Read Fool Me Once for Free Online Page B

are you drawing?” Maya asked.
    “You can’t tell?”
    It looked like squiggly lines. “No.”
    Lily looked hurt.
    Maya shrugged. “Can you tell me?”
    “Two cows and a caterpillar.”
    “The cow is green?”
    “That’s the caterpillar.”
    Mercifully, Maya’s phone rang. She checked her phone and saw it was Shane.
    “How are you holding up?” Shane asked her.
    “Good.”
    Silence. Three seconds passed before Shane spoke.
    “I’m digging this awkward silence,” Shane said. “You?”
    “It’s awesome. So what’s up?”
    They were too close for this “how are you holding up” stuff. It just wasn’t something that was a part of their relationship.
    “We need to talk,” he said.
    “So talk.”
    “I’ll come over. Are you hungry?”
    “Not really.”
    “I can pick up a buffalo chicken pizza from Best of Everything.”
    “Hurry, dammit.”
    She hung up. Camp Arifjan had served pizza as a choice at almost every meal, but the sauce tasted like turned ketchup and the dough had the consistency of toothpaste. Since she’d been home, she craved only thin-crust pizza and nobody did that better than Best of Everything.
    When Shane arrived, they all sat at the kitchen table and wolfed down the pizza. Lily loved Shane. Kids, in general, loved Shane. It was adults he didn’t do quite as well with. There was an awkwardness to him, a stoicism that most people, with their need forappearances and fake smiles, found off-putting. Shane couldn’t handle small talk or the excess bullshittery of modern society.
    When they finished the pizza, Lily insisted that Shane, not Maya, get her ready for bed.
    Shane pouted. “But reading to you is so boring.”
    That cracked Lily up. She grabbed his hand and started dragging him toward the stairs. “No, please!” Shane cried, falling to the ground. Lily laughed harder and kept pulling. Shane protested the entire way. It took ten minutes for Lily to get him up the stairs.
    When they reached the bedroom, Shane read her a story and Lily conked out so fast Maya wondered whether he had slipped her an Ambien.
    “That was fast,” she said when he came back down.
    “Part of my plan.”
    “What was?”
    “Having her drag me up the stairs. It tired her out.”
    “Clever.”
    “Yeah, well.”
    They both grabbed cold beers from the fridge and headed into the backyard. Night had fallen. The humidity weighed them down, but after you experienced desert heat wearing forty pounds of gear on your back, nothing else in the hot family really bothered you.
    “Nice night,” Shane said.
    They sat by the swimming pool and started to drink. There was something there, some sort of chasm, and Maya didn’t like it.
    “Stop it,” she said.
    “Stop what?”
    “You’re treating me like . . .”
    “Like?”
    “Like a widow. Cut it out.”
    Shane nodded. “Yeah, okay, my bad.”
    “So what did you want to talk to me about?” she asked.
    He took a swig of beer. “It may be nothing.”
    “But?”
    “There’s an intelligence report floating around.” Shane was still in the military, heading up the local branch of the military police. “Seems Corey Rudzinski may be back in the United States.”
    Shane waited for her reaction. Maya took a deep, long sip of the beer and said nothing.
    “We think he came across the Canadian border two weeks ago.”
    “Is there an arrest warrant out on him?”
    “Technically, no.”
    Corey Rudzinski was the founder of CoreyTheWhistle, a website where whistle-blowers could safely post information in a confidential manner. The idea was to disclose illegal activities by government and big business. Remember that story about the South American government official who had been taking kickbacks from the oil companies? A leak to CoreyTheWhistle. That police corruption case with the racist emails? CoreyTheWhistle. The abusive prisoner treatment in Idaho, the covered-up nuclear accident in Asia, the security forces hiring escort services?