Client On The Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller) Read online

  “I’m not doing anything until I find Lindsay Vail.”

  Shortly after they passed Evans, Teffinger felt something brush against his leg. He looked down and saw the head of a snake.

  “Not good!”

  The words startled Sydney. She looked at him and then followed his eyes to the carpet.

  “Oh my God!”

  The head was huge.

  A forked tongue darted in and out.

  Sydney immediately edged as close to the door as she could. She unhooked her seatbelt and scrambled into the rear seat.

  “That’s a rattlesnake!” she said.

  Teffinger said nothing.

  He was afraid that the sound of his voice would either attract it or provoke it. The reptile slowly climbed up the center console. Judging by what showed so far, it had to be every bit of six feet. Beady eyes stared directly at Teffinger’s face.

  It climbed higher.

  Now the head was next to Teffinger’s thigh, three or four inches below his right elbow. He slowly loosened his right hand from the steering wheel and then gently—almost imperceptibly—moved it until it got to the headrest of the passenger seat.

  “Pull over!” Sydney said.

  Teffinger’s chest tightened and his breath got short.

  “I said pull over!”

  He checked the rearview mirror. Another 18-wheeler was on his tail. No, not another one, the same one as before.

  Teffinger checked the shoulder ahead.

  It looked clear.

  He put on the right turn signal and slowly eased up on the accelerator. The trucker wasn’t expecting that and ran into Teffinger’s bumper.

  “Damn it!” he said.

  A heartbeat later the snake rattled.

  It climbed higher.

  All the way into Teffinger’s lap.

  It coiled up, raised its head, and looked directly into Teffinger’s face, no more than ten inches away.

  The trucker must have realized what he did, because he backed off. Teffinger got the Tundra onto the shoulder and let it coast to a stop.

  He left it in gear.

  But moved his right foot from the accelerator to the brake.

  The engine purred.

  Traffic shot by.

  The snake rattled.

  “I’m going to get out,” Sydney said. “I’m going to move real slow.”

  Teffinger said nothing.

  He dared not move.

  “Wiggle the fingers of your right hand if you heard me,” she said.

  He did.

  Moving as slowly as she could, Sydney opened the passenger door, then the backseat door, and stepped out. The snake bobbed its head.

  “I’m clear.”

  Suddenly the rattling stopped. The snake loosened its coil and laid its head down.

  Sydney pulled her weapon and said, “I’m going to shoot it. Move the fingers of your right hand if you want me to.”

  Teffinger swallowed.

  Then moved his fingers.

  “Okay,” Sydney said. “I don’t have much clearance. It’s only about three or four inches above your lap. The other problem is that the bullet will go through the door. I need to wait until there aren’t any cars in the line of fire. There’s an embankment on the other side of the freeway, so I won’t be shooting into a house or anything. Do you understand?”

  Teffinger wiggled his fingers.

  “Do you want me to do it?”

  He wiggled his fingers.

  “Okay, I’m going to go for the head,” she said. “I don’t know where the venom’s going to go, so keep your eyes closed.”

  Teffinger closed his eyes and waited.

  Seconds passed.

  Then more.

  Sweat dripped down his forehead and into his eyes.

  “The traffic’s too thick! I’ll never get a shot,” Sydney said. “I’m going to have to do it from the other side. Keep your eyes closed.”

  Seconds later, a breeze came from Teffinger’s left side, and the sound of the traffic got louder, meaning Sydney had gotten the door open.

  “Okay, don’t move,” she said.

  He braced himself.

  Don’t move.

  Don’t move.

  Don’t move.

  “I wish the damn thing would raise its head,” Sydney said. “I barely have a shot, the way it’s sitting. This is a lot tighter than I thought.” A pause. “Okay, on three—”

  “One.”

  Don’t move!

  “Two.”

  Don’t move!

  “Three!”

  When the gunfire exploded, Teffinger jumped for his life in spite of himself. The snake flew up and landed back in his lap.

  Unharmed.

  Rattling.

  Bobbing its head.

  Freaked.

  Teffinger closed his eyes as tight as they would go and braced himself for the fangs.

  50

  Y ardley’s client waived the potential conflict of interest that came from representing an attorney in the opposing law firm, and gave Yardley authorization to represent Dakota Van Vleck. “But if she gets assigned back to my case, that wouldn’t be right, you representing me and her at the same time—don’t you think?”

  Yes.

  She did.

  “If that happens, then I’ll have to withdraw as her counsel,” Yardley said. “She understands that. The other thing we do is build a firewall, meaning that we never talk about your case, even casually. By the same token, I never talk to you about her case.”

  “That sounds fair.”

  Yardley called Dakota and gave her the news.

  “Good,” Dakota said. “I’ll have a retainer for you the next time we meet.”

  “Like I said—”

  “No arguments,” Dakota said.

  “Hey, guess what? I learned how to swim this morning.”

  “Let me see if I have this right,” Dakota said. “You live on a sailboat and didn’t know how to swim?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re crazier than I thought,” Dakota said. “I’m going to have to think again about you being my attorney.”

  “Sorry, that’s already a done deal.”

  Yardley stayed in the cabin where the sun couldn’t get her—stripped down to her underwear with two fans blowing—and continued to input the names from the Ink Spot receipts into an Excel spreadsheet. With any luck, one of the names belonged to the man with the forehead scar; the man from the newspaper article who was wanted in connection with the abduction of Lindsay Vail; the man who followed Aspen Asher on Saturday night.

  The pirate.

  So many names.

  Over a thousand.

  It would take all day just to input them.

  In a perfect world, she’d be able to run background checks on them too. But she didn’t live in a perfect world and couldn’t think of how to get information, other than Google them and see what popped up.

  Her thoughts wandered to Coyote.

  She needed to keep her promise to the woman.

  Meaning she had to buy a good bottle of wine today and drink it with her tonight.

  The air would be cool.

  The sun would be gone.

  She bit her lower lip and wondered if her life was about to change.

  She went topside to see if Coyote was still on the Searay.

  She was.

  In spite of her better judgment, Yardley threw on shorts and a pair of flip-flops and headed over.

  Coyote looked up and smiled when Yardley stepped onto the boat. Then she must have detected the seriousness on Yardley’s face because she asked, “What’s going on?”

  Yardley pulled the towel up.

  Sure enough, there was a surveillance camera underneath.

  Pointed directly at the sailboat.

  “Do you want to tell me why you have me under surveillance?”

  Coyote’s expression was exactly what Yardley expected.

  A deer-in-headlights.
/>   The woman said nothing.

  Then she shook her head and said, “I can’t tell you that.”

  Yardley headed down into the cabin.

  The camera was connected to a digital recorder and the image showed on a flat-panel monitor.

  “Were you going to hide all this when I came over tonight?” she asked.

  Coyote nodded.

  Yardley turned and huffed down the dock.

  51

  D alton shut the trunk as the state trooper pulled up, leaned in the cop’s window and said, “This is the way my life works. I get a flat and of course the spare’s flat too.”

  The cop put a look on his face, as if he understood bad luck.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Mountain biking,” Dalton said.

  “You took a spill?”

  Dalton nodded.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said.

  “That’s good because it looks pretty bad.”

  It took five insanely long minutes to get rid of the jerk. Then Dalton pulled Malcolm’s body out of the trunk while Samantha kept a lookout. He stashed the man in the back seat, changed the tire, stuffed him back in the trunk and then got the hell out of there.

  “The more I think about it, you’re probably right that it’s too risky to dump him with the other body,” Dalton said. So they continued west on I-70, got off near Georgetown, wove into the mountains and dumped him three hundred yards off a deserted gravel road.

  In a boulder field.

  Back at Refuge-7, they wiped the Lexus meticulously. Dalton drove it to a high-crime area north of downtown and parked it with the windows open and the keys in the ignition. He gave it one final wipe and then walked three blocks south, to where Samantha was waiting for him. Then they drove back to the playroom and cleaned the place to perfection.

  Samantha went home.

  Dalton went to his loft.

  There.

  Done.

  Not a foolproof plan by any stretch of the imagination.

  But not bad, considering.

  When he powered his cell phone on, he wasn’t surprised to find twenty-seven new messages. Six of them were from Mandy Martin, each one more panicked than the prior.

  He dialed her.

  “Where the hell are you?” she asked.

  “I got jacked up mountain biking.”

  Hesitation.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, but I look like Frankenstein, so I’m going to handle things from home instead of coming into the office.”

  “There’s no time for egos,” she said. “I need you down here now. G-Drop dropped off the face of the earth. His manager hasn’t been able to get him on the line all day.”

  “I know. He left me a bunch of messages. I’m already working on it.”

  “He’s not going to show tonight,” she said. “I can feel it.”

  “Calm down—he’s probably just screwing some groupie.”

  “I already have the lawyers working on the legal aspect of all this,” she said. “What I need you to do is contact all the other acts and get them to commit to an extra ten minutes each, if we need it.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Get down here, please. Save my ass.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  52

  T effinger set a heavy black plastic bag on Kwak’s desk, next to a stack of Old Car Traders, and said, “I need some good evidence photos of what’s in here.” Then he headed for the door with the corner of his mouth turned up ever so slightly.

  Kwak looked at the bag.

  Then at Teffinger.

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Down in homicide, he got a cup of coffee and headed for his desk. Kwak called thirty seconds later and said, “What the hell is a rattlesnake doing on my desk?”

  “That’s not a rattlesnake, it’s a murder weapon,” Teffinger said. “Correction. Attempted murder weapon. Oh, I almost forgot, I need it dusted for prints too; and weighed.”

  “You’re messing with me, right?”

  No.

  He wasn’t.

  A minute later, Kwak called again.

  “Where’s the head?”

  “Smithereens.”

  “Smithereens?”

  “Right, Sydney blew it there.”

  “Sydney blew it to smithereens—is that what you’re saying?”

  “There you go.”

  “With her gun?”

  “Right.”

  Silence.

  “Nothing’s ever normal with you Teffinger, do you know that?”

  As soon as Teffinger hung up, Double-F called and summoned him. The photograph was still hanging on the wall, the one of the chief and the mayor, both smiling. “I heard about your close encounter of the reptilian kind. How long have you been driving around with that thing?”

  Good question.

  “I’ve actually been trying to figure that out,” he said. “Not long, I’d imagine.”

  “Any chance it crawled in there by itself?”

  Teffinger shook his head.

  “I got rattlesnakes up where I live, but I always leave the windows closed.”

  “Always?”

  “Well, 50 percent of the time.”

  Tanker creased his wrinkles.

  “You think the black woman put it there?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Here’s my advice—which you won’t take, by the way, because you never do. But here it is anyway. Take some time off. Get out of town until we can figure this thing out.”

  Teffinger stood up.

  “I’m still batting a hundred percent.”

  “On what?”

  “On not taking your advice.”

  Tanker chuckled.

  “Find out where she got the snake,” he said. “That’s your best lead.”

  “I already know that.”

  “I know you know that,” Tanker said. “I just wanted you to know that I know it too. I’m not totally out of touch.”

  Teffinger headed for the door.

  “No one ever said you were,” he said. “Totally, at least.”

  Tanker grinned and threw a pencil at him.

  “Go on, get out of here.”

  Back at his desk, the room suddenly seemed too small. The walls were too close, the ceiling was too low and the windows were too few. For a heartbeat, he thought about heading outside where he could breathe.

  Then he refilled his coffee cup instead.

  Screw it.

  No time.

  No one called with any information regarding the suspect in the Lindsay Vail case—the pirate with the forehead scar. Teffinger didn’t know what else to do, other than keep Coyote on Yardley Sage’s tail. Then something bad happened.

  Coyote called and said, “I got made.”

  Oh, man.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But she came over and confronted me. She saw the camera and all the rest.”

  Damn it.

  “Okay,” Teffinger said. “Go ahead and pack it up.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Coyote said. “This boat’s obviously contaminated, so you can’t stick anyone new on it. She’ll be watching the other boats too. I think it would just be best if I stuck around and made friends with her.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Teffinger called Jessie-Rae, who turned out to be in a production meeting with Geneva Vellone and the bigwigs. She stepped into the hall when she heard the tone in his voice. He gave her the short version of the rattlesnake incident.

  “I have to start taking this thing seriously,” he said. “You could have gotten bit; or Sydney. Whoever’s doing this doesn’t care.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to take your advice and go to New Orleans.”

  “When?”

  “The next flight.”

  “I’m coming with yo
u,” she said.

  “What I’d really like you to do is stay with Sydney tonight where you’ll be safe,” he said. “Besides, you have a radio show in the morning.”

  “I’m walking to my car right now,” she said. “Are you going to the house first?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  “God, you’re stubborn.”

  “You have no idea,” she said. “Bring your voodoo doll.”

  “Why?”

  “How are you going to find out where it came from if you don’t have it to show to people? In fact, bring the one with the needle in the eye too. Bring ’em both.”

  “You have to stop doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Being a better detective than me.”

  Sydney came over as Teffinger stood up. “I’m going to New Orleans,” he said.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Thanks but you’re more use to me here,” he said. “Stay focused on Lindsay Vail. If you think of anything new, or if anything breaks, get right on it. Everything else is second priority. In the meantime, see if you can find out where the woman got that snake.”

  53

  Y ardley ventured topside several times during the afternoon. In each instance, Coyote was still over at the Searay. She pulled out the binoculars and brought the boat in closer. The camera was no longer on the dash. So what was the woman still doing there?

  Yardley slipped on her flip-flops and headed over.

  “You’re still here,” she said.

  “Yes, I am,” Coyote said. “I put the camera away, though, so don’t worry about it any more.”

  “Do you have a bug or anything like that on my boat?”

  “No.”

  “How about my phone? Is that bugged?”

  “No.”

  “My computer?”

  “No.”

  “Anything?”

  “No.”

  “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  “Because I wouldn’t do that to you,” Coyote said.

  Yardley believed her, maybe because of the kiss.

  “So what are you still hanging around for?”

  “You’re going to bring me wine tonight, remember?”