I showered and shampooed, flossed and brushed, trimmed my beard, eased into bed, and turned off the light. Mindful of my breathing, I tried to relax my mind, to reach that elusively transcendental state of enlightenment that real Buddhists are always clucking about, the one I’ve never come close to reaching, the one that would’ve allowed me to consider Hub Walker’s offer of employment with complete, objective clarity. That was the plan, anyway. I was asleep before I knew it, dreaming about the only man I ever stabbed to death.
He was toking on a hash pipe, standing outside the alley entrance of an Amsterdam brothel where two Algerian brothers, both al-Qaeda financiers, were enjoying an evening out. To eliminate the brothers, my Alpha team members and I would first have to dispatch their bodyguard. I drew the job. My heart pounded in my ears as I eased in from behind and crooked my arm around his chest to stop him from reaching his shoulder holster, then thrust the tip of my blade into the side of his neck, slicing outward to hopefully avoid the blood spray and prevent him from shouting out. I was lowering his limp body to the ground when my cell phone rang me awake.
“You asleep?”
Groggily I glanced at the digital clock sitting on the wooden orange crate that doubled as my nightstand. It said 3:30 A.M.
“Who sleeps at this hour, Savannah? I’m out clubbing. I’m dancing the rumba.”
“You don’t dance, Logan. If dancing were any easier, it would be called football. Isn’t that what you told me once?”
“Possibly.” I rubbed my eyes. “You doing OK?”
“Fine.”
“Then why are you calling me at 3:30 in the morning?”
“Just to talk.”
“We talked all weekend.”
“That wasn’t talking, Logan. I believe that would be defined as ‘heated debate.’ ”
“I stand corrected.”
Our weekend together, in which we’d agreed beforehand to sleep separately in the exquisite villa Savannah’s father bought for her high in the Hollywood Hills, most certainly had its moments. We smiled over tender memories. We exchanged a few soulful gazes over candlelit dinners at her kitchen table, the kind that can prod a man’s glands to action without it even dawning on him that he has glands. Our hands brushed. We may have even come close to kissing once or twice. But mostly we bickered, hurling accusations and occasional insults at each other like so many pie tins.
You left me for another man.
You left me no choice. You checked out on me emotionally long before I ever packed my bags.
Gum surgery would have been more pleasant.
Nearly seven years had lapsed since the end of our marriage. Not a day had gone by since when my stomach did not grind over the realization of how big a mistake I’d made, letting her go as easily as I did. Savannah Carlisle Logan Echevarria was intelligent, compassionate, and indisputably beautiful. There were times when I could not look into her depthless mahogany eyes for fear that I was not worthy of such a view. Plus her wildcatting oilman father was obscenely wealthy. She was, in other words, the ultimate catch, the proverbial total package.
Don’t get me wrong. The total package was not without its flaws. At forty-three, Savannah could be strong-willed beyond all reason and argumentative just for the hell of it. There was also that small matter of her having dumped me for my former Alpha team leader, Arlo Echevarria. True, as she complained, I’d grown increasingly distant back when I was working for the government; I was no longer “there” for her and Echevarria was. That alone should’ve canceled out all of her awesomeness in my memory. And yet, somehow, it didn’t. I kept hope alive that someday, maybe, we would find ourselves together again. My desire to recapture what we once enjoyed was a feeling to be both savored and loathed all at once — savored because it reminded me of a time in my life when I was never happier; loathed because it was a time in my life when I was never more vulnerable. The yin and the yang. I wondered if Savannah didn’t suffer the same ambivalence.
“I’ve been thinking it over,” she said, “and I think I know what our issue was this weekend.”
“I happen to dislike bananas and you love them?”
“Not bananas.”
“Fruit should be round, Savannah, not shaped like phallic objects. I’ll just let it go at that.”
“I’m trying to be serious here, Logan.”
“OK, what was our issue?”
“Location. We were in my house. I used to live with someone else in this house. So, naturally you were going to be on edge, which put me on edge. By reenacting our perpetual relationship gridlock on an unbalanced stage, we fell into antagonistic patterns of communication. Clearly, it was a recipe for disaster.”
“That’s very impressive psychobabble, coming from a fashion model.”
“I don’t model anymore, Logan. I told you. I’m a life coach.”
“A life coach. How does that work exactly? You send off for some mail-order certificate that gives you license to tell people how to manage their lives?”
“I didn’t send off for some certificate, Logan,” she said, the rising agitation in her voice hard to miss. “I earned a master’s degree in psychology from UCLA. I’ve also done extensive postgraduate reading.”
“I could check out every book at the library on rocket telemetry. It wouldn’t make me Wernher von Braun.”
Cold silence filtered from the other end of the line. I’d overstepped. Yet again.
“I’m sorry, Savannah. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Like hell you didn’t. That’s always been your problem, Logan. You think you can say anything to anybody and get away with it. Is that who you are deep down? Somebody who enjoys hurting people for no reason?”
“Not usually. Having a reason helps immeasurably.”
“You’re so full of crap, you know that? I don’t even know you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”
“You knew me.”
“Nobody knows you, Logan. They only know what you want them to know. You put up walls. You let no one in. We were married for eight years, eight years. I never even knew what you did for a living, what you and Arlo really did — and I was your wife, for god’s sake.”
“We’ve been over and over this, Savannah.”
“Have you considered seeing a therapist? Therapy would do you a ton of good.”
“Pay some guy two hundred bucks an hour so he can tell me my problem was that I wasn’t breast-fed? Thanks, I think I’ll pass.”
“You have trust issues.”
“I have trust issues. Gosh, Savannah, do you think it could possibly have anything to do with my wife having dumped me for my best friend?”
She said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Check and mate.
I’d undergone regular psychoanalytical assessments as a member of the military. When the government of the United States authorizes you to kill other human beings, it wants to be assured that you’ll be reasonably selective when doing so. Sitting across the desk from a military shrink, you learn quickly what answers he or she is looking for, how to game the exam, because you both know that too much has been invested in your training, and that you’re too lethal a weapon to be shelved. I kill because it’s my duty, Doctor, not because I’m addicted to the hunt. Do I see them in my sleep, the dozens whose lives I’ve extinguished, some more gruesomely than you could ever imagine? Sometimes. But who doesn’t have an occasional nightmare? Nature of the beast, right, Doc? I passed every mental evaluation I ever took. But that didn’t mean I didn’t give serious consideration to Savannah’s suggestion.