The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Robert and Mitchell had the lower door open. When they touched her, she shrieked again, but they guided her quickly down and out and laid her on the floor. The smell of pus, panic sweat, and day-old meat rose from her body. Lying limp on the concrete, arms jerking, legs quivering, she began to keen—deep, split-open moans.

  Robert took three staggering steps toward the corner and leaned against the wall. He was crying, not loudly or with force, but matter-of-factly. Tears forged tracks through the drywall dust that had collected on his cheeks.

  Someone had probably reported the explosion or gunshots; police units were likely en route already, in addition to ambulances.

  Mitchell was holding the woman’s head tenderly in both hands, trying to smooth her stiff hair. He spoke to her with an eerie calm. “We killed him. We killed the motherfucker who did this to you.”

  She began to convulse violently, limbs thrashing on the concrete, and Mitchell cradled her head so it wouldn’t bang against the floor. Just as quickly as it had gone into motion, her body went limp, save her right leg, which continued to twitch, one broken toenail scraping concrete. Mitchell was up in a crouch over her, ear at her mouth, fingers checking for a neck pulse. He applied a sternal rub, digging his knuckles into her breastbone, and when he got no response, he began chest compressions.

  The woman’s head rocked slightly with Mitchell’s movement, her good eye slick and white, a porcelain egg. Tim stayed nearby, on his knees, ready to take over, though he knew, from some until-now-unrealized sense he must have acquired on blasted fields and in evac helicopters, that she was beyond reviving.

  A few paces away, Robert was muttering to himself, fists clenching in quick, furious pulses. Streaks of sweat stood out on his shirt.

  Mitchell stopped, arms bulging to stretch his sleeves. He stood and laced his fingers, bringing his hands to his belt. The more furious the activity, the calmer and more focused he grew. “She’s done. I’ll have the van waiting by the back fence.” He turned and headed up the stairs.

  Robert ran over to the woman. “No. Take over, Rackley. Take over.”

  Tim dutifully worked on her, but her mouth was cold and vacant against his, her body board–stiff, yielding upward around the union of his hands like cardboard pressed into carpet. Her lips had gone blue. He checked her carotid pulse again and got back only the dense coldness of marble.

  Robert’s face was moist, a blend of sweat and smeared tears, and a high shade of red that looked as if it stung.

  Tim got up, retrieved his pistol, and tapped Robert gently on the forearm. “Let’s clear out.”

  Robert wiped his mouth. “I’m not leaving her.”

  Tim placed a hand on Robert’s shoulder, but Robert knocked it off. The wail of a distant siren reached them.

  “There’s nothing more we can do here,” Tim said. “We go now. Robert. Robert. Robert.” Robert’s head finally snapped around. He blinked hard and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Tim squatted and fixed him with a calm, steady gaze. “I’m not asking anymore. Move.”

  Robert rose dumbly, a child following instructions, and made his way up the stairs.

  The woman’s head was tilted back on the hard concrete, her jaw stretched open. Tim gently pressed her mouth closed before stepping over Debuffier’s humped body and moving upstairs. Mitchell had wisely cleared the equipment from around the twisted metal door. As Tim stepped out into the backyard, he heard vehicles screeching up to the front curb. Just past the gap in the fence, the van was waiting, door slid open, and he stepped up and in.

  The twins sat in the rear, backs against the walls, Robert’s face flushed and combat-shocked, Mitchell’s shirt stained where he’d held the woman’s head. Tim yanked the door shut behind him, and they pulled out from the curb.

  “You ever jump into the fray like that again,” Tim said, “I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Robert didn’t show a flicker of response.

  The Stork, sheet-white and sitting on a phone book to see over the high dash, glanced back over his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…couldn’t go in. I was too scared.” Grimacing, he clutched his heart, bunching his shirt. “I got the car and waited for a sign, for someone to come out.” He fumbled in his pockets, pulled out a blue pill, and popped it.

  “You did fine,” Tim said. “You followed orders.”

  Robert clenched his sweaty bangs, his hair protruding in tufts between his fingers. “We could have gotten there earlier.”

  “No,” Mitchell said.

  “We could have…could have cut surveillance shorter. Just gone right in last night. She was there. She was in there the whole time.”

  Tim looked over at Robert, but Robert wouldn’t meet his eyes—he was looking everywhere, nowhere.

  “Don’t play ifs,” Mitchell said. “That’s a no-win game. It’s throwing yourself against a rock.”

  A series of cracks in the road made the van thrum with metallic urgency.

  Robert bowed his head forward, then smacked it back against the wall of the van, so hard it dented the metal out in a crater. His voice was still strained, his throat wobbly and constricted. “Christ oh Christ. She looked so much like Beth Ann.”

  He leaned over and threw up into his fist.

  25

  AS TIM PULLED through Rayner’s front gate behind the van, he was not surprised to see Ananberg’s Lexus with its Georgetown license-plate frame. The gate whirred, rotating closed behind them, folding them protectively into the large rise of the Tudor stage set. Robert stumbled out first, trudging for the house, and the Stork followed, his face drawn and bloodless. Mitchell seemed almost to glide behind them, steady and light on his feet. Tim parked and brought up the rear, a sheepdog herding toward the stone front step, but before they could arrive, Rayner opened the door, his eyes swollen and bloodshot, Ananberg up on tiptoe behind him.

  Rayner seemed not even to notice the walking-dead appearance of the crew advancing on him. He started to speak but had to clear his throat and start over. “Franklin’s at the VA hospital. He’s had a stroke.”

  •They sat spread out evenly across the chairs and sofas of the study, as if needing a buffer from proximity. Tim and Rayner had played unelected spokesmen, swapping information with flat, toneless, just-the-facts-please-ma’am sentences.

  Robert hurried to get down a few bolstering bourbons. He drank without hesitation, pausing only to suck ice. A different type of postop drink. The Stork drank milk through a straw—Tim guessed his palate abnormalities made drinking from a glass difficult for him. The Stork had settled down significantly now that the immediate threat had passed; his odd detachment seemed to make him impervious to trauma.

  Ananberg kept glancing at the still-moist stain on the front of Mitchell’s shirt.

  Robert looked exceedingly weary. He shook his head, his eyes glazed with grief. “I can’t believe the old man had a stroke.”

  Tim thought of his morning meeting with Dumone, the quiet apartment filled with the smell of stale carpet.

  Rayner sat leaning forward in his charcoal glen-plaid suit, gold cuff links peeking out from the sleeves. The thin white band of his mustache looked fake. “I got the news and called over about an hour ago. The nurse wouldn’t put him on to talk. I guess he wasn’t in full control of his faculties and speech. No visitors tonight. I’m getting him transferred to the VIP floor at Cedars first thing tomorrow. We can have more control there.”

  “Of his mouth?” the Stork asked.

  “Of his care.” Rayner’s annoyed gaze lingered on the Stork. “Franklin has an older sister, but he asked she not be contacted. He doesn’t want her flying out, fussing over him.”

  “Unmarried,” Ananberg said, by way of explanation.

  The ensuing silence was broken only by ice clinking against glass and the slurp of milk through the Stork’s straw.

  “I think we could all use some time. What do you say we take the rest of the weekend off, meet Sunday night?” Rayner said.

  Robert�
�s eyes were focused on absolutely nothing, as if they were peering down an endless well. An alcohol blush had bloomed on his face; now that he’d started drinking, Tim wondered if he’d be able to stop.

  Mitchell sat with his hands folded in his lap, the points of his thumbs touching. His arms he held tight to his sides, giving him a compact, focused bearing. His eyes had narrowed, almost to a squint, as though he were running net-explosive-weight calculations in his head. He was supremely calm, almost relaxed.

  Tim looked uneasily from one brother to the other, his anger and disgust growing. “Take some time off? This isn’t a church committee—we have matters to discuss.”

  Rayner cleared his throat, clasped his hands piously. “Let’s not start pointing fingers here. I know the execution went badly—”

  “No,” Tim said. “The execution did not go badly. It aspired to go badly.”

  “I have to agree with Tim’s assessment,” Ananberg said. “This was a mess.”

  “You weren’t there,” Robert said.

  “That’s exactly irrelevant. This blows up, we all go to jail.”

  “Look. Things were complicated. We didn’t mean for it to go down that way, it just happened.”

  “Well,” Ananberg said, “who happened it?”

  All eyes settled on Robert, except Mitchell’s, which tracked the pendulum of the grandfather clock. Robert tilted his glass at Tim. “Rack fucked up, too.”

  “Amen to that,” Tim said. “I should have set firm ROEs. We have strict procedures in place here. We need strict procedures in the field. There are gonna be some new rules.”

  “Like what?” Mitchell asked.

  “Not now,” Rayner said. “We’re in no shape to talk about anything.”

  “When we come back, we’re discussing this,” Tim said. “At length.”

  Rayner stood and flared his hands down the fabric over his thighs, smoothing wrinkles. “Monday at eight.”

  When Rayner passed him, Tim was surprised to see genuine grief in the downturn of his mouth.

  •The TV was murmuring in Joshua’s office, so Tim decided to forgo the elevator and sneak up the back stairs. His apartment waited. Mattress. Desk. Dresser. He pulled the child-size desk chair to the window and sat with his feet up, breathing exhaust through the screen, listening to someone yelling in the Japanese restaurant across the alley. It was remarkable how much angrier anger seemed when conveyed in an Eastern tongue.

  He checked his Nokia voice mail—two messages. The first was Dray. Her voice, recognizable to him in so many indescribable subtleties, moved right through him. She was doing her best to soften her tone, make it more feminine, which meant she was regretful and wishing to convey affection.

  “Tim, it’s me.” A long, crackling pause. “There are, uh, some forms here that need joint parental signatures. To cancel Ginny’s medical insurance. Dissolve what’s left of her college fund. Crap like that. If you could…If you could stop by sometime, that’d be great. I’ll be around tomorrow. Or I could leave them on the kitchen table, if you want, and you could do it when I’m at work. But I’d rather that…that…” A sigh. “I’d really like to see you, Timothy.”

  Bear’s startlingly gruff voice broke Tim’s momentary lapse into happiness.

  “Rack. Bear. How about a fucking phone call?”

  He got Dray’s machine, so he left a message, then called Bear. Bear said he’d like to see Dray, too, so Tim agreed to meet him at the house tomorrow at noon.

  He got into bed, since he had little else to do. Because of the brightness of the downtown street and the inadequate city-issue blinds, darkness didn’t really happen in his apartment. Night was a slightly altered attitude toward the hours, no more. It lacked lethargy.

  As a preemptive strike against the images he’d found beneath the coroner’s sheet, Tim tried to imagine Ginny in a peaceful pose, but everything came back trite and inauthentic. In life she’d never reclined peacefully in dandelion fields; there was little reason for her to do so now. His mind returned again and again to Debuffier’s bullet-split face, to the death they’d dealt him and the lives he’d be unable to take in the future. There was a cheapness to the killing; it lacked righteousness. It was like gaining a fortune through inheritance.

  Lane was dead and Debuffier was dead and Ginny couldn’t have cared less.

  After a while Tim found the emptiness of the room bad company. When he turned on the news, Melissa Yueh’s face peered out, gleeful and tainted with a red, almost sexual excitement. “The city is heating up again after another execution of a suspected criminal, Buzani Debuffier. Debuffier was shot and killed immediately after apparently committing a violent torture/murder.”

  “Violent torture/murder” seemed redundant to Tim, but then he wasn’t selling ratings. Footage rolled of guys in Scientific Investigation Division windbreakers poking through the debris at Debuffier’s. “…LAPD won’t disclose if they believe the case is related to the Lane assassination, but inside sources indicate that bits of rare explosive wire were found inside devices at both scenes—”

  Feeling his stress ratchet up another notch, Tim flipped the channel. Leave It to Beaver flickered out at him in black and white. June scrunched Beaver in a hug, and the Beav closed his eyes. The scene was cloying to the point of repugnance, but Tim left it on.

  He fell asleep to it.

  26

  TIM SLEPT LATE and showered long. The khakis and button-up shirt he’d hung in the bathroom to steam out the wrinkles actually smoothed out decently.

  He dressed in the living room, near the comforting murmur of the television. After a commercial featuring a bronzed and exuberant woman astride an elaborate exercise machine, Rayner appeared on a plush talk-show couch looking particularly unaggrieved—perhaps his sorrow over Dumone’s stroke had been feigned after all. Or perhaps he couldn’t help but perk up when he saw himself reflected back in the lens of a camera. He was, of course, commenting on Debuffier’s death, waxing poetic about vengeance and duty and this travesty we call justice.

  The pervasive theme of the show was that Debuffier had gotten what he’d had coming to him. With a few exceptions, the audience was energetic and sanctimonious, and the host, a Geraldo rip-off in an illadvised maroon suit, claimed that the “counteroffensive against murderers” was inciting Americans to take back the streets. When a caller proudly related that his cousin in Texas, inspired by the Lane hit, had “shot a burglar dead” the day before yesterday, the news received whoops and cheers.

  Rayner cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Well, it seems to me—and I’ve discussed this with several sources close to the investigation—that the person or persons behind these executions aren’t seeking to promote wholesale vigilantism. They’ve chosen these cases quite specifically—cases in which the justice system appears to have failed. I’d guess their motivation is to open up discussion about these shortcomings in the law.”

  Tim watched Rayner’s betrayal with the horrified anticipation of a first-day-on-the-floor med student at a thoracotomy. Rayner’s need to issue a communiqué had been thwarted, so he’d chosen to tackle the issues as a commentator rather than leaving the Great Unwashed to think independently about the Commission’s efforts. His tedious media analyses had been nothing more than preparation for future orchestration. Before long he’d be feeding information to handpicked journalists to spin coverage. Maybe he’d done so already.

  The TV host’s arms spread wide, bent at the elbows, microphone dangling like a baton. “Or they’re just kicking ass and taking names.”

  Rayner’s eyes were unaffected by the tight smile that flashed on his face. “Perhaps. But I think these executions—however misguided—are part of a dialogue. They’re indicative of a growing sentiment in Americans today. We’re simply fed up with the law. We don’t believe that the law owns justice anymore, that the law will work for us.”

  A hefty man in a Cleveland Browns sweatshirt called out, “Yeah! Screw the courts!”

  Off Rayne
r’s expression of pained forbearance, Tim clicked the remote. One channel over, John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted was holding forth on Crossfire. Tom Green solicited passersby to target-shoot at crime fliers of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted. Howard Stern implored viewers to wager guesses about the respective lengths of Lane’s and Debuffier’s penises.

  Tim felt sick by the time he turned off the TV.

  He used his socks to dust off a pair of oxfords, which he laced loosely in anticipation of blisters. He deliberated over belts. Only when he pulled cologne from his dopp kit did he realize he’d been dressing up to see Dray.

  He stopped by Cedars-Sinai on his way to Dray. The Beverly Hills–adjacent medical center rose glittering and imperious between Beverly and Third, a reassuring architectural display of order and competence. Tim got tangled up on Gracie Allen Drive before finding Lot #1 off George Burns Road. Trusty Tom Altman, aided by a smiling Arizona license, had little trouble talking his way past reception. After passing a woman wearing a mink over a hospital gown and an octogenarian with a Yiddish accent singing “Anything Goes” and raising his bathrobe for each glimpse of stocking, Tim found Dumone’s room on the VIP floor.

  He tapped the slightly ajar door with his knuckles before entering. A disgruntled expression on his pale, crumpled face, Dumone sat shored up by a clutch of pillows. Blanketing the nightstand to his left were flowers and gift baskets.

  Tim couldn’t resist a smile, and Dumone joined him, his grin pulling up only the right side of his face. “This place is all marble and plants and pillow fluffers. I feel like a pit bull at a poodle show.”

  Tim crossed, and they regarded each other warmly for a moment. “You look like hell.”

  “Don’t I know it. Look at this crap Rayner sent over.” Dumone’s hand rooted around one of the gift baskets and emerged with a foil-wrapped bag of coffee. “Guatemalan Fantasy. Sounds like a blue movie.”