The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “There’s no difference.”

  “You gonna teach me strategy, lawman?”

  “There’s a team gunning for Rhythm Jones.”

  “Not the whole team, Rack. They’re missing you.” His righteousness was undercut by a piece of spinach clinging to his incisor. Tim gestured and Bear buffed it off with his napkin.

  “You’ve known since you heard that taped 911 call what I’ve been doing, Bear.”

  Bear looked away, letting out a jerking sigh. “You’ve been as much a father to me as anyone’s ever been—”

  “You’re older than me, Bear.”

  “I’m talking right now, and you’re listening.” Bear’s anger was working its way into his face, coloring the rims of his eyes, turning his face an unhealthy white. “You were an officer of the federal courts. A law-enforcement agent of the attorney general. This is going to wreck Marshal Tannino. He loves you like family.” Bear’s voice was disdainful but also morose, even sorrowful. He gave off a hurt betrayal, that of an unjustly smacked dog. Tim felt his self-loathing anew in Bear’s expression, and the anger, once present, bled through him until its bearing was unclear.

  At the table beside them, two Hollywood agents, dressed like affluent Mormons, talked indecipherable industry babble over sashimi.

  “About half a million criminal cases go through the L.A. court systems a year,” Bear continued, his voice rising at a healthy clip. “Half a million. And you found what? Six you didn’t like? So you’re willing to shitcan the system because here and there something don’t work its way through like it should? Jedediah Lane was acquitted by a jury. It was your job to protect people like him. Congratulations. You’ve just added your name to the proud tradition of mob violence. Revenge killings. Street justice. Lynchings.” He was shaking hard enough that he spilled some of his lemonade over his knuckles when he took a sip. “You don’t deserve to call yourself a former deputy.”

  “You’re right.”

  “You swore you’d never be like him,” Bear said. “Your father. If there was one fucking thing I knew in the world, it was that people could rise above the shit they were brewed in. I knew that because of you. I thought I knew that because of you.”

  Tim’s face numbed, and he felt a sheen of moisture gloss his eyes. “I wanted to take something back. After Ginny. Do you understand that?”

  “I don’t agree with it. I do not fucking agree.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Do you understand?”

  Bear swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple jerking up, then down like a piston. “Of course I understand. But that has nothing to do with what you’ve done. I also wanted to take something back after Ginny. I also loved her. She was my niece, practically. I wanted to shoot a trucker who was manhandling a woman in a bar where I stopped that night, the night she was killed. Guess what? I didn’t. Just that simple. I fucking didn’t. There is no right way to take something back like that. You just stare at it and you learn it’s empty, you’re empty, and that’s the hard fucking painful fact of the goddamn catharsis—which is a word I’m sure you thought I didn’t know—that you don’t get anything back. Life ain’t a Spiegel catalog. You just go on with that part of you missing, period, the end.”

  Tim started to say something, but Bear raised one hand violently. “I’m just getting started. If every father killed three men to get at who killed his daughter, where would we be? These killings of yours. Lane. Debuffier. Were they unlawful? Yes. Was there malice? Yes. Willful? Yes. Deliberate and with premeditation? Yes, yes. You’re eye-to-eye with two murder ones. And don’t think I’m not gonna bring you in. Right here, right now.” His left cheek twitched up in a squint, physical discomfort’s overture. He belched quietly into a raised fist.

  “You can bring me in, Bear. Just not now.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “I need to finish the job. The Mastersons are out of control, on a rampage. I’m uniquely positioned to deal with them—I know their MO, their habits and patterns. You need me in the field, feeding you information. I can cooperate—through you—with the service, with LAPD. Let’s deal. Once we reign in this…”—Tim took a moment to search for the phrase—“lethal force I’ve helped to unleash, I’ll come back and face the music.”

  “Oh, sure. After all this, Tannino’ll happily turn you out on the streets to keep up with your vigilante activities. You’re a civilian now, Rack. What are you thinking?”

  Though Tim already knew what Bear’s answer would be, he kept laying groundwork for later. “My cooperation, intel, ass on the line, and eventual surrender. That’s what you get. I don’t care if Tannino wants the deal—you don’t have to work it out now. It’s what I’m offering. It’s the basis on which I’ll be working.”

  “No. Why should the marshal trust you now? Why should I trust you now?”

  “I’m finding my way back—to society and to what’s right. You can trust that.”

  “Forgive me for needing more.”

  “We’ve cut deals with mutts before.”

  “Can you imagine the shit Tannino would catch if things get worse and it comes out we had you and turned you loose? Or that we didn’t come after you full steam? No way. No deal.” Bear leaned forward, his right arm across his stomach, clutching. The cramping was just getting started. “Give me your weapon.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “We’ll have a showdown. Do you want that here, at Kose’s place?”

  “I’ll come in. You’ll get me. You have my word. But I’m finishing this thing.”

  His arm tightening across his stomach, Bear lurched forward, his elbow thunking the table, knocking over his glass. He studied the spreading stain for a moment, then looked up at Tim, realization giving way to fury. He cross-drew with his left hand, a single, economical gesture that ended with the barrel pointed at Tim’s head. “You piece of shit,” Bear gasped. “You fucking mutt.”

  A woman shrieked across the room, but surprisingly, nobody moved. Tim scooted back in his chair and dropped his napkin on the floor. “It’s just hydrogen peroxide. Don’t worry—it’ll break down into oxygen gas and water in your stomach.”

  Bear’s face was awash with sweat, his voice a coarse groan squeezed through the tightening vise of his gut. His torso was spilled across the table, but his face and the muzzle were up and pointed. “So help me God, I’ll shoot you before I let you leave here.”

  Tim kept his eyes on Bear’s. He rose slowly, Bear’s front sight inching up to track him, then turned and walked out of the restaurant.

  35

  FRIDAY-AFTERNOON RUSH HOUR in L.A.—a preview of purgatory. Tim found himself mired in it en route to USC. He’d stopped by the house of Erika Heinrich, Bowrick’s girlfriend, and peeked through the windows but found no one home. The only girl’s room was on the west corner of the house, facing the street.

  It was a well-baited trap—Bowrick would show eventually.

  The more Tim lurched and braked along the 110, the more he missed his Beemer.

  His Nokia vibrated, and, grateful for the reminder, he pulled it from his pocket and threw it out the window. It hit the concrete and turned to a drove of bouncing pieces.

  Tim had given Bear the Nokia number, and he wasn’t about to take any chances on a cell-phone trace. From here on out he’d use the Nextel, since the number was known only by the Stork, who was likely hiding under his bed about now, and Robert and Mitchell, who, as SWAT guys out of Detroit, would have no clue about cutting-edge electronic-surveillance technology.

  Tim had turned over Robert’s and Mitchell’s Nextel numbers to Bear in case the service wanted to put the ESU geeks on them, but even if they elected to pursue this route, it would take them days to set up.

  Tim called Robert and Mitchell again, but they’d both—either wisely or luckily—turned off their phones; voice mail picked up right away. Tim strained to come up with a timely and low-rent version of phone trap-and-trace that he could take advantage of despite his limited access
to resources. To his advantage was his latitude of movement outside the law—he could move quicker and dirtier than Bear and the deputy marshals—but he had trouble seeing how he could get it done without a direct line to network technology and a team to move block to block with handheld tracking units. He decided to keep trying Robert’s and Mitchell’s phones to ascertain whether they were still being used; if they weren’t turned on, they couldn’t be tracked.

  From what Tim had seen, Mitchell kept his phone off out of habit; Robert was the best bet for telephone contact. It occurred to Tim that the Mastersons might be keeping their cell phones turned off because they were tinkering with electronic explosives, preparing them. It also struck him that wherever they lived, it was far enough away from Rayner’s Hancock Park house that they’d needed a phone book to find a liquor store in the area.

  By the time Tim exited the freeway and made his way to Memorial Coliseum, it was close to 6:45, and he was concerned he might have missed Delroy Jones’s practice altogether. He entered the embrace of the stadium, momentarily disoriented by the thickness of dusk against the immense stretches of drab concrete. He spotted a single form in a red-and-yellow nylon sweatsuit, pounding its way up the great steep columns of stadium steps. Up one column, across the top, down the next. Then the same thing all over again.

  Tim retrieved a Gatorade bottle from his war bag, then sat at the top of the steps watching Delroy sweat his way up to him. He took a huge swig, relaxing as Delroy reached the top, eyed him with a street-wise scowl, and jogged across the bleacher in front of him. Tim’s appearance screamed cop—it had even before he’d joined the service.

  “Delroy Jones?”

  Delroy did not slow. “Who wants to know?”

  As Delroy hammered down the next set of steps, Tim rose calmly, walked ten feet to his right, and awaited his return. Delroy was breathing harder when he reached the top again. Tim noticed he winced slightly on his left steps, as if weathering a pulled hamstring.

  “How’d you like your coach to hear about you playing lookout on a stickup?”

  Never breaking stride, Delroy made a clicking noise of dismissal. “I was twelve years old, five-oh. You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

  Across the bleachers, down the stairs. Tim walked ten more feet, set the Gatorade at his feet, and sat. Delroy was panting hard as he approached the top again.

  Tim took a shot. “How about this. Present tense. I know your cuz Rhythm has pressured you to open up the college market. A lotta rich kids here, a lotta recreation. I also know you said no, but we have pics of you two together, and we can get those in the hands of your coach. Your scholarship’s coming up for renewal in, what? Four months?”

  Delroy ignored him, got halfway across the bleacher, then stopped, still facing away, his shoulders heaving as he caught his breath. He walked back, ran a hand across his forehead, and flicked a spray of sweat down on the concrete. The two men glared at each other, pit bulls squaring off over a rib eye.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m trying to protect your cousin.”

  “And I’m a Caucasian orthodontist. Nice to meet you.”

  Tim offered the Gatorade bottle, which Delroy ignored. “Rhythm Jones. Where can I find him?”

  “He don’t go by Rhythm no more. Goes by G-Smooth.”

  “It must be tough explaining the ‘Rhythm’ tattoo across his chest then, huh?” Tim sucked his teeth once, twice, a tic intended to annoy. “Now, listen Delroy, you’re gonna have to do better than that. Don’t throw me false names and bullshit leads. There’s a contract on your cousin, and the hit is closing in. You’re going to help me because you want to save your cousin’s life, and you’re going to help me because if you don’t, I will grip right and squeeze hard. I’ll have your rap sheet all over the Daily Trojan. I’ll distribute photos of you and Rhythm to everyone in the athletic department, everyone in the financial-aid office. Your face next to Rhythm’s infamous mug, it’ll make all the white assholes who run this campus pucker. Now, what’s it gonna be?”

  Delroy’s eyes flicked back and forth nervously. “Look, five-oh, I’m trying to train here, mindin’ my own bidness. Why don’t you back off? I ain’t a shot-caller. Shit, everyone interruptin’ me, aksin’—” He caught himself, but Tim was already on his feet.

  “Did someone else press you?”

  Tim’s reaction brought out an anxious twitch in Delroy’s face. “Shit, man. I thought it was just a bling-bling thing, get resolved. You think those motherfuckers are gonna cap him?”

  “I know they are. Did you give up an address?”

  Delroy took an uneasy breath, then stepped back and pulled up his sweatshirt, as if showing off a waistband gun. Wide purple bruises had flowered across his ribs on the left side—boot marks, most likely. “Motherfuckers didn’t leave me much of a choice.”

  •Tim gunned the Acura through the streets of South Central. He turned right at the waffle and fried-chicken shack, as directed, and slowed to a crawl, counting addresses under his breath. Rhythm’s stash house was blocked from view by a stucco wall, the only one on the block. Tim left the car up the street and circled back, pulling on his lead gloves. The wooden gate was unhooked, the latch resting just outside the catch. He knuckled it open.

  Front door ajar. An arm in view, flat on the floor from elbow to wrist. Tim unholstered his .357, closed the gate behind him to block the view from the street, and entered the house. He moved along the right wall, gun extended, elbows locked, his shoulder brushing a wall-mounted phone by the front door. The arm belonged to an obese body he assumed was Rhythm’s. It lay in the prone position, humped over a considerable belly, the head largely blown off. Residual powder burns, speckling, star-shaped entrance wound—it had been up close and personal.

  It must have given Robert and Mitchell gratification to ice a sexual predator like the one who killed Beth Ann. It must have whetted their appetite.

  Farther in, a white corpse lay, also facedown, with no visible signs of violence. Tim tilted the already-stiffening body with a toe and took note of the two gunshot wounds in the chest, both high on the breast-plate. Another body lay just out of view in the hall, two shots to the back—one between the shoulder blades, the other in the kidney. A scrawny black kid, no older than twenty, no taller than five-five.

  Tim did a protective sweep of the rest of the house. A folding table with a scale and a couple keys of either cocaine or Southeast Asian heroin in the back room. A security camera on a tripod knocked over in the far corner. A cheesy smoked-glass mirror with a gaudy gold frame. Three heavy-duty security bars made the back door impervious to kick-ins.

  A fourth corpse lay sprawled across the kitchen linoleum, Caucasian, chest opened up by a larger-caliber round. Joint body—lots of tats, strong lats triangulating a strong torso. An AK-47 lay beside him, the strap still hooked around his neck. Door muscle, from the looks of him. One of his hands held a bleating telephone, his forearm wrapped in coiled black cord.

  Standing over the body, Tim closed one eye and peered through the bullet hole in the window, sighting on a burnt and deserted apartment building about 125 yards away, across the house’s surprisingly expansive back lawn and an empty lot. An impressive shot. As a SWAT precision marksman, Robert probably worked with a McMillan .308 caliber, police model.

  Tim returned to the living room and examined the fallen security camera. The tape was missing—no surprise. Tim followed the snake of the electrical cord to a wall outlet behind a minirefrigerator. When Tim opened the refrigerator door, a puff of humid, rotting air sighed out at him. Room temp. Save for a fringe of mold on the plastic shelf, the fridge was empty. Tim pulled the unit out from the wall and swapped the plug for that of a lamp he retrieved from across the room. He clicked the switch. Nothing. A dead outlet.

  Dummy security camera.

  Tim scanned the room, his eyes resting on the wall-mounted mirror. He walked over and pressed the tip of his front pistol sight against the glass.
There was no break between the sight and its reflection. He tugged at the mirror, but it didn’t give, so he shattered the glass, gun-stock leading his gloved hand.

  Inside the small cave cut into the drywall and lathing, a handheld video lens stared out at him curiously. He slid the tape from the unit before returning it to the jagged mouth of the mirror. On his way out, he crouched over Rhythm’s body, examining what was left of his famous face.

  He would have liked to have felt sorrow.

  He drove for fifteen minutes before finding a Circuit City. He went for a TV/VCR combo because they were displayed in the back corner. He rewound the tape about an hour, then fast-forwarded the grainy black-and-white video. The angle covered most of the living room and the front door; the sound was surprisingly good.

  Rhythm was bopping around the room, belly jiggling, talking into his cell phone and gesticulating madly with his hand. The doorman whom Tim had found supine in the kitchen was standing perfectly still at the door, arms crossed, one hand clasping the other wrist, AK slung over one shoulder. The other Caucasian emerged from the back room toting two keys, the scrawny black teenager at his side. The kid slapped five with Rhythm and disappeared into the bathroom near the rear door. When white boy held out a brick in offering, Rhythm stuck a fat hand into the bag and ran a powdered fingertip across his gums.

  The shrill ring of the telephone interrupted an incipient conversation beatifying Biggie Smalls. The doorman grabbed the wall-mounted phone by the front door. “Yeah?”

  The phone continued to ring. He held the receiver away from his head and glanced at it, then trudged into the kitchen.

  “That damn phone broke already?” proclaimed Rhythm. He was half dancing now, bending deep at the knees, lost in shtick. “I just bought the motherfucker.”