Client On The Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller)

by R. J. Jagger

“I’m serious,” Rice added.

  “That’s going to be hard to enforce,” Teffinger said.

  “Then you need to pump it out,” Rice said.

  Teffinger thought about it.

  He stood up, headed for the door and said, “I’ll be sure no one uses it. Thanks. I owe you one.”

  “One?”

  Teffinger chuckled.

  “Thanks again.”

  He called Jessie-Rae and found that she was in the middle of a photo shoot with Geneva Vellone for billboards that would go up around the city.

  “When this is done, I’m going to buy a gun,” she said.

  What?

  Why?

  “To protect you,” she said.

  Teffinger chuckled.

  “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

  “There’s the problem, right there,” she said. “You’re not taking this whole thing seriously. Someone tried to kill you last night and you’re walking around today like nothing happened.”

  “I’m perfectly fine.”

  A pause on the other end.

  “If this guy shows up again, I’m not going to be standing there with my mouth open like some dumb bimbo,” she said. “If you have a gun you want to let me use, then fine. Otherwise I’m going to buy my own.”

  Teffinger shook his head.

  “Are you always this stubborn?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I’ll let you win every once in a while, so don’t get alarmed.”

  “You’ll let me win?”

  “Right.”

  “How generous.”

  She laughed. “The camera guy is waving for me to come over and shake my posterior. So, should I go shopping for a gun or do you have one you want to give me?”

  After changing into a T-shirt, sunglasses and a baseball cap—looking as Jimmy Buffet as he could—Teffinger got the Chatfield Marina gate code from a slip renter, and walked on wooden planks to P-Dock where Rice’s boat was moored. He found it in P-2, which was at the corner of the marina, with a great view of the lake and the dam—and, better yet, a straight visual shot to the end of D-Dock, where a large wooden sailboat was tied.

  Yardley Sage’s law office.

  The sky was blue and friendly.

  The sun felt perfect on his face.

  The interior of the Searay, by contrast, wasn’t much cooler than the surface of the sun. He took off the black camper canvas, except for the top, and let the cool lake breeze work its magic. Every bug in the world had come there to die. He wiped the interior down with a wet sponge, keeping an eye on the sailboat.

  He saw no movement.

  The door to the cabin was shut.

  If someone was there, it would be open.

  He headed over to take a look.

  On the way he spotted a black woman strolling on the sand on the other side of the no-wake zone about fifty yards away. She had long, panther-black hair and a strong, athletic motion. Even from this distance, she looked like someone Teffinger wouldn’t mind knowing.

  She wore street clothes and looked out of place.

  23

  R ipley’s murder troubled Yardley. Sure, the man was an ass—as big if not a bigger one than Adam Osborne—and because of that alone, he could do or say something to provoke a bad reaction from a stranger; even a deadly reaction.

  But he was smart, too.

  Smart enough to know he was an ass and had to watch himself. It would be rational to view his murder as nothing more than one of those stray, random things. It would be equally as rational to view it as the end result of something more sinister.

  The man was obnoxious.

  And powerful.

  And rich.

  And a lawyer.

  Which meant he had enemies.

  After lunch, Yardley grabbed her Mac Air out of the 4Runner, found an empty bench on the shady side of the 16th Street Mall, and logged on.

  The city throbbed around her, with those city sounds and city smells and city vibrations.

  She didn’t realize until now just how much she missed it. She was supposed to be downtown every day, a senior associate at this point, an important person and an accomplished attorney.

  Oh, well.

  She Googled Ripley but didn’t pull up a single thing about his death other than a few short articles.

  She closed the computer, called Aspen and got informed that nothing unusual had happened so far today, at least that she was aware of.

  “When are you leaving work?” Yardley asked.

  “I don’t know, five or so.”

  “Where are you parked?”

  “Broadway and 20th.”

  “Do this,” Yardley said. “Leave at exactly 5:10. I’m going to follow you from a distance and see if I can spot anyone else doing the same thing.”

  “Sure, kay.”

  “When you get to your car, pretend you have engine problems,” Yardley said. “Open the hood and stick your head in like you’re trying to figure out what’s wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if the guy’s around, he’ll probably hang out and watch. That’ll make him easier to spot.”

  “What are you going to do if you find him?”

  “Follow him and see if he leads me to a car,” Yardley said. “All we need is a license plate number.”

  A pause.

  “Be careful,” Aspen said. “I don’t want you on this guy’s radar.”

  Yardley chuckled.

  “We might get to the point where we need to get me on there on purpose.”

  Huh?

  Aspen didn’t understand.

  What was that supposed to mean?

  “What I mean is, after last night, you’re fairly tainted as far as bait goes. That means we need fresh bait.”

  “You mean you?”

  “Bingo.”

  24

  A my Whiteberry, the owner of Savant—an insanely successful contemporary art gallery on Wazee—called Dalton mid-afternoon, looking for a new cocaine supplier.

  “What’s wrong with Jenkins?”

  “He’s getting unreliable,” she said. “Half the time he doesn’t even answer the phone. I’m ready to strangle him.”

  Dalton had heard that same thing last week.

  Too bad.

  “Okay,” he said. “Got a pencil?”

  She did.

  He gave her a name and number.

  Savant could hold three hundred people. For a split second, Dalton thought about renting it for tomorrow’s party, but decided just as quickly that it would be too much hassle to bring in seating. Plus, the artwork would get jacked up and no one would want to open their wallet to un-jack it.

  “Stop by some time,” Amy said.

  “Will do.”

  “I’ll give you a private showing,” she added.

  He chuckled.

  “I might just take you up on that.”

  “I’ll save the best piece in here for you.”

  He grinned and said, “You’re too much.”

  Five minutes later, Dalton called his contact at B.T.’s, a free-spirited strip club on the south edge of Denver renowned for wild nights, a dance floor, and strippers who weren’t afraid to get up-close-and-personal.

  Not just friendly.

  Very friendly.

  In-your-face friendly.

  B.T.’s had an upper level that looked down over the main floor and could hold three hundred people easily. It also had a separate VIP room up there, in case anyone needed even more privacy. Dalton negotiated a deal to rent the upper level for the party.

  The rest was easy.

  One call took care of bartenders, who held their own liquor licenses and would bring all the booze. There would be an open bar plus drink tables, meaning full bottles, mix, ice and glasses. Since the alcohol was free to everyone at the party, they didn’t have to worry about liquor curfews. They could party till morning if they wanted.

  Another call got a DJ.

  Another got four limos on standby
outside the club, to get people safely to their hotels after they got jacked up.

  Another got security.

  Another got catering.

  They would stock three stages upstairs, each with two women at all times, with another twenty or so topless lovelies milling around in the crowd and doing whatever they were comfortable doing for whatever money they could arrange.

  Good.

  Done.

  Now he could concentrate on Lindsay Vail.

  When Dalton got to Refuge-7 mid-afternoon, the exterior of the building showed no signs of activity. He unlocked the gate to the chain link fence, drove through, and relocked it behind him. He backed the vehicle as close as he could to the front door, so there’d be minimum exposure when he carried the woman out and put her in the trunk.

  He killed the engine and stepped outside.

  It was hot—95 at least.

  The asphalt was slightly sticky. The only clouds hung over the mountains and even they were mere wisps.

  He put the woman in the trunk and headed west.

  25

  T he cabin door of Yardley’s sailboat was locked. Teffinger gave the vessel an inconspicuous once-over and detected nothing out of the ordinary. The windows had curtains. A red 5-hp Honda generator was strapped to the mast.

  The sun beat down.

  Back at the 270 Searay, he was surprised to find a strange woman on board, about thirty with thick brown hair, in the process of unbuttoning her blouse. She looked at him as he stepped onto the swim platform and said, “You must be Nick Teffinger.”

  He nodded.

  “Guilty.”

  She shook his hand, said “I’m Amanda Fox but my friends call me Coyote,” and continued to unbutton her blouse. “I have to warn you, I’m new to vice. This is my first assignment.”

  She pulled her blouse off to reveal a bikini top.

  Pink.

  Complementing a deep tan.

  “I assume that the sailboat you were just checking out is our target,” she added.

  “It is.”

  They talked about the assignment. She would photograph everyone who came to the sailboat and log the times. If the pirate showed up—the guy with the forehead scar—she would call Teffinger immediately and not try to apprehend him herself.

  She’d sleep there tonight.

  “By the way, sorry to hear about the Corvette,” she said.

  Teffinger cocked his head.

  “How do you know about that?”

  She laughed.

  “I know a lot more than that, starting this morning,” she said. “And so does the rest of Denver.”

  Teffinger swallowed.

  “Jessie-Rae Oceana?” he asked.

  Coyote nodded.

  “The woman’s a firecracker. Do you think you can handle her?”

  Good question.

  Very good question.

  Ten minutes later, as Teffinger was driving out of the park, the subject of that very good question called and said, “The shoot’s over and I’m a walking zombie. I need to get to bed early tonight—by eight or eight-thirty.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  “That means I need to start seeing you now to get my proper fix for the day,” she said.

  “I’m working.”

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s the least you can do after I made you famous this morning. Let me tag along. What are you doing, anyway?”

  He told her.

  He was headed to the house of the dead lawyer, Ryan Ripley, to have a closer look around. He was particularly interested in seeing if any more voodoo dolls popped up.

  “So let me come with you,” she said.

  He considered it.

  “If I say okay, will you behave yourself?”

  She chuckled.

  “What do you think?”

  Ripley’s house appeared to be as Teffinger left it, with no signs that anyone had entered or broken in. Before, he primarily concentrated on the office. Now he wanted to search the nooks and crannies.

  “So what are we looking for, besides voodoo dolls?” Jessie-Rae questioned.

  Teffinger shrugged.

  “I never know until I find it.”

  She made a sour face.

  “Really,” he said. “Someone killed him and I’m getting less and less convinced that it was a hooker or a thief. That means someone went to an awful lot of trouble to plan the whole thing. No one goes to that much trouble unless they have a lot of motive. That’s what we’re looking for—the motive.”

  Wearing gloves, they worked one room at a time, searching it thoroughly but leaving it as intact and original as possible.

  More than an hour into it, they found something underneath the bed in the spare bedroom. Teffinger got down on the carpet, stretched his arm all the way in and barely managed to grab it.

  A voodoo doll.

  He let it lie on the carpet and studied it.

  Unlike the prior one that was relatively intact except for the needle in the left eye, this doll was sliced all over with a razorblade or something of similar sharpness. The head looked as if someone had stuck it in a flame and held it there. The most interesting thing was the blood. It almost appeared as if someone with profusely bloody hands handled it.

  “Weird.”

  He looked back under the bed just to be sure he got everything. Good thing, too, because he spotted something else. He reached in and pulled out a page of a newspaper that had been folded open to an article.

  An article he recognized; an article about him; with his picture, even.

  The paper was covered in blood.

  Jessie-Rae studied it and then backed away.

  Teffinger saw something in her eyes and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “I think this thing is you.”

  26

  W earing her incognito clothes—a baseball cap, sunglasses, shorts and tennis shoes—Yardley waited on the shady side of the 16th Street Mall for her client to emerge from the tall gray office building across the way. Spotting someone following Aspen Asher from her office to her car was going to be harder than Yardley thought.

  A lot harder.

  The photograph of the pirate from the newspaper, while better than nothing, wasn’t better than nothing by much. It was just one grainy shot, from one position, with one facial expression. Change any one of those, or add sunglasses or a bandanna or a moustache, and forget it.

  Worse, bodies were everywhere.

  A lot more than Yardley envisioned.

  Stampeding.

  Passing one other.

  Jockeying for position at the intersections.

  Suddenly Aspen emerged, swinging a tan leather briefcase, nicely dressed, walking fast, to all intents and purposes just one more workday stiff anxious to escape the city heat and swap into sensible clothes.

  Yardley followed, as far back as she could; concentrating on the people between her and Aspen; doing her best to memorize the backs of their heads and the colors of their clothes.

  Two blocks later, when Aspen turned east on California, most people continued straight, but some didn’t, including a large muscular man about six-two wearing jeans, oversized sunglasses, red tennis shoes, a black T and a blue bandanna.

  It was the bandanna that intrigued Yardley the most.

  The forehead scar was the man’s most distinctive mark.

  The bandanna would hide it.

  Yardley phoned her client, who answered on the second ring.

  “We might have someone,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What’s he wearing?”

  Yardley described the man.

  Then something bad happened. Aspen slowed down, just a tad, and looked behind her until she spotted the man. She stared directly at him. Just for a heartbeat, but directly, nevertheless.

  At 17th Street, when Aspen turned left, the man turned right.

  Yardley followed twenty steps behind with a racing h
eart.

  The man suddenly stepped into the shade of a building and stopped. Yardley had no choice but to continue walking, directly in front of him.

  She kept her face pointed straight but felt his eyes on her.

  A half-block later, when she glanced over her shoulder, he was there.

  Twenty steps behind.

  27

  W ith Lindsay Vail hogtied in the trunk of the BMW, Dalton wound up Clear Creek Canyon west of Golden. The steep canyon walls messed up the radio, so he popped in an old Beyonce CD, cranked up “Get Me Bodied,” and pulled up the MTV visual of her dancing in a silver dress.

  To the left, Clear Creek frothed down the canyon, sometimes wide and slow but mostly narrow and fast. The summer had sucked most of the life out of it, but it still had more than enough power to kill an unsuspecting kayaker.

  Unfortunately, traffic was thicker than he anticipated.

  Too many people were heading up to Central City to throw their money in the slots. He didn’t have time for the intrusion. He needed to get this done and then pick up Samantha Dent.

  G-Drop needed his toy in place.

  He turned right on Highway 119, which took him out of the canyon. Five miles later, the other cars on the road turned into Central City. He continued straight, wonderfully alone.

  He turned onto an old mining road that hardly had any gravel left and did his best to stay out of the bigger ruts. A rooster-tail followed.

  A nice Colorado sky floated above.

  Deep blue.

  Almost a crayon color.

  A smaller, one-lane road forked in from the right. He turned up it and came to a dead-end five minutes later.

  He killed the engine and stepped out.

  The heavy aroma of pine perfumed the air. Not a wisp of air moved. The mountain was deathly silent; so quiet that he could hear his own breathing. A bluebird the size of a pigeon landed on the branch of a lodgepole pine and set it bouncing. Something rustled in the undergrowth to his right. He looked but saw nothing.

  He felt good.