Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) (10 page)

The cover charge was $5.00.

He paid with a hundred-dollar bill and put $10.00 in the tip jar, which got him a hug from a cute brunette and a hand down his pants for about five seconds.

The women inside must have smelled the money.

Two of them latched on and were already rubbing their tits on him before he even got to the bar. But then again, maybe it wasn’t the money. He was, after all, an attractive man.

Make that an attractive man with an incredible physique, a physique good enough to get up that stupid rock in Clear Creek Canyon, even if it did take him three tries.

He didn’t care how drunk he got tonight.

He’d take a cab when the time came.

He owned the night.

He already knew where he’d bury Tessa Blake tomorrow.

All he had to do at this point was sit back and chill.

HE CLOSED THE CLUB FIVE HOURS LATER with seven beers in his gut and ended up going home with a stripper named Phoenix.

She a real name that started with a B.

Brenda.

Or Barbara

Or Bernadette.

Something like that.

She was a gorgeous long-legged thing who loved to clamp his head between her vice-like thighs and get tongued. Midway through that tonguing, when he had the woman worked up into a solid sweat, his cell phone rang.

“Don’t answer,” she said.

He ignored it at first, then pulled it out and looked at his watch.

2:38 a.m.

What the hell?

“Hello?”

A voice came though, a familiar one.

“We had a situation develop earlier this evening.”

“What kind of situation?” Jekker asked.

“Something serious,” the voice said.

26

Day Four—June 14

Thursday Night

LONDON DIDN’T HAVE A LOT OF STUFF but did have a not-too-ancient Gateway laptop that got her on the web whenever she wanted. Tonight, as the storm raged outside, she and Venta hit the search engines—looking for another female P.I. who had been lured to Bangkok and disappeared; someone they could cross-reference to and maybe find a common denominator.

So far, an hour into it, they had nothing.

Nada.

Zippo.

The bar-buzz wore off more than a half hour ago. Now, getting nowhere fast, the exuberance waned too. Venta was in the bathroom with the door closed when her cell phone rang.

“Will you get that?” she shouted.

London did.

“Venta’s receptionist,” she said.

“Venta’s receptionist?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Venta?”

“She’s in a meeting with John.”

“John?”

“Right,” London said. “But she’ll be out in a minute. Who should I say is calling?”

“Hannah.”

London held the phone away from her mouth and shouted, “It’s Hannah.”

“Hannah?”

“Right.”

“Tell her I’ll be right there.”

“Did you hear that?” London asked.

Hannah had.

London went back to working the web, but listened with a half-ear as Venta talked. It seemed to be about nothing. Afterwards, Venta said, “Hannah does work for me now and then. She wants to know if I’ve made up my mind yet whether to relocate to Denver.”

London cocked her head.

“Well, have you?”

Venta nodded.

“I don’t have a choice,” she said. “That man I told you about—Nick Teffinger—has one blue eye and one green one. Did I mention that before?”

No, she hadn’t.

“And they’re both for me.” A worried expression washed over her face and she added, “Of course, he doesn’t know yet that I had a hundred different cocks shoot cum on my face in Bangkok.”

London winced at the visual and said, “If he has any real substance, it shouldn’t matter.”

Venta grunted.

“Shouldn’t is a big word, sweetie; a universe-sized word.”

A HALF HOUR LATER they found an interesting article from the Miami Herald. A P.I. by the name of Rebecca Vampire disappeared in May of last year while “out of the country.”

“Vampire?” London asked.

“Right, Vampire.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, it says it right here, Rebecca Vampire.”

A photo accompanied the article.

“She sure doesn’t look like one, though,” Venta added.

The woman was hot, blond and hot.

“Do you recognize her?” London asked.

“No.”

27

Day Four—June 14

Thursday Night

WHEN 6TH AVENUE ENDED as a freeway and turned into a street as it entered metro Denver, a street with intersections, Teffinger did his best not to T-bone anyone as he busted through red lights. He made it all the way to Colorado Boulevard and by some miracle actually caught a green light and continued east. The windshield wipers swept back and forth and brought an upscale neighborhood of Tudor mansions on tree-lined boulevards, home of Denver’s rich and powerful, in and out of focus.

Teffinger didn’t know this side of town that well and studied the signs.

Then, there it was—the street.

He turned right and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Five minutes later, on his third pass, he spotted a dark shape on the ground, barely visible at the base of a row of pitch-black hedges—a shape that could be a body.

He slammed on the brakes and ran over, not swinging the truck door shut, not caring if the interior got soaked.

There he found Dr. Leanne Sanders.

She was laying face down, motionless in two or three inches of water.

He rolled her over to get her mouth off the ground and felt wet goop at the back of her head, thicker than water. He couldn’t see it but knew it was blood, fresh blood, still flowing, meaning she was still alive.

TWO HOURS LATER he wound up Green Mountain to home and found Venta waiting up for him, watching Body Double. An empty wineglass sat on the coffee table. The stress on her face reminded him that a good amount of Leanne’s blood had transferred to his clothes.

He kissed her and said, “That isn’t mine.”

Then he recapped the evening for her.

Halfway through, she interrupted him. “I don’t ever want to lose you.”

He held her at arms length and looked into her eyes, the eyes of this mysterious woman he had only known for three days and couldn’t imagine life without her.

“Me too,” he said.

At first, he couldn’t believe his own voice.

As soon as he said it, though, he was glad.

“You too?”

He nodded.

“Right, me too.”

“You’re not just messing with me, are you?”

“To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before in my whole life.”

“You don’t even know who I am,” she said.

“I know enough,” he said. “And I want you to appreciate something. I’ve never fooled around on a woman, behind her back. So if you want this to be an exclusive thing, starting right now—actually, starting since Monday when we met—just say the word.”

She played with his hair, as if deciding, and then said, “The word.” Two seconds later a mischievous expression washed over her face.

“What?” he asked.

“Do you remember what you promised me this morning?”

He tried to remember but couldn’t.

“Do you want a hint?”

“Yeah, give me a hint.”

“Rug burns,” she said.

28

Day Five—June 15

Friday Afternoon

JEKKER WOKE UP in a bed that was too soft to be his. He opened his eyes a crack, enough to let some light in but not enough to hurt. Dark drapes were framed by a strong sunlight trying to break in from the outside. Next to him lay a woman, the stripper from last night, now showing an extra five pounds that he hadn’t noticed before. She hadn’t removed her makeup before passing out. Mascara and lipstick had drifted on her face during the night and now gave her the appearance of a Picasso painting.

It didn’t diminish the underlying beauty.

He muscled out of bed, staggered into the bathroom and took a long piss.

The beer, so incredibly easy to swallow last night, had settled into the front of his head and now beat on his skull with little hammers. His mouth felt like a desert sandstorm.

Aspirin.

He needed Aspirin.

A truckload of Aspirin.

Not in thirty seconds.

Right now.

He found some in the cabinet, tossed three to the back of his mouth and downed them with a full glass of water, followed by another, and a third.

There.

The healing was in progress.

In twenty minutes he’d feel semi-human.

He got the shower as hot as he could stand it and stepped in. When he came out ten minutes later, the woman was in the kitchen and the coffee pot was full.

He walked in with a towel around his waist.

“Morning,” he said.

“Afternoon, actually.”

What?

Really?

She handed him a cup of coffee.

“12:30,” she said. “You were good last night. I’m glad you came over.”

He was too and kissed her to prove it.

“If you want to see me again, you can,” she added.

“You mean like a date or something?”

She nodded.

“Yeah, if you want,” she said. “Or you can just come over and hang out and watch TV or something. Whatever you want.”

He pictured it and liked the picture, more than he thought.

She grabbed his hand, led him into the bedroom and shut the door, drawing the room into a deep darkness. Then she dropped to her knees, slid her fingers up his thighs, slipped the towel off and said, “I just want to say thanks for last night.” A few minutes later she paused for a heartbeat, looked up, and said, “My name’s Bethany.”

As soon as she said it he remembered.

“I know that,” he said.

She paused again.

“Sorry,” she said, “I think I forgot yours.”

“Dylan.”

“Glad to meet you, Dylan.”

A HALF HOUR LATER, after throwing Bethany on her back and giving her the most intense oral attack of her life, he took a cab to the strip club to pick up the Audi, only to discover something weird.

The Audi wasn’t there.

Maybe his memory was flawed, so he had the cabbie crisscross the area for a three-block radius. When it failed to appear he had the driver drop him off at the loft downtown.

A call to the impound lot told him that the vehicle hadn’t been towed, meaning it must have been stolen. That didn’t surprise him, given the neighborhood. He was actually in the process of calling the police to report it missing when he remembered something, something bad, something worse than bad.

The envelope was under the front seat, the envelope with the pictures of Tessa Blake inside.

His name and address were on the registration in the glove box; on the insurance card too.

Damn it!

He stormed out of the loft, took a cab to Enterprise, rented a 4-door Nissan sedan, and drove into the mountains to the boxcars. When he got there, a car that he didn’t recognize sat in the road in front of the gate, a car with no signs of life inside. Whoever had been driving it must have continued on foot.

He got out of the rental, slammed the door and huffed up the road, one foot in front of the other, as the little hammers pounded inside his brain.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

29

Day Five—June 15

Friday Morning

LONDON HOPPED OFF THE TREK, chained it to a tree and walked inside the Starbucks. She spotted Venta at a corner table looking better than a human being had a right to, with two cups of coffee, meaning one was for London. She hugged the woman, momentarily noted that her breasts were too firm to be real and too soft to be fake, and then got right to the point.

“I got up early and worked the phone,” she said. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“The good,” Venta said.

“Okay,” she said. “Our Florida P.I., Rebecca Vampire, who disappeared out of the country, actually disappeared while she was on some kind of assignment in Bangkok.”

Venta slapped her hand on the table.

“I knew it!”

Then she stood up and danced.

Every man in the place watched, transfixed.

After Venta sat down, London put a serious look on her face and said, “That’s the end of the good news.”

Venta didn’t care.

“The end?” she asked. “What more could we possibly need?”

“Lots,” London said. “I haven’t been able to uncover anything to suggest that she was working for a law firm, much less for Vesper & Bennett. Also, no one I talked to recognized the name Bob Copeland. And unlike what happened to you, neither her office nor her house were ransacked.”

“That doesn’t mean someone didn’t slip a file out of a drawer,” Venta said.

“Maybe, but that’s speculation,” London said. “Don’t get me wrong, just the fact that the woman disappeared in Bangkok is enough to convince me that the same exact thing happened to her that happened to you. As far as a court of law goes, however, it’s a whole different story. We’ll need a lot more connections before the court will admit any of it into evidence. Right now, from an evidentiary point of view, the fact that the woman is a P.I., and disappeared while in Bangkok, is nothing more than an irrelevant coincidence.”

Venta was undaunted.

“She’s also hot.”

London nodded.

“Okay, that too,” she said.

“So what do we need?”

“We need to tie her to Vesper & Bennett,” London said. “If we can do that, then we’ll have something.”

“Then let’s do it.”

“How?”

“By taking a road trip.”

“You mean to Miami?”

Venta nodded. “That’s exactly what I mean. There’s only so much you can do by telephone.” Then she stood up and grabbed London’s hand. “Come on, darling, we’re heading to DIA.”

“You know I don’t have money for that.”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s going on my plastic.”

Two hours later they were cruising at 35,000 feet, pointed east, maybe wasting their time, maybe not.

30

Day Five—June 15

Friday Morning