Die Again to Save the World

by Ramy Vance

  Sven pursed his lips. “I agree.”

  “You… You do, sir?” Reuben stammered.

  “I do.” He sighed and looked up from the report. “Good work, Reuben,” Sven added, dismissing him with a raised eyebrow.

  Riding high on his success, he spotted Aki. She stood against a window, reading something on her phone.

  OK, Sven undid some of the confidence shaking from this morning, he thought as he approached her. I got this.

  He joined her at the window. “Hey.” Reuben gulped. I don’t got this.

  She frowned as she read her screen. “Can you believe this? Schaeffer somehow evaded his surveillance. He flew out of Des Moines in the middle of the night and headed for Albuquerque. What’s in Albuquerque?”

  “Nuclear testing plants in the New Mexico desert?” Reuben automatically offered. Then he remembered the kid's file. "His aunt."

  She sighed. “Which one do you think he's visiting?”

  Reuben shrugged. Smooth.

  Aki sighed. “I hope we can get this guy. We have an agent in Santa Fe driving out there right now, but Sven wants me out there if he needs backup. So, I'm on standby.”

  “Right,” Reuben replied. “Hey, listen. I know we’re all under a lot of stress here with the threat of a possible bomb—”

  “Tell me about it,” Aki cut in. “You know what sounds so good right now? A long relaxing bubble bath. I don’t even remember the last time I did that.”

  Reuben scratched his temple and tried to fight away the mental image of Aki in a bathtub. “Would you, uh…” The words he’d rehearsed came bubbling out. “Would you, maybe, want to go to a… Or go out somewhere relaxing? I mean, I don’t mean a bubble bath. Well, of course, if you wanted to, but what I really mean is like out to drinks or something?”

  She cocked her head. “Are you asking me out?”

  Reuben felt his face burn. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

  She eyed him for a long, terrifying second. “You know what? Let’s do it.”

  “Yeah?” His voice rose in shock.

  “Sure.” She winked and sashayed away. “It’ll be fun.”

  Reuben stood there until she was gone. Had she really said yes? He glanced at his Apple Watch. This was historic, and he had to note the time.

  9:47 in the morning. The exact minute of his triumph.

  He stood at the window and tried to calm himself down enough that he wouldn’t blow it by tripping over his own feet or something equally awkward.

  That was when he saw… What was that?

  “An exploding ball of light?” His eyes grew wide. “Nuclear?”

  It wasn't nuclear. A clear wave of energy that distorted everything around it rushed toward his building as he watched through the window.

  “What the…” Reuben froze with fear as the invisible wave passed seamlessly through the glass.

  Suddenly, his body was vibrating like a seismic tremor. He felt like he was being torn apart at the atomic level.

  His skin cracked. His blood boiled.

  He screamed.

  He died.

  Chapter Two

  Martha—Tuesday, February 14, 7:56 a.m.

  NYPD officer Martha Dragone crept through the alley, trying not to let the sound of her combat boots alert the target to her presence.

  The lone figure—dressed in a cliché bad-guy black trench coat—click-clacked past the back doors of shuttered hipster bars and the rickety fire escapes of the sexy urban-chic apartments of the nouveau riche. Martha struggled to keep up.

  The target was Alister Pout. If her sources were correct, the douchebag's alias was “the Canadian.”

  The Canadian made sense. He was from Carnduff, Saskatchewan.

  Founder and majority holder in the social media platform RedBook, the tech investor seemed to have his fingers in every seedy pie in Manhattan. That, and he was connected to several murders.

  Since when is being a tech-multi-millionaire not enough?

  Charming, devilishly handsome, and loaded to the hilt, the Canadian managed to evade every implication against him.

  Those whom he couldn’t circumvent, he bought off. He was a venture capitalist who the Manhattan Scene recently featured as one of the “Top 35 Under 35.” A real mover and shaker. Last year, he'd been voted the most eligible bachelor at a charity auction.

  If they only knew about his dark side.

  “If only I could take him down. That's all I’d need,” Martha muttered under her breath.

  Taking him down would be tough. No one believed a rookie cop who’d only been on the job about eleven months. Not when it was someone who funded galas, police balls, and the mayor’s campaign.

  Besides, while big-city cops knew better than to be openly sexist, they made their opinions known—no girls allowed in this club.

  Passive-aggressive little bitches.

  Proving that Alister Pout was dirty would change all that. Upgrade her status from rookie to rockstar. That was why, on her day off, she had her back pressed against a dumpster trying desperately not to gag on the collective smell of rancid meat and rotting eggs.

  Total rockstar behavior.

  She didn't know what Alister was doing here. Murdering someone else? Paying off a business rival? Selling a bomb? One thing was sure. Martha was going to find out.

  Alister rounded the corner toward a six-story parking garage. Martha followed him from a safe distance, darting in and out of bushes and behind corners. She caught the reflection of a burly, tattooed night guard watching Netflix on an iPad.

  Frasier? Really?

  When she entered the garage, the morning light glinted like laser-beam spotlights on the shiny metal of BMWs, Mercedes, and the occasional Porsche or Ferrari thrown in for zesty seasoning.

  She slid up to a Jaguar and crouched beside it as Alister entered an elevator. Frasier guard stepped in after him.

  As soon as the doors shut, Martha made a mad dash to the elevator. She watched the overhead numbers.

  One…

  Two…

  Three…

  No, four.

  She slammed open the door to the stairwell and bounded up the stairs two at a time, reaching the fourth floor out of breath. Excited, she tried to ram it open.

  Locked.

  “Damn.” She flew down the stairs to the third floor, then burst out of the stairwell, sprinting up the car ramp to the fourth floor.

  As she was about to turn the corner, she saw the Frasier guard roping off the entrance.

  He eyed her with disdain. “Restricted access, ma’am.” He clicked a faux-velvet rope into place with a big, meaty hand. “You’re going to have to go back down.”

  “Yes, of course.” She thought about identifying herself as a cop. Still, cop or not, following a suspect without going through the proper channels was dangerous.

  Best to fly under the radar.

  Time to mobilize backup. She headed back down the incline and shot off a text to her partner. She had stumbled onto something. She was sure of it.

  She pinned her location and turned the corner, away from the night guard. As soon as she was out of his sight, she leaned out over the third-floor wall. She heard muffled voices and tires squealing.

  She leaned farther and could now see the opening to the fourth-floor wall. She surveyed the distance. If she could climb out on the ledge, she could probably see what was going on.

  Martha climbed out onto the ledge with careful movements, balancing her weight on one foot. Slowly rising to full height, she steadied herself against a corner.

  With one hand on the wall, she reached the other up and…bingo. She touched the opening of the fourth story and pulled herself up with both hands.

  “Thank you, hot yoga,” she whispered.

  She hung from the wall like an uncoordinated Spiderman, her legs dangling wildly in the air beneath her.

  She could see the fourth floor perfectly.

  Two large white delivery vans were parked side by side. Alister st
ood behind them, a lit cigarette in hand. Around him, half a dozen men scurried around at his commands.

  “Unload it already,” Alister barked.

  One of the men opened the van’s side door and nonchalantly began to unload the contents.

  "Holy shit,” Martha whispered. Her eyes grew wide, and she felt her insides turn cold as she saw what was inside. She knew Alister Pout was into some crooked misdeeds. But this?

  “Hey! Who are you, eh?” Alister shouted and looked up.

  She realized that in her distraction, she’d gotten sloppy, and the bastard had seen her.

  His eyes were cold blue steel, not the dreamy heartthrob that lit up bachelor auctions. “Who the fuck are you?” Before she could react, he pulled a pistol from his trench coat, and with a zip, she felt the excruciatingly blinding pain of a bullet piercing her shoulder.

  Her hold on the ledge weakened, and…

  “Oh fuck,” she muttered as she collapsed into a dizzying free-fall.

  Chapter Three

  Reuben—Saturday, February 11, 7:03 a.m.

  “Information for Precinct. Sound of shots fired, 200 block First Avenue, parking lot outside the Tuscan Café. Two shots heard from the east.”

  “Copy that.”

  “We’re requesting response cars, multiple suspects.”

  “Copy, requesting response cars.”

  The garbled noise of the police scanner was the first sound Reuben heard when he came to.

  Emphatic yells followed, “Go get 'em, boys!”

  There was only one place he'd ever be with a raging maniac yelling at a police scanner. He was safely in his bed.

  Wait. What?

  He had died, hadn’t he? Was it all a dream? The explosion. The meeting with Sven. Getting a date with Aki… He had been blown up, right?

  Reuben recalled the visceral feelings of his insides cooking and his skin splitting open. He shook his head. Had he imagined it all?

  No, that was real. It had to be.

  “There was a bomb…”

  Wasn't there?

  He was sure of it. That pain and the invisible wave of energy. Some kind of experimental weapon that cooked him from the inside, like in a sci-fi movie.

  But now, here he was in his bedroom with his blankets, his furniture—even his computer running his Je Ne Sais Pas screensaver.

  In the other room, his dad ran the police scanner like he did every morning. Some people needed coffee to start the day off right. Others liked workouts or meditation.

  His dad preferred the morning’s take on murder and mayhem.

  OK, Reuben reasoned. It was only a dream. An astonishingly vivid one, but a dream nonetheless.

  He sat up in bed and threw off the covers. At least he was alive. There was no bomb. The world more or less still existed.

  Reuben wondered if asking Aki out the way he had in his dream would work. Maybe in real life he wouldn’t do it so awkwardly. Perhaps he’d be super cool.

  That was when he noticed the pizza box on the dresser. He'd ordered pizza a few nights ago, but he distinctly remembered breaking the box down and taking it out to the apartment dumpster.

  Next to it was an unopened Amazon package.

  “The curtains.” He jerked his head to the window.

  Not too long ago, the city had cut down the tree in front of his window. Now, the incoming streetlight light through the blinds kept him up all night. He’d ordered blackout curtains on Amazon, and they arrived Thursday night. He had spent most of Sunday morning hanging them, and it took him forever. He didn’t have the right screws, and he’d had to make not one but two trips to the hardware store. His respect for Martha Stewart had grown exponentially that day, and all he had done was hang some stupid curtains.

  Now the window had nothing but bare blinds.

  The police scanner continued, “The suspect has entered the Second Cup Café, and…”

  “Produced a pink baseball bat,” Reuben quoted in unison. He froze. “What the hell?” He grabbed his Apple Watch off his nightstand and checked the date.

  Reuben yelped loudly. “Saturday fucking February eleventh?”

  What the fuck was going on?

  Reuben's dad bellowed from the living room, “What the hell you yelling about in there?”

  “Nothing, Dad,” he replied.

  Reuben’s pulse quickened. Was he having a mental breakdown? He grabbed the Amazon package and ripped it open. Shrink-wrap still neatly sealed his fresh curtains.

  He checked the date on the pizza box—February tenth at 7:30. He flipped it open. One slice remained. He picked it up and took a tentative bite. It was old but edible.

  “Certainly not four days old,” he mumbled.

  “I’m not going to have to have you committed or anything like that, am I?” Reuben’s dad called. “Talking to yourself; it’s what happens when you sleep alone all the time. You get weird. It’s not natural.”

  That was the last thing Reuben wanted to hear right now. Especially from a guy who yelled at police scanners.

  “OK, Dad.” Reuben stumbled into the other room and rubbed his face.

  Whatever was going on, he needed to start this day. That meant getting his dad to take his meds. He sure as hell didn’t need him to have another episode, especially when it looked like he was on the verge of one himself.

  The sooner he could get that taken care of, the sooner he could start looking into his mental problems.

  His dad sat by the living room window with a morning beer, running the police scanner at full volume. Reuben had taught him how to stream the police feed online, but Marshall Peet insisted on having an old-school police radio.

  The living room was as spacious as any city apartment, with hardwood floors, plush orange couches, and a fifty-two-inch plasma TV that was powered off in a rare moment, sparing the room the talking heads on a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

  Reuben was particularly grateful for this because if he was in some sort of personal sci-fi-slash-metaphysical experience, the last person he wanted to prove it to him was Bill O’Reilly.

  Talk about a “no spin zone.”

  As Reuben stepped into the kitchen to make breakfast, he passed the frame on the wall. He felt a twinge of sadness over what had been. It was the Medal of Honor awarded to his dad when he was on the force. Next to that was another frame, a mounted Key to the City.

  At one time, Marshall Peet had been a cop and a good one. That was before…everything.

  “Don’t make those damn hash browns, Mr. Hash Brown.” Marshall scoffed. “They’re shit. You always burn them.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Reuben barked. Only his mother had been allowed to call him “Mr. Hash Brown.” Not much pissed Reuben off, but his dad calling him that did.

  Marshall knew it, too. He waved his hands. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered as he turned back to the scanner.

  Reuben considered the past three days, which was somehow the present again, looking for more clues. He remembered that hash browns had been Friday’s breakfast experiment, and yes, they were a bad idea. His dad had thrown them out, and Reuben had taken them out with the trash on…

  “Monday,” Reuben recalled in a whisper.

  He took the trash out only on weekdays because it coincided with his morning work routine. With a quick burst, he ripped open the freezer.

  The hash browns were still there.

  “Nothing like a little murder to start the day, huh?” Reuben had made this joke verbatim the first time he had lived through this day. He wanted to see his dad's reaction to the replay.

  “Keeps you straight like V8.” Marshall raised his beer to emphasize his comment. His face softened. “Just like when you were a kid, huh? You loved your V8.” Then his eyes narrowed as though he remembered he was supposed to be an asshole and he added, “Not that you drink it now. Now, you’re too good for V8, aren’t you?”

  Reuben’s mouth dropped. That was the exact response he’d received the first time. He stared at his dad
. Marshall paid no attention and instead studied the scanner as new information came in.

  “I tell you,” Marshall rambled, “these cops these days, they aren’t even cops anymore. All these laws, political correctness, pussyfooting around. They don’t do shit anymore. Underfunded. Undertrained. Outgunned. It’s a shit show.”

  Reuben steadied himself against the counter. Sure, his dad had the same soapbox issues, but he’d heard this one word for word. He tried to focus on making breakfast. His dad had to have something with his meds, and Reuben needed to make sure he got them before he left. He grabbed some eggs and cracked them open over the skillet.

  “They let these damn criminals go wild,” Marshall continued. “They’re babysitting all those criminals like they’re entitled children. Too many criminal rights. Stick to the Mirandas and that’s all you get, then lock ’em all up."

  Reuben mouthed the last words with him as he sprinkled cheese into the sizzling pan.

  “Innocent until proven guilty, Dad.” Reuben ordinarily knew better than to interfere with Marshall’s rambling. Still, if he was in some sort of time warp, could he change the events?

  “Innocent until proven guilty,” Marshall scoffed. “It’s only a theory. You gotta have instinct, guts, and you gotta know how these sonsabitches think.”

  OK, Reuben thought, I changed the order of things, but not the narrative. Marshall would have gotten to the same rambling nonsense anyway.

  He grabbed his dad’s pillbox on the counter. He knew it was accurate because he tediously loaded the pills each week and kept up with them. Yep. It was on Saturday’s dose.

  “You need to eat something.” Reuben handed Marshall a steaming plate of eggs and a glass of orange juice. He set the Saturday pills on the table.

  Marshall growled. “I’ll eat when I’m good and ready.”

  “Take your meds, Dad.” Reuben set the plate down. “Please, humor me so I can get ready for work.”

  “State Department’s working you on Saturday now?”

  Reuben’s face froze. No, they weren’t. However, the CIA was. Not that his dad knew he worked for them. His dad was so unreliable, always blurting things he shouldn’t. Reuben told him he worked for the State Department as his cover. Lying to his dad made him feel simultaneously like a real covert agent and guilty.