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

by R. J. Jagger

  Between that and the scar on his face, he looked downright dangerous.

  Maybe he needed another one now; on the other arm—something different, though.

  He took a swig of Jack Daniels and then headed for the shower, getting it as hot as he could stand it. When he came out he felt like a new man, a man with a full night ahead of him. He slipped into jeans and a black muscle shirt and then headed down the rickety hotel stairs. He drove around downtown Pueblo until he spotted a bar with thirty or forty Harleys out front, then parked his beat-up Chevy a block down the street and doubled back on foot.

  The place was packed, dark, loud, and rowdy.

  Nice.

  Red vinyl booths lined the left wall, and a long bar ran down the right. In the back, by the restrooms, were a couple of pool tables and a small dance floor, with a handful of drunks twirling around with no sense of coordination or timing.

  There had to be over two hundred people in there.

  They weren’t just drinking.

  They were either shit-faced or on their way.

  Tattoos were everywhere; plenty of women, too.

  Perfect.

  He found a space at the bar big enough to squeeze into, ordered a Bud Light, and then looked around for backup prey, just in case Mia Avila turned out to be problematic.

  At least half the women were dogs, bow-wow, worse than dogs, not even worth a bone.

  Two nice ones, though—both heavily tattooed and wearing muscle shirts—were playing pool in the back. He wandered in that direction, leaned against the wall, and watched ’em without being too conspicuous.

  They would work just fine, either of ’em.

  He walked over and set two quarters on the table. “I got the winner,” he told them.

  “That’ll be me,” one of them said.

  “My ass,” the other one said.

  Five minutes later he was up, racked ’em, and let the woman break. Two stripes went in.

  “You can still take solids if you want,” he said.

  She laughed, then walked over and leaned in.

  “Are you interested in a little side bet?”

  He cocked his head.

  “What’d you have in mind?”

  “The loser buys beer.”

  That sounded good.

  “Fine, but now you got me motivated,” he warned.

  She ran a finger down his face, along the scar, and laughed.

  “It won’t matter,” she said. “I’m still going to kick your ass.”

  “Start kicking.”

  She was about twenty-seven, five-feet-three with jet-black hair, the same color as his, in fact. It hung loose and she constantly tossed her head to get it out of her face—very sexy.

  Her name was Martina.

  She won the first game; and the second.

  Then Draven had to piss like crazy and headed to the men’s room while she racked ’em up.

  A man wearing a leather vest with no shirt underneath walked into the restroom just before Draven did. The guy walked past three empty urinals and into the stall, then left the door halfway open and started pissing.

  Draven could tell that the jerk was pissing all over the toilet seat.

  When the guy came out, Draven looked inside and checked.

  Sure enough, the seat was still down, covered with piss, nor had the guy flushed. Draven flashed back to a time last year when he had to crap like crazy and had to wipe someone else’s piss off the seat.

  “Goddamn pig,” he muttered under his breath.

  The man looked at him.

  “You got a problem, buddy?”

  Draven stared back at him. “Maybe I do.”

  The biker paused, as if deciding.

  Then he had a knife in his hands and said, “You little bitch.”

  Draven punched, hard and fast, going for the nose and getting it. Blood splattered from the guy’s face. Then he hit him in the stomach, below the ribs, as hard as he could. The guy immediately doubled up and fell to the floor. Draven grabbed him by the hair and dragged him over to the toilet, then shoved his face in it and held him there while he struggled.

  After a long time, he pulled the guy’s head out, let him catch his breath, and then shoved his face back in.

  The asshole kicked, but it did no good.

  “Now you wish you flushed.”

  Draven kicked him in the balls, pulled his head out, and threw him on the floor.

  Two minutes later, he was running down the street with three bikers chasing him.

  Gunfire erupted.

  The windshield of a car next to him exploded.

  He zigzagged and ran even faster.

  After he lost them, he circled back to the bar and hid behind a pickup truck across the street. When they returned, he memorized their faces and then headed back to the hotel.

  When he got there, he knocked on the door next to his.

  A woman opened it.

  She wasn’t exactly a prom queen, but not the opposite either. Her short punked-out blond hair reeked of pot. For some reason he liked her right away.

  “You still open for business?” he asked.

  She grabbed his shirt and pulled him inside.

  “You look dangerous,” she said. “That gets me hot.”

  7

  Day Two—September 6

  Tuesday Morning

  Teffinger got up early Tuesday morning, with Davica already in his thoughts. He threw on sweatpants and jogged out the front door well before the crack of dawn, letting his legs stretch and his lungs burn, while he flashed back to being in bed with her yesterday.

  He could have taken her if he’d wanted.

  She had him in bed for a reason and it wasn’t just to watch the DVD. They could have done that in the study. Or not done it at all.

  “You definitely have some willpower,” he told himself. “Maybe too much.”

  Even though September had just started, and Indian summer hadn’t yet begun, the mornings were already getting a chill—perfect for jogging.

  He did three miles at a pretty good clip and then finished the workout with several sets of pushups and sit-ups in his front yard. Forty-five minutes later, he was at his desk downtown, the first person to work, trying to get organized while the coffee pot fired up.

  He drank the entire pot and was just starting to make the second one when Sydney showed up.

  “I checked the Internet to exhaustion last night,” she said. “Someone as rich as Davica Holland ought to be showing up all over the place, but Google acts like she doesn’t even exist.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  Sydney couldn’t wait for the pot to fill, so she pulled it out, stuck her cup under the coffee stream, and then switched back after it filled, never spilling a drop.

  “Very impressive,” Teffinger said. “But can you do it behind your back?”

  He then did it, behind his back, spilling coffee all over the place.

  “Tell me again why I work with you?”

  He smiled, mopping the counter with paper towels.

  “Because you have to.”

  She looked doubtful. “That couldn’t be enough. There must be more.”

  Then Teffinger said something he didn’t expect.

  “I might have to take myself off the Davica Holland case.”

  “Why?”

  “I think I’m more interested in sleeping with her than finding out if she’s a murderer.”

  Sydney rolled her eyes.

  “Even if you took yourself off, you still couldn’t sleep with her,” she said.

  That was true.

  “Such a dilemma,” he said.

  “Here’s what you do,” she said. “A, don’t sleep with her. And B, put the little fellow back in his cage and then find out if she’s a murderer like the city’s paying you to do.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And C,” she added, “don’t always look so surprised when I’m right.”

  He smiled, then p
ut on a serious face: “What do you mean, ‘little fellow’?”

  She sipped coffee.

  “You’re not black, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then.”

  He laughed, then surprised himself again, and told her about the bedroom incident yesterday.

  She frowned as she listened.

  “Davica has motive. And unless and until we can better pinpoint when Angela Pfeiffer disappeared, she also has opportunity. Now she’s got you off balance with this bed thing. My question is whether she’s doing it on purpose.”

  It was shortly after nine o’clock when Teffinger realized he had done something really stupid.

  “I left my mug down by the railroad tracks yesterday,” he told Sydney.

  “The one we got you when you got promoted?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m going to ride down and get it. You want to tag along?”

  A half hour later they were back at the scene where Angela Pfeiffer’s body had been found. The mug was still there, sitting on the top of the concrete retaining wall, but now Teffinger had another problem.

  The first pot of coffee suddenly wanted out—right now, not in two seconds, this second.

  He looked around for the best spot, decided it was behind a rusted 55-gallon drum, and told Sydney to look the other way for a few moments.

  “Unbelievable,” she said. “How is it that you haven’t been fired yet?”

  He laughed.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  He looked around, saw no one, then pulled the so-called little fellow out and went for it. That felt so incredibly good. He aimed at a small rock, going for accuracy, hitting it pretty damn good even if he had to say so himself. By the time he finished, the rock was much more exposed, except it didn’t quite look like a rock any more.

  He zipped up and then bent down and looked at it.

  It looked like a finger.

  He found a stick and moved the dirt away.

  A hand appeared.

  8

  Day Two—September 6

  Tuesday

  Aspen parked her car—a faded Honda Accord with a dented front fender—in a lot on the east side of Broadway. The law firm was a six-block hike from there, but the rates were cheaper. She wore the second of the five outfits she’d bought on Saturday. Sooner or later people would notice that her wardrobe wasn’t exactly overabundant, but with over a hundred thousand dollars owing in student loans she could only afford what she could afford.

  It was ironic, actually—an attorney at one of Denver’s most prestigious law firms who would be dirt-poor for at least three years, probably four, maybe forever.

  She got to the office by 7:30, wanting to make a good impression, and started billing right away. However, Rachel’s disappearance, and probable death, pulled at her.

  Shortly before lunch, she went to the dead-files room and pulled the Dr. Beverly Twenhofel case, knowing she was probably overstepping her boundaries and hoping against hope that no one saw her so she didn’t have to come up with some lamebrain explanation.

  “Leave it to you to get fired on the second day of work,” she told herself.

  Rachel Ringer, Esq.’s handwritten notes were in the file.

  Beautiful.

  Unfortunately, Rachel had either never been told, or had never written down, the name of the so-called patient, the one who Dr. Twenhofel believed to be a killer.

  The guy’s name was nowhere in the file; damn it, a dead end.

  She slipped the folder back exactly where she’d found it and then returned to her office.

  No one saw her.

  At noon, she expected someone to drop by and invite her to lunch, but no one did. So she pulled out her brown bag and worked the Internet as she ate at her desk, using every search engine she could think of to see what it had on Rachel. By the end of the hour, she’d found six or seven newspaper articles about her disappearance.

  None of them were particularly helpful, though—another dead end.

  At 1:00 she went back on the clock and worked her ass off until six. Then she hoofed it to her car and fought traffic until she got home.

  That evening, after supper, she drove to The Fort. It turned out to be a restaurant south of Morrison, smack dab at the base of the foothills in Jefferson County, surrounded by undeveloped land. She sensed that it might have started out as a getaway estate for someone rich.

  She understood now how someone could be abducted in the parking lot without anyone noticing.

  She went home and turned on the Fitness Channel for background noise as she went over her outstanding bills. Lots of them were overdue, but she just didn’t have the funds in hand right now.

  A new cell phone bill arrived today, so she paid last month’s.

  That brought her checking account balance down to $82.00.

  She straightened up the apartment and went to bed.

  The upstairs neighbors had their music on again. The bass pushed through the walls and straight into her brain. She pulled the pillow over her head and closed her eyes. It did no good, and the more she thought about how rude they were, the more awake she got, so she drove down to 24-Hour Fitness to exhaust herself on the treadmill.

  9

  Day Two—September 6

  Tuesday Morning

  Under a cloudless Colorado sky, Draven drove west through Clear Creek Canyon, one of his all-time favorite places in the world. Sheer rock walls rose straight up on both sides, leaving just enough room at the bottom for the twisty two-lane road and the river, which frothed with white foam as it pounded over boulders, seriously stunning.

  He used to tube those icy waters back when he was a kid, almost drowning himself more times than he could count. That was back in the days when asshole landowners strung barbwire across the river to keep kayaks and tubes off.

  Draven got tangled up in some of that barbwire once; got eight stitches in his face and almost lost an eye.

  He paid a special little visit to the landowner two nights later.

  Word got around.

  Most of the barbwire on the river came down after that.

  He passed through the first tunnel, then the second, where the road cut through the mountains. Now the tunnels were lighted, unlike years ago when all they had were signs that warned drivers to Turn Headlights On. When he came to Highway 119 he took it, deeper into the mountains, past Black Hawk for about five miles, where he turned onto a gravel road that followed a string of short telephone poles.

  At the end of that road he came to a cabin.

  A beat-up pickup sat out front.

  A detached garage squatted to the left.

  He stopped, killed the engine, walked to the door, and knocked.

  A teenager answered, about seventeen, with brown spiked hair, dressed in total black. Draven expected someone older and a lot more normal.

  “You the guy who wants to see the place?” the kid asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “My dad couldn’t make it,” the kid said.

  “Fine,” Draven said. “No problem.”

  “Go ahead and look around.”

  The place had a large central room with a vaulted ceiling, really nice, actually, and two separate bedrooms. The water came from a well, but the electricity was public. The garage was empty and spacious with a dirt floor. You could spill a lot of blood in there, clean it up easily, and no one would ever be the wiser.

  Best of all, there were no other structures in sight.

  No one would hear screaming.

  Just to be sure, he asked the kid. “No neighbors, huh?”

  The kid shrugged. “I’ve never seen any houses anywhere around here.”

  “How big is your property?”

  The kid wrinkled his forehead. “I think it’s a hundred acres, or two hundred, something like that. My dad would know.”

  Draven nodded.

  It was good enough.

  He’d scout around later, just to
be sure no one else was around. But at least for now the place seemed perfect. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it until the end of the month. Five hundred, right?”

  The kid shrugged.

  “Whatever my dad told you.”

  “He told me five hundred plus a thousand security deposit.” He handed the kid fifteen hundred-dollar bills.

  Done deal.

  After the kid left, Draven got the stuff from the trunk of his car and brought it into the bedroom—cameras, tripods, monitors, sheets, cuffs, blindfolds, ropes, chains, locks, and all the rest of it, including the all-important DVD recorder.

  He scouted the surrounding area.

  There were no other houses around.

  Very nice.

  Pine trees perfumed the air. Green lichen covered boulders that jutted out of the earth, some as big as trucks. The aspen trees were just starting to get a yellow hue.

  Just for grins, he jogged all the way down to Highway 119, and then walked back up, enjoying a perfect day.

  He locked up, stopped at Black Hawk and played blackjack for a couple of hours, stuffed his face at the casino buffet, and headed back to his Denver apartment.

  He’d almost pulled into the parking lot when he spotted four edgy bikers hanging around. They looked like they’d been there for a while. He drove past too fast to see their faces but knew they were the jerks from Pueblo, the three assholes who chased him down the street, plus someone else—probably the guy Draven stuffed in the toilet.

  Shit.

  How’d they track him?

  They must have seen his license plate number, the little bastards.

  So, they want to play?

  They want to play so bad that they came all the way up here to Denver?

  Fine.

  He could play too.

  10

  Day Two—September 6

  Tuesday

  The hand in the dirt turned out to be connected to a body, as Teffinger suspected; a woman’s body, to be precise. He watched as the Crime Unit unburied it scoop by scoop, careful to not overlook any foreign materials or evidence. The grave was shallow, not much more than six inches, just like Angela Pfeiffer’s. The state of decomposition of the two victims was also similar. The graves were no more than a hundred feet apart.