Caribbean Hustle (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) (2 page)

“I was able to figure out that he was in Denver. I flew here Tuesday. Yesterday morning I kept the building under surveillance until a blond with a yellow purse showed up. I intercepted her and asked her if she was wearing a white skirt and white blouse on Monday. She said she was. I told her she was being stalked. You know the rest.”

“Interesting.”

She tightened her brow.

“You don’t believe me.”

Teffinger shifted his feet.

“Do you still have your plane ticket?”

She pulled it out of her purse.

It was legitimate, a one-way ticket for Kovi-Ke Gray from Jamaica to New York and a second from New York to Denver. She also had registration papers for the Sheraton, checking in Tuesday night.

He handed them back.

“Where were you Monday when you had the vision?”

“Jamaica. Underwater, diving. I own a dive shop in Montego Bay called the Ugly Tuna. I was escorting four divers when the vision came. We were in the Throne Room, actually.”

“What’s that?”

“The Throne Room? It’s an underwater cavern about sixty-five feet down. The walls are covered with yellow sponges and coral. You get to it through a crack in the reef about eight feet wide. There’s a large elephant ear sponge on the bottom that looks like a throne.”

Teffinger pictured it and winced.

“Sounds claustrophobic.”

“It’s not for everyone. You need to be wired for it, which is why I usually take it, that and the Widowmaker’s Cave, where you enter eighty feet down and then come up and out through a ten foot wide chimney. Or you can go the other direction, although that’s not my preference. I have other divers who work for me that primarily only take groups to the City that Sank.”

“Which is what?”

“You’re not a diver, are you?”

“Not exactly.”

“The City that Sank is the old Port Royal,” she said. “It used to be a pirate hub way back in the day, frequented by the likes of Anne Bonney and Mary Read. Pirates congregated there from as far away as Madagascar. In 1692 an earthquake destroyed the city and caused about two-thirds of it to sink into the sea, including several pirate ships. It’s a relatively open dive if you want it to be, so you don’t have to be as experienced to do it. It’s my bread and butter.”

“So you have people who work for you?”

“We have three boats and several dive leaders,” she said. “We’re in negotiations with the government to harvest the pirate ships I told you about.”

“So, archeological work?”

“If it pans out.”

The sunshine hammered down.

“I need coffee,” he said. “You want some?” She hesitated. “Don’t worry about Station. She won’t be out for at least a couple of hours.”

5

Day Two

June 5

Thursday Morning

They ended up down at the BNSF switchyard, sitting on the tailgate of his Tundra with a thermos of coffee and disposable cups in hand. The clanging of couplers and the power of the engines were their wind chimes. Teffinger pointed to a nearby building, an abandoned, boarded-up four-story brick job, and said, “A guy named Tarzan used to live there.”

“Who was he?”

“A guy with ambition, but not the right kind. More the kind that gets you dead.”

“He’s dead?”

“No but he will be someday. I like to come here now and then to remind myself he’s still walking the earth.” He took a long sip and said, “So how do you know this guy’s a killer? Have you seen him actually kill anyone?”

“No but I’ve seen his handiwork.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

She retreated in thought.

Her face grew tense.

“A woman was lying on the ground on her back,” she said. “She wasn’t moving. Her stomach was exposed and he was staring at it—meaning I was staring at it through his eyes. It wasn’t moving, the way it would be if she were breathing. It was totally and absolutely still.”

“So she looked dead.”

“No, not looked,
was
,” she said. “What happened next is that he wrote something on a piece of paper. I saw his hands in front of him as if they were my own. They were wearing latex gloves.”

“What’d he write? Did you see?”

“Yes. He was using a pencil. He wrote,
16 Weeks.
He did it in block lettering, not his normal handwriting, real slow, as if forcing himself to not use his usual writing. What happened next is the freaky part.”

“Why, what happened?”

“He folded the paper until it was only about two inches long,” she said. “Then he rolled it up until it was shaped like a cigarette, and he put it inside a glass vial about three inches long. He screwed a cap on. Then he cut a slit in the woman’s stomach and shoved the vial in.” She exhaled. “That’s when my vision stopped.”

“Did you see the victim’s face?”

“No,” she said. “When I’m looking through his eyes I can only see what he sees. It’s not like I’m there next to him and can look around wherever I want. He didn’t look at her face, at least not right then.”

“Tell me about her stomach.”

“It was tight, in good shape. I would say she was under thirty for sure.”

“White?”

She nodded.

“White but tanned.”

“When did this happen?”

“The vision? About a month ago,” she said. “Here’s the funny part though. You asked me before if I see things in real time. When I saw the guy stalking Station on Monday, that was pretty much real time. It came to me shortly before noon, which was about ten Denver time. That’s when Station came to work. The sounds and the picture fit together. The stomach girl, though, I don’t think that was in real time.”

“Why not?”

“Because the visual of her was mixed together with a visual of the inside of a restaurant. It was like I was watching TV and flicking between channels. He couldn’t have been in both places at the same time. I think he was in a restaurant at the time and thinking about what he did at an earlier time.”

“So you were seeing his thoughts?”

She shrugged.

“Yes and no. I was getting the visual part of his thoughts. I never get feelings or emotions or complicated thoughts or what he’s planning or anything like that. What I get is a lot more striped down, like what you’d get from a video camera, meaning visual and audio and that’s it. I think I was picking up the visual part of a memory he was replaying in his mind at a later time.” She cast her eyes on the building where Tarzan lived. “Can we go in there?”

“Why?”

“I’ve never been in a killer’s place.”

Teffinger hopped off the tailgate.

“Sure, why not?”

She followed.

Then they headed for the building.

On the way he said, “How long have you been having these flashes?”

“No long. They started about three months ago.”

“So it’s a recent thing—”

“Relatively.”

“Did something happen in your life around that time?”

“Like what?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t know, something traumatic; did you bump your head or did someone close to you die or something like that?”

She tensed.

Then she said, “No, nothing happened.”

“So they just all of a sudden started?”

“Right.”

6

Day Two

June 5

Thursday Morning

Teffinger rolled a rusty 55-gallon drum under a window, pried plywood off with a piece of rebar, and gained entry to the building. Inside it was quiet with no signs of transient intrusion. Shafts of sunlight punched through dusty air. They took the stairs up to the top floor, which was an airy open space with distressed wooden plank floors, high ceilings and walls of windows, most of which were surprisingly intact.

“This is where Tarzan lived,” he said. “Before he bought the place it was a shoe factory.”

Kovi-Ke approached.

She came close, almost stomach-to-stomach.

“Keep your eyes open,” she said. “Think about Tarzan for a minute. Don’t think of anything else, only him.”

“Why?”

“Please, do it for me.”

Teffinger complied.

At first the images were vague. But as he remembered, they became more visual and burned deeper and deeper into his mind.

Kovi-Ke stepped back.

“You want to kill him,” she said.

“Now you’re reading my mind?”

“No, I’m just looking into your eyes. What I see there is that you want to kill him.”

Teffinger shrugged.

“Maybe.”

“You would, if you got the chance; if you could justify it somehow, you’d do it.”

“Maybe.”

“There are no maybes,” she said. “If you could justify it, if he was escaping or something like that, you’d take him down, you’d do it in a heartbeat and never look back. The world would be a better place.”

“That last part’s true, that’s for sure.”

“So is the first part. It’s okay, I understand.”

“Understand what?”

“The feeling. I wanted to be sure you did too, before I tell you what I’m going to tell you.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Which is, that’s how I feel.”

“About the killer?”

She nodded.

“I don’t want to see through his eyes anymore.”

“Killing someone is never the right answer.”

She came close, with her lips almost touching his. “You’re not in his head. If you were, you’d understand better. But that’s only half of it. The other half is that I’m pretty sure he’s in my head the same way I’m in his.”

“You mean he can see through your eyes?”

She put her arms around his neck.

“Yes, sporadically.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s just a feeling I get,” she said. “It’s like there’s a shadow in my head.” She paused and added, “He’s trying to figure out who I am.”

“Why?”

“So he can kill me.”

She spun off and broke into a dance, an unashamed, hypnotic dance, so entrancing that it filled Teffinger’s eyes and brain and soul with a hunger he’d never felt before.

He wanted her.

There was nothing else in the world, only her.

It made no sense.

She was more wrong for him than almost any woman on earth.

It didn’t matter.

She was like a rock to the head. Smack, there you go, now deal with it, not in ten seconds, now, right now in this nanosecond of your life.

She pulled the baseball hat off, released her ponytail and shook her hair loose. Nothing sexier had ever happened on the face of the earth.

She unbuttoned her shirt and threw it across the room.

Then she took off her bra, waved it over her head and tossed it to Teffinger. He caught it and draped it over his shoulder.

It was his now.

No one else had it, only him.

Then he went to her.

She was waiting for him.

She was waiting for him with every molecule of life in her sinful little body.

7

Day Two

June 5

Thursday Morning

Back at homicide, Teffinger was in trouble and knew it. Kovi-Ke was a sudden drug in his life and he was already addicted. She was a bad drug, one that would kill him; he didn’t know that for sure, but that was his sense. Either way, he didn’t care. He’d die with the taste of her on his tongue and the sins of her legs wrapped around his body.

He headed for the coffee, only to be intercepted by Sydney Heatherwood, the newbie of the department, hand stolen by Teffinger out of vice a year ago. Her mocha African-American skin played well against a crisp white blouse and the tautness of her athletic body couldn’t be denied.

“You look weird,” she said. “You’re up to something.”

He poured milk in a cup, topped it with coffee and took a noisy slurp.

“Do me a favor and pull the Tarzan file.”

She frowned.

“He’s long gone, give it up.”

“Please and thank you.”

“You’re chasing shadows.”

“Actually, the opposite.”

At his desk he dialed Dr. Leigh Sandt, the FBI profiler in Quantico, who actually answered with a live human voice instead of a recorded one. He pulled up an image of a classy fiftyish woman with Tina Turner legs and a wedding ring the size of a small planet.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Teff?”

“Yes. I need a favor.”