Dead in Hong Kong (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (2 page)

He shook it.

No response
came
.

“D’Asia!”

She didn’t move.

It was then that he saw a knife sticking out of the woman’s chest. He pulled it out and threw it across the room.

No.

No!

No!

No!

He laid his head on her leg.

Then the lights suddenly turned on.

He looked over and saw d’Asia.

Then he looked at the body. It was an Asian woman, a second Asian woman, with a blond wig, someone he had never seen before.

“WHO IS SHE?” HE ASKED.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have any idea?”

“No,” d’Asia said. “I’ve never seen her before in my life. Obviously she’s a hit woman.

“Was she the one following you?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

The dead woman was about thirty and athletic.
Teffinger
went through her pockets and found both U.S. and Hong Kong currency, but no wallet or identification or car keys or anything else.

“No I.D.,” he said.

D’Asia looked distant and said, “I just killed someone.”

Teffinger
grunted.

“It was self-defense.”

“I don’t want to go to jail.”

“You won’t,”
Teffinger
said. “It was you or her. There’s nothing to worry about. I’m a witness to the whole thing.” He frowned and added, “I was so interested in getting you into bed that I never thought to close the garage door. That’s how she got in.”

The knife was a high-quality weapon with a 6-inch serrated blade and a black composite handle inscribed with red Asian characters.  

“We need to make a report,”
Teffinger
said.

“To who?”

“The Lakewood P.D.,”
Teffinger
said.

“But you’re with Denver, right?”

He nodded.

He was.

“So you won’t be the one investigating?”

“No.”

D’Asia stood up.

Her shirt had blood on it.

“I don’t trust anyone else,” she said. “I only trust you.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

She said nothing.

Instead she stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. When she came out, she had her jeans and T-shirt on. Both were still wet but no longer dripping.

“What are you doing?”
Teffinger
asked.

She kissed him, hard and passionately, then ran down the hall and shouted over her shoulder, “I can’t outrun this. I need to go back to Hong Kong and meet it head on.”

Before he could stop
her, she was out the front door r
unning down the street
, d
isappearing into the storm.

“D’Asia, come back here!”

SHE DIDN
’T COME BACK—not in five minutes, not in ten, not
in
thirty.
Teffinger
reached fo
r the phone six different times to call the Lakewood P.D.
but never dialed. He took a shower, grabbed a Bud Light and watched the storm from behind the wheel of the ’67.

An hour passed.

He drank three more beers.

D’Asia didn’t return.

She wouldn’t.

He knew that now.

Then he realized why he hadn’t reported the incident. It was because he was coming up with a plan. When he realized what it was, it shocked him.

It was dangerous.

It was wrong.

It could end his career.

But he had no choice.

Day Two—August 4

Tuesday Morning

______________

PRARIE DUBOIS DRAGGED her 22-year-old French body out of bed and pulled the curtain back to see what the Parisian morning looked like. The first rays of daylight were just starting to wash the City of Light with a golden patina. A barge moved slowly up the Seine. The sky had a few rough clouds, but not many. She threw on sweatpants and a T-shirt, pulled long blond hair into a ponytail, and headed out for a jog through the cityscape.

The cool morning air felt good in her lungs.

She got into a rhythm and picked up the pace
, d
oing five-minute kilometers, or better.

She tried to not think of Hong Kong, but it had been popping into her thoughts more and more frequently since her father got murdered.

That was o
ne week ago, exactly.

Last Tuesday.

He was s
hot in the back of the head
by a fare, s
omeone who didn’t mind splattering someone else’s brains all over the windshield of a cab for a few measly euros.

HONG KONG.

She had buried the memory at one point, but it came back in the last few days. It happened six months ago, when she was in the middle of her second year of graduate work at the University of Hong Kong.

On a Saturday night, she went clubb
ing; h
er and Ushi.

They wore expensive high heels and skimpy clothes that showed off curvy bodies.

They drank.

They drank some more.

The men started to look good.

Then something happened.

A man walked over, put his arms around her and kissed her like he owned her. He was six foot, with a rough bad-boy look and long black hair. She cocked her arm back to slap him, but before she could, he pulled her onto the dance floor.

What happened next wasn’t clear.

She remembered dancing.

Groping.

Drinking.

Kissing.

Laughing.

She remembered wanting to screw his brains out.

Maybe that happened.

Maybe it didn’t.

She couldn’t remember.

WHAT SHE DID REMEMBER was waking up in a windowless room with a serious headache. She was kept prisoner there for two weeks. She had contact with only one person, a man who always wore a black hood. She had no idea who he was, but he wasn’t the bad-boy from the club.

His body was different.

His voice was different.

His everything was different.

She wasn’t mistreated.

Then one day, out of the blue, she was released.

It came with a
warning
, a crystal clear warning;
get out of Hong Kong by midnight and never tell anyone what happened.

SHE FLEW OUT OF HONG KONG at 11:45 p.m. that night and returned to Paris.

She told no one, n
ot even her father, who quit his job at Musee d’Orsay four months after she got back and became a cab driver. That’s what he was doing last week—driving a cab—when someone put a bullet in the back of his head and took his money.

A hundred euros, max, according to police estimates.

Probably only half that.

TWO HOURS AFTER HER JOG, she was drinking coffee and studying at a sidewalk table on Rue de Montmartra when a woman sat down and said, “I’m Emmanuelle Laurent.”

Prarie studied her, e
xpecting to know her from somewhere.

But she didn’t and said, “Prarie Dubois.”

“I know.”

The woman was a few inches taller and slightly older than Prarie—twenty-six or twenty-seven—with a tight body and a sensuous face built to break hearts. She wore loose khaki pants, a pink tank top and a stylish lig
htweight jacket.

She had n
o makeup.

Long blond cascaded down her back, v
ery sexy
e
ven by Paris standards.

“I’d like to show you something,” Emmanuelle said. Prarie must have had confusion on her face because the woman added, “It’s at Musee d’Orsay.”

Musee d’Orsay?

That was where her father worked for more than twenty years, in the preservation department, before mysteriously quitting two months ago to take a job as a taxi driver. The museum was world renowned for its impressionist paintings. 

Van Gogh.

Renoir.

Degas.

Pissarro.

Monet.

“Why? What’s at Musee d’Orsay?”

“You’ll see,” Emmanuelle said.

Day Two—August 4

Tuesday Morning

______________

KONG LIVED ON AN ISLAND PACKET 35 SAILBOAT that he moored in the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter of Hong Kong and only took out when the water got mean enough to kill him. The rest of the time, the bluewater vessel remained in the marina.

The boat was the perfect size.

It was big enough to accommodate his six-foot frame.

It was small enough that he could handle it on his own.

It was built for screwing.

It was also built for heavy weather, meaning it could roll completely over and self-right without taking on water. He knew, because he had done exactly that, twice. The second time snapped the mast.
That was a
n inconvenience
,
a story for telling at
th
e club but not much
more.

The boat was nice but
it
wasn’t his passion.

Money was his passion, m
oney and women.

He was built to excel at both. At 31-years-old, he owned a perfect body ripped with muscles, hazel eyes, flawless skin, a face that turned women into disposable pleasures, and thick black rock star hair that hung past his shoulders.

He had money, even by Hong Kong standards.

He didn’t flaunt it and, in fact, worked hard at keeping a low profile. Men noticed him, but women noticed him even more. For most, he was nothing more than a fleeting vision, eye candy passing by on the street. For others, however, for the perfect ones, the special one percent, he actually became candy that he let them taste.

Some were single.

Some were married.

He didn’t discriminate.

He was born and raised in Shanghai, but stayed on the island after getting a graduate degree at the University of Hong Kong in economics—a degree that he had never used and never would, but was still glad he had. He fluently spoke both of Hong Kong’s official languages—Cantonese and English—but also got by in Spanish and Japanese.

HE WOKE UP shortly before noon on Tuesday
, s
tretched
, s
lipped into trunks, headed topside and dove into the water. Then he swam out of the marina and straight out into Victoria Harbour for half an hour before turning around and heading back. Mid-afternoon, his phone rang and a surprise voice came through.

“It’s me,” the woman said.

The voice belonged to his blackmailer.

Kong’s chest tightened.

“We’re done,” he said. “No more.”

“I wish we were,” she said. “I don’t like this any more than you do.”

Kong rang his fingers through his hair.

“Here are your choices,” he said. “Hang up the phone, right now, and live; or wish you had, later, when I find out who you are—which I will.”

The woman chuckled.

“Same amount and same place as before,” she said. “Five o’clock tomorrow.”

The line went dead.

Kong closed the phone and threw it at a seagull with all his might.

The bird’s skull shattered with a pop.

Day Two—August 4

Tuesday Morning

______________

TUESDAY MORNING,
TEFFINGER
’S ALARM CLOCK jerked him out of a fitful sleep with all the subtleness of a freight train. He took a three-mile jog, showered and got to the office just as dawn broke, well before anyone else. Working was impossible. Instead, he paced next to the windows, propped himself up with caffeine and nervously second-guessed the sanity of everything he did last night.

He may well have ruined his life.

Time would tell.

The only certain thing was that he couldn’t go back and undo it.

Sydney
Heatherwood
showed up shortly after seven, wearing a white blouse that looked extra crisp against her African American skin.
Teffinger
personally stole her out of the vice unit a year ago. Although she was only twenty-seven and still the newbie of the homicide unit, she had already cut her teeth on some of Denver’s worst.