Nick Teffinger Thrillers - Box Set 1 (Specter of Guilt, Black Out, Confidential Prey)
Page 44
The girl wiped the blood off.
“I’m fine,” she said. “You?”
Pantage checked.
Her nylon had a run and the side of her skirt was dirty.
Stuff was all over the sidewalk.
Pantage helped gather it up. There were paperbacks, CDs, folded up posters, pens, a calculator, a clock radio, makeup, perfume and lotions.
The girl’s name was Netta.
They shook.
Pantage grabbed the last thing down, a DVD, and glanced at the cover. There was something striking about it. The title was “Rebel Without a Cause.” Netta must have seen something in Pantage’s face because she said, “Have you ever seen that movie?”
No.
She hadn’t.
“Take it.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“For helping me pick everything up—”
She shrugged.
“Thanks.”
The movie went into her purse.
They hugged.
Then they parted.
Half a block later Teffinger called and said, “Where are you?”
She told him.
She was outside knocking skateboarders to the ground.
“Outside?”
Right.
“I’d rather you stayed at the firm,” he said. “The gladiator may have been following you yesterday. Look around and see if there’s a blond lifeguard tailing you.”
She turned.
It was true.
There she was, back fifty steps, paying attention to something in a store window.
“Who is she?”
“Her name’s Lea,” he said. “She’s today’s equivalent of the scorpion guy from yesterday who turned out to be a non-event. Both of them were hired by Condor to guard you.”
“To guard me?”
Right.
That.
“Condor didn’t tell me anything about that.”
“He thought you wouldn’t approve.”
“Well, he was right.” A beat then, “I need to see you. When?”
“I don’t know. Tonight?”
“Deal.”
“You were a bad girl,” he said. “You broke into the gladiator’s place.”
“You talked to Kelly?”
He did.
“So what’s next?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Politely, Pantage called Condor and expressed appreciation for his concern but respectfully asked that he call off the troops.
He argued but didn’t win.
Pantage walked down the sidewalk as if to nonchalantly pass the bodyguard, then stopped at the last second and held her hand out.
“You’re Lea,” she said. The shock on the woman’s face was palpable. “Nice to meet you, I’m Pantage.”
Right.
The woman knew.
“You’ve been called off,” Pantage said. “Call your office and confirm if you want. Have a nice day.”
She turned and headed for Wazee.
It was time to see what she could find out about the mystery woman from her past, Yardley White.
92
Day Five
July 22
Friday Afternoon
Teffinger climbed a rusty fire escape up seven floors, questioned the sanity of what he was doing, then took a peek inside an industrial, single-paned window. He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. The space was just that, space, broken by no walls or interior obstructions other than a few support columns. A young Asian woman was bound to one of those vertical shafts with multiple wraps of red rope. She was standing with her back strapped to it. Her feet were separated with a stretcher bar and her arms were pulled up tight, putting her in the form of an inverted Y. The rope was as snug as it could be without digging into her flesh. A red ball gag was in her mouth.
She wore no clothes.
The gladiator was kneeling at her left foot with his back to Teffinger, working yet another wrap of rope into place.
He wore jeans but no shirt or shoes.
Head-banger riffs jagged through the air.
Teffinger rapped on the glass.
The man’s head turned, not all the way, just enough to concentrate on whether he actually heard something.
Teffinger rapped again.
The gladiator turned, saw him and stood up.
His body was ripped.
He was tall, too, at least one and maybe even two inches taller than Teffinger. He flicked his head and the motion ricocheted through a thick mane of black hair.
Seconds later the door opened and Teffinger was face to face with the man.
“What the hell do you want?”
“I’m—”
The man cut him off.
“I know who the hell you are,” he said. “That wasn’t the question. The question is, what the hell do you want?”
“I came here to give you a friendly piece of advice,” Teffinger said.
“Like what?”
“Like leave Pantage Phair alone, because if anything happens to her I’m going to personally rip your head off and pee in the hole.”
“Is that a threat?”
“That’s absolutely a threat.”
The gladiator narrowed his eyes.
Then with a lightning motion he punched Teffinger in the gut, grabbed him by the face and pinned his head against the door.
“Here’s a little piece of advice for you,” he said. “Don’t fuck with the wrong person.”
He threw Teffinger down.
“Now go and piss back to where you came from you little broke-dick dog.”
Teffinger grabbed the railing for support and forced his body up into a vertical position.
He brushed his jeans off.
The knee was ripped.
“See you around,” he said.
Then he was gone.
93
Day Five
July 22
Friday Afternoon
Yardley swung by the bookstore on the opposite side of the street, detected nothing unusual and entered from the back. Everything was as it should be. The computer hadn’t been taken or copied, everything in the vault was intact, all the books were on the shelf and her gun was still in the top drawer.
Someone tried to turn the front door knob, found it locked and knocked.
She peered out the window and saw the last person on earth she expected, Pantage Phair. She unlocked the door, grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her in.
“This is a breach of protocol,” she said.
The woman was confused.
“I don’t understand.”
Yardley slapped the woman’s face.
“You’ve put us both at risk,” she said. “How dare you?”
It took time, but Yardley eventually learned what was going on. The woman had a memory loss and was trying to reconstruct her past. She didn’t remember anything about Yardley, not word one. She only became aware of her earlier today when Marabella mentioned her name.
Yardley studied her, deciding.
Then she headed into the kitchen, pulled two cold diet Cokes from the fridge and sat the woman down.
“I’m going to assume Marabella won’t mind me talking to you,” she said. “You were fully a part of everything I’m going to tell you.”
“Thanks. I’m scared to death,” the woman said. “Did I kill someone out in California?”
Yardley nodded.
“Chiara de Correggio,” she said. “You honestly don’t remember doing it?”
No.
She didn’t.
“I could forget a lot of things,” Yardley said. “But I don’t think I could ever forget anything like that.”
“Well I did.”
“Lucky you.”
“I feel like I’m waking up from a beautiful dream to find that the real me is a nightmare,” Pantage said.
“Nightmare may be a little strong,” Yardley said. “You definitely have a past though and it’s not particularly pre
tty.”
The woman grabbed her hand.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me who I am. Tell me what I did—no, I already know that—tell me why I did it. That’s what I can’t figure out. I don’t know what happened. I remember killing Chiara but it only comes in flashes of images. I don’t know why I did it. Was it justified? Did I somehow get provoked? Was it self-defense?”
Yardley felt the corner of her mouth go up ever so slightly.
“Justified? You’re kidding, right? You slit the woman’s throat wide open while she was unconscious.”
“How do you know?”
“Are you serious?”
Yes.
She was.
“You told me,” Yardley said. “You dumped the body over a cliff that same night. It was foggy out.”
The woman receded.
She remembered.
Yardley could see it in her eyes.
She could smell it on her skin.
Everything.
That’s what Pantage wanted to know, every stinking detail.
Yardley got a glass of ice, poured Coke in and topped it off with a splash of rum.
“You too?”
Yes.
Definitely.
Yardley took a deep drink and organized her thoughts. “First of all, you have to promise not to go all goody goody schoolgirl on me and run to the police with what I tell you.”
“I won’t.”
“I don’t mean maybe,” she said. “I need a one hundred percent guarantee.”
“You have it.”
Yardley chewed on it, still not sure.
Then she clinked glasses with Pantage, they downed them and mixed two more.
“Marabella runs an organization,” Yardley said. “Basically it’s a game of lawyer swap. I do all the nuts and bolts work. What we do is find a lawyer who’s been disbarred or is on the run from something, usually someone who’s out to kill them for one reason or another, and we match them with another lawyer who’s sick and tired of the whole legal rat race and wants to get out.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Let me clarify,” Yardley said. “The outgoing lawyer applies for admission in another state through reciprocity. The new lawyer shows up, pretending to be the old lawyer. We arrange placement of the new lawyer with a firm, with someone on the inside who knows what’s going on and gets a cut of the action.”
“What’s in it for the old lawyer?”
“Money.”
“How much?”
“It varies,” Yardley says. “To a large part it’s determined by their goals. Sometimes all they want to do is open up a spa, which they can float for a couple of hundred grand. Sometimes they need a million or more.”
“Where does the money come from?”
“The incoming lawyer,” Yardley said. “We only approach people with deep pockets.” A beat then, “There’s one exception to that formula. You’re one of the people who fall into that exception.”
Pantage swallowed.
“How so?”
Yardley took a long swallow. “It isn’t pretty,” she said. “There are cases where the incoming lawyer doesn’t have the funds.”
“That was my situation.”
She nodded.
“You cleared out your bank accounts but that wasn’t anywhere near enough to get into a scheme like this,” she said. “Marabella fronted the money for you. Pantage Phair was a real lawyer. She got her money, disappeared with a new name and papers that I put together for her, and that was that.”
“So where does that put me? Am I supposed to pay Marabella back?”
“You really don’t remember?”
No.
She didn’t.
“Okay, it goes like this,” Yardley said. “You and Marabella came to an agreement. She’d front the money for you and get you into the program. In return, she’d call on you one day to do a job for her.”
“What kind of job?”
Yardley shrugged.
“That would be up to her when the time came,” she said. “It was made very clear to you that it might very well be something extremely risky and probably illegal.”
“I agreed to that?”
Yardley nodded.
“There was full disclosure and your eyes were wide open,” she said. “You had every opportunity to turn it down. Back then your name was London Winger.”
Pantage drank what was left in her glass, more than half, in one long swallow.
“So what you’re saying is that I sold my soul to the devil.”
Yardley tilted her head.
“Something like that.” She leaned forward. “Let me give you a piece of advice. Someday when Marabella asks you to do whatever it is that she asks you to do, do it without question. Don’t screw with her. Don’t double-cross her.” Yardley saw the wheels spinning in the woman’s head and added, “You can’t just run away from this. You can’t just hop on a plane and disappear.”
“Why not?”
“Because Marabella always has collateral to call on,” she said.
“What kind of collateral?”
“Your family, your friends, whatever it is that’s dear to you at that point in time,” she said. “And when it starts it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop until you come back. What happens at that point, you don’t want to even know.” She patted the woman’s hand. “There’s no reason to dwell on it. Just do what she says when the time comes.”
Pantage exhaled.
“What if I killed myself?”
“The collateral still gets collected. It’s a message to others.”
“So I’m trapped.”
“That’s the wrong way to think about it,” Yardley said. “Marabella liberated you. All you have to do is hold up your end of the bargain.”
The woman stood up to leave.
“Think it through,” Yardley said. “You’ll get used to it.”
Pantage took two steps and turned.
“One question,” she said. “How did you find me? I mean, I was on the run from the law, right?”
“Right.”
“So how’d you find me when the law couldn’t?”
“Normally I do all the finding,” Yardley said. “That’s the hardest part of my job, finding good incoming candidates. You were an exception. Marabella found you. She never told me how. I don’t know if you two bumped into each other walking down the street or met at a bar or whatever. It was a fait accompli by the time I got pulled in.”
The woman headed for the door.
“Thanks for all the honesty,” she said. “I won’t say a word to anyone.”
“That’d be smart.”
94
Day Five
July 22
Friday Afternoon
Back at the law firm, Pantage went to Marabella’s office, closed the door and said, “I went to see Yardley White. She filled me in.”
“And?”
“And I may be a lot of things but I don’t screw people who help me,” she said. “I just wanted you to know.”
Marabella hugged her.
Pantage hugged her back.
“I don’t understand how you found me. Yardley didn’t know either.”
“I didn’t find you,” Marabella said. “I stumbled into you.”
“And I told you I killed someone?”
The woman nodded.
“Why would I do that? Why would I say something like that to a complete stranger?”
Marabella smiled.
“You don’t remember?”
No.
She didn’t.
“When we met, you had the barrel of a gun in your mouth,” she said.
“I was going to kill myself?”
She nodded.
“You were ten seconds away from it. You had nothing to lose by telling me anything.”
“You talked me out of it?”
“I did.”
“You saved my life then.”
The woman shrugged.
“Did I ever say thanks?”
“Five hundred times.”
Pantage hugged her again and said, “Let’s make it five oh one.”
“Okay but no more.”
Back at her office there wasn’t much left of the billable day but she deposited her ass in a chair and forced herself to salvage as much of it as she could.
Teffinger called her cell.
“I stopped by to say hello to your little gladiator friend. We didn’t chat long. He was busy stringing a little Asian girl up with red rope.”
Pantage flashed back to the Concrete Flower Factory.
“Yeah, he’s into that.”
“You knew?”
“Well, sort of. What’d you two talk about?”
“The weather mostly,” Teffinger said. “Mainly I wanted to see if he had a piece missing from his left ear.”
“Did he?”
No.
He didn’t.
“Both ears were normal,” he said. “If you see him anywhere, I don’t care if he’s a mile away, you let me know immediately. Deal?”
Sure.
Deal.
“Are we still on for tonight?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
When she stuck her phone back in the purse, something scraped the back of her hand. She investigated to find it was that movie, “Rebel Without a Cause.”
She studied the cover.
The man on the front was gorgeous. The rebellious angst on his face was real.
He was James Dean.
Pantage remembered the name as soon as she saw it on the cover.
James Dean.
He died young, if she was thinking of the right guy.
She set him on the desk and got back to work.
Ten minutes later when her eyes inadvertently fell back on the man, an image jumped into her brain.
She was at Jackie Lake’s house.
James Dean was at the woman’s dead body.
He was flexing his fingers open and closed and open and closed, as if he had just done something hard with his hands and was working the pressure out.
He looked at Pantage, shocked to find someone else there, then charged.
She ran.
She toppled a blue lamp in front of him as she bolted through the living room. It slowed him just enough that Pantage made it to the front door.