Saving Tess Page 5

  Not that it really mattered. I would get back to wherever he’d found me, with or without him, though I hoped I could convince him to help me. It would make things easier.

  “I need to go back,” I said, keeping my voice even. “I know it’s probably not safe, but I need to find out if something there will jog my memory.”

  “It is more important to keep you safe,” he argued. “Besides, there is nothing there anymore. The street has been cleared.”

  That wasn’t unexpected, though still frustrating. “If I go there, maybe I can remember why I was on that street to begin with. That could tell me why I’m here. Answer a whole lot of questions.”

  “Why do you need to know?”

  The question was churlish, almost as if me wanting to find the missing weeks of my life was somehow offending him. I tamped down my frustration and reminded myself of all the things Luis had done for me, the risks he’d taken for me.

  “If you woke up in the US or Canada or Brazil or wherever, and found out that you were missing weeks of your life, wouldn’t you do whatever you could to figure out what had happened?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched, though I couldn’t tell if he was hiding a smile or a scowl.

  “If I woke up in a place that was not here, I would not worry myself about knowing how I had gotten there. If you were from here, you would understand.”

  He had a point. I had a few more of my own. “I’m a reporter, and I want to be a good one. Finding the truth is what I do. That includes finding it about myself.”

  The hypocrisy of my statement wasn’t lost on me. What I hadn’t said out loud, what I hadn’t even wanted to think about, was that another reason why I wanted to go there was to avoid the other things in my past I was eager to forget. Things that Luis’s kiss had brought forward. Or, more specifically, the person the kiss had made me remember.

  It had been a long time since I’d kissed anyone, but it didn’t make any sense for me to be reacting so strongly when I hadn’t even thought of Clay Kurth in years. Maybe a dream or two, but that was my subconscious. I had no control over that. Just like I didn’t have any control over the things that popped into my head when I was being kissed.

  Right?

  “You will put us both in danger if we go back there.” He stood and began to pace. “Why would you want to do this?”

  “Were you even listening to me?” I asked. “I just said why I need to go.”

  He shook his head but didn’t look at me. “None of those are good enough reasons.”

  I raised an eyebrow and stood, wishing I would’ve looked intimidating, rather than like an angry kindergartener. “Fine. If you don’t want to take me, you don’t have to. Just tell me where it is, and I’ll go myself. You can go back to your apartment and get on with your life.”

  He spun around, his eyes wide. “You cannot go there on your own! They will kill you!”

  “Not if they don’t see me,” I countered. “I can sneak around there, and no one will know any different. Trust me, I know how to make people ignore me.”

  He grabbed my arm, fingers digging into my flesh. “Non ti lascerò andare!”

  Wonderful. He’d switched back to Spanish.

  And he was hurting me. I yanked my arm away and pointed at him. “Don’t you ever grab me like that.”

  “I am sorry.” He smoothed down his shirt, hands shaking as he worked to regain control. “I am afraid for you. I do not want you to get hurt.”

  I wanted to believe him, and I did to some extent, but something didn’t quite sit right with me. He kept saying he wanted to protect me, but wouldn’t that mean he would want to get me somewhere safe? How was I supposed to know where safe was if I didn’t even know what I’d been doing in that country?

  Maybe I hadn’t been messing with the drug cartel. Maybe I was safe from them, but I was in danger from some other source. Corrupt government or law enforcement? Someone I’d managed to piss off during the weeks I couldn’t remember?

  Why couldn’t he see that I needed to know? That was how I would keep myself safe. And I needed to know that I could do it myself.

  “Are you going to help me or not?”

  A look of resignation crossed his face. “I will take you first thing in the morning.”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to spend another night in that place, worrying about everything, including whether or not I was going to get eaten alive by bedbugs. I’d been sitting around – or rather, lying around – long enough. Time to get things done.

  “I’m going now,” I said. “I can’t take not knowing.”

  “What if your memory never comes back?”

  I considered the question before answering him honestly. “I have to try.”

  The thing I didn’t tell him was that my gut was telling me that whatever I’d been on to wasn’t something I could easily forget. I only hoped I’d survive long enough to find it again.

  Ten

  Clay

  The sun had hit that point where it wasn’t quite daylight but wasn’t night either. I knew the correct word was twilight, but I’d made the mistake of saying it on one of my first cases and nearly caused a riot with a group of teenage girls and their mothers. I’d made it a point to never use that term since. I’d shared that particular memory one day when Tess and I had been looking for Brianne, and she’d told me how she’d covered some event the lead actors from the movies had done.

  The memory popped up as Brianne and I cornered a sketchy-looking cokehead in an alley down the road from The Black Cat. We’d checked out the bar back when Tess had first gone missing, but no one had claimed to know anything then. Since we’d lost what I’d hoped was a lead when our friend at the apartment building – we’d learned his name was Luis Orozco from some receipts – I’d decided that we needed to go back over everything again, this time looking for Luis.

  A half hour ago, Brianne and I had been at The Black Cat, asking people if they’d seen someone matching Luis’s description around the time Tess had disappeared. One of the regulars had said that he’d heard a cokehead ranting about some marica who’d been sneaking around after an accident. The regular didn’t know more, but he’d told us to wait because it was almost time for the druggie’s fix. Maybe we could get more out of him than others did.

  “We just want to talk,” I said as I held up my hands, palms out to show I didn’t have a weapon.

  Brianne was the one with the gun. I didn’t ask where she’d gotten it or if it was even legal. She was a soldier. Of all the trust issues I had with her, worrying about her with a weapon wasn’t one of them.

  The blank look the guy gave me told me either he didn’t speak English or the drugs he was on kept him from understanding what I was saying. I switched to Spanish and repeated my statement.

  “About what?”

  “About a guy you saw two weeks ago near a car accident.”

  His eyes widened, and he shook his head violently from side to side. “I don’t know anything. Please.”

  Shit. That didn’t sound good.

  I decided to start simple. “Can you at least tell me where the accident was?”

  “Why should I?”

  Brianne muttered a curse behind me and then stepped up with something in her hand. The druggie darted out and grabbed what I saw was money. He quickly rattled off directions and then ran past us, either in a hurry to get away from us or get to some cocaine, probably both.

  “Do you think she was in that accident?” Brianne asked as she stuck her gun back into the waistband of her pants. “We checked the hospitals and the morgue. Even if she was a Jane Doe, we should have found her.”

  The haunted look in Brianne’s eyes made me say what both of us were thinking. “Unless she wasn’t taken to the hospital.”

  Tess and I had rescued Brianne from a hostage situation the day before Tess had gone missing. The thing that Brianne and I hadn’t said to each other – although we both knew it was the most likely answer – was that Tes
s had become the one needing to be rescued.

  The cartel who’d had Brianne and the others in her Red Care group had given us two bodies in exchange for the ransom money I’d borrowed from a friend back in Colorado. If they’d found Tess and learned the role she’d played in rescuing the survivors, I doubted they’d be looking for money rather than revenge.

  My stomach clenched at the thought of what those men could have been doing to Tess. They hadn’t sexually assaulted anyone in the Red Care group, and Brianne’s own injuries had been from trying to protect the others, but I didn’t think Tess would get the same consideration.

  A touch on my arm pushed back the dark thoughts. Brianne’s expression was grim, but not hopeless.

  “We’re going to find her,” she said. “Let’s go check out that accident site, see what it tells us.”

  When she made comments like that, it made me wonder exactly what she’d been up to in the years since we’d parted ways. In the FBI, I’d met a lot of military personnel from different branches and of varying ranks, and something about the way Brianne handled herself didn’t quite mesh with the picture of an average army soldier.

  My curiosity, however, would have to wait.

  The sun had been reduced to a thin sliver on the horizon by the time we reached the site, and we could hear the city changing from day to night around us. Not all parts of San Jose were bad, but there were only a few places where it was safe to be out after dark. While searching for Tess, Bri and I hadn’t exactly been following the unspoken rules, but there were some parts of the city even we hadn’t ventured unless it was daylight.

  This area was one of those.

  Neither of us wanted to wait though. This was the first real lead we’d had in days and returning to the hotel to sit on our asses until dawn wasn’t an option. I just hoped that we didn’t have to find out if the two of us were enough in a fight against some of the thugs we’d seen skulking around lately.

  The car – or cars – were gone, which wasn’t surprising, but enough damage remained for me to piece together what might’ve happened. Between the tire tracks, the pieces of colored plastic, and drops of oil still left, I deduced that one car had been hit from behind by another hard enough to at least tip it onto its side, if not completely flip it. Some of the dark splotches on the road could have been dried blood, but I couldn’t tell for sure, not in the dim light I had now.

  Still, I followed the possible blood trail away from the street. It didn’t go far, but since it didn’t end with a big stain, I was hopeful that if someone had been injured, they hadn’t died there. We just needed to figure out where that person had gone and who they were.

  Low voices from across the street reached my ears, and I quickly signaled for Brianne to hide. I ducked into a shadowed corner just as they came close enough for me to identify a single male speaker. He spoke English with a heavy accent, but the voice sounded familiar enough that I wondered if it was someone I’d spoken to recently.

  “I carried you in that direction,” the man said. “You were bleeding, but I did not want to risk being seen out in the open, so I waited until I was hidden from view to bandage your wounds.”

  “There’s nothing here.”

  Those three words were enough for me to identify the voice. It didn’t matter that she was almost whispering. I would have known her anywhere.

  “Tess!” Brianne was a step ahead of me, enfolding her sister in a hug that surprised Tess as much as it did me. Bri had never been overly demonstrative, though I supposed thinking someone was dead and finding out they were actually alive was a better reason than most for a hug.

  “Brianne?” The bewilderment on Tess’s face was almost comical, but I didn’t focus on that.

  My attention was on the lean young man next to her. The one who’d told me he’d never seen her before. At least he had the good manners to look guilty.

  “What the fuck?!” I stepped right up to him, leaving only an inch between us. “You had her right there in your apartment, and you lied to my face?”

  “I was protecting her,” Luis said, glaring at me. “I did not know who you were or if you wanted to hurt her.”

  “Luis, you said it was…” Tess’s voice trailed off. “Clay?”

  I turned toward her, already raising my arms to embrace her, and she took a step back.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I dropped my arms to my sides, confused. As Tess moved back to Luis’s side, my heart dropped. Had she, while being held by this man, fallen for him? Did she blame me for the accident? I couldn’t imagine she was angry with me for the time we’d spent together before she’d left. She’d seemed happy.

  Could I have been so wrong?

  “Who is this guy to you?” Brianne demanded. “He told Clay he’d never seen you before.”

  “Luis rescued me,” Tess said, her chin taking on that stubborn set I knew so well. “And you heard him say that he didn’t know what Clay wanted with me.”

  I didn’t like the way she said my name. Like I was nothing to her.

  Bri turned to Luis and held out a hand. “Thank you for taking care of my sister. We can take it from here.”

  “We?” Tess echoed, shaking her head. “You could barely bother to talk to me on holidays but him you kept in touch with all these years?”

  Something was wrong here.

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she continued. “It’s not like the two of you gave a damn about my feelings back then. Why would you now?”

  Did she…did Tess think that something had happened with Brianne and me while she was gone? That didn’t quite sound like what she was saying, but she also didn’t sound like she knew the truth about what had happened when we were younger.

  “And you.” She rounded on me, her eyes flashing. “Coming in here and questioning Luis, as if you have a right to know anything about me. You can go fuck yourself.”

  I stared at her. What in the world had happened in these past two weeks? “Tess, I–”

  “Not here.” Brianne tapped my arm. “We’re too exposed out here. We need to get somewhere inside, away from prying eyes, and then we can talk.”

  I didn’t like it, but she was right. We’d get to the bottom of what was going on, but not here and now. Safety first. The rest would come.

  Eleven

  Tess

  What the hell was Clay Kurth doing here?!

  I didn’t even want to try to imagine why he was here with Brianne, of all people. And that was another thing. Why was my sister here? When we spoke last, she hadn’t mentioned going to Costa Rica. Had we talked since I could last remember? Had I told her I was coming here, and she’d followed me? Had I told someone else, and when I’d virtually disappeared for two weeks, Brianne had gotten notified? As shitty as our relationship had been since that last night in DC, I liked to think that if either one of us were ever in real trouble, the other would come to help.

  But that didn’t explain Clay.

  My stomach twisted painfully as I considered the possibility that Brianne had been with Clay when she’d made the decision to come to Costa Rica. Why he would have come with her, I didn’t know. Maybe for sentimentality’s sake, or maybe he’d become a decent guy since we’d parted ways.

  The reason didn’t change what the two of them had done to me. I liked to pretend it was all in the past, but seeing him here, seeing them together, it was like hearing Brianne say it all over again.

  “Grow up, Tess. Clay is a player. He hooks up with a different girl every week. You’re not that kind of girl. You need a relationship before you have sex. Clay doesn’t. I don’t. We didn’t.”

  Brianne had been right about us needing to get away from the open space, and Luis had already told me on the way to the site that we needed to keep our voices down. Having to wait to release everything I had to say made every step build my anger even more. I’d been able to let go of other things from my past, but what Brianne and Clay had done to me had l
eft a scar deeper than any physical wound. The two people I’d loved the most had betrayed me. I’d lost my two best friends, and I’d never trusted anyone like that again.

  Hell, I was still a virgin because I’d never wanted to let a guy get that close to me.

  Information that would follow me to the grave.

  “Here,” Brianne said, pushing open a gate. “Move it. Come on.”

  I glared at her as I walked by, resisting the urge to remind her that we weren’t all in the army and none of us had to take her orders. I wasn’t going to risk our safety because my sister and I didn’t get along.

  “Who are they?” Luis whispered as he followed me into the alley.

  As I slowed my steps to keep our conversation private, I tried not to grimace at the smell of cat pee. The Big Apple. Costa Rica. Cat piss was cat piss.

  “She’s my sister, Brianne. The guy’s name is Clay Kurth. He used to be Brianne’s friend when we were younger.”

  He didn’t need to know any more than that. As grateful as I was to Luis for what he’d done for me, it didn’t mean we were friends. He might’ve been caring for me for two weeks, but we’d really only known each other a couple of days.

  “Will you tell them about your memory?”

  I heard no judgment in his voice, only curiosity, and I wondered if a part of him hoped that I wouldn’t confide in them, that he’d know this secret no one else did. I was aware of how he watched me and had no doubt that he’d see such a secret as something that bound us together. Because of that, I was tempted to tell Brianne and Clay everything, but I knew I had to be careful. I couldn’t trust anyone completely. Especially not them.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I want to know what they’re doing here first.”

  Luis nodded, the pleased smile on his face telling me that I’d been correct in my assumption about what he’d wanted me to do.