62
Day Eight—June 18
Monday Night
LONDON GOT OFF WORK at 8:00 p.m. to an ominous rainy sky that turned her to a sloppy mess by the time she got halfway to the bus stop. The stop had no shelter so she hugged a building until the RTD came. She put her bike on the front rack as fast as she could and took a seat directly behind the driver, where the weirdoes were less likely to bother her.
Water dripped from her head.
A chill worked its way into her bones as Colfax rolled by.
When she got off at Simms, the bus driver must have forgotten about her bike, because he pulled away with it still in the rack.
Great.
Her apartment was more than two miles up the road, meaning a long walk, in rain no less, not to mention that she had been on her feet all day.
She hung around the stop for a few moments to see if the driver figured out what he did and was swinging back, but no bus came and she headed down the street on foot.
Halfway home her cell phone rang.
The voice of the V&B attorney, Sarah Woodward, came through. “We just got some news and I thought you should know about it right away.”
“What kind of news?”
“Mark Remington hung himself in his hotel room,” she said.
“He did?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know yet for certain,” Sarah said. “The word is that he didn’t leave a note.”
London pondered it.
Then she said, “He knew it was all coming his way and took the easy way out.”
“Maybe,” Sarah said. “I’m hoping to have more information tomorrow.”
WHEN LONDON CALLED VENTA and told her the news, Venta said, “I see three possibilities. He’s actually still alive and the whole thing is a charade so that V&B can say it tried to investigate but couldn’t. Or V&B killed him so he couldn’t drag them down. Or he really did kill himself because, as you say, it was all about to hit the fan.”
“So how do we figure out which it is?” London questioned.
A pause.
“I don’t know right at this second,” she said. “I’ll have a better handle on it by the morning. Let’s plan on meeting for coffee.”
London almost hung up but said, “Are you still there?”
Venta was.
“If he was murdered, you might be next,” London said.
Venta already knew that.
“Or you,” she said. “I’m staying at Teffinger’s tonight. Maybe you should join us. In fact, I’m going to insist on it. It’s time you two met anyway. So pack your stuff because I’m swinging over to get you in a half hour.”
“You don’t think Teffinger will mind?”
“No, he won’t. But I’ll give him an extra good blowjob just to make sure.”
London groaned.
“That’s more information than I need.”
TWO MINUTES LATER MICHAEL MONTANA CALLED. London recognized the incoming number and almost didn’t answer but changed her mind at the last second.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked.
“You don’t know?”
“No. Know what?”
She took a moment to collect her thoughts and said, “Look, I’m sorry about this morning. I sort of had a heat-of-battle thing going on. I took it out on you when I shouldn’t have.”
“I want to see you,” he said.
“Tonight’s bad,” she said. “How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s too long.”
She chuckled.
“How am I supposed to survive until then?” he added.
“See you tomorrow,” she said.
A BLOCK LATER SHE CALLED HIM BACK. “Tonight’s bad because I can’t be alone. I’m going to spend it with friends.”
“Spend it with me.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“And I never will if you don’t give me a chance.”
A pause.
“Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She hung up, called Venta and said, “Thanks for the invite, but I’m going to spend the night at Michael Montana’s.”
Silence.
“Okay, but remember, he could be the enemy.”
“If he kills me, you’ll be the first person I tell.”
“I’m serious.”
63
Day Eight—June 18
Monday Night
THE 1967 CORVETTE IS THE COOLEST CAR ever made, hands down, end of story, period. Teffinger owned a red one, convertible, numbers matching, second flight. True, it was a small-block and paled by comparison to its older sibling the 454, but it still had 300 horses under the hood and turned heads with the best of them.
He kept it in the garage with the top down and the front end facing the street.
Shortly after dark it rained, light at first, then heavy, then downright mean.
Perfect.
Venta followed him around the house, sipping a glass of wine, as he closed windows.
“Nice ass,” she said.
“Sydney says I don’t have an ass. She says I just have a place where an ass is supposed to be.” He grabbed her hand. “Come on.”
“Where we going?”
“To the all-time best place in the world.”
He swung by the kitchen, grabbed a cold Bud Light, and headed for the garage. They ended up sitting in the Corvette with the garage door open, watching the storm through the windshield. “This is my favorite thing,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Favorite?” she asked.
“Okay, second favorite.”
“It’s dark,” she said.
True.
They could hardly see each other.
The rain pummeled straight down.
Thunder crackled over Green Mountain, rolled over their heads and got swallowed up to the east.
Teffinger took a long drink of beer.
Damn good stuff.
“I have to admit, this is sort of cool,” Venta said.
“If this doesn’t recharge your batteries, nothing will.”
“So are your batteries getting recharged?”
“Yes they are.”
“Good,” she said. “You’re going to need the energy later.”
HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO EASE GRACEFULLY into the next subject so he just went for it. “Hey, do you remember the night we met, and you waited in the truck while I responded to that pilot who got stabbed in the back?”
Yes she did.
“The guy’s name was Alan English,” he said.
Right.
He mentioned that once before.
“It turns out that he was in Bangkok,” Teffinger said. “In fact, he was just getting back from there on the night he got killed.”
“Small world,” she said.
“I wonder if you’d recognize him if you saw him,” Teffinger said.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe he was someone who went to that place where you were kept,” Teffinger said.
“You think?”
Teffinger shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you have a picture of him?”
He did, in his laptop.
“Let’s have a look,” she said.
TEFFINGER SWALLOWED THE LAST OF THE BEER, crushed the can in his hand and opened the door. “Be right back,” he said. “You want some more wine?”
She handed him the glass and said, “Go ahead and top me off if you want.”
Teffinger returned two minutes later with fresh liquor and the laptop. He fired it up and showed her several pictures of Alan English. She studied them and said, “If he ever went to that place, I never saw him.”
Teffinger exhaled and found no lies in her voice.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she said. “We didn’t ge
t that many Americans. Plus everyone who spoke English is etched in my mind.”
Teffinger closed the laptop, twisted around and set it in the back, feeling better than he had all day.
Lightning flashed, directly overhead, followed immediately by an explosion so powerful that it brought them both out of their seats.
64
Day Eight—June 18
Monday Night
THE AUDI’S WIPERS SWISHED BACK AND FORTH at high speed but still couldn’t keep the slop off the windshield. Jekker drove with both hands on the wheel, forward in the seat, as he twisted farther and farther into the mountains on a pitch-black road.
The radio was off.
Tessa Blake was in the trunk, alive but not for long.
Up ahead he saw something weird on the road.
Red lights.
They looked like taillights.
But they didn’t hang together like the lights of a car. They weaved back and forth, coming closer to one another and then drifting apart. Then he figured it out.
They were motorcycles, three of them, caught in the storm and going slow. What idiots. Jekker had ridden cycles in the rain before. The problem wasn’t so much the loss of traction as the loss of vision. In a storm this violent and this dark, it’s a wonder that the idiots could even see the road.
They had to be drunk.
Or stupid.
Or both.
They disappeared to the right around a twist in the road, then reappeared, then disappeared to the left, then reappeared. Jekker took his eyes off the road long enough to look at the speedometer.
35.
The motorcycles couldn’t be doing more than 25.
Naturally.
Jekker would either be stuck behind them for miles or he’d have to pass. Passing would be problematic at best. They were riding single file, well separated. The closer he got the more he could tell that they were all over the road.
Bunch of damn drunks.
He had to be careful to not clip one of them.
That’s all he needed with Tessa Blake in the trunk.
He pictured three leather-clad freaks on Harleys, maybe even part of a gang. The cycles had to be Harleys instead of crotch-rockets, because kids rode crotch-rockets and they’d be too smart to be out in a mess like this. No, the bikes would be Harleys and the riders thought they were bulletproof.
Jekker closed the gap even farther.
Then, damn!
A forth bike appeared from out of nowhere, directly in front of him.
It had no taillight.
No headlight.
No nothing.
A Harley.
Jekker slammed on the brakes and brought every muscle in his leg to bear down. The driver turned and waved an arm, frantic.
It was a woman wearing a red bandana.
Then he skidded into her, hard, directly on the back wheel.
The bike flew to the right.
The woman came over the hood, hit the Audi’s windshield and disappeared over the top of the car.
The Audi slid to a stop.
JEKKER TWISTED AROUND TO FIND THE WOMAN but saw only darkness. He powered down the window but heard nothing except the pounding of the rain on the asphalt. He opened the door, ran to the back of the vehicle and saw nothing.
He shouted into the blackness, “Are you okay?”
No response came.
“I said are you okay?”
No response.
He looked up the road.
The three motorcycles were turning around and doubling back.
HE JUMPED BACK INTO THE CAR and slammed the door. Then he jammed the stick into first gear, made a violent turn to the left into the opposing lane, stopped just short of running off the road, backed up, and then turned again to the left, now pointed back the way he came.
He floored it.
A quick glance in the rearview mirror showed three headlights approaching fast. When he brought his eyes back to the road he couldn’t believe what he saw.
The woman was directly in front of him on the ground, broken and trying frantically to crawl out of his way.
She waved her arm.
Total fear gripped her face.
Before Jekker could react, the Audi pounded into the woman and forced her underneath.
She got hung up on something under the engine and dragged for a hundred yards, maybe more, then disappeared out the back end.
65
Day Nine—June 19
Tuesday Morning
LONDON ROLLED OVER IN BED and drifted out of sleep just far enough to register that the mattress was firmer than usual and that someone was taking a shower. She opened her eyes to find herself in a strange dark bedroom. Two heartbeats later she remembered where she was.
She recalled the sex, the incredible sex, the rock star sex, so vivid she could still taste it.
She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms above her head, feeling more like a complete person than she had for a long time. She had let herself go without someone else in her life for too long and now realized what a huge mistake that had been.
Michael Montana walked out of the bathroom with wet hair and a towel around his waist, trying to figure out if she was awake.
“Hey there,” she said.
“Hey there back.”
When he walked over, London grabbed his towel and pulled it down. He looked just as good as she remembered. Michael must have read her mind because he said, “I have an eight o’clock meeting.”
“Too bad because you’re going to be late.”
She licked him until he got hard.
Then the rock star took her.
Wildly.
Like an animal.
Afterwards, while throwing on clothes at light speed, he said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why?”
“Because now I’m addicted.”
WHEN LONDON GOT OUT OF THE SHOWER Michael was already gone. A full pot of coffee waited for her in the kitchen. Next to it was a note: “I mean it—addicted! I’ll call you later. PS—If you snoop around, don’t look in the bottom drawer of my bedroom dresser, whatever you do.”
She poured a cup of coffee, stirred in a touch of skim milk, and sipped it as she walked into the bedroom.
Delicious.
Banana-nut.
Nice and hot.
She almost set the cup on the top of the bedroom dresser but realized it might leave a mark. So she set it on a paperback book and pulled out the bottom drawer. It was empty except for a pair of keys and another note: These fit the Jeep. Enjoy.
She walked to the front window and looked outside.
A white Wrangler with a black hardtop sat in the driveway.
Cool.
She resisted the urge to snoop around, drank one more cup of coffee as she read the paper and then got in the Jeep and headed home.
AFTER FULL DISCLOSURE, Rebecca Vampire’s sister immediately and energetically gave London the go-ahead to give Rebecca’s name to Sarah Woodward.
Then London called Sarah at V&B and told her.
Rebecca Vampire.
“Good,” Sarah said. “Email over everything you have on her.”
London hesitated and then said, “Okay.”
Sarah said thanks and indicated that she had no further news about Mark Remington’s suicide at this point. But she added, “We hired a Bangkok P.I. to sniff around and see if he could find the place where Venta had been taken. He had heard rumors about such a place. He had also heard that it was somehow connected to a man named Niran Thung. Now do you want to hear something really interesting?”
“Absolutely,” London said.
“This Thung guy is the brother of a lawyer named Aran Thung,” Sarah said. “And Aran Thung isn’t just any lawyer. He runs one of the most influential firms in Thailand, by which I mean that he has lots of political clout and business clout. He’s the kind of man who could persuade people to look the other way if something bad was happening.
”
“Damn,” London sad.
“Major damn,” Sarah said. “Now do want to hear something else that’s really freaky?”
“Shoot.”
“The name of Aran Thung’s firm is Thung, Manap and Deringer, Ltd., which probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but here comes the freaky part. They have a branch office right here in good old Denver, USA. In the Republic Plaza Building to be exact.”
“So you think they’re connected to Venta’s abduction?”
“I don’t know if I’m ready to jump that far yet, but they’re the most prominent blip on the radar screen right now, that’s for damn sure,” Sarah said.
66
Day Nine—June 19
Tuesday Morning
AT DAYBREAK TUESDAY MORNING, Teffinger pulled in front of the for-sale house and killed the engine. He unscrewed a thermos of coffee and topped off a half-filled disposable cup. Then he walked around the side of the house on squishy grass to the backyard and stood next to the spot where Samantha Rickenbacker died. He closed his eyes and pictured her lying there, with a broken neck that left her head twisted at a disturbing angle.
He spotted a dry area on the concrete patio where he sat down and leaned against the house with his legs stretched out.
A slight morning chill still hung in the air. Robins were already hopping around in the grass, stalking insects. A dog barked nonstop, a block or two away, but still annoying. A couple of clouds hung in the sky from the storm last night, but not many. The early morning sun painted them yellow.
This is where Samantha Rickenbacker died.
And where Tessa Blake disappeared.
Last Tuesday.
One week ago.
There was a time, early in his career as a detective, when he went back to the murder scene of every unsolved case on the one-week anniversary of the event.
As a reminder.
As an inconvenience.
As a time to reflect.
As an opportunity to remind himself that he had not yet done the job.
But in the last three years, after he got promoted to the head of the homicide unit, he hadn’t gone back once. In his defense, he didn’t have time—at least that’s what he told himself. But now, sitting here and watching the day start, he realized that maybe there was something deeper at work. Maybe he was getting jaded. Maybe he was becoming like some of the older detectives on the force.
Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) Page 18
