Internal Affairs

by Jessica Andersen

  The resulting semicontrolled chaos meant she was able to slip in, find an unattended anesthesia station and relieve it of enough sodium thiopental to do the job, along with a handful of syringes and needles in their sterile packages. She felt bad knowing that the anesthesiologist in charge of the station was going to have to account for the missing items, but this wasn’t the time for niceties. She’d lied to her friends; it seemed a short leap to outright theft from strangers.

  It’s for a good cause, she told herself as she ghosted back out of the medical center well within her ten-minute time window. Everyone in Bear Claw—everyone who isn’t a conspirator, anyway—wants to get al-Jihad back behind bars. But as she crossed the parking lot to where Romo was waiting for her, she couldn’t help wondering whether she was making excuses, looking for reasons to forgive him, excuses to reconcile what he’d done with the fact that despite it all, she was still desperately attracted to him. It would certainly fit her personal pattern.

  “All set?” he said the moment she opened the door.

  “Got it.” Deciding she’d deal with all the doubts later, she slipped into the driver’s seat. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where to?”

  “Someplace safe.” She didn’t care where they went, she realized as he pulled out of the parking lot. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes for a second. When she did that, she could see the explosion all over again, could hear it ringing in her ears. Fax had suffered broken ribs, Tucker more than that. Her fault, she knew. All hers. And the terrorists’, of course, but if she’d called for help the moment she’d walked into her home and seen a man bleeding to death on her living room carpet, none of this would have happened.

  “Hey.” Romo touched her hand. “You okay?”

  “Just torturing myself with a little game of ‘what if?’”

  “Like ‘what if you’d gone into surgery like your mother wanted?’”

  She smiled, her eyes still closed. “Yeah. Something like that.” Then she stilled, and opened her eyes. Looked at him. “I didn’t tell you my mother wanted me to be a surgeon.”

  He glanced away from the road and met her eyes, frowning. “Yes, you did. You—” He broke off, shaking his head. “It’s gone now.”

  The suspicions she’d mostly managed to set aside crept back around the edges of her consciousness. “You’re remembering more and more. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  He cut her a sharp look. “Are you asking whether I’m faking the amnesia? Seems like a moot point, given what you’re about to inject me with. In about a half hour, you’ll be able to ask me whatever you want and be certain of getting a real answer.”

  “According to some studies, the pentothal only works as well as it does is because subjects believe it’ll compel them to tell the truth, so they do. Really, all it does is lower your inhibitions. It doesn’t make you any less likely to lie.”

  “Are you saying you think I’ve been playing you all along?” Romo’s voice was a low growl.

  Sara’s chest went tight, but she held her ground. “Fax and Tucker are in the hospital right now because of me. Cut me some slack, will you?”

  He drove in silence for a few minutes, then exhaled a long breath before he said, “You’ve got an odd habit of straddling the line. I wonder if that wasn’t what had me looking so hard at your office in my previous life.”

  She stiffened, stung. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  “I think you know, but let me give you a couple of examples…like how you’ve hidden me but dropped a raft of hints to your friends. Or how you’ve gotten involved with the task force, but not really. How you practice medicine, but not really. It seems to me that you do a whole lot of things in your life halfway. Then when they don’t work out, you can content yourself with knowing you didn’t try your hardest, so you didn’t really fail, while at the same time, you failed, which means you were justified in not trying your hardest.” He wasn’t looking at her now, was concentrating on the road as he said, “I can’t help wondering whether that wasn’t part of what happened between the two of us. I might’ve screwed up, but how hard did you fight to keep us together, really?”

  Her blood had chilled in her veins as he’d been talking, turning icy with anger, and betrayal. “How dare you?” she snapped. “Over the past two days, I’ve patched you up, I’ve hidden you, I’ve helped you above and beyond the call of whatever might’ve been between us in the past. If you don’t call that me giving my all, then nuts to you. I don’t need you, and I don’t need your grief.” Her voice roughened on angry tears. “And for your information, I didn’t fight worth a damn to keep us together, because do you know what? I spent my childhood watching my otherwise intelligent mother take my cheating father back time after time. I heard all the excuses she made to herself, and to me. So forgive me if I don’t do excuses anymore, and I don’t beat my head against walls, or however you define giving something my all. If that means that I’ve been giving up on things by your definition, then fine, I give up. But only on goals and people that haven’t given me any reason to fight for them.” Like you.

  She didn’t say the last two words aloud, but they hung in the air between them as he turned off the highway and headed them into one of the long-term parking lots at the airport. They didn’t speak again as he collected his ticket from the automated machine, and found an out-of-the-way space for the little hybrid. Once he’d killed the engine, they sat in silence for a moment, in the dim illumination of the badly lit garage.

  “I’m nervous,” he said finally.

  It was the last thing she would’ve expected him to be feeling, never mind admitting it, that she just sat there a moment longer. “You’re afraid of what you’re going to remember? What you might’ve done?”

  He nodded, jaw clenching and unclenching before his expression firmed once again. “Well, putting it off isn’t going to change the past, is it?”

  She shook her head. “Not in my experience, no.”

  “Then let’s go.” They locked up the hybrid, abandoning it for the time being in the long-term lot, knowing that sooner or later the task force was going to start looking for her, and they needed just under two days of space to do what they needed to do. They took a shuttle to the terminal, another to a nearby hotel, where they caught a cab to another airport hotel. There, figuring they’d muddied their trail sufficiently, they rented connecting rooms using the cash she’d pulled from an ATM when she’d bought the disposable phone.

  By unspoken consent, they both went straight into his room. It was a supremely generic midscale hotel room, complete with mirrored closet doors, a generous marble-and-chrome bathroom, and a main room done in greens and browns, with a big king-size bed and bank of wide windows overlooking the parking lot.

  Romo flicked on the lights, then crossed to the window and closed the curtains. He turned to her, seeming larger somehow than he had only moments before, his presence commanding her attention, her imagination. “Did we ever travel together?” he asked, his voice low and rough, almost wistful.

  She shook her head. “No. We stayed close to home.”

  He grimaced. “Pity. I would’ve liked to be the sort of guy who took his girl down to Cancun for the weekend, just because.”

  You could be, she almost said, but the words wound up stuck in her throat because she wasn’t sure that was the truth. If the pentothal worked and he regained his memory, he’d go back to being the man she’d almost loved, the one who hadn’t loved her back. It didn’t seem realistic to hope that he’d retain the more open, giving personality he’d shown her over the past few days. That wasn’t Romo. It was…a fantasy, she supposed. A nice wish. The man who could’ve loved her back. The man, she thought, she would’ve fought for.

  He smiled sadly, as though she’d said the words aloud. “Yeah. No second chances, right?”

  “Right.” She waved him to the single king-size bed. “Get comfortable.”

  He tried to sen
d her a suggestive leer, but it fell flat. So instead he took a deep breath, toed off his shoes, shrugged out of his blazer and lay facedown on the bed, close to the edge of the mattress. She killed the room lights, leaving the small space lit only by the dim, indirect illumination coming from the bathroom. Then she pulled the desk chair up close to him, loaded a syringe, bared the crook of his elbow and injected the liquid into his vein with little ceremony.

  As she did so, she hoped to hell she’d gotten the dosage right. Pentothal was a barbiturate, which meant if she dosed him too heavily, he’d fall asleep instead of remembering. So she went very light on the dose, thinking she could add if she needed to.

  She thought she’d come close to getting it right, though. Within a few minutes, his eyes started going unfocused. His eyelids drooped and he looked at her with fuzzy good humor. “Am I remembering anything?” he said, voice blurry.

  “You tell me,” she said.

  He smiled goofily. “Tell you what?”

  The silly, too-open expression on his normally grim-edged face made her heart turn over in her chest, made her soul whisper, Oh, Romo. But she knew she couldn’t let that show, couldn’t let him know how close she was to falling all over again, for a man who didn’t really exist.

  ROMO WAS FLOATING on something warm and soft, surrounded by golden light, with an angel hovering over him. On one level, he knew he was in an airport hotel, that the angel was Sara and he was stoned on barbiturates. On another level, though, he was someone else, someone he didn’t recognize. That man was closed and unhappy, angry with himself, untrusting of the world. He hoped that wasn’t the real him. If it was, he didn’t think he was going to like the guy very much.

  The thought brought a pang of unease, a slash of grief, because now he better understood Sara’s reluctance to give him a second chance. He couldn’t blame her if this was the guy she’d dated, the guy who’d broken her heart. Romo would’ve fought the bastard if he knew how. He didn’t, though, which meant that all he could do was howl in silent anguish as that dark, angry part of him overtook the man he’d been for the past few days.

  The world darkened around him, grew dim and unhappy.

  As if from far away, he heard Sara ask, “Do you remember the prison riot?”

  Yes, he remembered. And he wished to hell he didn’t, because the moment the floodgates cracked, the memories started spilling back. Shock rattled through him, tempered with excitement at the thought that finally—finally!—they were getting somewhere.

  He could picture his contact, the man who’d recruited him as a code cracker, tempting him with promises of money and all the computer power he could want. The guy had said there wouldn’t be any killing except for Romo’s faked death and the subsequent body switch, which would be covered up by conspirators within the various organizations. The man had lied, though. Several guards and prisoners had died, along with the prison warden himself.

  But then something seriously weird happened—the moment those images flashed in his reconnecting brain, they morphed to another scene entirely, one of rainy darkness and a blood-drenched alleyway. And a woman lying sprawled inelegantly on the street, her throat cut, her eyes staring up at him in accusation.

  Where were you? her eyes demanded. Why didn’t you save me?

  Nausea and horror twisted through him as the rest of it came back. And he wished to hell he’d left it buried.

  Chapter Eight

  One second Romo was lying quietly, and the next, he arched back on the bed, his hands fisting in the covers and his face etching with horror.

  “Alicia!” he cried. The word seemed torn from his throat, a single word of anguish, of despair.

  Sara froze. “Romo?” she whispered. “What’s wrong? What are you seeing?”

  Ugly suspicions took root, bringing a flare of jealousy. Had he started a relationship under his postfuneral identity, whatever it had been? What had happened to the woman? From the sound of his voice and the pain on his face, it hadn’t been good. Trying to calm the rapid gallop of her heart, telling herself it might be important, no matter how much it hurt to hear that he’d found someone after her, Sara made herself ask, “Who is Alicia?”

  “Detective Alicia Frey.” His eyes were closed, his face carved with terrible pain. “She was my partner back in Vegas, before I came to Bear Claw.”

  Surprise rattled through Sara, along with a good dose of unease. He’d never talked about his years in Vegas, or why he’d left and come to Bear Claw, going straight into the internal affairs department, which was an unusual choice for a transferring cop.

  That’s old history, she told herself. It’s not important right now. It meant the drug was working, though. She knew she should steer away from the subject, which wasn’t related to the case at hand. But the weak, needy part of herself, the part that had wept for him long after he was gone, needed to know.

  “What happened?” she asked softly, figuring that was a general enough question that it didn’t entirely violate the trust he’d placed in her when he’d agreed to the pentothal. It came very close, though.

  “We were working a series of casino robberies, armored cars being hit on a specific schedule. It was obvious that there were cops involved—payoffs and information being dropped, that sort of thing. We got too close and made the wrong people nervous. A call came in, we answered…it was an ambush. I made it out. She didn’t.”

  The staccato recitation might have robbed the story of its horror if it hadn’t been for the grief slashed across his face, the hollowness of his voice.

  “Let’s focus on—” she started to say, but he wasn’t done.

  “I didn’t realize I loved her until she was gone,” he said in a quiet tone that was laced through with self-recrimination. “We never dated, never even kissed. We both knew we couldn’t have a relationship like that and stay partners. But eventually we stopped dating other people, too. We joked about our surrogate relationship, not realizing until too late that it was the real thing, at least for me. When she was gone…I lost it. I went after the men who’d set us up, nearly killed two of them, came close to getting myself chucked out of the force for good. But the powers that be were embarrassed by what had been going on under their noses, and let me transfer the hell out of Vegas instead. I couldn’t stay there. Not after what had happened. But I couldn’t let it go, either.”

  “So you came to Bear Claw,” she said, losing track of the proprieties as things started lining up in her head.

  His face smoothed some, though it remained etched with the echoes of grief. “The first week I was in town, I saw you walking from one building to another, wearing a long yellow coat and a wool hat. Pretty, pretty Sara. But I knew you weren’t for me. After what happened with Alicia, I didn’t want something serious, and you had serious written all over you. Still do.”

  She knew she should say something, knew she should redirect him to the months after his supposed death, but at the same time she was riveted by what he was telling her. She had a feeling this explained much of what had happened between them, but knew she was still missing pieces of the puzzle. Her moral core said she should stop him, that he’d never given her permission to grill him about his past. But the ex-girlfriend inside her, the one that had always wanted to understand what went wrong between them—that piece of her said to keep going.

  Knowing she was better than that, and she owed both of them more, she said, “The day of the prison riot, you were going there to meet with an informant. Did he have actual information for you, or was that part of the setup for faking your death?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know. I can’t…I can’t remember. I remember Alicia, and I remember you. It was that night in the alley, you know. That was the night I ruined everything.”

  It took her a moment. “You mean when those punk kids hassled us?” She’d all but forgotten about the incident, given what had happened later, when Romo had left the house, supposedly on a call, and had wound up in a bar, going home with another
woman. Earlier that night, though, there had been an incident, she remembered now. It had just been another one of those city annoyances to her, but had apparently been more than that to him.

  Casting back, she remembered that the night had been dark and rainy, the air heavy with the ominous tingle that presaged thunder and wind. She and Romo had been living together for a few months at that point, and things had been going great—or so she’d thought. They’d been out to dinner with Tucker and Alyssa, Cassie and Seth, and Chelsea and one of the few and fleeting boyfriends she’d had prior to meeting Fax. Sara and Romo had spent the entire meal playing footsie and exchanging caresses under the table, all an unstated warm-up for things to come when they got home. Blood pumping, feeling giddy and foolish with lust and—in her case, at least—love, they’d headed to his car wrapped in each other, oblivious to anything but the prospect of getting naked.

  As they’d passed by the mouth of a dark alleyway, shadows had detached themselves from the darkness, two in front, two behind, punks wearing slung-forward hoodies and sneers. Under other circumstances it might’ve been a really bad situation, but Romo had flashed his badge and gun, and the punks had taken off. She’d been a little surprised that he hadn’t detained them while she called for backup, especially knowing that four other cops had just left the restaurant and were close at hand. But that small oddity had soon been lost amid far bigger things, at least to her mind, in the days that followed. Things like infidelity. Like heartbreak. Like the fact that they hadn’t gone home and made love; instead, he’d dropped her off and pretended to answer a damned call from his superior at IAD.

  “I went back there later,” Romo said, pulling her out of her memories and into the moment. “Back to that alley.”