Double Die (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  “Did she ever tell them to you?”

  “No.”

  Teffinger took a sip of wine.

  “So what did she tell you, exactly?”

  “She told me about him, she told me about the Van Gogh, she told me I was the only one who knew and that I had to promise to keep her trust.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, I told no one,” she said. “You’re the first person I’ve breathed a word of this to. Anyway, I was worried about her, getting in with a criminal and all that. The whole thing just sounded so dangerous to me. When I asked her where the guy lived, she didn’t know. She said he didn’t ever want her over there in case someone came for him. He didn’t want her to ever get caught in the crosshairs. They usually only met at her apartment. He would crisscross all over town and be absolutely sure no one was following him when he came over. After dark they’d go for walks but they’d stay in the shadows. They never went out to restaurants or bars or anything like that.”

  “Big spender—”

  “Money wasn’t the issue,” Dandan said. “She loved the man.”

  Teffinger wrinkled his face.

  “Goddamn it.”

  “I decided to do a little snooping around on Kelly’s behalf,” Dandan said. “One night when he left her apartment, I followed him.”

  “Did Kelly know?”

  “No, she knew nothing. He led me to a shipyard way down south, past the airport. Hundreds of boats of all sizes were propped up on blocks either being stored or renovated or gutted for parts or whatever. It must have been okay to sleep over on them because a few people were, although not many. It turned out that Rail was staying on an old rusty tugboat that looked like it hadn’t seen water in twenty years. It didn’t totally shock me given what Kelly said about INTERPOL being after him. It was actually a good hideaway with a lot of escape routes.”

  “Did you tell Kelly?”

  “No,” Dandan said. “A week later, though, she mentioned that Rail was coming over that night. I took the opportunity to pay a visit to his place.”

  ______

  Dressed in a black hoodie and even blacker jeans, Dandan parked the 911 a full half mile from the shipyard and closed the distance on foot under a dark moonless sky. The wind was strong, rattling and whistling everything stupid enough to be in its path. Dandan hunched against it with the hood up and her hands in the pockets.

  She hated cold.

  She hated wind.

  She hated dark places.

  She hated grungy places.

  She pressed forward with increasingly faster steps, determined to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible now that she was actually going through with it. She didn’t know what she expected to find.

  Her blood raced.

  She worked her way between ghostly hulls and menacing shapes, memorizing each one, focused on keeping her bearings and sense of direction. The wind smelled like rust and diesel and dried seaweed and abandonment. The ground was rock and gravel and scraps and rutty dirt, good enough to twist an ankle if she let it.

  Rail’s vessel was dark and dead when she got to it.

  She threw a rock against the hull.

  No one came out.

  No voices shouted.

  Propped against the side was a tall wobbly ladder made of two-by-fours. She pulled a flashlight out of her back pocket, ran the beam quickly up and down the wood and then killed it. She climbed up slowly in the dark, testing each rung and working to not get splinters.

  Then she was up.

  The deck was higher than she thought.

  It was a long, long way down if she had to jump.

  She brought the flashlight out and turned it on long enough to get oriented. Then it went back out. The cabin door was firmly locked. There were windows, lots of them, but breaking one was out of the question. A hatch near the front of the boat was propped open a couple of inches, enough to get her fingers under.

  She pulled.

  It didn’t move.

  She squatted and put her entire strength into it.

  It fought her but eventually came up.

  She crossed her chest, wedged her legs in and dropped down. The fall was farther than she expected. She powered on the flashlight and found herself in a windowless cavity of the vessel. The hatch was above her head by a considerable amount. If she jumped she might be able to grab an edge and hang on. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to muscle out from that position or not.

  She swallowed.

  The cavity was full of old junk on fabricated metal shelves—dingy ropes, grimy chains, and rusty parts. Behind a metal door was a shallow cavity. Inside that cavity was a shiny aluminum case. She brought it out, set it on the floor and opened it up.

  Inside was an impressionist painting.

  It was the Van Gogh that Kelly told her about.

  She ran the beam over it.

  Her chest pounded.

  This could change her life.

  It could change her life forever.

  She closed it up and put it back exactly as she found it. At the end of the cavity was a bulkhead door.

  It was locked.

  The only way out was through the hatch.

  She turned the flashlight off, wedged it in her back pocket, positioned herself under the hatch and jumped for it.

  She fell short by a good six inches.

  She tried again.

  She fell short again.

  She was trapped.

  She made a platform of junk, tall enough to let her jump and actually get a grip above.

  It didn’t matter.

  She was able to hang but that was it.

  She didn’t have the strength to muscle her way up and out.

  She was trapped.

  Time passed.

  Then the inevitable happened.

  Rail came home.

  Dandan wedged her body into the narrow cavity with the Van Gogh and closed the door all but an inch, fearing it would latch and entomb her.

  There was no darker blackness anywhere on earth.

  The air passing in and out of her lungs sounded like a hissing snake bobbing its fangs in front of her face.

  71

  Day Eight

  July 15

  Tuesday Morning

  As Rail jogged up Haight he suddenly felt predator eyes drilling into the back of his head. He could be wrong. He’d had a number of false flashes in the past. He’d also had some that saved his life. His heart pounded. His instinct was to turn but he didn’t. He kept jogging with his face pointed into the fog.

  The important thing was to stay normal.

  The important thing was to not drive the predator back into the shadows.

  He continued at a steady pace for two blocks, crossed the street and continued in the same direction. A quarter mile later he turned left around a corner and ducked behind a parked van.

  Nothing happened for thirty seconds.

  Then a black sedan turned the corner.

  Its lights were off.

  It moved slowly.

  Two figures were inside, one male and one female, neither in good enough focus to make out features. The figure in the passenger seat—the female—brought a cigarette to her lips and took a deep drag.

  The vehicle stopped at the first crossroad and hung there as if deciding which way to go.

  Then it did a quick 180 and headed back.

  72

  Day Eight

  July 15

  Tuesday Noon

  “Luckily, Rail never came into that part of the boat that night. In the morning I got smarter. I found a scrap piece of metal somewhat shaped like a hook. I tied it onto the end of a rope and tossed it time after time after time out the hatch until it finally caught on something. I was able to pull myself out, barely, but I did it. I untied the hook, threw it and the rope back into the boat and then pushed the hatch back down to where it had been originally. It was light out at the time but I don’t think anyone saw me.”

/>   Teffinger frowned.

  “You came back later and stole the painting,” he said.

  Dandan nodded.

  “I did but that didn’t happen until after Kelly got taken out of your bed,” she said. “It’s not that I didn’t want to steal it before then, I did, but I refrained myself. I thought Rail would think Kelly took it. I was afraid he’d kill her. After she died, though, I acted quickly, before Rail got scared and decided to leave town.”

  Teffinger took a long swallow of wine.

  He smelled lies.

  The more likely scenario was that Dandan took the painting before Kelly went to Denver. Rail thought Kelly was behind it, followed her there and pulled her out of Teffinger’s bed to interrogate her. She knew nothing about it.

  He killed her.

  After all, that’s what he’d been hired to do all along.

  “So why are you telling me all of this now?” Teffinger said.

  “I didn’t say anything before because Kelly was already dead and there was nothing I could do to help her,” she said. “Telling anyone about the painting would only risk my losing it.”

  “That’s still true,” Teffinger said.

  The woman exhaled.

  “I saw Rail on the street yesterday,” she said. “I think he got onto me somehow.”

  “So you’re looking for protection—”

  “To a point,” she said. “You’re looking for Rail and he’s looking for the painting. I figured you could use that information to your advantage somehow.”

  Teffinger swallowed what was left of the wine.

  “Take me to his tugboat,” he said.

  “Right now?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes, right now.”

  Traffic was thick and talk was minimal as they headed south. En route Teffinger called Del Rey to be sure she was safe in the hotel room, which she was. Not only was the door locked but she’d pulled a couch in front of it. On the table in front of her was Teffinger’s gun, fully loaded with the safety off.

  “Don’t let anyone in,” Teffinger said. “No room service, no nobody.”

  “It won’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “And hope to die?”

  “No, and hope to live.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Teffinger turned his attention to Dandan.

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t know if you told me the truth about stealing the painting after Kelly got murdered or whether you did it beforehand. There’s something you should know though. If you did do it beforehand, that wasn’t the reason Kelly got killed. Someone hired Rail to kill her. She was as good as dead from the first moment she met Rail.”

  The woman cast a glance his way.

  “Nice to know but I didn’t take it beforehand,” she said. “I might be a greedy bitch but I don’t put my friends in danger.”

  The words sounded sincere.

  “What was Kelly up to before Rail entered the picture?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning someone wanted her dead badly enough to hire Rail to do it,” he said. “If I knew who that person was I’d be a giant step closer to Rail.”

  “She wasn’t up to anything that I was aware of.”

  “I’m thinking that she either saw something she shouldn’t have or learned something she shouldn’t have,” Teffinger said. “For some reason she became a threat to someone. It could have happened all of a sudden, by some freak accident. Did you ever notice a change in her behavior? Did she get withdrawn or overly serious or concerned about something she wouldn’t talk about?”

  “Wow—”

  “Is that a yes?”

  It was.

  “Like I said before, Kelly had been seeing Rail two or three weeks before she ever mentioned anything about him to me,” she said. “There was a day when she missed work. In hindsight, if I’m remembering it right, it was in that time period a week or so before Rail came into her life. It was a Wednesday. Tuesday everything had been fine, Kelly was just her normal old Kelly self. Then she called in sick on Wednesday. On Thursday, when she got back to work, she was different.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “But it wasn’t exactly her that came back. It was a different version of her.”

  “Where’d she go that Tuesday night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Teffinger took out his phone, pulled up the calendar, clicked back to last year and then worked backwards from the time Kelly got murdered. “If I’m doing this right, the Wednesday she missed was in the first or second week of April.”

  “That seems right.”

  He called Sydney in Denver.

  “I need you to do me a big favor,” he said. “See if anyone got murdered in San Francisco on the first or second Tuesday night of April last year. If someone didn’t get murdered, figure out if something happened that, if someone else saw it, someone would want that person dead.”

  Silence.

  “Who is this?”

  “Funny,” he said. “This relates to Kelly Nine.”

  “I already figured that out. How soon do you need it?”

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Do you have it yet?”

  “Teffinger—”

  “Please and thank you.”

  A pause then, “How’s Del Rey?”

  “She’s alive.”

  “That’s almost a first for you,” she said. “If I ever get in danger, remind me that I don’t want you guarding me.”

  Back to Dandan, “The man who hired Rail did it through a private investigator in Washington D.C. by the name of Oscar Benderfield. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anybody who knows him or who has ever mentioned him?”

  “No.”

  “How about any lawyers in D.C.? Do you know any?”

  “No. I hate lawyers.”

  “Does that mean you know some?”

  “No, I just hate them on general principle.”

  Five minutes later they were at the shipyard. They parked a half-mile away and headed in on foot, weaving through a graveyard of rusty hulks that were at the wrong end of their useful lives.

  “That’s it over there,” Dandan said.

  Teffinger studied the vessel.

  It was a dilapidated piece of junk.

  “It looks like it came here to die,” he said. “Stay here.”

  Then he headed that way.

  En route he picked up a stay piece of rebar.

  It was dirty and rusty in his hand.

  It felt good.

  It felt like it could crack a skull if it needed to.

  73

  Day Eight

  July 15

  Tuesday Afternoon

  The tugboat showed no signs of recent habitation. There were still distant remnants of prior life but they were from a time long past. Several unopened cans of food were in the galley, thick with dust. A box of cereal was tipped on its side. The cereal was gone, replaced with mouse droppings. The batteries in a flashlight were deader than dirt.

  Spiders owned the place.

  Still, Rail was back in town and might have the place in mind as a source of refuge. He might show up at some point. With that in mind, Teffinger scrounged around until he found a pencil. He looked for paper, couldn’t find any, then ripped open the cereal box and used the inside cardboard. On it he wrote, Van Gogh, followed by his cell number. He put it on the counter next to the sink and left.

  Back at the Porsche Teffinger told Dandan, “Rail left a long time ago, probably right after you took the painting.”

  “What about evidence?”

  “I didn’t see anything of use.”

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “INTERPOL already has his fingerprints.”

  She cranked over the engine, shifted into first and took off.

  “So now what?”


  “Now you go back to work.”

  “Are you going to stake the place out?”

  “No.”

  “I saw him on the street,” she said. “He’s in town. He might end up back there.”

  Teffinger scratched his head.

  “If he does he’ll call me.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because I left him my number.”

  Dandan frowned.

  “Nothing personal but you don’t seem like a real detective half the time.”

  “You’re generous. Most people put my real time no more than ten percent.”

  Dandan knew she should smile but didn’t. Instead she said, “I’m going to stake the place out tonight.”

  Teffinger swung his eyes at her.

  “No.”

  “I’ll be way off,” she said. “He won’t see me. If he shows up I’ll call you.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for starters, you’ll end up dead and then I’ll have one more thing to kick myself in the ass about for the rest of my life.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. So what are your plans for the Van Gogh?”

  “Sell it.”

  “How?”

  “I found someone.”

  “Someone in the black market?”

  She nodded.

  “Is he shopping it?”

  “He is a she and the answer is yes.”

  Teffinger shook his head.

  “That’s how Rail got onto you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “If I was you I’d drop out of sight, right here right now. I wouldn’t go back to work, I wouldn’t go back to my apartment, I wouldn’t do anything I normally do, I’d get cash out of the bank and throw my credit cards away, I’d stay off the Internet, I’d throw my phone away, and most of all I wouldn’t tell my little black market friend where I was.” She studied him. “Rail’s killed for a whole lot less than the value of that painting,” he added, “a whole lot less, not to mention it was technically his to start with.”

  Her normally confident eyes clouded over.

  “I thought he was in town to kill you or Del Rey.”