The Warrior Code (5 page)

Two pairs of green eyes steadily looked at him and then turned to face the cop cruisers rolling up.

The police officers took their statements and radioed in when Beth told them about her assault in Yellowstone National Park. The police department machinery moved swiftly after that, and once the four hoods had been transported away, the three of them went in two cruisers to Jackson P.D. in the Town Hall.

Sergeant Kelly – seven foot tall, broad as a barn door, with close-cropped hair and piercing blue eyes – was waiting for them when they arrived. He crushed Meghan and Beth in a bear hug and gripped Zeb’s hand in a bone-crushing handshake.

‘Knew their father. Heck, I know the whole family. And why shouldn’t I? We were neighbors, served together in the P.D. before Bud decided he wanted to be a hotshot save-the-world kinda guy and joined SWAT. My girls and these two grew up together, went to the same university, and if I believe some of the stories, raised a lot of hell together.’

He slammed a hand on Zeb’s shoulder, his equivalent of a friendly pat. ‘Ketchum at YNP, Yellowstone National Park, told me all about what happened and briefed me about you. You’ve brought trouble to my town, haven’t you?’

He winked at Zeb’s piercing gaze, taking the sting out of his comment.

An hour later, he rubbed his hands in satisfaction – Zeb watched them, wondering if they’d start a fire – and leaned back in his chair, which creaked in protest. ‘That gang has twenty hoods we know of in the state, and now they’re down to fifteen. Mr. Carter, if you hang around a week more, the Jackson P.D. would be most grateful to you. We’re a low-crime state, and we’re dead keen to make sure it remains that way.’

Zeb let the banter wash over him and made a request. ‘Could you arrange for reservations in another hotel? Not too far away? In some other name?’

Blue eyes stared back at him as if he’d sprouted horns, and then a palm the size of a baseball mitt slammed on the desk. ‘Of course! Yeah, we can take care of that.’

‘Not we. You personally, if you don’t mind.’

‘Sure.’ He chuckled on seeing the blank expressions on the twins’ faces. ‘Mr. Carter here is a wily one. If the gang is keeping an eye on your hotel, then you’re still staying there for all they know, since you haven’t checked out. That gives us an opportunity to grab them, if any of them are keeping a watch on your hotel. But to reduce risk, we’ll move you to a different hotel, under different names.’

‘Make it a married couple,’ Zeb added.

‘I’ll book them in my in-laws’ names. That way, I can always arrest them for fraud at some later date.’ Kelly left, still chuckling, to make the arrangements.

Zeb left the twins with Kelly and went back to their hotel to retrieve their stuff. He slipped out of the service entrance and made his way back to Kelly. Kelly had received the room keys and check-in forms by then for their new hotel, hand delivered. There were privileges to being a cop.

Zeb drove them back to the previous hotel and accompanied them up the elevator to their floor. He searched the floor, pushed open an anonymous door, and found stairs that led down. He followed the twins down and took them out using a discreet staff entrance.

If there were gang eyes on the hotel, they would have seen the women returning to their room.

He drove them to their new accommodation, a hotel on a street that led away from Town Square – a busy hotel due to its location.

Busy was good. Busy meant more people for the twins to blend in with.

He led them to the service entrance, made them turn their jackets inside out and don them. He pulled a couple of baseball caps from his backpack, jammed them low over their heads, made them tuck their hair under the caps and asked them to always look down.

‘Cameras,’ he said briefly when Beth raised her eyebrows at the precautions he took.

He took them up the staff elevator and left them with a terse, ‘Don’t unpack. I’ll be back soon.’

He went to the lobby, reserved another two rooms using one of the several identities he carried, and headed back to the twins.

They watched him silently as he hustled them out of the room, heads bowed, and took them up the stairs to a different suite from the one Kelly had booked.

He inspected their suite first before leading them in, pulled the curtains closed, and deposited their bags on the bed.

‘You don’t trust anyone, do you?’ Meghan asked him with amusement in her voice.

‘Not till we know what exactly is going on.’ As he was leaving, he turned back. ‘Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we talk and try making sense of this.’

‘What happens when we know what’s going on?’ she asked him.

‘Then, it’s hunting season.’

Chapter 6

He grilled them the next day. They were in a café on Town Square, deep inside, Zeb facing the entrance. Zeb figured the busy, crowded square was low risk, as long as he was with them.

‘Tell me everything, right from your dad’s death and Beth’s shooting.’

He had read all the available coverage of the university shooting in the back editions of newspapers and in internet channels, and they added very little more to what Ketchum had told him.

He saw Beth’s hand twitch once before Meghan’s covered it and squeezed it.

Meghan went over the details Zeb already knew, watching the bustle in the café, taking comfort in the intensity of the here and now. ‘You know, we weren’t supposed to be in university that day. We both had been through our commencement ceremonies, and that particular day we were supposed to be just hanging out at home. However, our friends were visiting the campus that day, and they asked us to go along.’

Beth took up the narration. ‘Initial information about the number of shooters was sketchy. Some said three, some said four, some six. The number of dead was also unclear. The shooters were geeks and had set up jammers, so cell phones were dead; the SWAT comms weren’t functioning; only landlines were operational. The cops set up a perimeter, and after an hour of trying to negotiate with the shooters, the SWAT team went in. Six of them, led by Dad. They went from room to room on the ground floor of the main building – they knew the shooters were on the ground floor, since there were enough choppers in the air who had eyes on the other floor. SWAT shot and killed two of the crazies, and when they breached the last room, they found me.’

She took a deep breath, and Meghan gripped her hand hard, her knuckles turning white, and took over. ‘Dad and another SWAT member went in hard. They used dynamic entry, using speed and surprise to take the shooters off guard, but without a flash-bang – since they didn’t know who they’d find in there. They found three students on the floor, apparently dead, and one of them was Beth. Two shooters were standing behind the bodies.

‘Dad froze for a moment. One fucking moment. One of the crazies emptied his magazine in Dad. Body armor caught almost all of the bullets, except two, which penetrated his goggles.

‘The other SWAT officer took out the crazy and the second shooter and got help, but it was too late. Team Leader Bud Petersen had never made a mistake as a cop. That day he made his first and his last.’

She angrily knuckled away the tears from her eyes and drew a shuddering breath. Beth gave her a tight, comforting hug.

‘The medical team found me with a bullet in my head, but I was still breathing, though unconscious, and they choppered me to the hospital immediately. That immediate response by the SWAT team and getting me to the hospital quickly, saved me. The bullet had gone through the left side of my head, entering the front, exiting the back, high enough to avoid contact with any of the left hemisphere. I was operated on, placed in an induced coma while the doctors did what they had to. Meg says the town just came to a stop while I was in the hospital, flowers spilling over into the street, making it difficult for ambulances to navigate. The country’s best neurosurgeons were constantly being consulted every minute. They say I responded to commands, but I have no recollection. My first memory is of her sitting beside me.’

She stopped and played with the cup in her hand. Zeb was motionless and patient, allowing her to tell her story, her way, at her pace.

‘I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t remember anything. Life started for me from that point onwards.’ She didn’t elaborate, but Zeb got how she must have felt – a person with no identity and no remembered life entering a world of strangers.

She went on to explain the recovery, the repeated operations, the last of which took place eight months after she was shot.

‘They call it dissociative amnesia,’ Meghan resumed. Beth’s voice had gone hoarse with talking, and she had fallen silent. ‘The patient not only loses memory but also autobiographic information. Sometimes some memory is retained, but in Beth’s case, it was as if the hard disk had been wiped clean. I had a faint hope that she would come through this without any side effects, though, of course, the doctors warned me that was highly unlikely. Beth not recognizing me, not remembering anything, was still a body blow for me. It took weeks for me to accept that this was how life would be now.’

She laughed without any humor. ‘You know, in all this, I never had the time to mourn Dad. Mom and he had no other close relatives; it was just them and us… so there wasn’t a family support system for me after the shooting and during Beth’s recovery. The cops, mainly the SWAT guys, became my support system, really. Dad’s team members’ families kept me company every evening and brought me food. One or another of the guys' wives stayed with me throughout. Life became a blur for eight months; it was only when the last operation was performed on Beth and the doctors said that now it was up to her body and her brain that I started taking charge of our lives. Of course, in those eight months, I tried to
fill in
the blanks for Beth, tried to reconstruct her life.’

Beth smiled at her sister. ‘Many people, heck almost every one, looked at me as if I was some creature in a zoo. Some of the stupid fucks even tried to test my memory. Meg nearly shot some of them in the ass. I don’t know how I would’ve turned out if she hadn’t been around.’

A tear rolled down her face. ‘We started off in life as twins. After all this shit, we started off as friends, who also happened to be twins.’

She wiped her face and smiled apologetically. ‘I rarely visit those days. Not because they were traumatic – they were – but because I have realized how irrelevant the past is. One doesn’t need a past to start a new present and a new future.’

Zeb leaned back and looked at her. She had lost her memory, that which gave life its fragrance, and had made a new start for herself despite that loss.

He had striven to forget his past and had made a new life for himself.

He understood her. He knew just how difficult it was to let go of the past.

Or not have one.

In that one fleeting moment, he committed himself to them, determined to see this through to the end. 

Beth’s voice turned lighter. ‘Meg was flooded by media calls, requests for interviews, and several book and movie deals came out of the woodwork. One agent even managed to breach the security perimeter in the hospital and approached her with a contract. Kelly punched him on the nose and sent him packing.’

Meghan patted her arm. ‘When Beth was back home, we talked for a long time about what we were going to do with our lives and then made some decisions. We sold our home – Dad’s home – which, luckily for us, was mortgage free, and Dad’s service benefits kicked in, so financially we were good. I got a job offer in Boston to work in a graphic design agency, and we decided to move there. It would be a clean break for us, away from the past, an opportunity for Beth to start anew.

‘We moved to Boston in January of the following year and have been there ever since. I quit my job after one year and started our design business. Beth and I are equal partners. She looks after the financial side of it, and I look after the design part of it. I don’t know if the partnership would have worked with the old Beth. Twins working together – I’ve never heard of it.

‘But the new Beth is my friend, my sister, my business partner… she’s my everything.’

Something in Zeb’s face made her smile. ‘Oh, we both go on dates and have  separate and active social lives, but neither of us has found anyone serious.

‘So that’s us, Mr. Carter.’ She corrected herself a second later. ‘Zeb.’

‘Tell me about the business,’ he said, as if he had tuned out their story.

They both giggled and then laughed when they couldn’t hold it back any longer. Seeing his expression, Beth explained. ‘We had a bet – I said you would react in
exactly
this manner. Totally incurious about what happened to me, fully focused on the here and now. She said there wasn’t a single person on the planet who wouldn’t want to know more about what happened, how I survived, all that shit. You owe me a drink, sis!’

Zeb’s expression didn’t change, prompting Meghan to ask him curiously, ‘Don’t you smile, Zeb? In the few days we’ve known you, we’ve never seen any expression on your face. No smile, no laughter, nothing.’

‘Oh all right. The business.’ She explained the setup, a straightforward legal entity that undertook graphic and web design for small businesses. ‘You know the stuff companies want – logos, business card designs, web sites… we do all that. It’s just the two of us full time in the business, and we work with freelancers on the design bit. I do some of the design myself. We have a steady clientele who refer business to us – it’s a nice small business in a field that we enjoy working in.’

‘Have you been in debt, taken on any funding from anyone?’

‘Nope.’ She shook her head vigorously, brown locks of hair covering her left eye momentarily. ‘If you think this could be related to money we owe to someone, nope. We have never taken any loans from anyone. As I said, we were lucky on the money side. Frankly, Zeb, I just can’t see how this is connected to our business or to our life in Boston.

‘We work our butts off on weekdays, get home by around seven or eight p.m. We meet friends during the weekend, go for a movie, or to a bar… when we have dates, we split up and go separately. No date has ended badly; no boyfriend has come around threatening us. For that matter, no client has camped at our doorstep with any kind of issue. There’s absolutely nothing in our life or at work that we think could have any bearing on this.’