Page 5 of Peace Under Fire

“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.

Maybe.

Hopefully.

“That’s it? You just want me to recover the voicemail?” Tex’s voice was dry, as though he knew Squish wanted more.

He wasn’t wrong.

“That’s it.” For now, anyway.

Squish knew damn well that if the voicemail existed and said what he remembered, Tex would be just as driven to find Mandy as he was. Tex loved puzzles. No way would he let such a juicy one roll past him.

Plus, if Mandy was psychic—although they’d both avoided that word—maybe she could do more than find Lucky.

Maybe she could tell them who the traitor was in SEAL command, the one who’d betrayed them during Operation Whitehorse and almost gotten Squish killed. And maybe gotten Lucky killed. His gut clenched at the possibility. Either way, it all hinged on accessing that damn voicemail and proving he wasn’t nuts.

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

The knot at the back of Squish’s neck relaxed beneath a rush of hot relief. “I appreciate this, brother.”

“Don’t thank me until we find out whether that message exists,” Tex said dryly. Then the line went dead.

Squish released a deep, raw breath. Well, that had gone better than he’d expected. At least Tex hadn’t called him crazy and alerted his doctor to come cart him away.

CHAPTER 2

Two hours later, the migraine was in full swing, with two new nasty symptoms joining the party. An invisible asshole was driving a white-hot spike through his left eye, and his gut began rocking and rolling. Fucking hell, the nausea was almost worse than the eye spikes and the jackhammer chiseling away at his brain. Almost.

Clearly, he needed to up the ante and crack open a blister pack of Imitrex.

He’d hoped to hold off on the pill until Tex called back, since his brain always went AWOL after he swallowed one. But Tex hadn’t given an ETA on recovering the voicemail. If an op went sideways, and lives hung in the balance, finding that message would get shoved to the backburner.

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