Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

Isabella veered to her left.

Wait, hold up.

Maya had thought Isabella had come out to wave good-bye or maybe have a last word with her brother through his truck window. But that wasn’t the case.

Isabella was getting in on the passenger side of the truck.

Maya had two choices here. One, go back to her car and follow them. She would seriously consider doing just that, following the truck, but she was afraid that she’d lose them, and without her cell phone, she could no longer track them.

Two...

Enough.

She hurried to the truck, flung open the back door, slid in, and placed the muzzle of the gun at the back of Hector’s head.

“Hands on the wheel.” Then, pointing the gun at Isabella before returning it to Hector’s skull: “You too, Isabella. Hands on the dashboard.”

Both stared at her in shock for a moment.

“Now.”

They slowly moved their hands to where she wanted. Remembering how she had underestimated Isabella the last time they tangoed, Maya reached forward and grabbed Isabella’s pocketbook. She peered inside.

Yep, there was pepper spray as well as her mobile phone.

Hector’s mobile was in the cup holder. Maya grabbed it and threw it in Isabella’s bag. She wondered whether Hector was carrying. Keeping the gun on him, she quickly patted him down in the obvious places. Nothing. She grabbed the truck’s key and put it in the same bag too. She dropped the bag on the floor in front of her, and that was when she saw something that made her pull up.

It was a color that caught her eye...

“What do you want?” Isabella asked.

There was a pile of clothes on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

“You can’t just put a gun—”

“Shut up,” Maya said. “If you so much as breathe, I’ll blow Hector’s head off.”

There was a gray sweatshirt on the top of the pile. She pushed it away with her foot. And there, coming into view so clear she almost pulled the trigger in rage, was a too-familiar forest green button-down shirt.

“Talk,” Maya said.

Isabella glared at her.

“Last chance.”

“I have nothing to say.”

Maya started talking instead. “Hector’s about Joe’s height and build. So I assume he played the part of Joe in your video? You let him into the house. He acted out the scene. Lily knew Hector. She would go to him willingly. Then you just got a videotape of Joe’s face from...” That smile. The one he flashed on the video. “My God, was that from our wedding video?”

“We have nothing to say to you,” Isabella said. “You won’t kill us.”

Enough. Gripping the gun harder, Maya brought the metal butt down hard on Hector’s nose. The break was audible. Hector howled. Blood seeped through his fingers.

“Maybe I won’t kill you,” Maya said, “but the first bullet goes into his shoulder. Then his elbow. Then his knee. So start talking.”

Isabella hesitated.

Maya reared back the gun and smacked Hector again, this time on the side of the ear. He groaned and fell to the side. Instinctively, Isabella took her hands off the dashboard, trying to reach her brother. Maya pistol-whipped her across the face, pulling up on the power enough so that it hurt but didn’t cause any serious damage.

Still, Isabella was bleeding now too.

Then Maya pressed the muzzle of the gun on Hector’s shoulder and started to squeeze the trigger.

“Wait!” Isabella shouted.

Maya didn’t move.

“We did it because you killed Joe!”

Maya kept the muzzle in place. “Who told you that?”

“What difference does it make?”

“You think I killed my own husband,” Maya said, nodding at the gun in her hand. “So why would you think I won’t just shoot your brother?”

“It was our mother.”

Hector was talking now.

“She said you killed Joe. She said we had to help prove it.”

“Help how?”

Hector sat up. “You didn’t kill him?”

“Help how, Hector?”

“Like you said. I dressed up as Joe. We let your nanny cam tape it. I took the SD card back to Farnwood. The family had hired a CGI Photoshop guy. An hour later, I came back to the house with it. Isabella put it in the frame.”

“Wait,” Maya said, “how did you know I had a nanny cam?”

Isabella made a scoffing noise. “Suddenly the day after the funeral you have a new digital frame already loaded up with pictures of your family? Please. You’re the only mother I know that doesn’t keep any pictures of her daughter around. You don’t even hang up her artwork. So when I saw that frame — how stupid do you think I am?”

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—”