Shadow Kill (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (30 page)

The vehicle fishtailed, crossed the centerline, sped up the road for a long ways and slammed face-first into a telephone pole.

Teffinger ran for it.

As he got closer it took the shape of a sedan.

When he got there the driver’s door was wide open.

No one was behind the wheel.

No one was visible in the storm, either running away or on the ground or otherwise. No one was in the back seat.

“Del Rey!”

No one answered.

Teffinger circled the vehicle, searching the ground.

Nothing was there, only black puddles getting further pounded by the weather.

Then he ran.

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty steps past, then something happened. The silhouette of a figure appeared up ahead, not much more than a dark watery blur coming in and out of focus through the storm, but definitely a human. Teffinger ran faster, raising his knees as high as he could given the massive weight of the water on his pants.

The gap closed.

In ten seconds Teffinger would be able to lunge at it.

It took a clearer shape.

It began to look like a woman.

It was Del Rey.

Teffinger slowed.

Suddenly she shouted, “Teffinger, look out!”

He turned.

A large black shape
lunged at him out of the peripheral vision of his left side. A violent kick landed on his forearm. The gun flew out of his grip. He tried to follow it with his eyes but a rock-hard punch hit the side of his head. His feet buckled and his body slammed to the asphalt. Before he could even inhale to get air back into his lungs, weight was on him, a knee pressed him down, then iron fists pounded the back of his head with blow after blow after blow.

They weren’t to subdue him.

They were to kill him.

He twisted, then more, and stronger, and somehow got to his feet.

He stood there, wobbly, starved for air, trying to catch his breath, too weak to swing an arm even one more time.

The other man lunged at him.

Teffinger’s brain turned to hate.

It made him forget the pain.

It made him not care whether he lived or died.

It made him lunge back with every molecule of strength he had left.

89

Day Nine

July 16

Wednesday Night

The Big Kahuna
started life in the 60s as an upscale bar with surfboards on the walls, barmaids in grass skirts and an endless stream of Beach Boys and Jan & Dean spilling out of the speakers. Now it was a faded wave, a dirty lagoon on a not-so-trendy street in a not-so-safe corner of the urban jungle. People still went there, though, and not just the drunks and hookers and the occasional stray, but businessmen and bankers and lawyers and politicians who knew the place from days gone past and wanted to meet off the beaten path.

Leland Everitt’s silver BMW was parked on the street.

Zahara pulled to the curb four or five spaces behind it and killed the engine.

“That’s his car,” she said. “He’s already here.”

Jori-Lee’s watch said 9:48.

The night was dark.

Streetlights were on but the one in front of the bar was broken.

A neon sign said The Big.

Kahuna was dark.

“So now what?”

“Now we split up and take a stroll,” Zahara said. “You take that side of the bar and I’ll take this side, plus the back parking lot. Write down the license plate number of every car on the street, especially the nice ones, and especially any that pull in between now and ten. Don’t let anyone see you. Keep your face hidden.”

“Then what?”

“Then with any luck Leland and the person he’s meeting with will come out of the bar at the same time. Maybe I’ll recognize him—”

“Or her—”

“Right, or her, but I’m not counting on it. We can see what car the mystery person goes to. We’ll already have the number.”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll know who Leland met with.”

“That’s not enough,” Jori-Lee said. “We need to get inside and hear what they say.”

Zahara shook her head.

“There’s no way.”

“Is that a gym bag you have in the backseat?”

“Yes, why?”

Jori-Lee hopped
into the back and unzipped her dress. “I’m changing out of my work clothes,” she said. “What else do you have in here? Sunglasses or a hat or anything like that?”

“Forget it,” Zahara said. “He’ll know it’s you the minute you walk in the door. Just calm down and lay low. I might recognize the person when he shows up. If they came all the way here for a meeting the last thing they’re going to do is talk loud enough for someone around them to overhear what they’re saying. If you walk in there all you’re going to do is blow the whole deal.”

Jori-Lee kept changing.

“When I get inside I’m going to call you,” she said. “Be sure to pick up. Then I’m going to try to get my phone on their table. With any luck you’ll be able to hear what they say.”

“That’s insane.”

“True but insane is all we have.”

“How are you going to get your phone on their table?”

Jori-Lee wrinkled her brow.

“Give me a twenty,” she said.

“What for?”

“To bribe a waitress.”

Zahara hesitated and then pulled out her wallet.

“Here, take a fifty,” she said. “For the record, though, this will never work.”

“We’ll see.”

Zahara cocked her head.

“I’ll tell you what, if you’re actually going to do this, go in the back door. Don’t even go into the bar area itself. See if you can get in contact with a waitress and tell her what to do.”

Jori-Lee nodded.

“See, now you’re starting to think.”

90

Day Nine

July 16

Wednesday Night

A blond
Big Kahuna waitress with red lipstick and a short skirt was not only willing to do whatever it took to earn fifty bucks, but actually showed some creativity. She placed Jori-Lee’s cell phone behind a menu in the booth next to where Leland Everitt was sitting, then managed to spill coke all over his table. Not having a cloth to clean up the mess, she escorted him over to the adjoining booth while profusely apologizing.

Jori-Lee went back the car and listened with Zahara.

Leland occasionally coughed.

The sound was garbled.

At ten o’clock headlights came down the street and a vehicle parallel parked across the street. A man got out and went inside The Big.

Jori-Lee recognized the posture.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Do you know who that is?”

Zahara shook her head.

“That’s Preston Wendell.”

“
The
Preston Wendell?”

“Yes.”

“As in, the Supreme Court justice?”

“No question,” Jori-Lee said. “I’ve spoken to him in the hall a dozen times.”

“Damn.”

Right, damn.

“What’s he doing meeting with Leland Everitt?”

“Hopefully we’ll find out.”

Voices came from the cell phone.

The two men were talking.

What they were talking about, though, was unknown. The phone wasn’t close enough to pick up the conversation. An occasional word came through but only as an island in an ocean of swill.

“Damn it.”

The meeting lasted ten minutes.

The Supreme Court justice left first.

Leland Everitt followed two minutes later.

At Zahara’s place
with white wine in hand, they went through the mysterious
Client X
file retrieved from Leland’s credenza.

To say it was extraordinary would be an understatement.

Although Leland’s client was not identified by name in the papers, it was evident that he was a private investigator with an office somewhere either in D.C. or the surrounding area.

Someone contacted him anonymously and made him an offer.

The offer was to pay him a million dollars in cash.

He, in turn, was to personally kill, or hire someone to kill, a woman by the name of T’amara Alder.

The investigator took the job.

The cash was paid.

The investigator in turned hired a man named Jean-Luc Baxa to kill T’amara Alder. The deed was done Friday night.

The next day, the investigator hired Leland Everitt to find out who hired him. Who was the anonymous voice on the other end of the phone? The question was critical because the investigator felt that he would be eliminated as someone who knew too much. He wanted to know who to watch out for and who to get some dirt on, if possible, as a shield.

Jori-Lee dropped
the file in disgust.

“Nelson Robertson was the voice on the phone. The bastard.”

“So now we have the evidence,” Zahara said.

“Not really.”

“Meaning what?”

Jori-Lee shook her head.

“Meaning this file falls under the attorney-client privilege,” she said. “Even if we made it available to the police or the FBI, they couldn’t use it in a court of law. Nor could they use it to support a search warrant.”

“Yeah, but at least they’d have a lot of facts off the record,” Zahara said. “That would get them sniffing around. Once they do that they’ll come up with evidence on their own.”

Jori-Lee wasn’t impressed.

“We’ll keep it in our back pocket. I want to break this case open with solid evidence, real evidence, the kind of thing you can slap on a wall.”

“You want to be a hero,” Zahara said.

Jori-Lee thought about it.

It was partly true but mostly not.

“What I want is to prove that we have a killer sitting on the Supreme Court and then get his ass off it.” A beat then, “I’ll bet you anything that Leland Everitt is closing in on Robertson as the mystery voice who hired the investigator. That’s why he was so secretly meeting with Preston Wendell tonight. Wendell must know something about Robertson or at least suspect something. He was conveying it to Leland. Wendell’s a good guy. He wouldn’t want a stained judge on the court any more than I would. Way less, in fact.” She took a swallow of wine. “Tomorrow we need to go to work as dumb as dirt. We can’t let anyone onto what we know. Not yet.”

“Agreed.”

“As a footnote we need to figure out who Leland’s client is too, this private investigator,” she said. “He needs to be off the streets. Well at least now I know who I heard on the other end of the phone when T’amara Alder got murdered—Jean-Luc Baxa. He sounds foreign. I wonder who the hell he is.”

Zahara powered up her iPad.

“Let’s find out. You want some more wine?”

91

Day Ten

July 17

Thursday Morning

Whatever sleep came
Wednesday night was intermittent and twisty and anything but deep. Teffinger woke at the first rays of dawn Thursday morning in the Intercontinental, not the fleabag, still needing another four hours of rest but knowing he’d never get it, not even four minutes of it, not with his brain on fire the way it was.

He rolled onto his back.

Del Rey was still alive, next to him, sleeping soundly.

The man escaped into the guts of the weather.

The detective who processed the scene last night, a man named Phil Bates out of the Crimes Against Persons unit, wasn’t too pleased that Teffinger had been laying wait out in storm with a gun. “You were going to kill him? That was the plan?”

“No. The plan was to take him alive.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure,” Teffinger said. “I didn’t know if he’d even show up.”

Bates wasn’t impressed.

“Killing suspects isn’t the way we do things out here,” he said. “That may pass for okay in Denver but it doesn’t here.”

Teffinger argued.

It did no good.

“The other thing we don’t do here is shoot at cars just because we suspect something.”

“That’s all I had time to do, assume the worst and shoot. I hit a tire which is what I was aiming for.”

“Yeah, well, you also hit the trunk and put a bullet through the back window. There could have been a gaggle of nuns in that car.”

“Doubtful.”

“Maybe but it was also possible.”