Night Lawyers (Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) Read Free Page B

her this afternoon.”
    “Why don’t you hold off?”
    “Why?”
    “Because there’s more to that night than what you saw.”
    “Like what?”
    “I’m still trying to figure it out,” he said. “I’ll make a deal with you. Hold off until I can figure it out. If you do that, I’ll fill you in on the balance.”
    “You’re trying to figure it out?”
    He nodded.
    “So you don’t remember?”
    “Correct.”
    She shrugged.
    “It doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “By my count you had seven beers and seven shots, plus the round that I sent over.”
    “You sent over a round?”
    She smiled.
    “Had to.”
    “Why?”
    “It seemed like the right thing to do,” she said. “If I’d have known you were going to drive drunk and smash into someone’s car I wouldn’t have done it. So how are you going to figure out the rest of the night?”
    “Detect,” he said. “That’s what detectives do.”
    She studied him.
    “My allegiance is with Silke Jopp,” she said. “She’s paying me to do a job and I’m going to do that job. On top of that, a man’s life is in the balance.”
    “If you turn everything over right now, that might be all you ever get,” he said. “Maybe it will end up being enough, but maybe it won’t. If you take my way, you may end up with more. You probably will in fact.”
    She chewed on it.
    “Just hold off for 48 hours,” he added.
    She sipped coffee and studied him over the edge of the cup.
    “How do I know you’ll actually tell me anything?”
    He raked his fingers back with his hair.
    “Even if I don’t, in 48 hours you’ll still have everything you have now. What’s the harm?”
    She looked out at the horizon line.
    “Nice day.”
    “Do we have a deal?”
    She frowned.
    “No.”
     
    They headed down the mountain on red flagstone steps with Neverly in the lead.
    Suddenly she froze.
    Teffinger saw the problem.
    The woman’s foot had come down next to a thick rattlesnake.
    “Don’t move!” he said.
    She said nothing.
    Sweat ran down her face.
    Teffinger walked around the snake, got a stick and waved it gently in front of the reptile’s head until it saw nothing else.
    The body coiled.
    The head came up.
    The tail shook.
    The eyes pointed at Teffinger and away from Neverly.
    “Okay, talk a slow step back,” he said.
    Neverly complied, getting three feet away and then running back up to the deck.
    Teffinger tossed the stick down, backed up and said, “Go away. No one’s going to hurt you.”
    The snake stayed coiled for a few heartbeats and then slithered into the brush.
    “Okay,” Neverly said.
    “Okay what?”
    “Okay, forty-eight hours.”

    6
    Day Two
    June 5
    Monday Afternoon
     
    The call Teffinger knew would come sooner or later came mid-afternoon, after he had sufficient time to sweat. “Seen any good movies lately?” Teffinger recognized the voice as the same one as on the tape, “Preston’s.”
    “Cut to the chase,” Teffinger said. “What do you want?”
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the man said. “We’ll get to all that. First, I want to be sure you understand the full extent of what we have.”
    “I’ve watched it.”
    “Right, I suspect you have,” the man said. “But I want to be sure you appreciate that I didn’t leave after our little fight. You thought I did, but I hung back in the shadows and saw what you did. My girl did too. We both saw it.”
    “Saw what?”
    “Don’t play games,” the man said.
    “Tell me,” Teffinger said. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
    “We saw what you did, you little shit. You slit the woman’s throat open with that little broken-bottle friend of yours; the same little friend you tried to shove into my face. We saw you throw her body in the back of your little white pickup truck. We saw you take off like a bat out of hell.” A pause then, “Reminds you of the Meatloaf song, doesn’t it?”
    “Bullshit.”
    “Where’d you dump her?”
    “You saw nothing because nothing