Blank (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

Teffinger looked at his watch.

  It was almost 11:00 meaning 1:00 a.m. New York time.

  Sydney would be asleep.

  He dialed anyway because if he didn’t he’d forget what he was thinking by the morning.

  She answered.

  Her voice was scratchy and unfocused.

  “The waitress who recognized the woman, did she work at a nice restaurant?”

  “Teffinger it’s one o’clock here. You’re waking me up.”

  “I know, I’m sorry,” he said. “The restaurant though, was it an expensive one?”

  “They’re all expensive,” she said. “Do you want to know what I paid for supper?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Yes.

  She did.

  “It was a nice enough place.”

  “Was the woman decked out?”

  “The waitress?”

  No.

  The other one.

  “I didn’t ask,” she said.

  “Tomorrow find out,” Teffinger said. “If she was decked out and the restaurant was on the expensive side, I’m guessing she’s a lawyer, particularly if she was with other people dressed like lawyers—ask the waitress about that tomorrow. If all those pieces fit then start concentrating on law firms but here’s the important part, don’t let her know anyone’s looking for her. I don’t want her tipping off Northway. In fact, the more I think about it, Northway might even be in the same firm.”

  “Practicing law?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s not possible,” she said. “His license was revoked.”

  “He still has the skills,” Teffinger said. “A license is a piece of paper. Just don’t let them see you coming, that’s the point I’m making.”

  “Fine, I’ll wear my invisible suit. Anything else?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Did the—?”

  “Teffinger that was a rhetorical question.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m giving you the rhetorical answer. Did the waitress actually wait on the woman? Is that why she remembers her?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Several months ago, six, seven, eight, something like that. She wasn’t real clear with dates.”

  “Okay, contact the manager, use your best charms and see if he’ll give you the credit card runs for that time period.”

  “Okay, good night.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask if there’s anything else?”

  “I already made that mistake once,” she said. “Where are you, in your truck?”

  Yes.

  He was.

  “What’s that song?”

  “Jan and Dean, ‘Little Deuce Coupe.’”

  “It sounds like a cartoon. When I get back remind me to show you where the real stations are.”

  72

  Day Four

  July 21

  Thursday Night

  Thursday evening Yardley took the elevator from her loft down to the parking garage, fired up her silver 3-series BMW and merged into the Denver twilight. From the trendy buzzing streets of LoDo she wove over to Santa Fe and headed south. Six o’clock had come and gone. She hadn’t called Cave with the name of the person at the top.

  He hadn’t called to give her one final chance.

  As she headed out of the guts of the city the lights got less bright, the traffic lights got farther apart and the taillights thinned.

  Cave was behind her somewhere.

  She could feel his breath on her neck.

  The miles clicked off.

  The city gave way to less city.

  The buildings got shorter and fewer.

  The streetlights disappeared.

  The speed limit increased.

  Still, even this far south, traffic existed.

  She kept going.

  Headlights were behind her, not right on her ass, but definitely there. A large green sign indicated to exit here for the Chatfield Reservoir. In a couple of miles the road would cut left into I-25.

  She was in no-man’s land.

  She kept her eyes peeled on the road and both hands tight on the wheel.

  Then she saw what she was looking for, namely a 2x4 with nails sticking out, near the centerline.

  She pointed her left front tire at it and held her breath.

  The wheel hit it.

  The tire exploded.

  The vehicle jerked to the left.

  She got it under control, pulled over to the shoulder, stopped and put the hazard lights on.

  If everything went as planned, Cave was behind her somewhere. He’d see her at the side of the road and pull over to take his kill. That’s when the man from out of town would take him down.

  She got out and opened the trunk, ostensibly looking for the spare.

  The night was coffin quiet, broken only by a faint chatter of crickets and a slight twist of wind. A low blanket of clouds hid whatever stars and moon might be above.

  “Are you out there?”

  No response.

  She kept her cool.

  Of course he was there.

  He was the one who placed the two-by-four.

  Headlights came up the road, only one pair now with no more behind, a couple of hundred yards away.

  A chill ran up her spine.

  When she was being instructed earlier this evening as to what to do, it seemed simple. Now the night played with her. Cave might simply slow down, shoot her through the passenger window, and keep going.

  Bam.

  One shot.

  Game over.

  The car approached.

  It slowed as it got closer.

  She shouted into the darkness, “This could be him. Are you ready?”

  No one responded.

  The silence forced a terrible thought upon her.

  What if the man who called her earlier wasn’t the person Marabella brought in to do the work? What if he was actually a friend of Cave’s?

  What if this whole thing was a setup?

  What if Cave was the one who placed the two-by-four?

  73

  Day Four

  July 21

  Thursday Night

  Pantage and Renn-Jaa stared up at the gladiator’s loft from the same parking space as last night. This time the lights were on. Also this time no drunken woman staggered down the sidewalk. Pantage had her window open with her arm dangled out. A cigarette hung from her fingers. She took a puff then parked it back outside.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I saw a shadow shift,” Renn-Jaa said. “I’m about 90 percent sure he’s home.”

  Pantage checked the time.

  It was 11:12 on a Thursday night.

  “He’s in for the night,” she said. “We’re wasting our time.”

  “Ten more minutes.”

  Pantage took another puff, flicked the butt to the sidewalk and closed her eyes.

  Teffinger.

  Teffinger.

  Teffinger.

  No one had ever taken her the way he did.

  Not even the gladiator.

  A scene sprang into her head, as if she was sitting in a dark theater and the screen suddenly sprang to life, flickering at first with a jagged surrealism and then becoming vividly focused.

  She was in a desperate fight.

  Chiara had a fistful of her hair.

  She was trying with all her might to rip it out of Pantage’s head.

  Pantage twisted and dropped to the carpet.

  Chiara fell with her but kept her grip.

  Pantage punched her in the face, again and again, getting only glancing blows, unable to strike a direct hit.

  Chiara kneed her in the gut.

  Vomit shot into her mouth.

  Then hands came to her throat.

  They tightened with deadly intent.

  She twisted, desperate, but the woman was on top of her. There was too much weight to shift off. She flailed her arms and got a hand on a wine bott
le. She brought it upside the woman’s head with a terrible thud.

  The woman fell to the side.

  She groaned for a heartbeat then went limp.

  She wasn’t dead.

  Her chest moved.

  Breath came in and out of her mouth.

  Pantage watched her for a moment while dark thoughts filled her brain. Then she walked into the kitchen and looked for a knife.

  “Are you okay?”

  The words came from Renn-Jaa.

  The image vanished.

  The screen went black.

  “Yes.”

  “Look,” the woman said, pointing.

  Pantage followed the woman’s finger to the gladiator’s loft. The lights were going out.

  “Either he’s going to bed or stepping out,” Renn-Jaa said.

  Two minutes later the gladiator emerged at ground level, walked half a block to a car and took off.

  “We’re up,” Renn-Jaa said.

  74

  Day Four

  July 21

  Thursday Night

  When Teffinger got home the house was an oven. He opened the windows, charged up the ceiling fans and sat on the front steps with a cold one.

  The night was black.

  A light breeze rustled the leaves.

  Dry lightning flashed to the east somewhere over Denver.

  Bugs sucked up to a streetlight. A bat swooped in with jagged flight and snatched one out of the air. Survival; it was everywhere, all the time. Teffinger always envisioned himself with kids.

  Kelly would be a good mother.

  Pantage was a lot wilder than Kelly but that didn’t necessarily mean she’d be selfish. It wouldn’t hurt a kid to have a little wildness in his blood. That would increase the chances of not being snatched out of the air by a bat.

  His street dead-ended at a turnaround as far up into Green Mountain as civilization went. His house was third from the end on the left side. Coyotes, deer, fox and rabbits were rampant; rattlesnakes, too. In fact Teffinger almost stepped on a four-footer on the back patio last month.

  He was caught between Kelly and Pantage, dead center, smack in the middle, a helpless piece of metal between two equally powerful magnets.

  He’d made no promises to either but still he felt like he was cheating on both of them. He needed to make a choice but neither of them was letting go. If he had the time to concentrate on nothing else, things would probably get pretty clear pretty fast.

  He didn’t have that time though.

  That was the problem, that was always the problem, not just with this but with everything.

  He pulled a quarter out of his pocket.

  “Heads Kelly, tails Pantage.”

  He tossed it up and missed the catch.

  It bounced on the concrete and rolled into the grass.

  “I’ll take that as an omen.”

  He swallowed what was left of the beer, crushed the can in his hand and headed inside. In the kitchen something sticking out from behind the toaster caught his eye.

  It was a piece of paper.

  It was one of the pages he copied from September’s file on Van Gogh.

  “What’d you do, blow back then when I wasn’t looking?”

  He debated, wondering if he should read it or not.

  Then he decided that even though he was getting the blame, the moral concepts were the same now than they were before. He burned it and washed the ashes down the sink.

  75

  Day Four

  July 21

  Thursday Night

  The solitary headlights approached with a whining of tires and the blare of a radio. Yardley stood on the shoulder side of her car, not knowing if Cave was coming down the road or sneaking up behind her or somewhere else altogether.

  The headlights slowed as they came alongside.

  It became clearer that the vehicle was a convertible.

  Voices shouted louder than the radio.

  As it got alongside, the voices took shape as belonging to teenagers, a bunch of them. Two were standing up, waving their arms, and one of them shouted, “Bottle bomb!”

  Bottles flew at Yardley’s car.

  Glass shattered.

  Pow!

  Pow!

  Pow!

  Then the vehicle sped up and the taillights receded up the road.

  Suddenly Yardley heard a noise behind her.

  She turned.

  A shadow was there.

  She ran up the road.

  “Get back here!”

  She ran harder.

  Footsteps closed in.

  The gap shortened.

  Then a fist punched the back of her head. Her feet gave out and her body went down, landing with a terrible blow to her chest before she could get her arms in front.

  The oxygen slapped out of her lungs.

  Colors spun in her head.

  Then everything went black.

  She retained consciousness at some point thereafter in a confined space with her hands tied behind her back and a rope gagged around her mouth.

  She was in the trunk of a car.

  She had one thought and one thought only, namely that this was the exact position Deven had been in before she was yanked out and stabbed with a screwdriver.

  Cave had tricked her.

  She’d underestimated him.

  Now she’d die for being stupid.

  First Cave would have his fun with her.

  He’d take his time.

  He’d be creative.

  He’d enjoy himself.

  76

  Day Five

  July 22

  Friday Morning

  During the break-in last night, the gladiator didn’t jump out of a corner with killer hands, or charge up the fire escape with a knife in his hand, or mysteriously drop out of the ceiling with a war cry. Every noise and flicker of light in the universe seemed like one of those but in the end none were.

  Things were much the same as before.

  One exception was that they found a full drawer of neatly coiled lengths of red rope, with labels ranging from four to twenty feet.

  The other exception was the laptop.

  This time when they flipped it open, instead of getting a password screen the display sprang to life. They found a number of flash drives in a drawer, grabbed one and copied the document files.

  In the process, Pantage knocked over a small green banker’s lamp, which shattered on the wood planking.

  They left it where it was and got the hell out of there.

  That was last night.

  Now it was morning.

  Pantage got two hours of seat work under her belt then pushed the gladiator’s flash drive in her laptop and took a look. One of the folders was labeled “Rope.” In it were hundreds of photos of naked women tied in intricate bondage.

  She scanned a few of them and closed the folder.

  Then she saw a folder that grabbed her by the throat, a folder labeled “Pantage Phair.”

  She clicked it open to find a number of JPEG images of herself spanning back two weeks, long before Friday night when they ostensibly first met. Many were snapped downtown in the financial district or on the mall; she was dressed in attorney attire, often with Renn-Jaa going to lunch, plus a couple with Condor as they walked to the courthouse the week before last. She had a leather briefcase in her left hand.

  There were three with her walking with Jackie Lake.

  Those weren’t the creepy ones though.

  The disturbing ones were at her loft, taken from LoDo below as she stood on her balcony. There would have been some of her in bed if the guy could have gotten an angle.

  With the door closed, she showed the images to Renn-Jaa who said, “We have to get these to Teffinger right away.”

  Pantage frowned.

  She knew that.

  They’d broken in.

  In a perfect world, Teffinger would never know about that. Unfortunately the world was getting less and less per
fect.

  “This is actually good,” Renn-Jaa said. “As long as we have to confess to Teffinger what we’ve been up to, we can tell him about the three guys who attacked the black woman.”

  Pantage ran her fingers through her hair.

  “We can get disbarred,” she said. “Both of us. Breaking into to someone’s place—twice no less—then stealing information from a computer, that’s pretty serious conduct for an attorney no matter what the motivation.”

  Renn-Jaa contemplated it.

  She didn’t argue.

  “I don’t care about me,” Pantage said. “My life’s pretty much screwed up at this point and I don’t see myself recovering. You’re a different story though.”

  “What do you mean? Your life’s screwed up—”

  Pantage stood up and looked out the window.

  “We need to be smart,” she said. “We need to get all this information to Teffinger without implicating ourselves.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll hire an attorney,” she said. “What we say will be privileged. She can then transmit everything to Teffinger without specifically mentioning our names.”

  Renn-Jaa tilted her head.

  “Her?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you already have someone in mind?”

  Pantage nodded.

  “Kelly Ravenfield,” she said. “She has Teffinger’s ear.”

  Renn-Jaa shook her head.

  “She’s trying to get Teffinger,” she said. “I can see her letting it slip that you and me are her clients. She can get a leg up that way.”

  Pantage shook her head.

  “If she purposely betrays our trust, Teffinger wouldn’t look very favorably on it. She’d just be shooting herself in the foot. Besides, Teffinger already graduated from third grade, meaning he’s going to put two and two together anyway.” She looked at her watch. “Let’s see if we can get Kelly to meet us for lunch. He’ll know we broke in. My concern is that we never formally admit it.”

  Renn-Jaa smiled.

  “This has nothing to do with anything,” she said. “You just want an excuse to meet Kelly.”

  77

  Day Five

  July 22

  Friday Morning

  Teffinger’s night of so-called sleep dripped with dreams of scorpions. He didn’t realize why until he woke up and remembered the arm tattoo of the man who stalked Pantage yesterday. He got the coffee pot charged up and let it do its thing while he took a three mile pre-dawn jog through the silent streets of Green Mountain, then headed to work with a bowl of cereal in his lap and a thermos of the good stuff laying on the passenger seat.