And here it came. The part he really didn’t want to get into. Talk about opening himself up to thorny questions. Even so, he forced the explanation out.
“She called to warn me that things were going to go south at the cult compound. That we would be attacked. That I’d be severely injured, perhaps even killed, and that Lucky would be captured by some very bad men. She begged me—” he could still hear the urgent, ragged sound of her breathing, the echo of tears in her voice “—begged me not to go, to cancel the operation.”
Dead silence crawled down the line. “She called you before the op?”
“Yeah.” Squish coughed to loosen his tight throat. “Two full days before the op went live.”
“She told you everything that was about to happen before it happened?” Tex repeated, as though he couldn’t believe he’d heard it right the first time.
Squish recognized the reaction. Absolute disbelief. He’d felt the same way when he’d listened to the message from his hospital bed.
“That’s right. Every. Detail. She described how Lucky killed Apostolos. Knew about the RPG rounds that took down the compound entrance and buried me. She even said that Lucky’s tracking device would be cut out of him and squashed beneath a boot, and that nobody would be able to find him.” He paused before adding quietly, “Which would explain why it quit working. She nailed every detail a full two days before it happened.”
“Why the didn’t you take this to North or Westmoore?” Tex asked, his voice flat.
And this was where his head injury came into play. He rolled his shoulders, fighting the sense of shame. No matter how often the doc told him that the side effects of his brain injury were to be expected, they still felt like a fucking weakness.
He forced the rest of it out.
“Because after I called her and found out her phone had been disconnected, I went to listen to the voicemail again, but it was gone. There’s proof of the incoming call. But the message is missing. I have no proof that voicemail exists.”
What he did have was proof of a traumatic brain injury, which had left him prone to perceptional fallacies—paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, warped realities. All of which he’d experienced during those first few days in the hospital.
“Could you have dreamed about the message?” Tex asked, his voice noncommittal.
“No. It wasn’t a dream,” Squish said. “I even pinched myself to make sure I was awake.”
And hadn’t he felt like a complete moron for doing that.
“Is there a chance you could have accidently erased the message yourself?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe.” Squish’s fingers tightened around his phone.
It was clear from the flatness of Tex’s voice that he was wondering other things as well—like whether Squish had imagined the whole incident.
No surprise there. He was wondering the same damn thing. Although he didn’t think so, it had felt too real. The metal of the phone had been chilly in his clenched hand. He’d heard the static on the recording and the wobble in her voice.
Those earlier hallucinations hadn’t felt the same—less vivid. less detailed. Besides, he’d stopped having them once the docs had changed his meds, long before he’d pressed play.
Whatever. It was time to address the giant white elephant tiptoeing down the telephone line.
“Look. We both know that the damage to my brain can cause hallucinations. Hell, maybe I did imagine that call. But if not, if she said what I heard, then we need to find her. We need to find out what she knows.” He paused and then rasped the plea out. At least, it sounded like a plea to him. Felt like one too. “And I need to know if I imagined it. I need to know if it was a hallucination.”
Jesus, the dude had no clue how fucked up it was being unable to trust your own mind, your own memories.
More silence ate at the line, and then, "Have you hallucinated other incidents?”
Squish took a deep breath, held it, and forced out the truth. “Not since those first two days after waking up. I listened to that message days after the last hallucination, days after they changed my meds.”
Christ, he’d thought the drugs had caused the hallucinations—until that damn voicemail.
He could almost hear Tex’s mind working.
“That’s why you were so insistent on bugging back to Virginia Beach against the doc’s and Commander North’s recommendations, isn’t it? To talk to her. To find out if she’d called.”
“Yeah,” he admitted with a shake of his head, which sent a splinter of pain through his temple and dislodged the icepack. He eased it back into place.
Although there had been more to it than that. If she had called, if she had predicted the future, maybe she knew other things too. Like what happened to Lucky. Where the rebels had taken him. If he was still alive.
“Okay. So, you went to talk to this gal—this Amanda Wilde. What happened?”
“She’d vanished.” Squish winced as a new round of silence crept down the line. He could imagine the “Oh, Shit” look on Tex’s face. “And no, I didn’t imagine her. She lived in my condo complex for almost a year. Our neighbors remember her. The places she volunteered at remember her. She’s not a figment of my dysfunctional imagination. She exists.”
“But she vanished?”
Squish nodded, caught the icepack as it started to slide, and froze as his skull tried to break into itty bitty pieces.
“That’s right,” he managed.
“What do you mean by vanished?”
“I mean I can’t find any record of her. No hits on her name whatsoever. No hits on the phone number she called me from. All the places she volunteered at say she hasn’t been by in weeks. And the Pattersons, the couple she supposedly sublet the condo from, claim they don’t know her and didn’t know she was staying there. She’s disappeared.” Frustration seethed through him.
“Now that’s interesting.” Tex’s voice was absent, like he was running that flood of info through his computer chip of a brain. “What are you asking from me?”
“I’m asking you to hack into my phone and recover my deleted voicemails.” Squish’s voice tightened in disgust. “I’ve already tried to access them, but the phone is licensed to HQ2 and locked down tight.”
Sure, he could have gone to Commander Westmoore, his normal CO, for access to the deleted message, but that would have meant explaining. It was bad enough manning up to Tex—explaining to Westie would be much, much worse. The voicemail had come days after the hallucinations stopped. If he’d imagined that message, after they’d swapped out his meds… Yeah, that information could get him jettisoned from ST4 on permanent disability.
Of course, telling Tex could ultimately have the same consequence. But perhaps not. Tex knew what it felt like to have a disability sideline you from the job you loved, a job you were damn good at. Tex knew what it was like to lose the teams. But Tex’s disability was irreversible. A missing leg couldn’t grow back, but the brain, when given time, could recover from a traumatic injury.
Tex might be willing to give him that time and wait to see if his brain healed without reporting this conversation to North or Westmoore.