Kill Me Twice (A Zeke Edison Novel Book 1) Read Online Free

Pamela?”
    “Yes, he caught me from behind.” A shiver ran through Paulette.
    George engulfed her hands in his. “There’s a way you can defend yourself against that. I’ll show it to you.”
    His words were meant to reassure, but they made Paulette nervous.
    “You’re not going to protect me?” she asked.
    “Of course, I am. I told Zeke I would, and I keep my word. I’m just talking about, you know, some time in the future. You don’t want a big lug like me around all the time.”
    In truth, she did. At least for the foreseeable future. George had trimmed down from his playing weight, too, losing twenty-five pounds. But that left three hundred more, all lean muscle. Add that to his imposing height and few people would try to give him a hard time. Paulette found that comforting.
    As did George’s easy acceptance that she’d lived and died before.
    When she questioned him about that he told her a bit about his own life.
    “My mama and daddy are … passionate people. I never saw two other people who loved each other as much as they did or fought as hard as they did. And I mean with fists, feet, elbows and knees. It wasn’t just mama getting beat on either; she gave as good as she got. It scared me bad until I got bigger than both of them. Then it stopped when I told them if they kept on I was going to join in and neither of them would like that.”
    “They took you at your word?” Paulette asked.
    George nodded. “They could see I wasn’t fooling.”
    “But how does all that help you accept what I told you?”
    “When I was smaller and still scared, I used to run to the house of the lady across the street. She always took me in and made me feel better. She was a lady who’d moved up to Georgia from Jamaica. She’d read to me and, later, give me books to read on my own. She was the one who made me always do my best in school. I also learned she knew how to do magic. She was an obeah woman. I asked her to cast a spell or something to make my parents stop fighting. She said she couldn’t interfere with them because … Well, what she said was they were working out problems from an earlier life.”
    Paulette leaned in and kissed George’s cheek.
    “So you do know I told you the truth.”
    “Let’s just say I can sympathize. But when I put an end to my parents’ fighting I told them they’d had enough time to work things out. If they kept on, I was going to show them what a real whupping was not only in this life but in any more to come. That settled them right down. They get along fine these days.”
    “So you will protect me? While Mr. Edison sees about Jonas Dawson.”
    George nodded. “Anyone tries to bother you, they’ll get a real whupping, too.”
    Aaron Levy was the child of diplomats, an Israeli father and an American mother. He had dual citizenship and as a young man had fought in the Six Day War, helping Israel to a lightning swift victory as a tank commander and losing his right leg below the knee in the process. He stayed in the service rising through the ranks of military intelligence. When he had irreconcilable differences with a commanding officer appointed by the newly elected Menachem Begin government, he took a long-deferred medical discharge and pension and moved to his mother’s hometown of Chicago.
    There he started his private investigations agency, the tradecraft he’d learned as a military spy being invaluable. His mother’s many connections to the city’s political power structure didn’t hurt either. For all the violence of American society, Aaron found the level of little more than the occasional exchange of small-arms fire to be easily tolerated compared to what he’d experienced back home.
    Having personal understanding that a missing limb or other so-called disabilities did not limit the effectiveness of a smart investigator, Aaron believed in hiring the handicapped from the start. That included those with emotional challenges, Zeke Edison among them.
    Zeke had