Kill Me Twice (A Zeke Edison Novel Book 1) (5 page)

Zeke held out a towel for Reggie as she emerged from a fifteen minute swim in Lake Michigan. The air temperature was a San Diego-like seventy-two. The water temperature was fifty-nine. Reggie’s body-length goosebumps had a bluish hue. In a bow to social convention she’d worn her desert camouflage pattern undergarments as a bathing suit.

Using the outstretched towel as a modesty shield, she shucked her scraps of clothing.

She looked at Zeke and gave him a wink. “Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

“That scar along your ribs on the right side is new. To me anyway.”

He was familiar with the one where the tip of her left kneecap used to be.

“You know what Churchill said?” Reggie asked.

“A lot of things.”

“He said, ‘Nothing in life is so exhilarating as being shot at without result.’ Well, if you even get nicked like I did, it just pisses you off.”

Reggie sat on the sand of Zeke’s private beach, looking out at the water.

Zeke sat next to her.

“Take your shirt off and put your arm around me,” she said. “Warm me up.”

He did as he was told. She snuggled into his embrace.

“Damn, you’re warm. That’s what I like about you, you know. Your body heat.”

“It’s pretty much that way with everyone. I’d bring a guy down in a game, he’d say, ‘My neck’s a little tight. Put a hand on it, will you?’”

Reggie laughed. “Okay, you’ve got a sense of humor, too.”

She leaned in and kissed him.

“So what happened to the guy who shot you?” Zeke asked. “Something bad, I hope.”

“I sent him to paradise with nothing but regrets. All those virgins and he gets his wienie shot off.”

Zeke looked at her, trying to see if she was joking.

“All true,” Reggie told him. “Well, maybe my shot wouldn’t have been fatal, even if it did hit him in the crotch, but the special ops guys with me took care of the rest.”

Zeke shifted his position, sat behind Reggie with a leg on either side of her, wrapped her up in both arms.

“Much better,” she said. “You know what I thought of when I was evacked out of there?”

“What?”

“How pissed I’d be if I didn’t get to see you again.”

“That new scar looks like it came from more than a nick.”

“It did.”

“I’d have been pissed, too, if I didn’t get to see you again.”

“No doubt about it, we were made for each other,” Reggie said. “Put a hand on my neck, will you?”

“I want to kill bad guys,” Reggie told the army recruiting officer who’d come to the Northwestern campus. When the guy gave her a dubious look, she added “What?”

They sat facing each other across a small table in a school ROTC facility.

“I’ve never heard that from a woman before,” he said.

“You know the female of the species is always deadlier, right?”

“Not so much in the U.S. military.”

“Then you’re not making the most of your human resources.”

The recruiter looked over to the big guy sitting near the door.

Without turning away from the recruiter, Reggie said, “He’s my boyfriend. He’s got two more years of college to go. I like ‘em young.”

The big guy told the recruiter, “Get her signed up and ship her out of the country so she doesn’t do any damage over here.”

Reggie said, “He’s kidding, but I do need my outlets and I’m patriotic, and we’re always fighting a war somewhere, aren’t we?”

“You want to be a combat soldier, do I have that right?”

“Special forces,” Reggie told him.

“There are no women in special forces.”

“Not yet, but the army is letting women train as Rangers. That’s special forces.”

“Female personnel only train as Rangers; they don’t serve in that capacity.”

“Yet,” Reggie said, “but it’s a slippery slope, right? And with Patti Grant in the White House we have a female commander-in-chief. She says do it, who’s going to tell her no?”

“No one,” the recruiter admitted. “So you’re betting on the come?”

“That and a lot of other things”

“Okay, for the sake of discussion, tell me what you have to offer the army.

“In two months, I’m going to graduate
summa cum laude
with a journalism degree. I’m an All-American lacrosse player, and I speak Arabic fluently. How’s that?”

“Pretty damn good.”

“Wouldn’t look bad on your record, landing me, would it?”

“Not bad at all.”

“But if I sign up it has to be with the explicit understanding, in writing, that I get into Ranger training. If I can’t cut it, I’ll serve out my hitch at whatever else they assign me.”

A sly grin lit the recruiter’s face.

Reggie said, “Yeah, I know. I’m asking for trouble. I want it that way. You ready to meet my terms?”

“Let me make a phone call, check out what you’ve just told me.”

“Sure.”

The recruiter enclosed himself in a small office in a far corner of the room. He returned ten minutes later and extended a hand to Reggie. She stood and took it. “We’re good?”

“Ms. Green, you have a deal. You’ll enlist as a second lieutenant, go through basic training and if you do well at that you’ll get the opportunity to
train
as a Ranger. If you wash out, other more suitable duties will be found for you. Perhaps something using your journalism or language skills. Are you good with that?”

She nodded and shook his hand. “You play fair, I’ll play fair.”

“You say that as if you think the army might not honor its word.”

Reggie shrugged. “People, institutions, nobody is perfect.”

The recruiter reclaimed his hand and looked as if he was having second thoughts … until he realized she was testing him. If he backed out now, he’d be admitting he wasn’t dealing honestly with her. And then there was her boyfriend.

He was on his feet now, too, a big SOB. Tall and strong.

The recruiter was a war vet with extensive close-quarters combat experience. But the boyfriend was a monster, and he looked just a bit crazy. With guys like that, you wanted to have a bigger weapon and a full magazine.

The recruiter looked back at Reggie.

“You’ll get a fair shot, Ms. Green. The rest is up to you.”

Reggie, joined Zeke, George and Paulette for dinner that night: carry-out fried chicken. They ate in the kitchen, one of the first rooms to be completely rehabbed. The idea of dining on the terrace on a pleasant evening had been rejected, after a bit of discussion.

“You’re worried about someone dropping in, I could always growl at unwanted guests,” Reggie suggested.

George replied, “That’d scare them off, all right, but we don’t want to lose any of the good will we built up.”

“You feel the same way?” Reggie asked Zeke.

He said, “You know how I am. I want you all to myself, loonie or not.”

“Amen to that,” George added.

A look that would have intimidated an assassin flashed through Reggie’s eyes, but she let the moment of wrath pass. She turned to Paulette and said, “I told Zeke I’d be happy to help with his case, but he said he can’t tell me what it is. Client confidentiality and all that. He said I could ask you if you’d like to share.”

Reggie picked up a chicken leg and took a bite with an audible snap of teeth.

Way to make an impression, Zeke thought.

To his surprise, though, Paulette nodded. Rather than frighten Paulette, Reggie’s savage table manners seemed to reassure her. Or maybe she just wanted another woman involved in the effort. Maybe both of those things.

“Please understand that I’m not making things up here,” Paulette said to Reggie.

Reggie nodded. “Try me. I’ve heard a lot of strange stuff that turned out to be true.”

Paulette nodded, taking comfort in those words. She told Reggie her story and why she was afraid she would be murdered a second time. Then she squared her shoulders and waited for an adverse reaction.

Reggie liked that posturing. She told Zeke, “This is a brave woman.”

Paulette laughed. “Me? I’m Chicken Little.”

“Unh-uh, a coward would have just run and hidden herself. You not only took a stand against a threat, you opened yourself to possible ridicule. Although the two guys at this table probably know better than to do that.”

Reggie’s look said Zeke and George had better know better.

Zeke patted Reggie’s hand as if humoring her melodramatics.

He was the only guy in the world who could get away with that.

He said, “I got an email from a friend.” Never mentioning it was from his shrink. “It said the Division of Perceptual Research at the University of Virginia has people doing past lives research. They’ve been collecting stories of people who can recall earlier lives for 45 years.”

“Really?” Paulette looked happy to hear that news.

“Yeah,” Zeke said. “It took me by surprise, but apparently you’re not alone. Nobody’s come to any conclusions yet. I don’t see how they really could. But if psychiatrists and psychologists and a major university have all put decades of work into the subject, you have to think it’s either worthwhile or they have people who write damn good grant applications.”

Paulette looked at George, sitting next to her.

“Hey, I’m all in no matter what,” he said.

Paulette smiled at him. She turned to Zeke.

“Me, too. I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll try to find as many as I can.”

Reggie didn’t need a prompt. “I know more than Sluggo over here does. The way I can see helping is to make sure nobody sneaks up on him from behind. Or any other direction. Everybody good with that?”

They all were. When dinner was done, Paulette and George excused themselves. Zeke washed the dishes and Reggie dried.

Finishing the last plate, Reggie asked, “Have we waited long enough?”

“We’ve built up enough of an edge for me,” he said.

“Then show me to your bedroom, and I’ll tell you some war stories.”

“You’ve always known how to talk dirty to me.”

After they managed to rip the top sheet and scatter blankets and pillows to the four corners of the room, Reggie lay next to Zeke as they both stared at the ceiling and caught their breath.

“I remember a past life,” Reggie said.

“You were Alexander the Great or Attila the Hun?”

“Neither of those guys.”

“Emperor Nero?”

Reggie knew Zeke would continue mining that vein unless she stopped him.

“I was the wife of a samurai.”

Zeke turned his head to look at her. “You’re serious?”

She met his gaze and nodded.

Zeke said, “I haven’t read a lot about feudal Japanese society, but wasn’t it highly hierarchical?”

“It was.”

“And weren’t women nowhere to be found in that hierarchy?”

“There were exceptions, but you’re pretty much right.”

“You were one of the exceptions?” Zeke asked.

Reggie shook her head. “Minor aristocracy and a pain in the ass. By all rights, I should have had my head chopped off. Only I was a real looker and the local daimyo, my husband’s lord and master, issued an edict that he’d be the only one who would decide my fate. He wouldn’t have tolerated my impudence if it had been directed at him, but he was amused by a woman who gave other men fits. One of the unacceptable things I did was martial arts training.”

“Sounds risky,” Zeke said. “Let me guess. You got into it with your husband somehow.”

“There was an archery competition. He beat all the other samurai and should have received the grand prize: money, land and elevated status. Only the daimyo said, ‘Let’s see if you can beat your wife.’”

Deke sighed. “You just couldn’t help yourself, could you? You had to know your life would be richer, at the very least, but you couldn’t throw the match.”

Reggie told him, “Under the rules of the game in those days, only a man could divorce a wife at will. My husband had been forbidden to kill me, but it was perfectly acceptable for him to boot me out of his house and his life. Which, I’d heard, was his plan. My only socially acceptable alternative was to become a nun in a temple. If I stuck it out there for two years, then
I
could get a divorce.”

Just the idea of Reggie as a nun boggled Zeke’s mind.

“So you showed the guy who was the better archer,” he said, “with a crowd looking on.”

“A great big crowd. My husband was so shamed he committed suicide on the spot.”

“Damn. How’d it all go over with the fans?”

“I didn’t get any proposals from the other samurai. My husband’s lands were forfeit to the daimyo, as were the the prizes my husband would have won.”

Zeke grinned. “Mr. Big played your husband for a sucker. He knew you were going to win.”

“The daimyo was more sly than even I knew. He claimed me as property that had belonged to my husband. That lasted only so long. His wife let him have his fun and then in the most polite way possible told him I had to go. He couldn’t bear to chop off my head or order me to kill myself.”

“What’d he do?” Zeke asked, knowing things couldn’t have a happy ending.

“He poisoned my sake. I knew it, but I also knew it was the easiest way out. I drank it, hating myself as I did it. The last thing I remember him telling me was he would have me covered in golden wax to preserve my beauty.”

“Creepy,” Zeke said.

“Sure, by modern American standards. But I imagine wax as a preservative lasts only so long. His wife probably asked him, ‘Aren’t you tired of that smelly old thing yet?’ And off I went to the local dump.”

Zeke sat up and looked down on Reggie. “That’s a good story, but how do you know any of it’s true?”

“I didn’t, not for most of my life. I mean, it first came to me as a dream, and I thought that was all it was. Only that particular dream started when I was little, and it has recurred right through the rest of my life. I mentioned it to this little old holy man I met in India when I was covering the fighting in Kashmir between the Indians and the Pakistanis.”

“Don’t a lot of Indians believe in reincarnation as a part of their religion?” Zeke asked.

“The Hindus do.”

“So this guy you were talking to had a built-in bias.”

“Sure, he did,” Reggie said. “I knew that and told him so. He countered with a suggestion: Why don’t I see how good I am archery?”