by R. J. Jagger
What to do?
She spotted a flat rock and skipped it.
Six hops.
Not bad.
Clouds hung over the mountains, meaning there would be a sunset tonight.
Suddenly her cell phone rang and Coyote’s voice came through. “Just because we’re even doesn’t mean you can’t come over.”
Raven stopped.
The sand was squishy.
She wiggled her toes.
“I’m actually thinking about it,” she said.
“Well stop thinking about it and just do it.”
ON THE WALK BACK TO THE MARINA, Raven’s phone rang again. She thought it was Coyote, telling her to hurry up. But it wasn’t. It was someone she didn’t know.
A woman.
“Cotter down at the Ink Spot told me to call you,” she said.
Cotter—wife-beater shirt, beer gut.
Ink Spot.
This must have something to do with the guy she was trying to find—Mr. Scar-On-The-Forehead.
The pirate.
“My name’s Dawn Hooker,” the woman said. “Cotter has a picture of a guy up on his wall. I was in there today and recognized him.”
“You did? Do you know him?”
“Sort of,” she said. “I used to work in a tattoo shop called Body Art, down on Santa Fe. I gave the guy a tattoo there about five years ago.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“No. I’ve been trying to think of it, but I just can’t remember.”
“Do you think someone else at the place would?”
“It closed down, I don’t know, three years ago, maybe.”
“It did?”
“The owner robbed a bank,” Dawn said.
“Oh.”
“He didn’t do a very good job.”
“Understood,” Raven said. “Would you remember the guy’s name if you heard it again?”
She paused.
“I don’t know. Maybe—”
“I have a list of names I’d like you to take a look at,” Raven said. “Would you be willing to do that?”
“Sure. No problem. By the way, the tattoo that this guy wanted—it was really sick. That’s why I remember him.”
“Sick how? What was it?”
The woman told her and Raven’s forehead tightened. “Did you take a picture of it?”
“Yeah, but that stayed at the shop. It’s gone.”
“Could you sketch it for me?”
Yes.
She could.
It wouldn’t be perfect.
But Raven would get the general idea.
“I’ll do that tonight,” Dawn said.
“You’re an angel.”
The woman chuckled.
“I’ve been called a lot of things, but that’s never been one of ’em.”
They made arrangements to meet in the morning and then hung up.
COYOTE WORE A SHORT, WHITE, BUTTON-DOWN DRESS that hugged her body.
Very sexy.
As soon as Raven stepped on board, Coyote gave her a quick kiss on the lips. “I’m still officially on duty,” she said. “So don’t tell me anything you don’t want me to know.”
“Is this legal?” Raven asked. “Getting your target drunk?”
“Probably not, so don’t tell anyone.”
They drank screwdrivers.
Coyote loosened more and more of her buttons as the night got darker. A white thong started to peek through with more and more regularity.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Day Four—July 15
Thursday Morning
______________
DALTON DIDN’T GET UP TO LEAVE THE PARTY until three in the morning. Just as he did, a buxom brunette with hypnotic brown eyes came up and said, “Isn’t it exciting?”
“What?”
She ran a finger down his chest.
“What I’m going to let you do to me.”
They took a limo to his LoDo loft, screwed for an hour and passed out. Ordinarily after a night like that, he would sleep for ten or twelve hours. But the phone call from last night still nagged him. He got up at ten, showered, walked to work, poured a cup of coffee and headed straight for Mandy Martin’s office. She wore an expensive white dress with black open-toed shoes.
Her lips were soft rouge.
Her fingernails and toenails were hot pink and flawless.
“How’d the party go?” she asked.
“No one got arrested and no one died,” Dalton said.
She grinned.
“That’s more than I hoped for.”
“Did you ever hear of that Roman guy called Caligula, who was famous for throwing wild sex parties?”
She nodded.
“It was something like that?”
“Let’s put it this way—he could have picked up a few pointers,” Dalton said.
“Sorry I missed it.”
Dalton sipped coffee.
“So what’s the news on G-Drop?” he asked.
Mandy shrugged.
“As far as I know, he still hasn’t surfaced. Apparently his buddy’s AWOL too. What’s his name?”
“Malcolm Smith.”
Right.
Him.
Weird.
“Thanks for getting the other acts to fill in the void,” she said. “It still amazes me how you can always pull things together.”
“Aw, shucks, Miss Mandy—”
She chuckled.
“I never talked money with them,” Dalton said. “Maybe in appreciation, we can pick up the tab for the party.”
She cocked her head.
“What’s the damage?”
Dalton ran the math in his head.
“I don’t know how many of the escorts ended up getting screwed,” he said. “My guess is, all of ’em. We’re probably looking at twenty grand or so, right there. That’ll push the total to forty or thereabouts.”
“I don’t mind picking that up, if no one presses for an addition to their base contract,” she said. “Make the offer today and see what they say. Think they’ll go for it?”
After that party?
He did.
He did indeed.
HE WENT TO HIS OFFICE AND STARED DOWN at the city while he sorted things out. The big wildcard in his life was Lindsay Vail. Dalton needed to find out where Malcolm stashed her before someone found her and she ended up talking to the cops.
He shut the office door and called G-Drop’s manager, Alan Raspen.
Raspen was fifty, white, and looked like a longhaired rocker, past his prime, now busy getting bald, pudgy and cynical.
“You heard anything yet?” Dalton asked.
Negative.
“I didn’t share this with you before, but it’s nut-cutting time,” Dalton said. “Did you know that G-Drop is into S&M?”
Raspen hesitated.
Then he said, “I thought he might be.”
“He wanted me to set him up with a submissive here in Denver,” Dalton said. “That’s why he came to town a day early. I set him up, like he wanted. I’m thinking that what happened is that he got all jacked up on drugs and ended up killing the woman. The reason I say that is, I haven’t heard from her and neither has anyone else. I’m thinking that G-Drop and Malcolm are laying low and trying to cover their tracks.”
“You think?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Dalton said. “What I’m going to say next needs to stay with you and not go anywhere else. Is that fair?”
It was.
Absolutely.
“Between you and me,” Dalton said, “if they did what I think they did, they’re not going to be smart enough to cover their tracks. They need help. If they don’t get it, they’ll both end up on death row.”
Dalton paused.
And let the words hang.
He didn’t need to state the obvious, which was the fact that Raspen wouldn’t be getting a steady st
ream of checks in the mail if his money cow was in jail.
“What do you propose?”
“I’m willing to help them out,” Dalton said.
“Why?”
“Because they’re going to be grateful as hell and reward me like you can’t even believe,” Dalton said. “The first thing I need to do is find them. Where was Malcolm staying?”
Raspen didn’t know.
“What I need you to do is talk to your contacts or whatever and figure it out. I’m pretty sure it was someplace secluded, rather than a hotel or something; maybe a house rental or something. My guess is that they’re still there, probably trying to clean the place up. And if they’re not, at least I’ll have a place to start tracking them from.”
A pause.
“I’ll get right on it,” Raspen said.
“That would be sweet. Time’s ticking.”
“I know.”
“Remember, this stays between you and me.”
“Absolutely,” Raspen said. “I have a lot more riding on it than you do.”
True.
“Have the cops called you?” Dalton asked.
“No,” Raspen said. “I don’t think anyone’s opened a file yet. As far as I know, the only thing going on so far is that every reporter in the world is snooping around.”
“Be careful what you say to them.”
“They won’t get anything, don’t worry.”
DALTON HUNG UP AND SPRINKLED SHRIMP into the aquarium. If this actually worked—and Raspen was able to find out where Malcolm was staying—Dalton might have to plug the leak later.
Meaning Raspen.
Time would tell.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Day Four—July 15
Thursday Morning
______________
TEFFINGER WOKE BEFORE SUNRISE and jogged through humid New Orleans streets. He passed a mom-and-pop restaurant with the lights on and swung over to the window to have a look. An hour later, he brought Venzelle there for pancakes smothered under more strawberries and whipped cream than the law allowed. The waitress—a 60-year-old black woman—figured out his coffee addiction after the third refill and didn’t let the cup get empty again.
He tipped her $20.00 and told her he was going to come back and marry her someday.
She chuckled and said, “You wish.”
Then they headed to the New Orleans Police Department and—after a lot of explaining to the gatekeepers—ended up in the office of a homicide detective by the name of Max Moniteau.
Teffinger liked the man from moment-one.
He was about fifty, white, five-feet-eight, bald on top, gray on the sides and 150 pounds soaking wet. Suspenders held up brown pants. His shirt was crispy white and long-sleeved, in spite of the impending heat. He had a gold tooth, a Timex watch and a simple wedding band.
Teffinger shook his hand.
And found the man’s grip a lot tighter than he expected.
He showed the man the voodoo dolls and the newspaper article of Teffinger that was found with one of the dolls. He explained that there had been two recent attempts on his life.
One by bullet.
One by rattlesnake.
He told Moniteau what he knew about the black woman who escaped when Teffinger got hit in the head with a rock. He told him about their plan to have the black woman follow him here and then figure out her name from the airline manifests.
Moniteau listened patiently and tapped his fingers on a book called Bangkok Laws.
When Teffinger finally stopped talking, the man put a solemn expression on his face and said, “You’re out of your league down here. You’ll be dead within 24 hours. My advice is to get back to Denver while you still can.”
“WHY DO YOU SAY THAT?”
“Well, let’s suppose you’re right,” he said. “Let’s suppose there’s a voodoo priestess, and he or she—let’s just say it’s a she—lives in New Orleans, and let’s suppose that she put a death curse on you at someone’s request.”
“Ryan Ripley’s,” Teffinger said.
Moniteau shook his head.
“The name isn’t important,” he said. “What’s important is that you now show up in New Orleans very much alive. That’s a slap in the face; a total slap in the face. How do you think she’s going to react to that?”
“I don’t really care.”
“Well you should,” Moniteau said, “because she has a reputation to maintain. And in that line of work, reputation is everything.” The man sipped coffee and looked Teffinger directly in the eyes. “My advice to you is to slip out of the city as soon as you walk out the front door. You don’t necessarily have to go back to Denver. Go wherever you want. Maybe you’ll still get your manifests without putting your neck on the block.”
“So does that mean you’re not going to help me?”
The man stood up.
“I just did,” he said.
Teffinger set his coffee cup on the detective’s desk and headed for the door.
Venzelle fell into step.
“Thanks for seeing us,” Teffinger said.
“No problem. Good luck to you. Don’t turn yourself into my next case.”
OUTSIDE, HE TOLD VENZELLE, “I can’t believe I actually liked that guy at first.”
She frowned.
“Maybe we should just do what he said.”
“He’s an idiot. We’re going to Plan B.”
“What’s Plan B?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t even know we needed a Plan B until just now.”
Chapter Sixty
Day Four—July 15
Thursday Morning
______________
DAWN HOOKER LIVED ON A 5-ACRE horse property off Highway 93 between Golden and Boulder. Raven maneuvered the 4Runner down a long gravel driveway, parked behind three Harleys and killed the engine. A black lab sniffed her briefly when she stepped out, and then escorted her to the front door of a modest house that looked to be fifty years old.
The air was quiet.
She knocked.
No answer.
She was about to rap again when the door opened and a woman appeared; barefoot, wearing jeans, a black T and a sleepy pre-coffee face.
Very attractive.
About thirty.
With long chestnut hair.
The cowgirl next door.
She stepped outside, closed the door and said, “The guys are still sleeping. They’re not exactly what you call morning people.”
Raven chuckled and wanted to ask who the guys were, but didn’t want to get nosy. “Thanks for meeting with me,” she said.
Not a problem.
“You want coffee?”
“I’d kill for coffee right now,” Raven said.
“Come on in, just be quiet.”
They headed inside.
THE HOUSE WAS SMALL, neat and girly. Dawn noticed one of the bedroom doors open, tiptoed over and peeked inside. Then she said, “They must be sleeping in the barn. We can talk.”
“They sleep in the barn?”
“They saw a rattlesnake in there a couple of days ago,” Dawn said. “Then they started daring one another to sleep out there. They’re worse than little kids.”
“Who are they?”
“One of them, I’m embarrassed to say, is my brother John,” Dawn said. “The other two are his buddies. Believe it or not, they’re all schoolteachers from Cleveland.”
On a road trip.
Must be nice.
Dawn turned out to be the manager of the Grizzly Flower, the cowboy bar of Denver, given to rocking country bands and a huge wooden dance floor that got more than its fair share of abuse.
Raven knew the place well.
She used to go there in her early-20s to get beer in her gut and get her ass slapped and dance until her legs collapsed.
THEY ENDED UP IN THE SHADE, leaning against a cottonwood tree by the corral with their legs stretched out, sipping coffee. Raven fired up her laptop
and opened the Excel spreadsheet that contained the names from the Ink Spot receipts. Dawn put the computer on her lap and scrolled down, looking for a name that rang a bell.
The name of the pirate.
Something moved on the ground to their right.
Raven saw it in her peripheral vision and turned her head.
A rattlesnake!
A huge one.
Coming right at them.
She punched Dawn and said, “Rattlesnake!”
Dawn looked over.
“That’s a bull snake,” she said. “It won’t hurt you.”
Raven jumped to her feet and got out of the way. The snake kept coming, slithered over Dawn’s legs, and headed for the barn.
Dawn tossed a pebble at it and said, “Go on, get out of here.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Day Four—July 15
Thursday Noon
______________
G-DROP’S MANAGER, ALAN RASPEN, CALLED DALTON shortly before noon with interesting news. Namely, Malcolm Smith had a good friend in Denver by the name of Jason Lynch. Maybe Malcolm was staying with him.
“You got an address or phone number or anything?”
“No, just the name.”
Luckily, Lynch was in the phone directory. A quick Google search showed him to be a lawyer with a downtown firm by the name of Radcliffe & Snow. He lived in Genesee. Dalton called the man’s home number from a payphone on the 16th Street Mall and got an answering machine.
He didn’t leave a message.
Then he called Radcliffe & Snow and was told the man wasn’t in. “When do you expect him?”
“He won’t be in today. He’s actually out of town.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“Let’s see—it looks like he has an 8:30 appointment tomorrow morning, so you might try him after that.”
“So he’s probably coming back sometime tonight,” Dalton said.
“That’s my guess.”
Dalton headed back to the loft, changed into jeans and a T, grabbed a baseball cap and shades, and pointed the BMW west. He kept the radio off.