Fool Me Once

Maya remembered now how good Isabella had been on those videos, always smiling and engaged. “So you, what, told your mother about it?”

Isabella didn’t bother answering.

“And I assume it was her idea for you to hit me with the pepper spray.”

“I didn’t know what you’d be like after you saw it. I was just supposed to get the SD card from you. So you couldn’t show it to other people.”

They wanted her isolated.

“If you showed it to me,” Isabella continued, “I was supposed to pretend I didn’t see it.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

But it was obvious. “I was supposed to slip up, start questioning my sanity…”

Maya’s voice drifted off. She stared straight past them now, straight through the truck’s windshield. Isabella and Hector looked at her, then turned to see what had captured her attention.

Standing there, directly in front of Hector’s truck, was Shane.

* * *

“If you move,” Maya said to Hector and Isabella, “I’ll shoot you dead.”

She opened the back door, got out, and reached back to take Isabella’s pocketbook with her. Shane just stood there and waited for her. His eyes looked red.

“What are you doing?” Shane asked.

“They set me up,” Maya said.

“What?”

“Hector wore Joe’s clothes. Then someone Photoshopped his face from a video.”

“So Joe is…?”

“Dead. Yes. How did you find me, Shane?”

“GPS.”

“I don’t have my phone with me.”

“I put trackers on both your cars,” Shane said.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because you haven’t been acting rationally,” he said. “Even before that nanny cam thing. You have to see that.”

Maya said nothing.

“So yeah, I was the one who called Dr. Wu. I thought maybe he could get you back into therapy. And yeah, I put the trackers on your car in case you needed help. Then when Kierce contacted me about those ballistics tests and you wouldn’t answer my calls…”

She looked back at the pickup truck. No movement.

Deep breaths…

“There’s something I need to tell you, Shane.”

“About the ballistics test.”

She shook her head.

Flex, relax…

“About that day over Al Qa’im.”

Shane looked confused. “What about it?”

She opened her mouth, closed it.

“Maya?”

“We had already lost men. Good men. I wasn’t going to let us lose any more.”

Her eyes starting welling up.

“I know,” Shane said. “That was our mission.”

“And then we spotted that SUV. And I’m listening to our guys pleading for help, and that SUV is bearing down on them. We set the target. We called it in. But they wouldn’t let us engage.”

“Right,” Shane said, “they wanted to make sure they weren’t civilians.”

Maya nodded.

“So we waited,” Shane said.

“While those boys pleaded for their lives.”

The side of Shane’s mouth twitched. “It was tough listening to that. I know. But we did what was right. We waited. We followed protocol. It wasn’t our fault that those civilians died. When we got confirmation-”

Maya shook her head. “We never got confirmation.”

Shane stopped and looked at her.

“I turned your signal off.”

“What… what are you…?”

“JOC radioed back for us to hold off.”

He shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

“They didn’t give us the go-ahead. They believed that at least one of the people in the SUV was a civilian, possibly underage. They radioed that it was only about fifty-fifty that the people in the SUV were the enemy.”

Shane’s breathing had grown ragtag. “But I heard-”

“No, you didn’t, Shane. I relayed it to you, remember?”

He just stood there.

“You think what’s on the audiotape would be bad for us because we sounded celebratory after we destroyed the target. But that wasn’t what Corey had on me. He had the radio call telling me that there could be civilians in that SUV.”

“And you shot anyway,” Shane said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t care about the civilians,” Maya said. “I cared about our boys.”

“Jesus, Maya.”

“I made a choice. I wasn’t going to lose another one of ours. Not on my watch. Not if I could help it. And if civilians died, if there was collateral damage, so be it. I didn’t care anymore. That’s the truth. You think I have these horrible flashbacks because I feel guilty about those dead civilians. It’s just the opposite, Shane. I have them because I don’t feel guilty. Those deaths don’t haunt me. What haunts me, Shane, what lingers inside me, is the knowledge that if I was up there again, I would do the exact same thing.”

Now Shane had tears in his eyes.

“So you don’t have to be a shrink to figure it out. I’m forced to relive what happened every night-but I can never change the outcome. That’s why those flashbacks won’t ever leave me, Shane. Every night, I’m back on that chopper. Every night, I try to find a way to save those soldiers.”

“And every night, you kill those civilians again,” Shane said. “Oh Christ…”

He stepped toward her, arms open, but she shook him off. There was no way she could handle that. She quickly turned around and looked behind her. Isabella and Hector still hadn’t moved.

It was time to get going.

“What did Kierce tell you, Shane?”

“Joe and Claire were killed by the same gun,” Shane said. “You knew that already, right? Kierce told you.”

Maya nodded.