Client On The Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller)

by R. J. Jagger

  Transients slept on the grass, wherever the best shade was.

  Some next to shopping carts.

  Some next to backpacks.

  Some next to nothing.

  “Robert Poindexter told me a bunch of stuff before he got killed,” Yardley said. “I’ve been debating whether to tell you or not, and I’ve decided that you have a right to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “You had an affair with Whitney White,” Yardley said. “Then you got blackmailed. You paid for a while and then asked Ryan Ripley to see if he could figure out who the blackmailer was. He later told you he couldn’t figure it out. That was a lie.”

  She paused to let the words sink in.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Actually, Ripley did figure it out,” Yardley said. “He found out that the blackmailer was none other than Whitney White herself. She set you up from the start.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Let me finish,” Yardley said. “Instead of telling you about Whitney, Ripley approached her and made her agree to split the blackmail money fifty-fifty. You paid a lot of money. Half of it went to Whitney and half went to Ripley.”

  Salter furrowed his brow, deep in thought.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “There came a point when Whitney wanted out. She had enough money and was sick to death of dealing with Ripley. She also felt a little sorry for you, too. Ripley said fine, he would carry on without her. She said no, it needed to end. So Ripley decided to take her out.”

  “So Ripley killed Whitney?”

  “Not directly,” Yardley said. “Ripley was deep into voodoo at that point. He went down to New Orleans and had his client put a voodoo curse on Whitney. The doll had a needle stuck in the left eye. A week later, Whitney died. The pirate—Robert Poindexter—is the one who did it. He stuck a screwdriver in her eye. That’s how he knew the story.” She paused and added, “Does any of this make sense?”

  Salter exhaled. “What I’m about to say can’t go beyond you,” he said. “I need that assurance.”

  She nodded.

  “You have it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I was at a big law firm party at Ripley’s about a month ago. My wife Susan was sick that night and stayed home. One of the young ladies at the party came on to me pretty strong and we snuck up to the master bedroom. She was drunk and started going through Ripley’s dresser drawers. She found a voodoo doll with a needle in the left eye. As soon as I saw it, I knew that Ripley had put a curse on Whitney and that he was behind her death. I resolved right then and there to kill him. But I bided my time. I wanted it to be the perfect murder.”

  “So you’re the one who killed him in the alley.”

  Salter shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I wish it had been me, but it wasn’t.”

  “Like I said, this doesn’t go anywhere beyond me,” Yardley said. “We can treat this as attorney-client privilege if you want.”

  “I’m being straight with you,” Salter said. “I didn’t kill Ripley. What did happen, though, is that I saw the pirate’s picture in the Rocky Mountain News. I recognized him as someone who had met with Ripley a number of times. He was somehow associated with Ripley’s voodoo client down in New Orleans. I knew in my heart that he was the one who killed Whitney.”

  “Well in hindsight, you were right,” Yardley said.

  “I guess I was,” he said. “At that point in time, I wanted to find out who he was and kill him with my own two hands. That’s when I hired you to find him.”

  Yardley must have had a look on her face because Salter laughed.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “You still haven’t figured out that I was your real client?”

  “You’re not making sense,” Yardley said.

  “Okay, it goes like this,” Salter said. “I needed someone to find the pirate and wanted to be sure the whole thing was legally confidential, which it would be if I used a lawyer instead of a P.I. I knew you’d be perfect for the job. But I knew you’d never help me, because of our past differences. I had a friend named Samantha Dent, who is an escort that I visited every now and then.”

  “I met Samantha.”

  “Yes, you did,” Salter said. “I told her that I wanted her to hire you to find the pirate. I had a story that she was supposed to use, namely that she had been followed by the man on Saturday night at the same time that he supposedly killed someone else across town. She was his alibi, in effect, but she didn’t want to go to the police and get him off their radar screen until she could figure out what his intent was with her.”

  “So that whole story was made up?”

  “It was,” Salter said. “Samantha was willing to help—for $150 an hour plus expenses—but she was clubbing with a friend on that Saturday night, a friend named Aspen Asher. So we needed Aspen to corroborate the story. Then Samantha came up with the brilliant idea of letting Aspen be the client, just in case you ever connected me to her. That way I would be even one step further removed. I asked her to approach Aspen but to not disclose my identity. Aspen agreed to go along with it, again for $150 a hour.”

  “So you were my client, all along?”

  He nodded.

  “It worked too,” he said. “You actually found him. Not in the way you wanted, but you found him nevertheless.” He chuckled and added, “Remember that night you staked out Aspen’s house with Samantha to see if the bad guy drove by?”

  She nodded.

  “That was me you chased that night.”

  They got up and strolled to the flower garden. “I have a question for you,” Yardley said. “Are you the one who killed the pirate?”

  Salter laughed.

  “Now why would you say that?”

  “Here’s my theory,” she said. “You came down to the marina that night and saw a man and a woman—a woman who looked something like me; and a man who looked something like the pirate—get into an SUV in the parking lot and drive off. Then you went down to the sailboat to meet with Dakota about her not being fired, and got told that I just walked down the dock a few minutes earlier and left with a man who they thought was you. You were now pretty sure that the woman you saw was me and the man was the pirate.”

  Salter nodded.

  “Go on.”

  “Then, if my theory’s right, you gave chase,” she said. “You didn’t know if we were leaving out the back entrance or the front one and took a guess. Then you saw a car pulled over at the side of the road. You stopped, ostensibly to see if the driver needed help, but actually to see if the driver was the pirate. You confirmed that he was, but didn’t have a good chance to kill him right then and there.”

  “I’m impressed,” Salter said. “Go on.”

  “You took off, but then stopped a half mile down the road,” Yardley said. “You stopped your car in the road and then sprawled out on the asphalt, as if you just had a heart attack or something. This time you had a knife in your hand. When the pirate stopped to see what was going on, you slit his throat. Then you got the hell out of there.”

  “That’s quite a theory,” Salter said.

  “It is, but if it’s right, then I just wanted to say, Thank you. You saved my life. Lindsay Vail’s too.”

  Salter grinned.

  “Well, if your theory’s right, then I would have to say, You’re welcome. I’d also ask you to not repeat the story to anyone.”

  She nodded.

  “By the way,” she said. “Do you remember that Ono Bird joke that you told me when I first started working at the firm?”

  He remembered.

  “The pirate told me the same joke. He said the guy who stopped to see if he needed help told it to him. That’s how I knew it was you.”

  103

  Y ardley was in the water practicing swimming when her cell phone rang. She pulled herself out and answered. The voice of the Colfax hooker, Cynthia Brown, came through. “How’s the book coming?”
r />   “Good, actually.”

  The phone call made Yardley pull up the memory of that fateful night. Her upcoming book had a prostitute in it. Yardley went down to Colfax, found a real life prostitute—Cynthia Brown—and asked if she could shadow her for the evening, as research for the book.

  Cynthia didn’t care.

  Yardley put on a short black wig and hooker clothes, and met Cynthia after dark on a Saturday night. She watched her do a number of blowjobs in the alley.

  Then something weird happened.

  Someone she knew showed up.

  Ryan Ripley.

  He was insanely drunk and kept ramming his cock into Cynthia’s mouth, gagging her. She kept trying to pull away but he wouldn’t let her. Then, when she finally broke free, he went insane.

  He punched her over and over.

  Yardley watched from the shadows, horrified, frozen.

  Then Ripley picked something off the ground, a club or iron bar or something like that. He raised it over his head, positioned to smash the life out of her, and said, “Suck on this, bitch!”

  That’s when Yardley jumped out of the darkness and stabbed him in the back.

  “Just thought I’d check in to let you know that everything’s quiet on my end,” Cynthia said. “How about yours?”

  “Same, now.”

  “What’s that mean? Now—”

  “There was a lawyer snooping around, thinking that someone in her law firm killed the guy as some kind of a perfect murder.”

  “A lawyer—who?”

  “Someone named Dakota Van Vleck.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “It’s okay,” Yardley said. “I got her diverted in another direction and then she dropped it altogether.”

  “Hey, I almost forgot, how’s it feel?”

  “What?”

  “You know, being the big three-O. Today’s your birthday, right?”

  Right.

  It was.

  “To tell you the truth, I forgot.”

  104

  T effinger watched his 1967 Corvette disappear down the street at the hands of a new owner that Paul Kwak found. In Teffinger’s back pocket was a certified check for the purchase price. He’d use half of it to pay off the loan he’d taken out to buy it in the first place. The other half would go into a trust account for Melissa Johnson, the 12-year-old from New Orleans who saved Teffinger and Jessie-Rae from burning to death.

  Melissa’s mother would be the trustee.

  Melissa would know about the trust and, hopefully, see a college future in front of her and prepare herself for it.

  Jessie-Rae pulled into the driveway three minutes later.

  “Was that your Corvette I just saw driving down the street?”

  It was.

  “How much did you get?”

  He showed her the check.

  “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “It was too cool for you anyway.”

  “Too cool for me?”

  She grinned.

  “Right, too cool.”

  “You don’t think I’m cool enough for a Corvette?”

  “Not even close.”

  He wrestled her to the grass and tickled her until she took it back. Then he kissed her and said, “I love you. Have I told you that yet today?”

  “You keep saying that,” she said.

  “I know. Is that a problem?”

  “Maybe.”

  Maybe?

  “What does that mean?”

  She pushed him off and sat on the front steps. He sat next to her, put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “I need to tell you something,” she said.

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Now you have me worried,” he said.

  She looked into his eyes and said, “I’m the one who put the voodoo curse on you.” He must have had a look on his face because she said, “Hear me out before you go ballistic.”

  “You’re messing with me, right?”

  No.

  She wasn’t.

  “I had a sister, Zandra,” she said. “She was a freelance reporter and was working on a huge article about voodoo groups who take big fees to put death curses on people. Zandra believed that these groups were actually murdering the people they cursed to make it look like the curses were really working. Zandra got murdered one night. Her laptop was taken. I couldn’t find a single file in her apartment on her voodoo research. I went to the cops and told them that one of those groups must have found out about her and killed her to keep the story from getting out. They listened to me but said they didn’t have the resources or time to go down to New Orleans and dig around into voodoo groups. So the case went nowhere. They chalked it up as a robbery.”

  “Maybe it was,” Teffinger said.

  “It wasn’t, but I’m not blaming them,” Jessie-Rae said. “I understand the concept of limited resources. But I wasn’t about to let these people get away with it, so I went down to New Orleans and started poking around. There was word on the street that death curses could be obtained for a fee. Outsiders, however, had to go through a local. I found a local, gave him $100,000 and had a death curse put on you. I didn’t know who would actually do the curse or who would try to kill you.”

  “I don’t get it,” Teffinger said. “Why me?”

  “Well, first Geneva told me all about you, how tough you were and everything, and then I did a bunch of research on you. My belief was that you would be able to fight them off and wouldn’t actually get killed. I planned to seduce you, stick by your side and watch your back. That’s why I moved in right away and made you give me a gun. I was hoping you would actually kill the guy when he tried to kill you, and that would lead to the rest of them.”

  “So you set me up as bait,” Teffinger said.

  “I did, but I didn’t really know you at that point,” she said. “When we were at Ripley’s, I slipped the voodoo doll under the bed where you’d find it; to be sure you knew you had a curse on you, so you’d watch out for yourself. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “You planted the doll there?”

  “I did. I figured it made sense, since you found another one there already,” she said. “It was my intent to watch your back to be sure nothing happened. That’s why I was so insistent on going to New Orleans with you. That’s why I wouldn’t leave New Orleans when you tried to make me. That’s why I checked into the Cajun Blue two doors down from you.”

  “To protect me.”

  “Right,” she said. “Of course, along the way, I fell in love with you and my plan changed. I wanted to get the curse off. So I squeezed $50,000 out of my credit cards and tried to find the local I used before, so he could take the money to whoever it was that put the curse on you in the first place. The problem was, I couldn’t find him. So I went to that voodoo shop with the woman who had the snake that bit you, to see if she knew who to contact to reverse the curse. She said she’d get it done for me and took the $50,000. Then I went back to the Cajun Blue. Someone must have followed me there. Two men broke in, tied me to the bed and painted me with blood, no doubt to scare me out of New Orleans so I’d forget about the $50,000.”

  “So you set up a perfect stranger—me—as bait, to catch the people who killed your sister. Do I pretty much have the story right?”

  “You have it half right.”

  Teffinger shook his head in disbelief.

  “So what’s the other half?”

  She stood up and stormed down the driveway. Then she stopped and said, “You’re forgetting about the part that I fell in love with you.”

  Then she ran down the street.

  Crying.

  Teffinger sat there, stunned, and watched her disappear. He grabbed a Bud Light from the fridge, brought it outside, drank it in three long swallows, and crushed the can in his fist. He threw it on the grass.

  Then he ran after her and finally caught her, all the way down by Cedar
Street.

  He hugged her tight.

  He kissed her deep.

  “You’re going to be a handful,” he said. “I can already tell.”

  She put her arms around him, laid her head on his chest and shook.

  “Does that mean you forgive me?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Come on, let’s go home.”

  About the Author

  Formerly a longstanding trial attorney before taking the big leap and devoting his fulltime attention to writing, RJ Jagger (that’s a penname, by the way) is the author of over twenty hard-edged mystery and suspense thrillers. In addition to his own books, Jagger also ghostwrites for a well-known, bestselling author. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers as well as Mystery Writers of America.

  www.rjjagger.com