Page 80 of Fatal Vision
Connor’s bagel sat untouched. “I’m not sure I can add much to your information.”
Shelby looked down and Colton wondered what she was seeing behind her sightless eyes. She’d admitted she didn’t remember why she’d divorced him. Was it possible she forgot that night? What went down?
Heaven help me. That would be an answer to his prayers, wouldn’t it? For her to never remember?
“We’ve got to start somewhere.” She squirmed in her seat and handed the rest of her bagel to Salisbury. “Since neither Connor nor I remember much, we’re relying on you, Colton.”
At least she was admitting to not remembering. In a sick way, he was relieved.
The dog jumped down, his nails clacking on the floor as he headed for the living room with another piece of bagel.
Colton kicked back in his chair. He could make quick work of bringing both of them up to speed and avoid the details that would help no one. “The taskforce involved my SEAL team, Shelby, and another Fed named Calisto, our helo pilots, and Dr. Edmonton.”
“Before we took off, we practiced a dozen times, didn’t we?” Shelby said. She continued to stare at the table and Colton could see her straining to remember. “You hated having us to account for—me and Juan Calisto. You didn’t believe we should go on the raid.”
She had that right. “Direct orders were for you two to go along to manage Quan once we nabbed him. My superiors assured me you both had the training and could handle yourselves in a firefight.”
“But you didn’t believe it.”
He believed the Feds were well trained—he knew Shelby had worked her ass off to prepare for the mission. Plus, her and Calisto’s job hadn’t been to engage the enemy, only handle the asset once he was in custody of Colton’s SEAL unit.
It had looked good on paper, but as every SEAL knows, the bad guys never follow script.
At his silence, Shelby’s blank gaze rose to his face. “That’s not it, is it? It wasn’t about my skills or training. You just didn’t want me there.”
So yeah, she might not remember that night in detail, and couldn’t see his face to check for lies, but it wasn’t hard to guess that he hadn’t wanted his wife in the middle of a skirmish in enemy territory. “A safer bet was for you and Calisto to stay back at the safe house and let us bring Quan to you.”
“Which is kind of a moot point now,” Sabrina interjected. “Quan was shot and killed, right?”
Colton nodded, seeing the whole scene play out as if it had happened the day before. Did Shelby remember her part in all of it? “When we flew in, we had two helos. We made it into the compound, secured Connor and started the extraction. We got Connor into the first Pave along with several members of my team and Dr. Edmonton, the physician who accompanied us to work on Connor.”
He bit off a piece of bagel but it tasted like cardboard as he chewed. He tossed the rest onto his plate. “Snowman, one of my squad, was with me, Shelby, and Calisto in the second Pave. One of Quan’s men materialized from the compound as Shelby and Calisto were preparing to load Quan inside. They were in the middle of cuffing him and putting a bag over his face when the gunman emerged. Snowman returned fire but Calisto was hit and fell into Quan. Quan grabbed Calisto’s gun, and started shooting.” Shelby was paying rapt attention. “Lt. Moore, our STS pilot, jumped out to help neutralize Quan and the shooter filled him with bullets while Quan fired wildly at all of us.”
“So you killed him,” Shelby said. “Snowman picked off the gunman, I helped Calisto into the helo, you saved Moore, and we took off.”
Colton rubbed his head. The pressure inside it was a thing of beauty.
Sabrina sat forward, her eyes wide. “Who flew the helicopter?”
“I did,” Colton said.
Her eyes grew even larger. “You’re a pilot and a sniper? Plus you sing Bruce Springsteen songs and rescue dogs. A real renaissance man.”
“Colton received his wings at age seventeen,” Shelby said. “He’s been piloting small engine aircraft for nearly half his life.”
“It wasn’t my specialty in the Teams,” he admitted, “just a skill I dusted off to get us out of enemy territory before we all ended up dead.”
“But I seem to remember there was another man, a terrorist?” Shelby asked, her forehead pinching. “Your mission was rescuing Connor. Ours was Quan, but there was something else. Someoneelse in the other Pave.”
Connor shot Colton a look. They both were under orders to never tell anything about that man. “Not to my knowledge,” Colton lied. His phone rang and he jumped up, happy for the distraction. “I’ve got to take this.”
It was Rory. “I’ve got some interesting trivia on your shoe.”
Colton headed into the kitchen, hoping like hell Shelby didn’t decide she needed to know what had happened to the second ‘terrorist.’ “My shoe?”
“The print you sent. Took me forever to figure out what type it’s from because that outline doesn’t match anything in my database.”
The man had a shoe print database? “What about it?”
