by R. J. Jagger
Teffinger walked to the window and peeked out.
He saw a little girl with tattered clothes pushing a two-wheeled bike that was too big for her. Her face and arms glistened with sweat. The sun played off a pink bow in her hair.
“Where can I find her?”
“You’re not hearing what I’m saying,” Modeste said.
“No one will ever know,” he said. “I promise.”
Modeste shook her head.
“It’s for your own good,” she said. “Don’t be angry with me.”
Teffinger took another look outside.
The little girl was gone.
An old man appeared from around a corner, hunched over from the weight of too many decades. Behind him, two men came into view, walking briskly past the old man to across the way and then looking up at Modeste’s apartment. The one in the red shirt looked like he could kill every living thing on the planet and not even blink. Teffinger dropped back, motioned Modeste over to the edge of the window and said, “Friends of yours?”
Her face contorted.
She grabbed her purse and said, “Come on!”
Ten seconds later they were out the back bedroom window and bounding down a rusty fire escape.
A safe distance away, increasing that distance with every passing second and continuously looking over his shoulder, Teffinger said, “Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
He stopped and grabbed her elbow.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on or not?”
She broke free and kept going.
“No.”
He caught up.
“You didn’t bring me home because you liked me. You brought me for protection.”
“I brought you home for both,” she said. “I was going to give you sex either way, if it makes you feel any better.”
“It doesn’t.”
He didn’t really care.
His suitcase was back at her place but his wallet and passport and cell phone were in his back pockets. There was nothing in the suitcase that he couldn’t live without or anything inside that could identify him. No, wait, there was—his plane ticket. It was one-way, he didn’t really need it any more, but it had his name on it.
A high-revving motorcycle made Teffinger twist his head around. It was the two pitbulls, closing fast from behind, fixated on their targets. The one in back—the one with the red shirt—had a gun, trying to finalize his aim. Teffinger jerked Modeste behind a parked van just as the shot came. It passed so close that it actually flicked his hair.
The brakes locked and the wheels squealed to a stop.
“Run!” Teffinger said.
Modeste stared at him, frozen.
“Run I said!”
She started but slowly.
“Go!”
She turned and ran with all her might.
The bike was down, stopping too fast to control, and grinding to a stop on its side a hundred feet away. The two men muscled their bodies off the ground and turned in his direction. The passenger who shot at him, the one in the red shirt, had the gun back in hand now, gripped in a steel fist as he approached. The other one had a large knife, black and worn. A serrated edge flashed for just a second as the sun caught it.
There was nowhere for Teffinger to run.
They were too close.
A shot came, louder than thunder and ripping through the van’s back panel with a terrible sound.
Teffinger’s heart raced.
He spotted a broken bottle at his feet and snatched it up.
Then, as they got close enough, Teffinger swung around the edge of the van and whipped the bottle at the red shirt with every ounce of strength in his body.
The man flinched at the last second but not fast enough.
His finger pulled the trigger.
A bullet ricocheted.
The glass landed squarely in his face jags first and stuck.
Blood splattered.
A frantic hand reached up to pull it out but stopped working halfway up. The man fell to the ground with the bottle still in his face, twitched for a second and then stopped moving.
The other man dived for the gun.
Teffinger got a foot to it first and kicked it away.
The man squared off, waving the knife back and forth with a deadly intensity.
Then he turned and ran.
Teffinger didn’t chase him.
He watched as the man got to the bike, fired it up and fishtailed the back tire as he squealed off. He threw one wild look over his shoulder as he twisted the throttle and then he was gone.
Teffinger gave the red shirt one final glance.
The man’s eyes were open, staring at nothing.
A fly landed on his nose and twisted in a little dance.
Across the street, a few gathered faces watched.
Against his better judgment, or maybe because of it, Teffinger searched the man’s pockets and was glad he did. There he found a wallet that might have identification, but more importantly he found his own plane ticket, the one that had been in the suitcase back in Modeste’s apartment.
That would have tied him to the scene.
He also found money and keys.
He tossed the money on the ground, stuffed everything else in his pocket and ran off in the direction Modeste had gone.
24
Day Four
June 7
Saturday Afternoon
In his mind, Teffinger did nothing wrong. He’d acted in self-defense and, if it had happened in the states, he would have stayed at the scene and let the justice system run its short and understanding course. Here though he didn’t know the laws, or how much they might be ignored or twisted or distorted in the name of corruption or extortion, nor did he know who the dead man was, or who he might be connected to that might be able to pull ugly strings.
So he left.
For better or worse, he left.
With any luck there’d been no security cameras in the area, the few faces across the street either didn’t get much of a look or knew better than to get involved, and the police investigation, if even there was one, would die a sudden and final death.
He wandered the streets of Port au Prince, hoping to have enough luck left to stumble onto Modeste. He saw her once but it turned out to not be her, instead being a woman who made eye contact and let a smile briefly cross her face before turning away.
Police sirens echoed through the streets with increasingly regularity.
Teffinger didn’t like them.
He found a bar, wedged himself into a dark corner and sipped lukewarm beer.
The dead man was someone named Widson Danticat, who had an address that Teffinger pulled up on Google Earth, to discover that it wasn’t that far away, half an hour or so on foot, a little longer if the heat got to him.
He swallowed what was left of his beer, left a good tip and headed that way.
Outside, he got his bearings, and then headed back in.
The guy behind the bar was an older man in a stained wife-beater shirt who talked to guys on stools in French.
Teffinger leaned on the counter and said, “I’m supposed to meet a friend named Janjak this afternoon but I lost her address. You wouldn’t know her by any chance, would you?”
The man’s face tightened.
“No.”
Teffinger nodded.
“It was a long shot.”
Then he left.
Danticat’s apartment was a mess, not ransacked, just the by-product of someone who placed no value on order and neatness. Dirty dishes filled the sink, tattered sheets hung as window coverings and stuff was everywhere—not good stuff, not useful stuff or even potentially useful stuff at some point in the future. No, this was stuff that should have been kicked to the curb decades ago.
The walls were too close.
The ceiling was too low.
The windows were too small.
It was worse than an elevator jammed up w
ith snakes.
Teffinger’s instinct was to get the hell out of there before some incurable disease jumped on him but instead he dug in, looking for anything that might explain why the guy had been after Modeste.
Clearly Danticat wasn’t self-motivated.
He didn’t have the drive to tend to his own existence, let alone be focused and involved enough to kill someone out of his own desires.
He was working for someone else.
That’s where his motivation came from, no doubt in the form of money.
That wasn’t good.
That meant Modeste was still in as much danger as she was before. There would be a thousand other Danticat’s in the city to replace this one with.
One thing about the guy, he liked his music. He had an actual CD player and three shelves of CDs. An open case on top of the player said Aitch-M – Closer to Nowhere on red lettering over a gray background that, on closer look, depicted a gargoyle flying over an evil city with a half-naked woman clutched in its talons. Teffinger leafed through a few CDs on the shelf and found them equally unknown and obscure.
Come on.
Who hired you?
An old VHS player was wired into an equally old boxy TV, not a flat screen by any stretch. For grins, Teffinger fired them up.
What he saw he could hardly believe.
He popped the tape out, gripped it like it was life itself, and got the hell out of there.
25
Day Four
June 7
Saturday Afternoon
Teffinger headed to Modeste’s apartment on the chance she’d returned, to find her huddled behind closed curtains, surprised beyond logic to find him showing up alive, but equally as ecstatic, which she proved by gripping him in a tight full-body hug and softly trembling with her head on his chest. He told her what happened after she ran off—how he’d killed the man in the red shirt, took his wallet, left the scene and then broke into the guy’s apartment.
“This,” he said tapping the videotape, “was in the guy’s apartment. I only watched a little of it but it’s a voodoo scene.”
“Voodoo?”
He nodded.
“We need to get to a player. I want to see what happens and I want you to tell me if Janjak is in it.” He paused and added, “Mister Red Shirt was someone for hire. That mean’s he’ll be replaced and my guess is sooner than later. Grab whatever you need from here. We’re not coming back.”
Two minutes later they were down the fire escape and leaving the vicinity.
“You’re mixed up in voodoo,” Teffinger said. “Tell me what’s going on. Who’s after you and why?”
She shook her head.
“There’s no voodoo,” she said. “Have you ever heard of the rock group Her? They’re from England.”
“No.”
“Well, the front man for that group is a guy named Johnnie Rail. Does that name ring a bell?”
“No.”
“Well, Rail has a seaside villa here in Haiti,” she said. “A couple of months ago, during a flight, a pretty young woman named May-May struck up a conversation with me. It turns out she was Her’s manager. We hit it off pretty good; she liked me, and ended up offering me a job as her assistant, right there on the spot. She needed someone as an interface for anything Haiti related, someone who knew the lay of the land. But when Rail wasn’t here in Haiti, which would be most of the time, I would be on tour with the band.”
“Sounds fun.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “But I really don’t know anything about the music industry and had a suspicion that I wouldn’t be able to earn my keep. I pictured myself getting fired. So I told her thanks but no thanks.”
“Personally I would have taken it,” Teffinger said. “Unless the group is a bunch of holes.”
“I don’t know if they are or not, but May-May said if I ever changed my mind, just stop by the villa. It was a standing invitation.”
“Do it now,” Teffinger said. “It’ll get you out of Haiti.”
She frowned.
“Unfortunately, something happened.”
Teffinger glanced over his shoulder. Walking thirty steps behind them was a man in a white T who looked like a fighter.
“So what happened?” he said.
“One day about a month ago when I was coming back from a flight I saw May-May across the terminal,” she said. “She was out the door and in a cab before I could get to her, but I knew she was in town. Seeing her made me reflect on my decision. I figured I’d been cutting myself too short. If I tried, I could make it in any business, including the music industry.”
“I believe that.”
“So that afternoon I went over to the villa,” she said. “No one knew I was going. When I got there I found five dead bodies.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she said. “There were four dead men and May-May, she was there dead too. From what I could figure out, two locals came to rob the place. They almost made it out before getting discovered. There was a shootout and everyone ended up dead, two guys from the villa, the two robbers and May-May. Next to one of the robber’s bodies were two large black bags with leather handles, sort of like a doctor’s bag, only bigger. I shouldn’t have done what I did, but I opened one of them up. Inside were bars of gold. I took both bags and left. I shouldn’t have done it but they were right there in my hands. No one knew I’d been there. I figured that they would think there had been three robbers and that the third one made off with the stuff.”
Teffinger shook his head.
“That was a mistake.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “When I got home I found a small leather case at the bottom of one of the bags, about the size of a book. Inside that case were six leather pouches that had old American movie star names on them.”
“Movie stars?”
She nodded.
“Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth and Lauren Bacall. Each of the pouches had a very large diamond inside.”
“So you had gold and diamonds—”
“Yes. Months went by and everything was silent. No one came my way looking for anything. Then, on my latest flight, my friend Constance, who checks my apartment for me every now and then when I’m gone, called and said the place had been broken into. She thought it was just the usual, mostly because the food had also been taken. Still, I was a little nervous and brought you home for protection, just in case. When we got there, I was 99% sure it was just the usual locals looking for whatever they could steal. Then those two men showed up outside and I knew that someone had somehow traced things to me.”
“So you think they work for Johnnie Rail? He’s trying to get his stuff back?”
She nodded.
“That would be my best guess,” she said. “On the other hand, they could be associated with the robbers. There’s one more possibility. They could be with the police, if Rail made a police report as to anything missing. I’m not sure if he did or not. The coins might be black market stuff so he might not have mentioned them. But they might be legitimate and now the police are looking for them on the side, for their own little retirement plan, not to return to Rail.”
“So where’s all this stuff now?”
“The bars, I cut up and sold in New York,” she said. “I put the money—just over a million, actually—in a bank account in the Caymans.”
“What about the movie stars?”
“I still have them; Constance is storing them for me at her place. I don’t know how to sell them and was afraid to start asking questions.”
Teffinger exhaled.
“When you sold the bars, that’s how your involvement got back to Johnnie Rail. That’s a lot of gold to liquidate. Give him back all the money you got, that’s my advice. Give him the movie stars too.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because the money’s in a safe bank account in my name,” she said. “Do you have any
idea how that feels? Besides, Johnnie Rail doesn’t need it. He’s doing just fine without it.”
“I’ll bet he’d disagree.”
“Maybe, but I don’t care,” she said. “I’m taking the first flight out of here in the morning and I’m never coming back. I’m the world’s newest ghost. I’m gone, disappeared, vanished.”
“He’ll find you, sooner or later he’ll find you.”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
Teffinger glanced over his shoulder.
The guy in the white T was still back there. Another man was with him now. They looked intense, as if they were about to bite a rattlesnake.
26
Day Four
June 7
Saturday Afternoon
Teffinger didn’t wait long to check the two guys behind him again, five seconds or thereabouts, maybe less. To his astonishment they had closed the gap with an absolute silence and were now two deadly shapes right behind him. A powerfully cocked fist immediately landed at the back of his head with the impact of a brick. Colors exploded inside his skull and his body staggered briefly before crashing down. Everything turned black before he hit the ground.
At some point he regained consciousness.
At first he didn’t know where he was or what had happened. His head felt as if a little demon had gotten stuck inside and was trying to bust out with a ball peen hammer.
His neck was whiplashed.
His throat was dry.
“Modeste!”
He struggled to his feet and swung his eyes to the left, right, behind him, up the street, everywhere.
She was nowhere.
She was gone.
The two men were equally gone.
He noticed something on the ground, at first foreign and then as the videotape from the shooter’s apartment; the voodoo scene.
He picked it up and staggered away.
It took a while for his head to clear and for options to materialize. It was a given that the two men took Modeste on behalf of someone, probably Johnnie Rail, but possibly the initial robbers or the police.