BAD
CLIENT
R.J. JAGGER
Praise for the thrillers of
R.J. JAGGER
“The pacing is relentless in this debut, a hard-boiled novel with a shocking ending… The supershort chapters will please those who enjoy a James Patterson-style page-turner.”
Library Journal
“The well-crafted storyline makes this a worthwhile read. Stuffed with gratuitous sex and over-the-top violence, this novel has a riveting plot …”
Kirkus Reviews
“A terrifying, gripping cross between James Patterson and John Grisham. Jagger has created a truly killer thriller.”
J.A. Konrath
“Creative and captivating. It features bold characters, witty dialogue, exotic locations, and non-stop action. The pacing is spot-on, a solid combination of intrigue, suspense and eroticism. A first-rate thriller, this book is damnably hard to put down. It’s a tremendous read.”
ForeWord Magazine
“Verdict: This fast paced book offers fans of commercial thrillers a twisty, action-packed thrill ride.”
Library Journal
“Part of what makes this thriller thrilling is that you sense there to be connections between all the various subplots. The anticipation of their coming together keeps the pages turning.”
Booklist
Every book by R.J. Jagger is a standalone thriller.
Read them in any order.
Nick Teffinger Thrillers
Witness Chase
Bad Client
Lawyer Trap
Pretty Little Lawyer
Attorney’s Run
Never Dead
Client Trap
Ancient Prey
Dead in Hong Kong
A Twist of Sin
Reverse Run
Lawyer Kill
Bryson Wilde Thrillers
The Scroll Lawyers
The Shadow File
A Way With Murder
Decker Trance Thrillers
Alley Lawyer
BAD CLIENT
R.J. Jagger
Thriller Publishing Group, Inc.
Bad Client
Copyright © R.J. Jagger
ISBN 13: 978-1-937888-02-2
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except where permitted by law. This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, businesses, companies, entities, places and events in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons (living or dead), businesses, companies, entities, places or events is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by
Thriller Publishing Group, Inc.
An Imprint of Dark Sky Publishing, Inc.
Golden, CO 80401
Printed in the USA
Chapter One
Last Month - June 15
Wednesday Night
_______________
THE YOUNG WOMAN SHIFTED the half-empty cup of Zinfandel to her left hand, set the cruise control of the car at 105, and dimmed the dashboard lights until the gauges disappeared entirely. With the interior of the vehicle now in total darkness, the black desert nightscape took on an even greater surrealistic edge as the headlights punched through it.
Outside, the dotted white lines of the two-lane road blurred together like cartoon frames and looked like one long string of white. The automobile drifted over the line and she brought it back, shifting her body in search of a more comfortable position.
“Mark your map,” she said, “because we’re officially in the middle of nowhere.”
The man in the passenger seat chuckled, then said, “There goes another one.”
“Another what?”
“Squashed rattlesnake,” he said. Then he laughed as if he’d just heard a joke.
“What?” she questioned, curious.
He shook his head. “I mean, talk about your basic bad luck. Here you are, a rattlesnake, out here in the middle of the desert, and you come to a road. It’s probably the only road you’ll ever see in your entire reptilian life. You go to cross it. It’s going to take you—what?—thirty seconds, maybe? You’re ten seconds into it and then—wham!—the only car within twenty miles flattens your ass.”
She pictured it and smiled. “Just not your day,” she said.
“Apparently not.”
The road ran flat and straight, occasionally rising or falling with the curvature of the desert floor but not bending an inch to the right or the left. The car purred, unchallenged, and even at this speed seemed to still be half asleep.
She brought the cup of wine to her mouth and drained it, feeling the alcohol drop warm and tingly into her stomach.
“It is weird though,” he added. “There you are, one minute everything’s perfect, and the next you’re totally screwed. And you really didn’t do anything, except travel through time for a few seconds, just like you’ve done a gazillion times before.”
She considered it. “There’s a difference between just traveling through time for a few seconds, and traveling through time stupidly for a few seconds. A huge difference.”
“Example,” he said.
“Take that rattlesnake,” she said. “All he had to do was look around a little before he slithered his little ass onto the asphalt.”
“Look around for what?”
“What do you mean, for what?—for cars.”
He laughed. “For cars? Rattlesnakes don’t even have brains. They don’t even know that cars exist.”
She smiled. “Yeah, well, they have enough brains to know they need to be looking around for stuff, all kinds of stuff, is what I’m saying.” She handed him the empty cup. “More, s’il vous plait.”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
The man swallowed what was left in the beer can, his third, and then powered down the passenger window. The desert air immediately rushed into the vehicle, loud and hot and furious, punctuating their speed. He flung the can into the darkness and powered the glass back up as fast as he could.
“Damn hurricane out there,” he said.
Then he twisted around to the back seat, managed to get the top of the cooler up, and pulled out another can of Bud Light for himself, plus the bottle of Zinfandel. Both were ice cold. He poured what was left of the wine bottle into her cup, filling it to the brim, handed it to her, and then powered the window back down just far enough to throw the bottle out.
She took it. “Merci beaucoup.”
They popped in a CD and settled into the ride while the desert rolled by outside, seriously stunning in a video-arcade-game kind of way. Small bushes dotted the landscape, a tribute to Darwinism at its best. Somehow they managed to not only find a way to live out here, but actually thrive.
“You know, you get out here, in a place like this, and it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t even exist,” she said. “I mean, look around. I’ll bet it looked the same exact way a thousand years ago. No people, no buildings, no nothing.”
The man exhaled.
“What?”
“Just the contrast,” he said. “Here, absolutely nothing. A hundred miles from here, more lights than some entire galaxies.”
“Can’t wait,” she said.
He nodded. “I just hope this actually happens,” he said.
“It will.” She exhaled. “It has to.”
HE ROLLED A JOINT and they passed it back and forth until it was gone.
Then he rolled another.
She knew that the smell
would hang in her clothes and probably be noticed when they checked into the hotel later this evening but really didn’t care.
The wine felt good in her gut but the pot would take her to the next level. She could get higher than she was and still have more than enough control to keep the vehicle pointed in a straight line. It wasn’t like they were in the middle of a New York rush hour.
The desert floor rose and fell more now. At times, when the road crested, the vehicle actually lifted as it flew over the crown, making her lighter in her seat.
Time passed and the miles clicked off. Songs came and went. Some they listened to twice, others they couldn’t skip over fast enough.
Then the man had his hand on her leg, just above her knee. “Let’s see what we have up here,” he said, inching it up teasingly.
She bit her lower lip and spread her muscular legs ever so slightly. He hiked up her skimpy cotton skirt, exposing her panties, and ran one finger up and down the inside of her golden thigh.
“Say, Take my panties off,” he told her.
She said it, lifting her ass off the seat as she did.
He slipped them off, briefly waved them like a victory flag, and then tossed them into the back. Then he put a hand on each knee and spread her legs apart as far as they would go. She let him, then left them there.
He went back to running a finger ever so teasingly up and down the inside of her thigh. Then finally, after an eternity, he touched her where it counted, with that magic rhythm of his.
The road went on, perfectly straight.
The heat built up between her thighs and her hips gyrated with a mind of their own, getting the most from his contact.
They crested a hill. Then . . .
They were on the wrong side of the road.
Headlights from another car came directly at them.
There was no time to get back in their lane.
They were going to crash head-on.
She clenched the steering wheel with all her might and stared at the lights. Then, just before impact, she shut her eyes as tight as they would go and screamed . . .
Chapter Two
Day One - July 11
Tuesday Morning
_____________
WITH A MORNING BRAIN THAT STILL WASN’T ready for the world, Jackie Jax, Esq., unlocked the door of her dark three-room law office, stepped inside and flicked on the lights. The familiar décor greeted her like an old friend, a décor described by some as more befitting a sleazy private eye from an old black-and-white TV show—cheap gray metal filing cabinets, a scratched pine desk with about two thousand coffee cup rings, and mismatched furniture that looked like leftovers from rainy-day flea markets.
She wore a sleeveless green cotton shirt, shorts, white socks and white tennis shoes. She also wore a bra, but it was a thin flimsy thing, just enough for some push-up and cupping. She wasn’t in the mood for discomfort today, not to mention it was supposed to be over a hundred again. Not your typical attorney attire, granted. But life is too short to not be comfortable. If someone wanted a stuffed shirt or a pinstriped suit sitting behind the desk, they could take their business down the street.
She really didn’t care.
Of course she had real clothes, a whole closet full, right behind that door over there—all conservative with an expensive hang, more than acceptable for a 29-year-old attorney.
Books covered the east wall from floor to ceiling, many of them law books, but just as many hardbacks and paperbacks. Every book ever written by James Michener, Ayn Rand and John Steinbeck was there somewhere, plus just about every hardback mystery or thriller to hit the NY Times Bestsellers List in the last ten years.
There were no diplomas or awards on the walls; they were all safe and sound in boxes at home, in the basement or garage somewhere. But there were lots of newspaper headlines and articles with her name displayed under glass, albeit in mismatched plastic frames.
She kicked off her tennis shoes and walked over to the coffee machine in her socks. The carpet felt good under her feet. She jiggled the cord to get machine working, and then booted up the computers and printers while it gurgled.
Outside, Denver started to wake up.
HER OFFICE WAS A SECOND-FLOOR WALKUP, above a souvenir shop on the 16th Street Mall in the heart of downtown, not far from the Paramount Café. Shuttle busses ran up and down the street and lots of people were already downtown and on the move. The shuttles were electric now and the smell of diesel didn’t hang in the air anymore. That made the city less city-like, somehow.
She set the alarm clock fifteen minutes early this morning, as usual, so she could spend some time with the vibrator before crawling out of bed. That usually kept her hormones in check until noon. But this morning she fell back asleep and missed the whole thing.
Her thoughts strayed to getting drunk and laid.
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK SHARP, her appointment—longtime friend Stephen Stepper, Esq., the infamous criminal lawyer himself—arrived right on time. He wore a summer-weight Brooks Brothers suit and had his hair in the usual ponytail. He hugged her, handed her a cardboard sign—Will Litigate for Food—and headed over to the coffee machine, looking over his shoulder to get her reaction.
“Thought you might need that,” he said.
She held it at arms length and studied it.
“The lettering needs to be bigger,” she said.
He smiled.
“You need to be able to read it from thirty feet, through a dirty windshield,” she added.
He pondered it, and agreed. “You’re way too much of a free spirit for your own good, you know that I hope.”
“Yeah, but I don’t care.”
“I rest my case.”
TWO MINUTES LATER SHE ENDED UP BEHIND HER DESK, and he in a chair, with an unusually serious look on his face.
“Listen,” he said, “let me tell you why I wanted to see you. By the way, I’m coming to you as a client, not a friend, so turn the meter on and open a file.”
She started to wave him off but he pushed a check for $10,000 across the desk. “That’s a retainer,” he said.
“Stephen, you’re insulting me.”
“This is for me,” he interrupted. “I need this to be formal.”
She left the check where it was and studied him.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
He shifted around and for a moment she thought he was actually going to get up and leave. But he didn’t. Instead, he cleared his throat and said, “It’s pretty simple, really. About two years ago, someone by the name of Mr. Northwest mailed me $5,000 in cash, out of the blue, as a retainer apparently, with a note that he’d be calling me later.”
She picked up a pencil and started jotting down notes.
“Lucky you.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, so I thought. Anyway, time goes on, and then one day I get a call from the mysterious Mr. Northwest. It was mostly light chitchat. In hindsight, he was feeling me out.”
“Oh yeah? About what?”
“Confidentiality, I think.”
“Confidentiality?”
Stephen nodded.
“He was trying to figure out if I was the kind of guy who knows how to keep a client’s secret a secret.” He slurped the coffee and retreated in thought. “I must have passed the test, because the calls started coming quicker and lasting longer. It was becoming more and more apparent that he just wanted someone he could brag to in a confidential setting.”
“Brag to about what?”
Stephen shrugged. “Nothing specific. He was always careful to not give me details. But things were weird enough that I started to tape the conversations.” He pulled a CD out of his briefcase and pushed it across the desk. “I copied them for you, about forty of them.”
Jackie picked it up and twisted it in her hand.
“To this day I don’t know who he is,” Stephen told her. “I don’t know his name—other than Mr. Northwest, which is no doubt a fake. I don’t know his address or
phone number or anything else.”
“So you have a client and don’t know who he is,” Jackie said. “That’s interesting.”
“That’s my question,” Stephen said. “Do I have a client or not? I’ve never taken a cent of the money he sent; it’s still sitting in a trust account. I’ve never formally given him any legal advice, and I don’t know who he is.”
“But you’ve talked to him forty times?”
“Roughly.”
“So what’s the issue Stephen, exactly?”
He twisted a pencil in his fingers. “I want a legal opinion from you as to whether these telephone conversations are within the attorney-client privilege.”
“Because?”
He hesitated. “Because if they’re not, then I’ll know that I have the option to turn them over to the police, if I decide to.”
Jackie couldn’t help but laugh.
“Stephen, this is me. Stop feeding me crap. First of all, you know damn well these conversations are privileged, whether or not you formally take this guy on as a client or not. Just communicating in this type of manner is enough to invoke the privilege, particularly after you took money from the guy. Second, you’d be the last person on the face of the earth to ever give the cops anything.” She leaned towards him. “So stop wasting my time and tell me what’s going on.”
He tilted his head.
“Okay, here’s the deal. I want to have these phone conversations in someone else’s file besides mine. Giving them to you and requesting a legal opinion is one way to do that without breaking the privilege.”
She nodded.
That was true.
He could give them to her because she was as bound to honor the privilege of the communications as he was. She couldn’t show them to anyone any more than he could, even though technically speaking Mr. Northwest wasn’t her client, Stephen was.
Bad Client (Nick Teffinger Thriller) Page 1
