the streets for a while, until things settled. So, I mostly stayed at home and went to hell.”
He had never seen her chew her nails before but her thumb edged between her teeth. “Did you get into drugs?”
Complete honesty, Lucca. “Undercover, I snorted a few times. I tried to stay clear but there were moments.”
He leaned in until she was forced to glance at him. “I didn’t get hooked. It was the alcohol and guilt that did me in for a time. I just tipped the bottle back and tried to drown out everything else.”
“Including me?”
“Especially you.”
“What changed us?” Cole dipped her head. “Was it me?”
“God, no. Gabe happened.”
Cole nodded. “You were close, like me and Becca. It really hurt you when he died. I understood that.”
“Not even close.” Scott raked a hand through his hair. “Sure, I loved my brother. Everybody looooved Gabe.” The emotion in his voice pushed him away from the wall. “But the truth is, more than half the time I hated his guts.”
Cole turned around, her face animated with surprise.
Scott’s face was tight with cold, hard emotion. “That’s right. I hated him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Didn’t expect that, did you?”
Scott moved away from her shocked expression.
“You have no idea what it was like to grow up with Gabe for an older brother. Dad never spoke about him without a catch of pride in his throat. Gabe went to military school and won wrestling championships. He aced the ASVAB and got into the Naval Academy. He was chosen for Navy SEALS as a freshman. It was like living with fucking Captain America. Nothing I ever did could equal anything Gabe did.”
Cole didn’t say a word. Instead, she sat down on the bed, and waited.
Scott paced as he talked. “I tried to be like Gabe but I didn’t have his endurance or his daring. Dad could see that early. By the time I was twelve, he was discouraging me from following in Gabe’s footsteps. Said I was more academic. I’d make a good lawyer or doctor. I finished college in prelaw to please my dad, but then I enlisted in the army. I made Ranger but Gabe never let me forget that, as far as a SEAL was concerned, it was second-best.”
Scott paused and stared at the wall. That was a hard admission for him, harder than facing his father’s disappointment when he left the service to join law enforcement.
He shook off that memory with a physical roll of his shoulders.
“When we met, I was a D.C. SWAT. You were right. I loved that shit, the power and status and the knowing that not just the bad guys but the general public took a respectful approach when we SWAT guys were around. Even Gabe was impressed. It was the only time I’d ever felt good about myself.” He glanced at her. “Until you.”
Cole sighed. “The night we met, I was surprised you even noticed me.”
“I couldn’t not look at you. Your eyes were wide open and they were full of me. Not my badge or my status. You didn’t know what I was. You weren’t a badge bunny or a woman on the prowl. You were this serious cute chick, and you wanted me. I was flattered as hell.”
Cole smiled for the first time. “I was impressed as anything.”
“After we married I thought I didn’t care anymore what any of my family thought. Not even Gabe. Let him have the glory. I had my own family. My own place. The best part was you were Blue, too. You knew and understood my life. We were a team.”
“You never told me any of this before.”
He hunched a shoulder. “That’s because I knew how it would sound. I wasn’t as good as Gabe. Everyone walking knew that. Why would I point it out to the one person who thought I was—” He stopped short. He no longer had the right to own that.
“The person who thought you were everything?” A flicker of humor brightened her gaze.
He nodded, his chest burning with emotion he dare not release.
“Scott, do you want to know my opinion of Gabe?”
“I’m sure I can guess.”
“I thought he was a gorgeous self-absorbed prick.”
It was Scott’s turn to register complete surprise.
“Oh, Gabe was charming, when he wanted to be. But he could be ruthless, too. He never let an opportunity to belittle or embarrass you slide. He went out of his way when I was around to show you up.” She shrugged. “I wanted to slug him that day he broke your thumb. He cheated to win at arm wrestling.”
Scott let her words circle until they found landing sites in his thoughts. “You never said any of this before.”
“How could I? You and your parents were so in love with Gabe’s image of himself. I couldn’t come in, an outsider, and start trashing your family’s attitudes. I wasn’t even sure they liked me all that much, in the beginning.”
“They liked you from the beginning.”
She smiled finally and stood up. “I liked them, too. But we were so raw and new to each other, I just wanted to fit in.”
He moved in close to her, wanting to savor every inch of her smile. “So you didn’t think Gabe was Mr. Studly?”
“Oh, from a distance, he was a total alpha-male-god-babe-magnet.”
Scott felt a smile tugging at his mouth. “Up close?”
“He struck me as a bit of a jerk.”
She moved in, too, and laid a hand on his cheek. “I’m not saying I really disliked him. He was funny and really good at telling stories. You loved him and he loved you. I get that now. Growing up with a sister, I didn’t have any experience with how brothers show love. All that testosterone-filled competition. But being a SEAL was Gabe’s only definition of a life worth living. It was clear you worshiped him and he loved being worshiped. I was just immune. I’d been with you.”
Scott didn’t answer that, didn’t have the words to explain how it made him feel, like the sun was shining on him from the inside.
He reached for her, half expecting to be stopped. Instead her hand landed on his chest as she reached up on tiptoe to meet his kiss.
It was the most tender moment they had ever shared. It felt good, yet new, as if they had totally missed out on some ways o
f being together and had not realized it until this very second.
When they were done, she broke away from him and moved back to the window where Hugo sat watching them. “Why did you shut me out?”
“I saw my father’s face the day the navy brought the news about Gabe. The golden son, the one he bragged about to everyone, was gone. It was as if the light had been turned off in my parents’ world. I knew the day of the memorial service that I needed to stop being a selfish prick. I’d been so happy in my own little world.” He slanted a glance at her. “It was my turn to step up. That’s why I applied to go U/C. I wanted to do something that would make my dad proud, even if he couldn’t talk about it at the time I was doing it.”
“You could have told me. You just came home one day and it was a fact.”
“I was a dick about it but I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I thought I could fill that hole in my dad’s heart. Pitiful, right?”
She digested this. “What kept you from drinking yourself to death after we broke up?”
He shrugged. “I got tired of wallowing in a ditch, so to speak. First I got up and went to the gym to peel off some of the fat. Then I went to get back the only job I was ever good at, police work.”
“Was it that easy?”
“Hell no. They wouldn’t give me my position back. Said I was too angry. They sent me to anger-fucking-management class.” He cracked a smile. “Joke, maybe?”
Her smile flickered. “But not the class.”
“No, the class was real. Dave Wilson, who had been my first partner, and then my handler undercover, helped get me back on my feet. When I had done that, he said I would be wasted on patrol or God forbid behind a desk. He recommended me to the DEA. I had experience as a narc and at the time they needed a K-9 officer. I went to sign up. I said yes because I get to be in on SWAT team take-downs but I also work solo with Izzy.”
“Best of all worlds.”
“Professionally, yes.”
He stopped before her and, reaching out, pulled her in against him. He touched her face, tracing her features with his fingers as if he had never really seen them before. The wonder of her being here, in his arms, with him rocked his world. She had taken it all in, every bitter sad bit of his anguished, angry, humiliating confession. And she hadn’t turned away in scorn or disgust. No, she was looking at him as if he was possibly the best man she’d ever known. He knew it wasn’t true. But he wanted to be that man, this time. For her.