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

  He patted her stomach, kissed her on the lips and said, “Remember, you’re getting paid well. Focus on the money.”

  He was almost out the door when she said, “Dalton?”

  “What?”

  “Remember what you promised before.”

  “You’ll be fine. Stop worrying.”

  He left the front door unlocked and headed around to the back of the building to check on Lindsay Vail.

  No sound came from the dumpster.

  She was being a good girl.

  Not calling out.

  He opened the lid and asked, “Are you okay?”

  “The ropes are killing me.”

  For a split second he thought about untying her legs, but got an image of her kicking the side of the dumpster, and said, “There’s nothing I can do about it. This is only going to be a couple of hours.”

  He closed the lid and headed for the BMW.

  He drove a mile down the road and parked. He doubled back on foot along the railroad tracks and found a spot where he could keep an eye on the dumpster, just to be sure nothing unexpected happened. Twilight was coming. Shadows were longer. Five minutes later a black Lexus came up the road.

  Malcolm drove.

  G-Drop sat in the passenger seat.

  Animated.

  Jamming.

  They pulled up to the building tentatively, not sure if they had the right place. Then G-Drop stepped out and howled.

  Again and again.

  A werewolf gone wild.

  Obviously jacked up on drugs.

  Dalton swallowed and pictured Samantha stretched out on the table.

  “Where are you bitch? Here, bitchy, bitchy, bitchy.”

  They entered the building, which immediately swallowed their sound. Dalton had a bad feeling. So bad that he trotted over and took a position next to the dumpster. Lindsay Vail wasn’t making a sound. Good thing, too.

  A few minutes later, the Lexus disappeared down the street with only Malcolm inside.

  Dalton crept to the front of the building.

  He opened the door and stepped inside on cat feet.

  The sounds from the playroom were disturbing.

  Insane, almost.

  He pictured Samantha being killed and ran that way as fast as he could.

  DAY THREE

  Wednesday

  July 14

  34

  T effinger woke up Wednesday morning when Jessie-Rae straddled him and bounced up and down until he opened his eyes. Enough light snuck in from the hallway to see that she was already dressed and wide-awake. “Rise and shine, sleepy-head.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five,” she said. “I’m your new alarm clock.”

  He stretched and said, “I like my new alarm clock.”

  She hopped off, lifted a short white dress just long enough to flash a black thong, and said, “I have to get to work.”

  He reached a hand towards her and said, “Give me that.”

  She grinned, headed for the door and said over her shoulder, “Men.”

  “At least show me the other side.”

  She flashed her ass, then left.

  Ten seconds later she popped back into the room and said, “Be careful today.”

  “I will.”

  “I mean it, Nick. I woke up with a bad feeling.”

  He jogged, showered, and discovered that his new alarm clock made coffee. He filled a thermos and ate cereal in the Tundra as he drove to headquarters. Then he did something he knew he shouldn’t.

  He called Coyote, knowing she was sleeping but needing to find out what happened at the sailboat last night, if anything.

  She didn’t answer, naturally, because that’s the way his life worked.

  She did, however, call back a half hour later. “The pirate didn’t show up and I don’t think he’s going to,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think Yardley Sage is his lawyer. What I do think, though, is that she’s trying to find him.”

  Then she told Teffinger an interesting story.

  Yardley showed up about six-thirty last night. Ten minutes later, another woman showed up, well dressed. They ate, left in Yardley’s 4Runner, and didn’t return to the boat until 10:30. They brought a laptop on deck, popped in a CD and opened files for a long time. Coyote amplified their conversation and listened.

  “From what I could tell, they broke into Lindsay Vail’s house and downloaded her computer on to the CD they were looking at,” Coyote said. “They were trying to find something to figure out who the guy was.”

  “You mean the same guy we’re looking for? The pirate?”

  “Exactly,” Coyote said.

  “Why?”

  “That didn’t come up,” Coyote said. “But they’re serious about the whole thing, that’s for sure.”

  Teffinger cocked his head.

  “So who was this other woman?”

  “Funny you should ask,” she said. “She ended up sleeping on the sailboat with the lawyer. Since they didn’t initially show up at the same time, I figured she must have driven her own car to the marina. So after they went to bed, I wrote down all the license plate numbers of the vehicles in the parking lot. I got their registrations and then pulled up driver’s licenses. The woman turns out to be someone named Aspen Asher. I did a background check on her but didn’t turn up anything.”

  “Damn you’re good,” Teffinger said.

  “I took pictures of them on the boat, but they didn’t come out very good,” she added.

  Teffinger questioned her for another few minutes.

  Then he hung up, printed a color copy of Aspen Asher’s driver’s license, topped off the thermos and headed for the stairway. The elevator opened as he walked past and Sydney stepped out.

  “Want to take a ride?” he asked.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Where?”

  “With me.”

  “Yeah, I know that, but where?”

  “To the place I’m going.”

  She gave him a sideways look and said, “It’s going to be a long day.”

  Fifteen minutes later they arrived at Lindsay Vail’s house. When they saw the busted window in the back, Teffinger took a long sip of coffee and said, “I can’t believe it. They really did break in.”

  “That’s a big no-no,” Sydney said.

  Teffinger nodded.

  “Keep it under your hat for right now,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I want it in my back pocket in case I decide to put a little pressure on our friend Yardley Sage at some point.”

  “You’re so devious,” she said. “Hey, I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  “How can I keep it under my hat if it’s going to be in your back pocket?”

  “Bad,” he said.

  “If you think the top of my head is going to be anywhere near your back pocket, you’re so wrong—”

  Teffinger pictured it and chuckled.

  On the way back to headquarters, Sydney turned the radio to FM 104 Hot Talk and said, “Did you know that your two friends are talking about voodoo this morning?”

  Teffinger swallowed.

  No.

  He didn’t know that.

  He didn’t know that at all.

  “They’re taking calls on whether people believe in voodoo and whether they’ve had any experiences,” Sydney added. “Judging by the calls coming in, there are a lot more nuts in this city than I knew about.”

  Teffinger turned up the volume and concentrated.

  Concerned that Jessie-Rae might have broken her promise to not talk about what they found at Ripley’s house. Then, as the words clicked off, he realized that the discussion was general in nature and that she’d kept her word.

  No mention of Ripley.

  Or lawyers.

  Or dolls that had been sliced.

  Or burned.

  Or found next to newspaper articles.
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  “You should call in,” Sydney said.

  Teffinger tilted his head.

  “And say what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Ask Jessie-Rae out for lunch and see what she does.”

  “On the air?”

  “Yeah. It would be romantic.”

  Teffinger actually considered it before remembering that he had someone in his shadow trying to kill him. The last thing he needed was a public announcement of who meant something in his life.

  “Maybe some other time,” he said. “Did I tell you that she carries my spare gun around inside the house?”

  “What for? The shooter?”

  Teffinger nodded.

  “I had to let her, otherwise she was going to buy her own.”

  “Well, don’t piss her off while she has it in her hand,” Sydney said. “That’s my advice.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “As if guys have a clue how to do that.”

  35

  Y ardley woke Wednesday morning with an uneasy feeling. The break-in to Lindsay Vail’s house last night didn’t turn up anything of use and now she regretted it. Sure, Aspen was the one who technically entered, but Yardley was equally guilty as a co-conspirator, a lookout and a recipient of stolen items. She had committed at least two or three felonies and could never undo that fact. She would be disbarred if she ever got caught.

  That was her first thought.

  Her second thought was that Aspen’s life was in danger and she was proud of herself for having the guts to bend the rules. If she got disbarred, she’d become a fulltime author.

  Screw it.

  She crawled out of bed, opened the hatch and stepped outside. An early morning dawn washed a yellow patina over the water. Three seagulls flew overhead. One had something in its mouth and the other two were trying to steal it.

  The air felt nice.

  Cool.

  Comfortable.

  Two pulls on the rope got the generator going. Now she had electricity. Back in the cabin, she turned on the bilge pump and drained the hull as Aspen wiggled out of the sheets. They splashed the sleep out of their eyes, took a two-mile jog on the beach and found the coffee pot full when they got back. Aspen headed home to get a change of clothes and a shower before reporting to work.

  “Just be careful,” Yardley said. “Walk around the perimeter and look at the windows before you go in.”

  Aspen nodded.

  Sure.

  “So what’s the plan today?”

  “There isn’t one yet,” Yardley said.

  “Well call me when you get one.”

  Before she left, Aspen wrote a check for $20,000 and set it on the table. “I forgot to give you that the other day,” she said. “Use it up as fast as you can and let me know when you need more.”

  The sailboat had a shower but Yardley never used it because the tank filled up too fast and she had no way to dump it. So she always showered at the campground, which was only a quarter-mile hike through the field. That’s where she was heading when her cell phone rang and Dakota’s voice came through.

  “Hey, remember that story you told me about the voodoo case you had with Ripley?”

  Yardley remembered.

  “Well, there’s a rumor floating around that the cops found a voodoo doll in Ripley’s house.”

  “Interesting but I’m not surprised,” Yardley said. “Ripley was obsessed.”

  “Obsessed?”

  Right.

  Obsessed.

  “He always kept it quiet so he didn’t come off as a weirdo, but he talked to me about it since we were working the case together. Every time the subject came up, he knew more and more about it. It was obvious that he was researching it to death, way more than was necessary for the case.”

  “Well that’s weird.”

  “If you think that’s weird, I have something even weirder.”

  “Like what?”

  Yardley told her.

  After Ripley settled the case for the voodoo priestess, where she paid $5,000 and agreed to counter the spell that she denied putting on him in the first place, the guy’s life actually improved. The rash on his face mysteriously vanished. He bought a $1 lottery ticket that ended up being worth almost $25,000. But then, a month later, he was driving north on Highway 85 in a thunderstorm near Greeley when his car left the road and slammed into a telephone pole. The impact broke his back and nearly every other bone in his body. He spent eight painful hours in the emergency room before dying.

  “Ouch.”

  “By itself, that’s not weird,” Yardley said. “But here’s the strange part. The night after this guy ran off the road—the very next night—his lawyer went downtown and drank Tequila until he closed a bar. They found his body the next morning on the ground by his car. He got stabbed in the spine three times.”

  “Ouch. Robbery?”

  “That’s the theory,” Yardley said. “Apparently his wallet was missing.”

  “That is freaky,” Dakota said, “that they both died within 24 hours of each other. But you’re not suggesting that the voodoo priestess put a spell on them or something, are you?”

  “I’m just telling you what happened,” Yardley said.

  36

  A t one in the morning, Dalton cut off I-25 onto I-70 eastbound, tired as hell. He had the window down. The cold Rocky Mountain air howled in his ear and kept him awake. In another fifteen minutes he’d be at Refuge-7.

  The radio was off.

  Traffic was light.

  A major change had come to his life.

  G-Drop was dead.

  It was G-Drop’s fault, pure and simple. All Dalton wanted him to do was to back off Samantha Dent and realize he was jacked up and killing her, but G-Drop got confrontational and took a swing. Dalton landed a warning punch to his face. G-Drop should have backed down but the drugs were in control. He did exactly what he shouldn’t, and attacked full force. Dalton didn’t attack back but did land enough punches to make a point about where things were heading. That’s when G-Drop spotted an iron pipe, swung it at Dalton’s head and connected with his shoulder. The pain shot straight into Dalton’s brain and he couldn’t control his fists.

  G-Drop ended up on the floor.

  No longer moving.

  Maybe dead, maybe not—unconscious, for sure.

  Dalton untied Samantha.

  She immediately picked up the iron pipe, raised it as far above her head as she could, and brought it down with a terrible vengeance directly on the man’s skull.

  It cracked and indented.

  She smashed it again.

  Then she dropped the pipe, crouched in the corner and stared at the body.

  Dalton put his arm around her until she calmed down enough to get dressed.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  Good question.

  There was a lot of blood on the floor so they mopped it up, not perfectly, but at least to the point where it wasn’t visible. Then they lined the bottom of Dalton’s trunk with black plastic garbage bags. The body went in next.

  It barely fit.

  Dalton wanted to drop Samantha off at her house before he dumped the body but she wouldn’t hear of it. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you,” she said. “We’re doing it together.”

  He argued.

  She argued harder.

  They drove a long way into the mountains and parked on a desolate road. Then they carried the body into the darkness until their strength was gone—at least three or four hundred yards off the road.

  They drove back to Denver in silence.

  Dalton dropped Samantha off at her house.

  They hugged.

  “Do you have dishwashing gloves?” he asked.

  She did.

  “Okay, put them on and get a garbage bag,” he said. “Don’t get any fingerprints on the bag—that’s what the gloves are for. Wash your clothes, tear them up and put them in the bag. I’ll call you tomorrow with a plan on how to best dispose of t
hem.”

  She nodded.

  Then she hugged him, tiight.

  “I killed a man,” she said.

  “Either you did or I did. Either way, it doesn’t matter.”

  Now Dalton was heading back to Refuge-7. In a perfect world, he would have put Lindsay Vail back in the playroom before he left to dump the body. But that hadn’t been an option, because of Samantha’s presence. He got back at 1:15 a.m., parked in front of the structure and immediately headed to the back.

  The dumpster was a black silhouette in a black night.

  He muscled the lid up.

  “Lindsay.”

  No response.

  “Lindsay, wake up.”

  Silence.

  He reached in but couldn’t feel her.

  So he hoisted himself up the side and eased in, expecting to find her tucked in the corner.

  She wasn’t in the left one.

  Or the right.

  His forehead broke into a sweat as he searched the entire interior.

  Rapidly.

  Thoroughly.

  She wasn’t there.

  She was gone.

  37

  T effinger wasn’t sure whether to drive out to the marina and confront Yardley Sage head on, right now, this morning, or whether to stay in the shadows and let Coyote keep her under surveillance.

  Sydney, however, had an opinion.

  “If they knew who the guy was, or where he was, I’d grab them by the throat and shake them until they talked,” she said. “But if Coyote’s right, they don’t know either of those. So there’s nothing there to get, at least not yet. If we leave them alone, maybe they’ll actually figure something out.”

  Teffinger gave her a sideways look.

  “I hate it when you’re right,” he said.

  “Luckily it doesn’t happen that often,” she said.

  “Actually, I think this is the first time.”

  “In that case, I’m one up on you.”

  He chuckled.

  Then said, “What I don’t get is why they’re hunting the guy. If we could figure that out, I’ll bet a lot of things would fall into place.” He stood up. “Do me a favor and find out everything you can on Yardley Sage’s co-conspirator, what’s her name?”