Double Die (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
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Did Jori-Lee still want to do this?
“Sure. Why not?”
“No reason. I was just wondering if you were having second thoughts.”
“Why would I?”
Zahara frowned.
“I know we’ve been talking about how the FBI would view you as a small fish if we got a case on Robertson and turned him in. The more I think about it, though, this would turn out to be the news story of the century. The spotlights would be intense. A lot of people would be taking the position that someone—i.e., you—shouldn’t be allowed to break into the house of a Supreme Court justice and then walk free, or simply get a slap on the wrist, just because they got lucky and found something incriminating while they were there.” She paused and said, “The more I think about it, the more I see the FBI taking a more serious view of what you did. Even if they didn’t want to come down hard on you, they’d almost have to, not to mention that there are probably more than enough zealots in that organization who would argue that what you did was a breach of national security, the same as if you’d broken into the white house.”
“So what are you saying? That I shouldn’t go to the FBI?”
“What I’m saying is that I’d really think it over.”
Jori-Lee wasn’t impressed.
“If Robertson’s throwing his vote and/or hiring people to kill people who are blackmailing him, there’s only one course of action to take,” she said. “If that means that I get caught in the collateral damage, then so be it.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know why we’re having this conversation.”
“Because I cringe at the thought of you in prison.”
Jori-Lee patted Zahara’s arm.
“That’s why we need a solid case,” she said. “I don’t want to leave Robertson with a way to wiggle out. And I don’t want to give the FBI something that they might shove in a drawer when the politics start going off.”
“Okay, then let’s do it.”
“I’ll go into Benderfield’s on my own,” she said. “That will keep you clean.”
“Staying clean isn’t my main concern,” Zahara said.
“Okay, then let’s go.”
102
Day Ten
July 17
Thursday Night
Thursday night after dark Teffinger pushed into the guts of the Dusty Beat, the same corner dive off Haight where he met Rail before. The man was in the same back booth, not much more than a shadow in the dark. As Teffinger approached, the man’s ponytail, solid chest and python arms took shape. He wore a blue cotton shirt rolled at the cuffs. His face, as before, belonged on the cover of a magazine.
A draft sat on the table, waiting for Teffinger.
He slid in and took a swallow.
It was cold.
It was good.
“Before we begin, I want to know what you did with Susan Smith,” Teffinger said.
Rail smiled.
“Right to the point, huh?”
“Seems that way.”
Rail shrugged.
“Sure, why not?” he said. “But just to be sure, we’re still off the record—”
“We are.”
Rail’s face got serious. “I gave her to Yoan Foca,” he said. “It was sort of a peace offering for losing the Van Gogh. It was to keep his mind off killing me while I tried to get it back.”
“She’s in Cuba?”
Rail nodded.
“He has her.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “Rest assured she’s not that important to him. She’s one of twenty or thirty. She’s chump change. What’s important to him isn’t her. What’s important to him is the Van Gogh.”
Teffinger took a long swallow.
“So you’re saying we could get her back?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “We could do a double deal, the Van Gogh in exchange for her and for Dandan. Of course, the logistics would get more complicated, with Dandan here in the city and Susan Smith all the way over in Cuba.”
Teffinger exhaled.
“Tell me about Yoan Foca,” he said. “What kind of man is he?”
“Actually, he’s a lot like you and me.”
Teffinger almost said, I didn’t know you and me were alike. Instead he said, “In what way?”
“Violent if you give him a reason,” Rail said. “Not so violent if you don’t.”
Teffinger leaned in.
“I’m not violent.”
“You killed two men last week.”
Teffinger almost argued but didn’t see the upside. “You’re right about the logistics. We need both women in the same place. We need to get them both at the exact same time.”
Rail nodded.
“Agreed.”
“That means either Dandan goes to Cuba or Susan Smith comes here,” Teffinger said. “I don’t see an upside to trying to do this thing in Cuba.”
“Agreed again.”
“Okay, that means he needs to bring Susan Smith here.” He cupped his hands, giving it one last thought. “Call him and tell him that’s the deal. And tell him I’m only going to deal with him personally, not his lackeys. I want to look him right into the eyes and be sure we have an understanding. I want to be absolutely sure he has no plans to send someone around a year down the road to kill someone, including me.”
Rail frowned.
“He doesn’t go outside Cuba.”
Teffinger stood up and swallowed what was left of the beer. He set the glass on the table and said, “He does now.”
Then he left.
He was halfway to the door when Rail called his name from behind. He turned and the man waved him back. He sat back down, impatient.
“Do you know why I always get here before you?” Rail said.
Teffinger wasn’t in the mood.
“No, tell me.”
“So I can keep my eyes on the door,” he said.
“Well, that’s nice.”
Rail shrugged.
“Sometimes it saves your life,” he said. “Two or three minutes ago a man walked down the street. He’s someone I met in Tangiers a long time ago. He’s in the same business as me.”
“He’s a hitman?”
“Among other things,” he said. “His name is Jean-Luc Baxa. He’s a crazy little bastard. By that what I mean is that he’s crazy enough to rip wings off birds.”
“Are you saying he’s the one after me?”
Rail nodded and leaned forward.
“I’m going to give you one more Ace to put up your sleeve,” he said. “But first I want to be absolutely sure that I’m included in this exchange with Foca. If you have any plans to cut me out I want you to be honest and tell me now.”
“No, you’re in,” Teffinger said. “You’ve already earned your keep.”
Rail nodded.
“You remember I told you before about how I fell in love with Kelly Nine,” he said. “I didn’t do the contract and of course someone else got hired to do the job. That person was Jean-Luc Baxa.”
“He killed Kelly Nine?”
“Yes.” He exhaled. “There, I’ve given you everything.”
Teffinger processed it.
“What was he wearing?”
“A red hoodie and a black baseball cap,” he said. “It was too dark in here for him to see me. I can help you take him down if you want.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because if he kills you then I don’t have a painting to give to Foca.”
Teffinger’s chest pounded.
“We’ll wait and see if he makes another pass.”
103
Day Ten
July 17
Thursday Night
The beat in Jori-Lee’s chest of possibly finding a smoking gun in Benderfield’s office got dimmer and dimmer the more they searched without finding anything. Half an hour into it that beat was almost completely gone when her phone rang and Sanders’ voice came through. He sounded like he just crawled out of a
burning house.
“Did you hear what happened?”
No, she didn’t.
Hear what?
“Robertson’s dead. It’s all over the news, every channel—”
“What happened?”
“He was out on the street and got robbed,” Sanders said. “He resisted and ended up shot. A couple of witnesses got whisked off by the FBI.”
“Why would he resist?”
“I don’t know but get home,” he said. “We need to figure out what we’re going to handle this.”
“I’m bringing Zahara with me.”
“Whatever, I don’t care. Just get back here.”
Sanders was a wired mess when Jori-Lee and Zahara got there, pacing in front of the TV with a beer in hand and two empties on the table. The news depicted an eerie scene of a body on the sidewalk, covered with a blanket under a forlorn drizzly night, awash in an endless sea of red and blue flashing lights.
“I’ve been thinking what we should do,” Sanders said.
Jori-Lee pulled her soaked blouse off, headed for the bedroom and said over her shoulder, “Tell us.”
“Nothing,” Sanders said. “We should do nothing.”
She came back in slipping a T-shirt over her head and tossed a similar one to Zahara, who made the switch.
“Do nothing?”
“Robertson’s gone,” he said. “There’s nothing he can do bad to the world at this point and there’s nothing left for us to expose.”
Zahara wasn’t convinced.
“There are eight cases where he threw his vote,” she said. “And he hired Oscar Benderfield to kill that girl who was blackmailing him.”
“T’amara Alder.”
“Right, her.”
Sanders shook his head.
“We don’t have proof,” he said. “The best thing we have is the flash drive and that’s not something we can cough up without getting Jori-Lee in a position where she’ll probably end up in prison. It was already iffy, going to the FBI, even when we had a trump card—namely, a Supreme Court justice to bring down. But now he’s already down. The trump card is gone. It’s history. If Jori-Lee voluntarily admits she broke into Robertson’s house, she end up in jail just as certain as the day is long. Hell, there will probably end up being an inquiry as to whether she was somehow involved in his death.”
Jori-Lee frowned.
“I did more than just break into his house,” she said. “I also broke into T’amara Alder’s place. You can also add Oscar Benderfield’s office, thanks to tonight.”
“That makes my point all the more right. As far as the eight votes that got swung, the ultimate outcome only changed in three of them, the rest were all six to three. Personally, I don’t have any heartburn the way they turned out, especially that case down in Texas involving the kid.”
They debated it.
Robertson was dead.
He wasn’t in a position to hurt anyone anymore.
Oscar Benderfield was dead.
He wasn’t in a position to hurt anyone anymore.
The hitman that Benderfield hired to kill T’amara—Jean-Luc Baxa—was still alive. He needed to be brought down, but they could do that with a well-placed anonymous call to the police.
So in the end Sanders was right.
They would just let the dog lie where it fell and hope that it didn’t spring back to life and bite them in the face.
“It’s settled then,” Jori-Lee said. “We’ll go to work tomorrow like nothing happened. We’ll never tell anyone what we know.”
Zahara nodded.
“Agreed,” she said.
“Agreed,” Sanders said. “We take it to our graves.”
He went to where the flash drive was hidden, waved it in his hand and said, “This ties Jori-Lee to Robertson’s home computer. I say we get rid of it. Any objections?”
Jori-Lee’s brain was fuzzy.
She couldn’t run the implications either way.
“Whatever you think is best.”
Zahara shrugged.
“Fine by me.”
Sanders fired up the stove and held the drive in the flames with a spoon until the thing melted. Then he put it under cold water and snapped it in two.
He tossed the pieces to Zahara.
“Throw these out your window while you’re driving home Two separate places, at a minimum several blocks apart.”
“Will do.”
104
Day Ten
July 17
Thursday Night
Teffinger was a tiger in a cage, just waiting for the door to open. His prey, Jean-Luc Baxa, was somewhere out there in the night, somewhere outside the Dusty Beat, pounding the pavement of Haight Street. Rail kept his eye on the window waiting for the man to make a pass.
In the interim he called Yoan Foca in Cuba, where it was the middle of the night.
The man didn’t appreciate being woken up.
He didn’t appreciate the demand that he personally come to San Francisco.
He swore and hung up.
Ten minutes later he called back.
“We’ll do what you said,” he said.
“You’re personally coming?”
“Yes. This better go perfectly. Do you understand?”
The line died.
Rail lit a cigarette, blew smoke and looked into Teffinger’s eyes. “Foca’s afraid that Mun Yin’s going to find a way to get his hands on the painting. He wants to close the deal before that happens. That’s why he doesn’t have an interest in you trying to get the painting all the way to Cuba. That’s why he’s coming here. He wouldn’t be doing that if you hadn’t gotten me in the loop. I might have lost his painting but he still trusts me.” He took a long drag and tapped ashes. “That’s what years and years of building a reputation gets you.”
Teffinger understood.
“So, tomorrow night, then?”
Rail nodded.
“He’s bringing Susan Smith?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the best way to do the exchange with no one getting killed?”
Rail blew smoke.
“Personally if it was me, I’d do it at sea, maybe out in the Bay,” Rail said. “We’ll get each one of you a nice stable rubber dinghy, fourteen feet or so, with an outboard on the back. You can each have night vision goggles. He can verify that you’re alone. You can do the same, plus verify he has the two women. You pull together and you open the painting so he can see it’s the real thing. Then, at the same time, you get into his dingy while he gets into yours. You shove apart and go your separate ways.”
Teffinger worked through the details.
It was as good as anything he could come up with.
“I’ve done a dozen deals like that,” Rail said. “I never had a problem.”
Rail did a double take at the window, said “Bingo,” and mashed the half-smoked butt into the ashtray. Teffinger followed Rail’s eyes behind him just in time to see a red hoodie and a black baseball cap disappear from the window.
He got up and swallowed what was left of his beer.
“I’ll handle this by myself.”
“The hell you will.”
Rail fell into step.
Teffinger didn’t care.
The tiger was out of the cage.
This was the man who stole Kelly Nine out of Teffinger’s bed.
It was the man who tried to steal Del Rey from the fleabag.
It was the man the world didn’t need.
105
Day Ten
July 17
Thursday Night
The red hoodie was already twenty steps up Haight Street by the time Teffinger pushed out of the Dusty Beat. He followed, walking briskly through the city chill, closing the gap while Rail tried to keep up.
Lightning was in his blood.
He knew the feeling.
He knew it only too well.
It was there last week in that one-second freefall just before he unleashed a
deadly blow at Jack Colder’s face. It was also there back at Oscar Benderfield’s house, when the man suddenly sprang at him with a knife. It was there a year ago when he first came face to face with the fact that someone had stolen Kelly Nine right out of his bed.
He quickened the pace.
Then he broke into a trot, a quiet, quiet trot.
Ten steps, that’s how far the gap was now.
Suddenly the man turned.
Teffinger recognized the face.
It was definitely the man who tried to steal Del Rey and, by implication, the man from the blue car who shot a bullet through the 4Runner.
Teffinger charged.
The man squared off, which wasn’t what Teffinger expected. Then he jerked to the left as Teffinger’s momentum kept him going in a straight line. At the same time, he swung at Teffinger’s head with a powerful right fist that landed with the impact of a hammer.
Colors exploded inside Teffinger’s head.
He was on the ground, flat.
Cold concrete sponged up into his clothes and sent an icy chill through his skin and into his bones. He tried to muscle to his feet and managed to get up on one knee. There he balanced precariously for a heartbeat before topping to the side.
He tried to get up again.
His muscles didn’t respond.
A terrible fight was taking place above him.
Teffinger couldn’t get up.
He couldn’t stop the pain in his head.
Then the fighting stopped.
Suddenly iron fingers grabbed his hair and yanked his head off the concrete. A bloody face leaned in. It belonged to Jean-Luc Baxa.
“Lucky for you you’re not the mark,” he said. “Tell Rail I didn’t kill him and that makes us even. The score is settled.”
Then he was gone.
106
Day Eleven
July 18
Friday Morning
Teffinger got out of bed before dawn Friday morning without waking Del Rey, downed two Tylenols and slipped outside for a jog. The air was cold but felt like medicine in his lungs. One major thing was clear from last night, namely that he wasn’t the target. The clarity of that came not only from Jean-Luc Baxa’s words but also from the fact that the man didn’t kill Teffinger when it would have taken only two iotas of effort.