Blake put on a face as if he’d love to cooperate, but couldn’t. “They’ll be lots of attorney-client stuff in there,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I can do. I’ll look through them for you and let you know if anything looks suspicious. I’ll do that this afternoon and call you by the end of the day.”
Teffinger shrugged.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll start like that.”
Five minutes later, just as they were about to break up, Blake Gray’s secretary buzzed on the intercom, apologized for interrupting, and informed Blake that he had an emergency phone call. Blake excused himself, walked over to his desk, picked up the phone and put it to his ear.
As he listened, his face grew serious.
He said nothing.
He only listened.
Then, at the end, he said, “I understand,” and hung up.
When they got to Denver Friday afternoon, Draven dropped Gretchen off at his beat-up Chevy and gave her the keys to it, plus two thousand dollars in cash. Her job this afternoon was to find a cheap furnished place to rent for a month and stock it with food, beer, and Jack Daniels.
Buy clean sheets too.
Draven hated dirty sheets.
Then, in the rental car, he drove up to the cabin and parked a half mile down the road. He snuck up to the structure on foot and found a car parked in front. After jotting down the license plate number, he crept up to the bedroom window and peeked in.
What he saw almost made him vomit.
He jogged back to the car and snaked down the mountain to Denver. On the way his cell phone rang.
“We got another client,” Swofford said.
Draven smiled.
Another client meant another pile of money.
“Details,” he said.
“He wants a specific person,” Swofford said. “She’s a stripper at a club called Cheeks. She goes by the name of Chase but her real name’s Samantha Stamp. Are you getting this?”
Cheeks.
Chase.
Samantha Stamp.
“Yeah, I got it,” Draven said. “The fee’s a hundred for a specific person,” he said.
A reminder.
Just to be absolutely sure there was no confusion.
“I know that and the guy’s already paid. He’s going to call me when he gets to Denver. My suspicion is that we’ll need the woman sometime tomorrow or the day after, so you’ll want to get it in motion. Don’t take her, though, until I give you the word. The guy wants to be sure he knows when that’s going to happen so he can be somewhere public, with an alibi-just in case.”
Draven could care less about that.
He already had a plan how to get the woman.
He was more concerned with being sure he didn’t have to worry about two live ones at the same time.
“We need to clean out the cabin first,” Draven said. “You know I don’t like overlap.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know when you can go back up,” Swofford said. “My guess is it’ll be sometime in the morning, before noon. I don’t see an overlap problem at this point. Remember to not take the woman until I give the go-ahead. Just scope her out and figure out how to do it, for now.”
“Understood.”
As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Gretchen, calling from a payphone. “I got us a really cool place,” she said.
Excitement oozed from her voice.
Draven smiled, picturing her face.
“It’s a house.”
She gave him directions, and thirty minutes later he pulled into a long gravel drive that dead-ended at a small bungalow in an undeveloped area of Jefferson County, on the west side of Highway 93, between Golden and Boulder. The place must have been a farmhouse at one point, say fifty years ago, given the acreage.
Paint peeled off the sides.
No doubt an old lead-based paint.
A wooden fence lay flat and neglected.
Weeds choked the driveway.
When he stepped out of the car, the air smelled like nature and the Colorado sky was clear and blue. He couldn’t hear any traffic at all. The foothills jutted up not more than a couple of miles to the west.
He liked the place immediately.
Gretchen bounded out the door and jumped on him, wrapping her legs around his hips.
“Isn’t it great!” she said. “I only paid for a month, but we can have it longer if we want.”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the front door.
“It’s got a huge bed,” she said. “And I put fresh sheets on it like you wanted. I’ve been waiting all day to try it out.”
“You mean with me?”
She kissed him.
“Yes, silly, with you. Only with you.”
That evening he headed to Cheeks while Gretchen went out to shop for a TV. He told her he was a private investigator and would have to work weird hours. She had no problem with that.
He didn’t like lying to her.
It wasn’t as if he had a choice, though.
Cheeks turned out to be a bustling, high-energy place with lots of grade-B strippers and beer-goggled guys. Draven ordered a Bud Light and hung out at the bar until Chase got called to one of the stages-Stage Number Four, apparently-near the back. Men flocked over so fast that Draven was lucky to get a seat.
And no wonder.
Chase was no ordinary stripper.