by R. J. Jagger
Not having a clue.
Chapter Ninety-Six
Day Five—July 16
Friday Afternoon
______________
DAKOTA CALLED RAVEN MID-AFTERNOON IN TEARS. “You’re not even going to believe it,” she said. “Adam Osborne summoned me to his office a half hour ago. He closed the door and said my services were no longer required at the firm.”
“He fired you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t give a reason.”
“Un-freaking-believable.”
“I’m already on the street,” she said. “I mean literally—I’m talking to you from the 16th Street Mall. He took me back to my office, let me get my purse and personal things, and escorted me to the elevator. He said HR would contact me this afternoon to go over health insurance coverage and stuff like that, but I was officially discharged starting immediately. He even took my keycard and laptop.”
“The bastard.”
“What do I do?”
“For right now, stay calm, go home and don’t talk to anyone about it,” Raven said. “I want to be sure you don’t say anything that they could later allege to be slanderous.”
“We need to sue them.”
“We will,” Raven said. “This is retaliation, pure and simple.”
“I need to get drunk so bad my teeth hurt.”
Raven paused, and then said, “Come out to the marina tonight about seven or eight. We’ll get drunk and you can spend the night.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
“I mean it, thank you so much.”
“Don’t thank me too much, I feel partly responsible for what happened. If I had been a better lawyer, I would have shut you down right away and told you to just concentrate on not making waves.”
Dakota chuckled.
“Do you think that would have worked?”
SHE CALLED BIG RICK at Physical Graffiti Tattoo and asked, “Any luck?”
The attractive-in-a-scary-way man moaned.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’ve been through all the receipts I could find, which weren’t many. It’s not our policy to give ’em out unless someone asks. If you ever find out who he is, tell me instead of the cops,” he said. “I want to introduce him to a few of my power tools.”
She mumbled thanks and slumped back on the cushions.
Another dead end.
THE BOAT ROCKED, meaning someone had stepped on deck. Coyote climbed down into the cabin and said, “You don’t look so good.”
“I was hoping to be able to feed you Robert’s last name today,” she said.
“And?”
“And it isn’t going to happen.” She exhaled and added, “I have a friend coming over tonight to get drunk. You want to join us?”
She did.
She did indeed.
Chapter Ninety-Seven
Day Five—July 16
Friday Afternoon
______________
DALTON DROVE NORMA JEAN through the storm until they found a public phone with no surveillance cameras. The woman called Teffinger and said, “Do you want your woman to live?”
A pause.
“Just let her go,” Teffinger said. “She has nothing to do with anything.”
“Sure, no problem, we’ll let her go,” Norma Jean said. “In return, we’d like you to do a little something for us, to show your appreciation.”
Silence.
“Like what?”
“Do you remember that road you were on this afternoon? The one out in the county that you turned right on, hoping the blue car behind you would follow?”
“I remember.”
“Go there at eleven o’clock tonight,” she said. “Take your seatbelt off. Then get your car up to a hundred and run it head on into a telephone pole. Once we confirm that you’ve done it, and that you’re dead, we’ll let the woman go.”
“You got to be nuts.”
“If you don’t do it, then we’ll kill your little friend at 11:05. You’ll be next, at some point down the road, except it won’t be anywhere near as fast and clean as what we’re offering now. It’s your choice. And you only get one chance to make it.”
The woman hung up.
She looked at Dalton and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
WHEN THEY GOT BACK to the French Quarter, where the sidewalks were eerily devoid of humans, Dalton fought his way through the storm to the river, to watch the whitecaps and feel the earth shake. The rain pelted him but he didn’t care. It was warm. He hugged a concrete ledge, nestled in and pushed drenched hair out of his face.
The river was empty except for the turbulence and spray.
The sky was wild.
He liked it.
It made him feel alive.
He needed to decide whether to get out of the voodoo business. It was hard to believe that it had been five years since James Madden recruited him. In that time, the voodoo priestess, Ida Wrisp, had put thirty-three death curses on people. In each case, the person requesting the curse had been personally screened by James Madden and had not been allowed personal contact with the priestess. And in each instance, the person placing the curse delivered a healthy fee to James Madden—typically $100,000 to $200,000. Ida Wrisp, bless her naive little heart, knew that fees were paid, but had no clue how much. Madden gave her enough money to be able to live in her strange little world without worry.
That’s all she wanted.
That’s all she needed.
The rest of the money got split between Madden and the three finishers—Dalton, the pirate and Norma Jean—who made the death curses come true.
Dalton did seven of them.
The pirate did nine.
And Norma Jean did the rest.
Madden hadn’t done any in the last five years. But before that, he was a one-man show, reportedly responsible for making several years worth of curses come true.
Ida Wrisp didn’t know that she got help.
The woman actually thought she cast real magic. So did the people who came to her. As far as they were concerned, when the woman put a death curse on someone, that person died. If the curse didn’t work, the money was refundable.
Of the thirty-three people cursed in the last five years, thirty-one were dead. The Starbucks cashier in South Beach—Jesse Montgomery—would be thirty-two.
Teffinger would be thirty-three.
At that point, Ida Wrisp’s success rate would be a hundred percent.
Dalton had been at it a long time.
Time wasn’t on your side in a business like this.
AND THEN THERE WAS THIS WHOLE FIASCO with the pirate getting tattoos from women several years ago and now killing them in the same manner. How or why the pirate came up with such a bizarre scenario still baffled Dalton. One thing he did know, however, is that the pirate was passionate about it. He couldn’t stop talking for two weeks about how he put a bullet in the back of Andrea Copperstone’s head.
Dalton listened with a distant amusement.
It didn’t really concern him.
That is, until the pirate decided to do Lindsay Vail, who lived in Denver—Dalton’s town. The pirate wanted to split the work to add an extra safety measure, which was a technique that the two of them had used successfully in two voodoo kills. Under the pirate’s proposition, he would do all the surveillance work on Lindsay Vail and feed the information to Dalton, who would do the actual abduction. Then the pirate would take over and do the kill.
Dalton was initially hesitant.
Then the pirate said that he wanted Dalton to give the woman a tattoo—the same tattoo that the woman gave him years ago, and at the same place on the body, namely the stomach.
The woman was attractive.
For some reason, the thought of tattooing her abdomen, as some kind of pre-death marking, sparked Dalton’s imagination.
So he agreed.
The pirate did the surveillance and then flew
to New Orleans to coordinate with James Madden regarding upcoming curses.
Dalton stayed in Denver and did the abduction.
That was last Saturday, almost a week ago now.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be more complicated than he anticipated. Another woman was in Lindsay’s house.
A woman who ran screaming into the night.
A woman he had to chase down and stab.
A woman named Julie Pratt.
The pirate gave Dalton $50,000 to compensate for the unexpected mess.
Dalton accepted it and called it even.
After that, though, he was no longer interested in doing the abduction part of the equation. So when it came to the next woman on the pirate’s to-do list—Dawn Hooker—Dalton agreed to do the surveillance but no more.
The rest would be up to the pirate.
THEN THERE WAS THE WHOLE G-DROP MESS. Everything had become too complicated. Dalton was never supposed to be this far out on the edge.
He needed to get all the risk out of his life.
He needed to downsize his dark side.
HE PUSHED TO HIS FEET, hunched against the storm and began to muscle his way back to James Madden’s place. His mind was made up. Quitting time was here. He’d made his money and had his fun.
Now it was time to get out and ease fulltime back into the GQ life.
First, of course, Teffinger needed to die.
That was more important now than ever.
After that, Dalton would tell Madden he was through.
The question would then be whether Madden would let him out or have him killed.
Chapter Ninety-Eight
Day Five—July 16
Friday Evening
______________
MINUTES PASSED, THEN HOURS. Teffinger came no closer to finding Venzelle. The storm intensified, the daylight transitioned to twilight and the lights of New Orleans started to kick on. He was driving out to the voodoo shop where the snake bit him, mysteriously pulled to it for some reason, when Sydney called and asked, “Are you still alive?”
Teffinger looked at his watch.
8:38 p.m.
“Yeah, but don’t ask me at this time tomorrow,” he said.
“You sound weird.”
“There’s some stuff going on.”
“Define stuff.”
He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to waste time telling her about the phone call from Kristen Starkell since she couldn’t do anything about it one way or the other; but he told her anyway.
She let him finish and said, “You want to know what I think?”
“No.”
“Good, because here it is,” she said. “I think they’re trying to get you to believe that they’re actually going to sit back and do nothing until eleven. In my opinion, it’s nothing more than a scheme to throw you off base and to get your guard down. They’re going to kill you before 10:30, while you’re not watching your back.”
Teffinger chewed on it and realized something.
She was probably right.
“You’re right,” he said.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act so surprised when I’m right.”
He chuckled.
“Sorry.”
“So what are you going to do? Try to track down the blue car?”
He hadn’t thought of that, but she was right again.
They had inadvertently given him a clue—namely, that they had in fact been following him earlier this afternoon in the blue car, like he suspected. If he retraced his steps, maybe he could find a gas station camera that picked up a license plate number.
He should have been doing that hours ago.
“I have to go,” he said.
“I’m coming down,” she said. “I don’t care what you say.”
“Forget it,” he said. “The airport’s closed anyway.”
Silence.
“Nick, these are going to be some hard words, but I want you to listen to them anyway,” she said. “They’re going to kill Venzelle no matter what you do. You should just get out of there now and save your own life.”
Teffinger said nothing and hung up.
TEN SECONDS LATER HIS PHONE RANG.
He looked at the incoming number.
Sydney.
He almost refused to answer, but did.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“I just keep picturing you getting killed.”
“I understand.”
A white SUV following two cars back grabbed his attention. He studied the driver’s face in the rearview mirror and couldn’t believe who he saw—Kristen Starkell, the woman trying to kill him.
The woman who had Venzelle.
“Nick? Are you still there?”
“Yeah but I got to go,” he said.
He decelerated quickly, jerked directly in front of the SUV and slammed on the brakes.
Chapter Ninety-Nine
Day Five—July 16
Friday Night
______________
DAKOTA ARRIVED AT RAVEN’S SAILBOAT, carrying four bottles of white wine, just as dusk settled over the marina. They popped a cork, turned the radio on for background noise, and drank. When the first bottle was gone, and Raven’s head had a pretty good buzz, Coyote joined them.
Then something weird happened.
Raven got a call from the last person she expected.
Jeff Salter.
“Is Dakota with you?” he asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I need to talk to her.”
Raven looked at Dakota and said, “Do you want to talk to Jeff Salter?”
Dakota made a face.
“Screw that asshole.”
“Tell her I just found out what Osborne did,” Salter said. “He had no authority to do that. Tell Dakota she is not—repeat not—fired and never was. Are you at your boat?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m coming down,” Salter said. “I want to be absolutely sure this gets straightened out tonight.”
The line went dead.
Raven filled Dakota in on what just happened.
“I don’t trust him,” Dakota said.
“Me either,” Raven said. “There’s no way Osborne would have fired you without clearing it with Salter first. My guess is that Salter figured out that the law firm’s going to be staring down the barrel of a retaliation suit. That means that all the snooping around that you’ve been doing, and the reason you’ve been doing it, will become part of the evidence, which means it will become a public record. At that point, lots of people will be asking questions.”
“He should have thought it through,” Dakota said. “He’s not as smart as he thinks he is.” She took a long sip of wine and said, “So what do we do?”
“We’ll figure that out after we hear what he has to say.”
THE TWILIGHT MORPHED to a blacker-than-black night and the thin Rocky Mountain air lost its warmth. The dark silhouette of a man wandered down D-Dock but stopped halfway when he saw three silhouettes on the boat.
“How cute,” Raven said. “Salter’s being shy.”
She got up and staggered his way.
“Wait here, I’ll see what his problem is.”
The dock swayed and made her realize she was drunker than she thought.
When she got to him, he grabbed her arm and pressed the barrel of a gun into her ribs. “Do exactly as I say or I’ll walk down there and shoot your two friends in the face. Do you understand?”
She didn’t recognize the voice.
It wasn’t Salter.
“I said, Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
He jerked her arm and said, “Walk.”
She obeyed.
He led her out of the marina, to the edge of the parking lot and into the back seat of an SUV.
“Lie flat on the floor and don’t make a sound.”
She obe
yed.
He took off.
Five minutes later he pulled over to the side of a dark road, hogtied her and then took off again.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“No.”
“You should,” he said. “The word on the street is that you’ve been looking for me all over town. That wasn’t a very smart career move.”
She swallowed.
The pirate?
“Robert?”
“That’s right,” he said, “Robert Poindexter, to be precise. Not that it will ever do you any good.” He paused, chuckled and added, “Oh, I almost forgot. If you hear breathing coming from the back, that’s Lindsay Vail. I’m going to let you watch me kill her before I kill you. Pretty exciting, huh?”
Her chest tightened and she peed her pants.
Chapter 100
Day Five—July 16
Friday Evening
______________
WHEN TEFFINGER SLAMMED ON THE BRAKES, both cars went into a spin and slid into a telephone pole with a horrific sound. The other driver—Starkell—got out and ran into the storm. Seconds later her car exploded. By the time Teffinger crawled out of his vehicle and made his way around the fire and smoke, she was gone.
Sirens approached from a distance.
Five or six cars pulled over.
He couldn’t waste precious time giving a statement so he wrote down the license plate number of the SUV and disappeared into the storm before the sirens arrived. A mile down the road he came to a tavern that was, miraculously, still open. He called a cab and drank a Bud Light at the bar while he waited.
“Take me to where I can rent a car,” he told the cabbie.
An hour later, he pulled up to his hotel in a red Mustang, killed the engine and opened the door to his room. He saw something he didn’t expect.
Kristen Starkell.
Sitting on the bed.
He didn’t see anyone else.
Only her.
He stepped inside and closed the door.
“Sorry I left in a hurry before,” she said.
Her hands were empty.
