Double Die (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  “I can’t say.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “No, I know, I just can’t tell you.”

  The man exhaled.

  “Meet me back at Benderfield’s but don’t go in, just wait for me at the curb.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll call you later and explain everything better. Right now I have to run.”

  Teffinger hung up and called the FBI profiler, Leigh Sandt, pulling her out of a deep sleep.

  “Have you ever heard of a guy named Rail?”

  “Teffinger?”

  “Yeah, me. Rail’s a hitman. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need to know who Rail is.”

  “Well you’re asking the wrong person.”

  “You never heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Can you check your system?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can it wait until the morning?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to find out.”

  Silence, then, “Tell me what’s going on.”

  He told her.

  Her told her about how he knew that Rail was the person who killed Kelly Nine. He told her that Rail currently had his hands around the throat of another woman, Susan Smith. “He likes to play with his prey before he kills them. That means she might actually still be alive.”

  So far no book with a phone number inside had shown up. Maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe Benderfield had been playing him on.

  He kept checking.

  He needed to get it done before Randy Johnson figured out where he was and pulled him downtown for questioning.

  Come on Rail.

  Show your ugly face.

  54

  Day Six

  July 13

  Sunday Evening

  Sunday evening Jori-Lee and Sanders drank wine on a blanket in a deserted section of beach thirty feet from the ocean’s edge. A sunset flamed above with neon colors, then grew gray, then disappeared altogether as night pulled a blanket over Miami. Jori-Lee shifted onto her back and found a few stars already poking through.

  She was torn.

  Sanders straddled her stomach, pinned her arms over her head and said, “I’m not letting you up until you tell me what’s going on inside that head of yours.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Wrong, something,” he said. “I can smell it. You’ve been a zombie all evening.”

  He ran his fingers down her arms to her breasts, then under her T and across her stomach.

  “God, Sanders.”

  “You can’t resist,” he said.

  That was true.

  “When I broke into T’amara Alder’s house I found a bunch of photos and took them. One of them shows a small flowery tattoo on her right ankle. It’s the same tattoo on the woman from Robertson’s video.”

  “So there’s no question T’amara Alder was the one working him over.”

  “None.” A beat then, “I need to get back to D.C.”

  “Forget D.C.,” Sanders said. “Call in and quit. Stay here with me.”

  “If you mean it I will, but after I figure out what’s going on.”

  “So you’re going back?”

  “I have to.”

  Sanders exhaled.

  “In that case I’m coming with you.”

  She almost said, That’s not necessary. What came out was, “Okay.”

  55

  Day Seven

  July 14

  Monday Morning

  Rail’s phone number never showed up. In the end Teffinger figured that the number was a lie designed to instigate a field trip during which Benderfield would find that nanosecond when Teffinger got off guard.

  The man should have stuck to the plan.

  It might have worked.

  After the bust at Benderfield’s office, Teffinger headed back to the scene and unruffled Randy Johnson’s feathers to the extent possible by giving a statement, complete including the fact that he coming back from the man’s office, which he broke into.

  Then he checked into the first fleabag he could find and slept.

  That was last night, the middle of last night to be precise, the ungodly middle of last night to be even more precise.

  Now it was morning.

  The window coverings were vinyl pull-shades, ten-dollars new, now worth about a buck fifty. Daylight squeezed around the edges, not sunlight, think gunk.

  Teffinger took a peek outside.

  The morning was late.

  The sky was a Simon & Garfunkel gray.

  The sun, if there was one, was somewhere on the other side of the gray.

  He took a long heaven-sent piss, got the shower up to temperature and stepped in. Before he got the curtain closed his phone rang, faint, coming from his pants over by the bed.

  He got it, stepped back in the shower and stayed at the far end where the spray was less likely to kill it.

  Del Rey’s voice came through.

  “It’s me.”

  “How are you? Any signs of the bird ripper?”

  “No bird rippers. I’m fine except for you not being here.”

  “Then you’re doing better than me.”

  “Why? Why happened?”

  “I ended up in a little tiff with Oscar Benderfield last night,” he said. “He ended up dead.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “That’s two in one week, Teffinger.”

  He knew that.

  He knew that only too well.

  “They were both self-defense. Benderfield actually attacked me with a knife.” He pounded his hand on the shower wall. “They were both scum. Did I take things too far when they gave me a chance? I don’t think so but I have to admit, deep down, I honestly don’t know.”

  The words hung.

  Del Rey said, “You didn’t. I know you Teffinger, you’re not like that. When are you coming home?”

  “Today.”

  “Good.”

  He kissed the phone and set it on the edge on the tub on the safe side of the curtain.

  The soap was some cheap rectangular thing that felt like waxy sandpaper and barely lathered.

  Teffinger didn’t care.

  It was good enough to wash off the stench of last night.

  He was working that waxy sandpaper through his hair when his phone rang. He stuck his face under the spray long enough to clear his eyes, then stepped to the back of the water and answered.

  “Teffinger, it’s me.”

  The voice belonged to the FBI profiler, Dr. Leigh Sandt.

  “Tell me something good,” he said.

  “Something good.”

  He smiled.

  “Not funny.”

  “A little funny.”

  “Okay, a little, what do you got?”

  “You must have done something good in your prior life because Karma’s coming back at you,” she said. “I’m pretty sure Rail is a man from Portugal named Javier Arcos.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “Yes, as in ninety percent, not a hundred.”

  “Good enough. What’s his story?”

  His story was one Teffinger didn’t expect. Javier Arcos, born in prison, grew up in the Lisbon ghettos before he eventually made his way at age eighteen to Monte Carlo, where his perfect face and perfect body got him entry to the beautiful people.

  They scrubbed him up.

  They took him in.

  They showed him off.

  In return he did favors; sexual at first, then the kinds that his street savvy was particularly suited to, none of which were legal. The life was okay but not what he wanted. What he wanted was his own money and his own rules. He got into black-mar
ket art, relics and ancient collectables.

  His network grew.

  His reputation grew.

  He learned languages.

  Then he got into the murder game, working for the richer-than-rich who had enemies that could no longer be ignored. He was good at his craft, good enough to be the only man for the job when the target was a diplomat or a high-profile person of prominence and presence.

  He met lawyers.

  They fed him secret assignments for secret clients.

  “Two years ago, at the height of it all, he vanished,” Leigh said.

  “To where?”

  “Unknown,” she said. “The best working theory is that one of his own clients took him out as a way of tying up loose ends.”

  “Then why are we talking about him?”

  “Because the next best working theory is that didn’t happen. What really happened is that INTERPOL was getting too close so he just decided to turn himself into a ghost. He had more than enough money at that point to live comfortably wherever he wanted for the rest of his life.”

  “So why do you think this guy is Rail?”

  “Because that’s the name he used in Europe, plus he has a history of getting assignments from lawyers.”

  Teffinger’s chest pounded.

  This was the guy.

  He could smell him now.

  That was the good news. The less-than-good news was that there were no photos of the man that INTERPOL had been able to access. The man could walk up to Teffinger and slap him in the face with a dead fish and Teffinger wouldn’t know who he was.

  Also, one thing didn’t make sense.

  Why would anyone hire him to kill Kelly Nine?

  She was a minnow.

  He was more equipped to slay sharks.

  “I have to go,” Teffinger said. “You done good.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  He waited.

  “You wake me up in the middle of the night wanting me to do work, and I actually get stupid enough to do it even though you’re not my boss or even in the same organization, and then I come up with all this, and all you have to say is, You done good?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “What I should have said was, can you email me the INTERPOL files?”

  “Do you know what your problem is Teffinger?”

  “No, what?”

  “You’re always you.”

  He smiled.

  Then he hardened his face and said, “I killed two men this week.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Do you feel good about it?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Then don’t worry about it.”

  “I didn’t reign myself in. Five years ago I would have at least tried.”

  “If I know you, you did try. But even if you didn’t, the sad truth is that the more crap we see, the quicker we are to cut to the chase,” she said. “That’s just the way it works. Ten years from now you’ll walk down the street and randomly shoot little old ladies just because their hair’s so goofy.”

  Teffinger pictured it.

  The corner of his mouth turned up ever so slightly.

  “How many kills does Rail have in Europe?”

  “He’s a suspect in at least fifteen,” Leigh said. “There are probably two or three times that that no one knows about.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “More than you. So be careful.”

  56

  Day Seven

  July 14

  Monday Morning

  Rail got pulled out of sleep Monday morning by the ringing of his phone, not the regular one, the special one, the one few knew about and ever fewer called. He grabbed it as he swung his six-three frame out of bed and answered as he headed for the bathroom.

  The caller was a woman.

  “Do you still have the digits I gave you before?”

  The voice belonged to Emmanuelle Le Monte, one of the deeper and more intricate cogs in the Paris division of INTERPOL. The digits referred to her bank account in Switzerland.

  “I do,” he said.

  “The price is 200,000 Euros,” she said.

  His pulse raced.

  The price had never been that high.

  Still, she’d never led him astray. She’d never overplayed the value of the information she would provide. She had something big, and, if he gauged the tone in her voice correctly, something immediate.

  “Give me an hour.”

  “Do it and then call me back at this number in two hours.”

  “Okay. Throw a stone in the Seine for me.”

  “I will.”

  “A big one. Make a splash.”

  They met four years ago. He was on the banks of the Seine just down from the Eiffel Tower, throwing rocks in the water, ostensibly just a guy out killing time on an all-too-rare sunny Parisian day, not a guy stalking his next target who was on the right bank, up fifty meters.

  She strolled by.

  Their eyes locked.

  Rail knew even before his first breath exhaled that he could never consider his life lived unless he knew this woman, what she liked, what she hated, where she grew up and most importantly what she felt like in the dark when her body trembled and sex poured out of her every breath.

  She offered him a cigarette.

  He took it but didn’t light up and instead inserted it carefully in his shirt pocket.

  “I don’t smoke,” he said. “I’m going to save this for you for later.”

  “There’s a later?”

  “Yes.”

  He handed her a rock and pointed to a plastic bottle floating down the river, twenty meters off shore.

  “See that green guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “First one to hit it gets to choose position,” he said.

  She studied him.

  Then the corner of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. She twisted the rock in her hand until it was best positioned and then threw.

  Her aim was terrible.

  Rail’s wasn’t.

  That was four years ago.

  Now it was today. Payment made, Rail called at the appointed time and said, “Give me 200,000 Euros worth of words.”

  “No problem,” Emmanuelle said. “An FBI profiler by the name of Leigh Sandt has been asking about you. She thinks you might be connected to two cases in America; the murder of a San Francisco woman named Kelly Nine a year ago, and the abduction of a woman named Susan Smith from a Denver club a few nights ago.”

  Rail paced.

  “How did she connect me?”

  “Unknown, other than she was looking for someone named Rail,” Emmanuelle said. “Although she’s with the FBI it’s technically not an FBI investigation. She’s helping a Denver homicide detective by the name of Nick Teffinger. He’s the one who wants you.”

  “Nick Teffinger?”

  “Yes, do you know him?”

  “Let’s just say we have some history together.”

  “Well, he has the whole INTERPOL file on you,” she said. “So watch your back.”

  “You sent it?”

  “No, not me personally, I would never do anything like that,” she said. “Blanc is the one who talked to the FBI woman. He’s the one who sent the file. So, was the price fair?”

  “Unfortunately, it was. Call me if anything else comes up.”

  “You know I will.”

  He almost hung up when muffled words came from the phone.

  “Rail, you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “After you went to America, did you meet a woman? You know, someone like me?”

  He focused on the distance, deciding whether to lie or tell the truth.

  His instinct was the former.

  She deserved the latter.

  “I met someone but no one’s like you and never will be,” he said.

  “Are you still with h
er?”

  “No. I didn’t work out.”

  “Maybe you should come back to Paris some day.”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe I will.”

  His eyes narrowed. Only a handful of people knew he killed Kelly Nine. The people who knew he abducted Susan Smith were likewise limited.

  Only one person knew about both.

  That person was Oscar Benderfield.

  57

  Day Seven

  July 14

  Monday Morning

  Jori-Lee and Sanders caught the first available flight Monday morning from Miami to D.C., a pre-dawn deal so pre that it was almost a redeye. Jori-Lee went straight to work from the airport, which got her to One First a mere forty-five minutes late, hardly enough to raise an eyebrow, although one did come up. It belonged to Robertson’s secretary, a Marilyn Monroe type actually named Marilyn—the third of that genre to occupy that space if the rumors were true.

  “Morning,” she said.

  “Back at you.”

  Robertson’s door was closed.

  Jori-Lee nodded at it and said, “Is he in?”

  “Yes. He was in your officer earlier.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. He’s in one of his moods though; so be warned.”

  “How much of a mood?”

  The woman leaned forwards and lowered her voice. “I’ve already got my asbestos underwear on.”

  Jori-Lee walked down the all-too-familiar paneled corridor, past the closed-door offices of the other two law clerks to her space, which was just before the kitchen and across from the library. The carpet was thick, pure wool and imported from England—green, the color of money. The static buildup never went away. She left the door open, plopped down into the worn leather chair behind her desk and touched a brass banker’s lamp to get rid of the electricity.

  Files were everywhere; on the desk, on the credenza, on the windowsill and on the floor, all patiently awaiting justice.

  Her phone rang, not the desk phone, the cell.

  It was Sanders.

  She closed the door.

  “Did you see the morning paper?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Page eight. A woman’s body was found yesterday in a dumpster.”

  “T’amara Alder?”

  “That would be my guess,” Sanders said. “The article doesn’t give a name. Now that I’m physically in D.C., I’m getting more concerned that the guy who killed her will see you as a threat. I’m going to stake out your place today from across the street and see if anything weird happens.”