The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He leaned over and vomited on his shoes.

  A girl two stools over looked down at her splattered capris and screamed. The smell rose from the puddle, rank and heated. Richard grinned, his chin stained with puke, and raised his arms, Rocky style.

  The bartender was cursing a blue streak, and a gym-enhanced security bozo was closing fast, barking into a radio. The bouncer from outside plowed through the crowd and grabbed Richard.

  “All right, asshole, I told you before, you get hammered in my club again, you’re fucking finished.” He threw a full nelson on Richard, bending his head forward and making his arms stick up like a scare-crow’s. The other guy seized Nick’s shoulder and jerked him back off the bar.

  “Take it easy,” Tim said. The bouncer slammed Richard against the bar. Tim’s hand shot out and grabbed the bouncer’s thick neck, thumb digging into his sternal notch. The bouncer gagged out a sound and froze. “It wasn’t a suggestion,” Tim said.

  He waited for the bouncer to release Richard. The other guy let go of Nick and stepped wide, eyes on Tim, looking for an angle. Several people were watching, but for the most part loud music covered the sound of the commotion. The dance floor remained a swirl of oblivious motion.

  Tim removed his hands, holding them up in a calming gesture. The bouncer took a quick step back, coughing.

  Tim said, “I don’t much like to fight, and I’m sure you could kick my ass anyway, so what do you say we just do this the easy way. These guys are going to pay their tab—” he nodded at Nick, who fumbled a few bills out of his pocket and onto the counter “I’ll walk my acquaintance out of here, and you’ll never hear from us again. Sound good?”

  The bouncer glowered at him.

  “Okay.” Tim shouldered Richard and half dragged him to the door, Nick scurrying close behind. They stepped outside, and the cool air hit them like a chest-high wave.

  “That asshole,” Richard slurred, rubbing his elbow. “Why didn’t you badge him?” He fumbled in his pocket for his valet ticket, but Tim dragged him to the curb and hailed a passing cab. He deposited Richard inside and stepped back to let Nick slide in.

  Richard opened his mouth to say something, but Tim rapped the window with his knuckles, and the cabbie pulled away. Tim headed back to the valet stand and handed off his ticket. The bouncer was back at his post by the rope, rubbing the raised red mark on his neck. “You all right?” Tim asked.

  “You’d better get the fuck out of here. Fast.”

  They stood in tense silence, waiting for Tim’s car to be pulled around.

  30

  TIM SAT ATOP the playground slide at Warren Elementary, a few blocks from his old house, his feet pointed downward on the aluminum slant, clutching a bottle of vodka loosely in his lap. The small, unadorned merry-go-round sat still and silent, a flipped spider with bunched metal legs. Swings rattled in the night breeze; a tetherball bounced against its post. The air smelled of tanbark and asphalt.

  He’d been here last on a lazy Sunday when Ginny had interrupted his edging the back lawn to make him walk her over, hand in hand, so she could again study the monkey bars that she was too afraid to swing across. They’d stood there silently, father and daughter, while she circled the bars, examining them from all angles, like a horse she was planning to mount. When he’d asked if she wanted to try, she shook her head, as always, and they’d walked back home, hand in hand.

  Tim was shivering, though he wasn’t the least bit cold. He found himself walking, studying the ground at his feet. He found himself on his porch, ringing his doorbell.

  Some commotion, then Mac answered. It took Mac a moment to recognize him and take his hand off the butt of the Beretta stuffed into the waistband of his sweats. Behind him, even through the thickening haze of his grief and anger, Tim could see the blanket and bed pillow on the couch from which he’d been roused.

  “I want to see Ginny’s room,” Tim said.

  Mac’s body swayed, as if he’d taken a step, but he hadn’t. “Look, Rack, I don’t know if this is such a—”

  Tim spoke low and calm. “You see that pistol in your hand?”

  Mac nodded.

  “You’d better step aside or I’m gonna take it from you and ram it down your fucking throat.” His voice wavered hard.

  Mac’s mouth pulsed in a half swallow, half gulp before smoothing back into a handsome inscrutability. “Okay.”

  Tim pushed open the door, and Mac stepped back. Dray was coming down the hall, knotting her bathrobe, her mouth slightly agape. “What are you—?”

  He lowered his head when he passed her and shoved into Ginny’s room, locking the door behind him.

  He heard the sound of Dray and Mac talking down the hall, but he was too drunk to shape the sounds into words. He took in the room blurrily, the mound of stuffed animals in the corner, the pleated shade crowning the pink porcelain lamp on the diminutive desk, the inane glow of the Pocahontas night-light. Only when he curled up on Ginny’s bed did he realize he still held the vodka bottle. The last thing he remembered before dozing off was setting it gently on the floor so it wouldn’t spill.

  •When he awakened, it took him a few moments to remember where he was. He’d curled into the fetal position to fit on the small bed. He scooted up against the headboard, rubbed his eye, and felt the pinch of crust against his lid. Dray was sitting across the room, back to the wall, facing him. The faint gray light of early morning, split by the slats of the venetian blinds, fell across her face.

  He glanced at the now-unlocked door, then at her. She had an unbent bobby pin in her mouth, angled down over her plump lower lip.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, placing his feet on the floor. “I’ll leave.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Yet.”

  Her stare made him uncomfortable, so he studied the yellow and pink flowers of the wallpaper.

  “You were crying last night,” Dray said.

  He clasped his hands, pressed the knuckles to his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you dare apologize for that.” She leaned her head back until it thumped softly against the wall. “Maybe you should have done more of it.”

  He blinked hard, kept his eyes closed. “I don’t know what to do to diminish the hurt. There’s got to be something, some outlet for the victims. If not, if we don’t get anything from the courts, from the laws, what are we supposed to do?”

  “Mourn, stupid.” She propped her chin on the union of her fists. “And, Tim?” She waited for him to look up. “We’re not the victim. We’re related to the victim.”

  He sat with that one for a few minutes. Then he said quietly, “That is a damn powerful insight.”

  Dray took a deep breath, as if preparing for an underwater plunge. “You and I, we have a tough time starting conversations, not having them.” She lowered her arms until they stuck straight out, her elbows resting on her kneecaps. “I went to the grocery store today for the first time. Shopping not for three, not even for two. I skipped the candy aisle because Ginny, you know, and I bought less stuff, just for me, and I got to the checkout counter, and it was thirty-something dollars. So cheap I almost started crying.” Her voice cracked, a seam of vulnerability. “I don’t want to shop for one.”

  He felt something break inside him and spill relief. “Andrea, I—” He sat up sharply. “Wait a minute. You didn’t go to the grocery store the day I went in to work, the day of the Martía Domez shooting?”

  “I couldn’t get off the couch that day. What’s going on?”

  “The Stork said that’s when he broke in and bugged my watch. I left it at home.”

  “No way. I was here all day.” She let a sigh puff out her cheeks. “They must have had their eye on you longer than they’re letting on. You knew they were manipulating you from the get-go—”

  “I’ll have to talk to Dumone. I know I can trust him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do. I know it in my bones.”

  “Well, maybe the
Stork and Rayner wanted a transmitter on you a week early, and they didn’t let on.”

  “Maybe.” His mind seethed with troubling thoughts. He vowed to get some answers from Dumone or in the next meeting at Rayner’s, to learn the precise parameters of the Commission’s stalking of him. His unease had been ratcheted up another notch—if his trust had indeed been violated, he’d be forced to implode the Commission.

  Dray remained backed against the wall, watching him with moist eyes. Her neck bore the mark of her nails from earlier scratching. “Come here,” he said.

  She rose with a groan, knees cracking, and crossed to Ginny’s bed. She lay down, her face on his chest, a wisp of hair falling to frame the outer edge of her eye. He put his spread hand over the back of her head and cradled it to him. She nuzzled into him like an animal, like a baby. They breathed together, then breathed some more.

  He pulled her hair back out of her face, and their eyes met, held. Her hand tightened on his chest.

  “I feel like we just found each other again,” he said.

  His phone, wedged in the front pocket of his jeans, vibrated against them both. Dray backed up off him, her knees and elbows pressing into the mattress, her chin resting on his stomach.

  He flipped the phone open. “Yeah.”

  Mitchell’s voice came with the staccato fire of cop argot. “The subject’s at the ten-twenty.”

  “Okay.” Tim turned off the phone and regarded Dray, savoring a final trace of comfort and, beyond that, feeling the stone edge of need bulldozing through him.

  She raised her eyebrows. He nodded. She pushed herself off him and stood, straightening her shirt.

  He wanted desperately to put his mouth on hers, but he feared if he started, he wouldn’t stop. He had to be across town, and he hated himself for it.

  On his way past her, they pulled together in a spontaneous embrace, caught sideways, her hands clasped around his waist, his arm down over her back, her face pressed to the side of his neck, chin resting on his shoulder.

  It was all he could do not to turn his head and kiss her.

  31

  TIM SPOTTED MITCHELL behind the wheel of a parked pizza-delivery car halfway up the block from Bowrick’s. A lit Domino’s sign was adhered to the roof, but the doors weren’t painted with the logo, a minor but noticeable lapse. Tim pulled open the passenger door and slid in. The interior smelled of cheap vinyl and stale breath.

  In the change in Mitchell’s face, Tim saw the toll the Debuffier incident had taken on him. His eyes and cheeks had darkened somehow, as if stopped-up thoughts had bled into them and grown stagnant. A vein had broken in his left eye, a dead snake zigzagging out from his pupil.

  “He was dropped off by a gold Escalade, new plates at 0557, looked like he’d tied a few on last night. He stayed inside until 0624, then emerged in worker’s coveralls with a hard hat under one arm. Caught the bus two blocks north at the corner.”

  “Bus number?”

  “He took the 2 to the 10. I tried to call you, couldn’t get through, so I followed him through the connection, then downtown.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “You’ll love this. The memorial. The new one going up downtown, for the people killed in the Census bombing. They have Bowrick and a few other community-service monkeys sandblasting metal for the sculptor. Some genius figured they could reform criminals and get the thing built at the same time. Irony or something. He can’t operate the sandblaster much with his lame arm, but they have him gofering around. Him and a bunch of convicts. They even break for prayer sessions. It’s like some fucked-up penance cult. As if sandblasting metal gets you off the hook for shooting up a school.”

  In the backseat, gloves and black balaclavas peeked out from Mitchell’s olive-drab duffel. Tim grabbed a hood, rolled it, and slid it into his back pocket. He pulled two flex-cuffs from the rubber-banded bundle as well.

  Curved in dueling loops like mouse ears, flex-cuffs worked like heavy-duty garbage-bag ties. Once they were cinched around an arrestee’s wrists, there was no easy release; they could only be notched tighter. The hard plastic strips were so unforgiving that detention-enforcement officers sometimes had to use pruning shears to cut them off. They were standard issue for ART raids, and Tim always liked having a few handy to restrain the unforeseeable.

  “Did he have a lunch with him? A brown paper bag or a lunch box or something?”

  “No.”

  “All right. So lunch is probably provided, but he might be back between twelve and one—if not, I’d guess between four and six. I’m gonna slip inside, be there waiting for him. If he’s not alone when he returns, give me a double tap on the horn. You are not to leave this post. Where’s Robert?”

  “Not here.”

  “I do not want him on-site. Clear?”

  Mitchell used two fingers of each hand to smooth his mustache. “Clear. I’m gonna split and switch out the car. I don’t want to be sitting here in this thing much longer.”

  Tim nodded and got out. He strode down the cracked sidewalk, letting his elbow dip to touch the handle of his .357, which felt reassuringly solid beneath his T-shirt. He passed two beautiful Mexican girls jumping rope, an old-timer walking a pit bull, a low rider with tinted windows. He circled the block and ducked through two backyards so he could approach Bowrick’s house from the rear.

  He wriggled through the bathroom window again and sat at the desk. Bowrick’s checkbook lay out, and Tim flipped through it. Bowrick made semimonthly paycheck deposits, each around five hundred bucks. A series of check entries caught Tim’s eye—two hundred dollars a week, every week, to the Lizzy Bowman fund. The name fluttered through Tim’s memory awhile before striking a cord. The coach’s daughter shot during Bowrick’s assault on Warren High.

  The kid was making his amends, working victim memorials, donating cash.

  The parents of the twelve kids who ate lead from an SKS would probably be touched.

  Tim pulled the chair around to the shadowed west wall, held his gun in his lap, and sat with his thoughts, which he found bad company. Lunchtime came and went with no sign of Bowrick. The shadows shifted in the room as afternoon came on, and Tim scooted the chair over to keep it in the dimness, staying on the hinge side of the door.

  Bowrick did not show up at five, or six, or eight.

  Tim found his mind drifting to Richard, the beaten-down PD who could see through the cracks and fissures of the system to the unbroken foundation beneath. The insurge of Tim’s own grief last night had scalpeled open a part of him, and the freshness of his sorrow, he found, had dulled his anger, his conviction. If there was anything objective towering out of the morass of his grief, he’d lost sight of it. To steel himself he thought of the child-killer he awaited. He thought of eleven dead students and one dead little girl. He thought of the closed casket at Ginny’s funeral, and why it had been.

  But matching his emotion step for step was the steady advance of another, more rational force. The cracked bedrock beneath the Commission. Lane’s and Bowrick’s pursuit—like Tim’s—of an idiosyncratic ideal they thought of as justice. The ways in which they’d all failed. Were failing.

  A little after nine Tim heard a key scratch its way into the front lock. He pulled his balaclava from his rear pocket and rolled it over his head. It covered everything but the crescent of his mouth, the spots of his eyes. The smell of dirt, sweat, and cigarette smoke preceded Bowrick into the room. He slammed the door and crossed to his closet, not noticing Tim in the darkness. Bowrick tossed his hard hat into the closet and pulled off his shirt. His back was marred with pocks, crescents of shiny, tight-pinched flesh.

  He was just lowering his arms when he noticed that the chair was not in its place by the desk. His eyes closed in a long blink. He turned calmly, expectantly, saw Tim sitting in the darkness. His shirt was balled at the end of his fist like a mop.

  He took note of the .357 aimed at his head. His hands rose, fell to his thighs. “Go on then,” he said. “Shoot me.
”

  His upper lip held the scraggly strands of a mustache forced before its time. Up close he was so slight as to suggest preadolescence. His appearance impressed upon Tim that the legal definition of adulthood was stunningly arbitrary, as preposterous as bar mitzvah manhood; some males are boys at twenty-two, some are men at sixteen. It was all in the gathering of focus, the shouldering of responsibility, the potential for menace. Tim had not counted on Bowrick’s seeming so much younger than himself, but why this was a sudden, essential criterion escaped him. In Bowrick’s frailty Tim sensed for maybe the first time the space between culpability and punishment.

  Tears eased down his cheeks, but Bowrick was otherwise completely unaltered—no jerky breathing, no reddening of the face, just the silent flow of tears, like thin faucet streams. His mouth set in a suggestion of a smile, of sadness and expectation, of weary relief.

  Tim’s grip remained perfectly firm on the gun, but his trigger finger did not recoil.

  “What are you? Dad of a kid who got shot? Uncle? Priest?” Bowrick’s bangs, greasy, long and thinned in tendrils, dangled over his eyes. “Fuck, man, if I was you, I’d shoot me. Go for it.” He tossed his shirt aside, his lame arm pulling back to his stomach like a snail retracting. His chest bore a bad Pink Floyd tattoo—the face from The Wall.

  Tim sorted through his legal arguments, his abstractions about justice, his ethical conclusions, but couldn’t find a mainstay. He searched for anger next, couldn’t locate it.

  “Well, go on, then.” Bowrick’s voice stayed tough, but the tears kept coming.

  “Why so eager?” Tim asked.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, fucking waiting for it. Always waiting for it.”

  “My violin’s in the car.”

  “Hey, fucker, you asked.” He rolled his head back. Took a deep breath. “It ain’t so clean like you think. I don’t know if one of the guys who got shot is your kid brother or something, but those guys were mean as shit. Ran that school like it was their own party, coach looked the other way ’cause he didn’t want to lose Sections.”