The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver (free ebooks romance novels txt) 📕

“Play it.”

She did. They heard a light, cheerful voice chatting briefly and saying she’d call later. She was outdoors, on a noisy street.

Shaw asked, “Can you send it to me?”

She didn’t understand. “Send . . . ?”

He explained, “You can save a voice mail as a WAV file.”

“A wave?”

“W-A-V. It’s a sound-recording format. You can save it on your phone. Google it. It’s easy to do. Then email the recording to me.” He gave her his address: [email protected].

She said she would.

“I’d like to see her room.”

“She doesn’t have one. She sleeps here—on the pullout.”

“Any personal effects? Papers, computer?”

She waved around the sparsely furnished place. “Most everything of ours is in storage in Mountain View. Where we had the house that was foreclosed.”

“I think I have enough to get started. I’ll need a photo. A better one than you posted online.”

She didn’t have any hard copies but she uploaded one to his phone.

The young woman, with long dark hair, was striking. High cheekbones, broad lips and big eyes, deep brown.

“Has anyone else called about the reward?”

“A couple of people.” Her voice lowered. “They were just assholes. They didn’t know anything. Just making stuff up about her being here or there so they could get the money.”

“That happens. All right. I have other projects going on. But I’ll do what I can.”

She shook his hand warmly. “Thank you, Mr. Shaw.”

“Colter.”

“Thank you. Bless you.” She touched the silver crucifix at her throat. Then said brightly, “It’s more now.”

“More?”

“What I can offer. I looked at the GoFundMe page an hour ago. People’ve contributed another $234. And I’m praying that there’ll be more.”

Shaw said, “Let’s find her first. We’ll worry about that later.”

21

Never be blunt when subtle will do . . .

Colter Shaw was adept at guile. He liked outthinking the criminals he was pursuing, liked strategizing against the geography, the elements, the forces that conspired to keep him from finding a missing person.

But sometimes you just had to throw clever to the wind and go for it.

Blunt . . .

When he stepped out onto the pungent street in front of Maria Vasquez’s apartment he caught a glimpse of the green Honda.

In one sense, there was some subtlety involved, in spotting the car. The driver had not parked directly on Vasquez’s street, but around the corner. As he scanned around him he saw the Honda in a reflection—a newly washed plate-glass window was at the apex of a triangle, which also included Shaw and the green car.

Since there was no direct view of Shaw’s bike from the car, that meant that the driver wasn’t now in the vehicle but was one of dozens of people on the street, lying low and surveilling him. That population included shoppers, folks delivering packages and envelopes and restaurant provisions, shopkeepers hard at work in the never-ending job of scrubbing the sidewalks, some women and men who were probably sex workers, a few pushers hawking their wares, and their consumers, those just standing around, talking to others in person or on cell phones and a few talking exclusively, and with animation, to themselves.

Only one way to find out who.

Shaw made sure his holster was snug and turned in the direction of the cross street walking quickly toward the side street where the green Honda was parked.

He flushed the spy in one second.

Dressed in black jeans and a gray windbreaker, head covered with a black baseball cap, the spy—about two hundred feet from Shaw—turned instantly and ran back toward the car. It began as a fast gait, then a sprint, though he paused briefly to speak to two large workers, in T-shirts, one with a shock of curly red hair, the other with a black, unwashed ponytail. Colleagues? Shaw didn’t see how. They were unloading supplies from a battered cab truck, double-parked at the intersection around the corner of which sat the green Honda.

The driver continued sprinting, Shaw was closing in. He’d catch up before the man could leap into the car and speed off.

Or that would have happened, if not for one problem.

As he approached the delivery truck, the two men stepped directly into his path and held out hands. Curly growled, “Not so fucking fast, asshole.”

Shaw tried to dodge but Ponytail jogged in front and grabbed him by the arm.

“Out of my way.” Shaw lowered his center of gravity and got ready to grapple him to the ground.

Curly took the other arm and they pushed Shaw up against the truck. He was pinned.

“Going to break more bones? Lemme ask. That make you feel like a man?”

Ponytail, who bathed as infrequently as he shampooed, growled, “Me and him oughta break a few of yours. See how you like it.”

“Okay. Take it easy.” Since Shaw had no idea what was going on, he only offered those generic words. He relaxed a bit and when Ponytail did too, Shaw yanked his right arm free and got the man’s meaty wrist in a come-along grip, dropping him to his knees.

“Fuck no.” Curly casually slugged Shaw in the belly, and he too went down.

Shaw caught his breath, slowly rose and backed away.

He heard, from around the corner, a car start and tires cry.

Hell . . .

The men started toward him. Shaw backed up farther and lifted his left hand toward them, palm up, and with his right, pulled his jacket open and sweater up, revealing the gun.

“Fuck, you a cop?”

“Look, man . . . We didn’t know.”

The nausea faded. He snapped, “What’d he say to you?”

“Who?”

“The man I was chasing.”

The workers regarded each other.

“You got it wrong, mister,” Curly said.

“Wasn’t no man. Was a girl.”

“And hot, you ask me.”

—

He spent several hours in his search for Tessy Vasquez.

The music club where she worked didn’t serve lunch but Shaw was able to talk to the manager, a skinny young man in clothes two sizes too big and with a droopy Vietnam War–era mustache. He wore a stocking cap not unlike Russell’s, but in green. He couldn’t provide any helpful information and had