Shadow Kill (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (23 page)

She smiled.

It was slightly crooked, very sexy.

“Yes.”

“Good, because I usually don’t talk that long.”

“I can tell.”

The food arrived.

It was in bags.

Dandan grabbed hers, stood up and said, “Let’s go.”

“We’re not eating here?”

“No, we’ll eat in the car. I have something to show you.”

In the alley behind the building Dandan slid behind the wheel of a red 911 Porsche Targa of the mid-80s era, back when the styling was still exceptional. She hiked up her skirt far enough to wedge the bag between her thighs.

“You’re a car girl,” Teffinger said. “I like that.”

“I hate cars, especially this one. Put your seat belt on.”

68

Day Eight

July 15

Tuesday Noon

They headed north
out of Chinatown with something always in their way, either the hundredth red light or a car or a construction crew or a diesel-stained bus or some hit-me-and-I’ll-sue-you fool crisscrossing this way or that. Dandan worked the clutch and the bag of eggrolls, not saying much, rarely getting out of second gear. Teffinger tried to keep his eyes on the cityscape and off Dandan’s thighs, succeeding most of the time.

“I’m still deciding if I’m going to do this,” Dandan said.

“Do what?”

“Show you something,” she said. “It’s against my better judgment.”

“It’s too late now,” Teffinger said. “You already bought me eggrolls.”

She looked over.

The corner of her mouth turned up ever so slightly.

“Good point.”

“There’s no turning back,” he said, “not with the eggroll rule in effect.”

She smiled.

“I get trapped in it every time.”

“It’s a sneaky thing.”

They crossed
the Golden Gate Bridge, wound through the tourist-soaked shoreline of Sausalito and killed the engine in the parking lot of a large marina on the north end of town. Five minutes later they stepped aboard a 30-foot Island Packard sailboat at the far end of the third dock.

“Yours?” Teffinger said.

“Yes.”

“I never pictured you as a sailor.”

“Good because I’m not,” she said. “I hate boats.”

She inserted a key into a formidable padlock at the cabin door, led Teffinger down teak stairs into the guts of the vessel, closed the door behind them and turned on the lights. She unlocked a storage door near the floor under the front berth, pulled out sail repair material, then reached farther in and retrieved an aluminum case, 2-feet by 3-feet and half a foot thick.

It was heavy.

She wrestled it onto the galley table.

“What do you know about art?” she said.

“Actually I paint a little.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

“Plein air landscapes, mostly.”

“Are you any good?”

“I’m in a few galleries.”

“Well, you may find this interesting, then.”

She opened the top. Inside was a painting, an impressionist painting depicting a black sailboat near a beach. Heavy rolling clouds filled the sky, mimicking in size, tone and scale the waves below. Several black-silhouetted figures in a wavy foreground field were doing something, possibly approaching the boat or coming from it. The piece was set in warm tones.

“This is called
View of the Sea at Scheveningen.
It was painted in 1882 by a man named Vincent Van Gogh,” she said. “You’ve heard of him, I assume.”

Teffinger recognized the style.

“Are you saying this is an original?”

She nodded.

“It was stolen in 2002 out of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, together with another one of his paintings called
Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen.
If you believe the Internet, the two together are worth over 30 million dollars. This one, in my option, is the much nicer of the two.”

“So what’s it doing here in your boat?”

“That’s a long story, a long dangerous story.”

“You’ve officially gone from having my curiosity to having my full attention,” he said.

“The story relates to Kelly Nine.”

Teffinger nodded his head towards the painting.

“Is this why she’s dead?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Then why do I care about this?”

She exhaled, unscrewed a bottle of white wine, filled two plastic glasses half way and handed one to Teffinger. He was more in the mood for beer but took a sip.

It wasn’t bad.

“You’re still going to be confidential, right?” Dandan said.

“Nothing’s changed.”

She studied him, looking for lies or exaggerations. She must not have found any because she said, “Okay then, here’s what’s going on.”

69

Day Eight

July 15

Tuesday Night

Zahara Knox,
the associate who so darkly warned Jori-Lee to stay away from Overton & Frey, lived on the 18
^th
floor of a contemporary high-rise smack in the heart of the matter. Tuesday night after dark, Jori-Lee knocked unannounced and unexpected on the woman’s door. Zahara answered dressed in jeans and a T, with a glass of white wine in her left hand, not her first. Her look of surprise fell off quickly.

“Come in.”

“Thanks.”

The interior wasn’t overwhelming by square footage, probably less than a thousand, but was open, ultra-contemporary and played to a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that had a view all the way to London. A lady-day 33 LP spun on an honest-to-God record player, weaving a scratchy lament of love gone wrong. The vinyl had a slight warp as it spun. The needle rocked up and down as if was riding an ocean swell.

Zahara topped her glass off, poured one for Jori-Lee and said, “You’re still thinking about Overton & Frey but what I said has you spooked. You want to know why I said what I said.”

Jori-Lee took a sip.

“Something like that.”

“Sorry but I can’t help you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know you.”

“Whatever you tell me remains between us,” Jori-Lee said. “I promise you that.”

The woman wasn’t impressed.

“Like I said, I can’t help you more that I already have.”

Jori-Lee looked around.

“Nice place.”

“It’s a golden handcuff,” Zahara said. “My advice is to not put one on.”

Jori-Lee hesitated, not sure she should say was she was about to, and then said it. “The warning you’re giving me relates to Leland Everitt, doesn’t it?”

The woman’s lips said nothing.

Her expression said plenty.

“You know something about him,” Jori-Lee added. “What is it? What exactly is he up to?”

Zahara stood up, took the wine out of Jori-Lee’s hand and said, “It’s time for you to leave.”

Jori-Lee walked to the door, turned halfway through and said over her shoulder, “See you at the firm tomorrow. Thanks for the wine.”

Then she was gone.

Outside
in the car she told Sanders, “The woman’s scared to death to talk but whatever she knows definitely relates to Leland Everitt. If we can get what she knows, I think we’ll be in a position to take him down.”

“Together with Robertson?”

She nodded.

“He made his bed, so screw him.”

Sanders exhaled.

“Will Zahara open up?”

Jori-Lee nodded.

“Eventually,” she said. “She liked me well enough even at the first to give me a warning, albeit cryptic. Whatever it is she has inside her, it’s dying to get out. Where else, if not to me? I just need to get her confidence level up that I won’t betray her trust.”

“That will take time.”

“It better not. That’s something we don’t have.”

70

Day Eight

July 15

Tuesday Noon

Okay then,
here’s what’s going on.
With that, there in the wooden guts of the Island Packard with an original Van Gogh sitting on the galley table, Dandan took a sip of wine and said, “Kelly met a man.”

“Rail—” Teffinger said.

Dandan nodded.

“Yes, Rail. She’d been with him for three or four weeks before she told me about him, although there was a spring in her step that hadn’t been there before so I already knew something was going on. Anyway, he made her promise to never tell anyone about him. He told her he was involved in black market art. INTERPOL was after him as were a number of more nefarious characters relating to transactions that went less than perfectly smooth. To prove what he did, he showed her the Van Gogh. She did research on it and confirmed that it really was an original that had been stolen in 2002 and had never been recovered. It was on a number of stolen art registries.”

“So she didn’t care that he was a criminal?”

“No.”

“That’s not like her.”

“To tell you the truth, I think she actually liked it,” Dandan said. “She wasn’t herself doing anything illegal but suddenly had this portal into a whole different world that hardly anyone ever saw. He gave her details.”

“Did she ever tell them to you?”

“No.”

Teffinger took a sip of wine.

“So what did she tell you, exactly?”

“She told me about him, she told me about the Van Gogh, she told me I was the only one who knew and that I had to promise to keep her trust.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, I told no one,” she said. “You’re the first person I’ve breathed a word of this to. Anyway, I was worried about her, getting in with a criminal and all that. The whole thing just sounded so dangerous to me. When I asked her where the guy lived, she didn’t know. She said he didn’t ever want her over there in case someone came for him. He didn’t want her to ever get caught in the crosshairs. They usually only met at her apartment. He would crisscross all over town and be absolutely sure no one was following him when he came over. After dark they’d go for walks but they’d stay in the shadows. They never went out to restaurants or bars or anything like that.”

“Big spender—”

“Money wasn’t the issue,” Dandan said. “She loved the man.”

Teffinger wrinkled his face.

“Goddamn it.”

“I decided to do a little snooping around on Kelly’s behalf,” Dandan said. “One night when he left her apartment, I followed him.”

“Did Kelly know?”

“No, she knew nothing. He led me to a shipyard way down south, past the airport. Hundreds of boats of all sizes were propped up on blocks either being stored or renovated or gutted for parts or whatever. It must have been okay to sleep over on them because a few people were, although not many. It turned out that Rail was staying on an old rusty tugboat that looked like it hadn’t seen water in twenty years. It didn’t totally shock me given what Kelly said about INTERPOL being after him. It was actually a good hideaway with a lot of escape routes.”

“Did you tell Kelly?”

“No,” Dandan said. “A week later, though, she mentioned that Rail was coming over that night. I took the opportunity to pay a visit to his place.”

______

Dressed
in a black hoodie and even blacker jeans, Dandan parked the 911 a full half mile from the shipyard and closed the distance on foot under a dark moonless sky. The wind was strong, rattling and whistling everything stupid enough to be in its path. Dandan hunched against it with the hood up and her hands in the pockets.

She hated cold.

She hated wind.

She hated dark places.

She hated grungy places.

She pressed forward with increasingly faster steps, determined to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible now that she was actually going through with it. She didn’t know what she expected to find.

Her blood raced.

She worked her way between ghostly hulls and menacing shapes, memorizing each one, focused on keeping her bearings and sense of direction. The wind smelled like rust and diesel and dried seaweed and abandonment. The ground was rock and gravel and scraps and rutty dirt, good enough to twist an ankle if she let it.

Rail’s vessel was dark and dead when she got to it.

She threw a rock against the hull.

No one came out.

No voices shouted.

Propped against the side was a tall wobbly ladder made of two-by-fours. She pulled a flashlight out of her back pocket, ran the beam quickly up and down the wood and then killed it. She climbed up slowly in the dark, testing each rung and working to not get splinters.