Chapter 4
I MADE THE return trip home under the speed limit and in record time, drove up to my gate, and left my car outside on the grass so that it would be easier for Justine to get out in the morning.
I no longer slept in the master suite, not since Colleen’s murder. I’d taken over the guest room that faced the front garden and had sliders out to the back deck.
The full moon was perfectly balanced above the ocean, and moonlight came through the glass, bathing the white bedding in a pearly glow. Justine looked ethereal, as if she were made of dreams.
I put my gun on the nightstand and got into bed beside her. She was sleeping soundly, but she turned at my touch and curled against me. I put my arms around her and kissed the part in her hair. She murmured my name and we kissed good night.
I tried to stop thinking, to let myself drift off. But there was too much inside my mind and it all fought for my attention: the men from Sumar; Colleen, dead, with her eyes open, three bullets in her chest.
And I thought about that night in Afghanistan when I was piloting a transport helicopter to Kandahar from base with fourteen Marines in the cargo bay. A ground-to-air missile fired from the back of a pickup hit the aircraft in the belly and took out the tail rotor section.
There was a horrific sound and the CH-46 began its downward spiral through hell. Even though I landed the Phrog on its struts, the missile had done its work.
No amount of time or therapy could erase the afterimages of the events of that night from my mind: the scramble out of the aircraft to the cargo bay, the chunka-chunka-chunka sound of .50-caliber guns going off, the stink of burning aviation fuel, the sight of the dead and dying men.
If Justine had been awake, she would have asked me what I was thinking—and I would have lied.
I had lied to Justine many times, and when I got away with it, I suffered. If she found out that I’d lied, we both suffered.
And that’s why psychologist Dr. Justine Smith couldn’t imagine a future with me.