The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Tim noted shadows moving beneath the front door, approaching from the knob side.

  The doorman disappeared from view. The mike barely picked up the fragile sound of tinkling glass. The sniper bullet.

  Then the front door flew open, the handle punching into the opposing drywall and sticking. Mitchell stormed in, heavy off the kick, both hands tight on his .45.

  Rhythm stopped bouncing. White boy’s hands, still clutching the bags of coke, shot up and out wide. Without hesitation, Mitchell double-tapped him, and he moved back in a half stagger, half slide, bouncing off the bathroom door and falling facedown like a plank. The bags of coke he’d dropped at first impact slapped the floor with chalky poofs.

  His too-wide face rearranged in an expression of blind rage, Rhythm lunged forward at Mitchell, his old-school Nikes slipping on the spilled cocaine just as Mitchell swung the sights. Rhythm’s legs went out from under him, and he fell forward, three hundred–plus pounds of flesh colliding with dingy floorboards.

  Mitchell was across the room in a flash, sliding on a lead knee, his other leg bent and trailing, elbows flared, both hands locked on the .45, which seemed to coast through the air until it stopped against Rhythm’s forehead.

  Rhythm grunted once, loud, and quivered, beached-whale immobile. His eyes rolled up, wide and fearful, crescents of white cupping the bottoms of his irises.

  “Rhythm,” Mitchell growled down at him, “meet the blues.”

  His arms jerked with recoil, and Rhythm’s head pulsed once and threw spatter. Mitchell was up, moving backward to the door, gun covering the room.

  The bathroom door, jarred from white boy’s collision, continued to creak open. Mitchell’s head and pistol locked on something, probably the scrawny black kid inside. A second later the kid slowly emerged, pants unbuttoned, arms held up, showing off his empty palms.

  The kid tamped down his evident terror. “I didn’t see nothin’. I’m gonna turn around, and I’m gonna walk away. Real slow.”

  He turned and walked out of the camera’s view, down the far hall. Mitchell watched him go. The .45 dipped, then snapped back up and fired twice.

  “Good for you, bud,” Mitchell said.

  A faint screech announced a vehicle pulling up to the curb. Mitchell grabbed the dummy security tape, backed up, and disappeared out the front door. His entire appearance had taken less than two minutes.

  The rev of the unseen vehicle rose and died.

  Tim hit “stop” on the VCR and popped the tape. When he turned, a young salesclerk, maybe seventeen, was at the end of the aisle, her eyes on the now-blank screen. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her hands gripped and pulled at each other, pressed against her stomach.

  She and Tim faced each other for an excruciating moment.

  “I’m sorry,” Tim said.

  He left her standing there, her mouth working on nothing.

  •The back door, featuring a panoply of graffitied street tags, had been kicked in so often it sat crooked in the frame. When Tim shoved it, it swung open, leaving the doorknob and a surrounding patch of wood stuck to the jamb.

  The apartment building smelled of urine and ash. Part of the interior had been burned out, but the structure still held. Where the flames had burned hottest near the entrance, a semicylindrical gap reached up all four stories to the roof. A heap of human feces awaited Tim on the stairs to the second floor. Each floor had three rooms to the rear, facing the stash house. Keeping his flashlight pointed at the floor, Tim moved through them, searching out the best angle on Rhythm’s kitchen window over a hundred yards away. A wrecking-ball crane in the deserted lot broke the center rooms’ views to Rhythm’s window, so Robert would have been forced to chose right or left. The fourth floor provided too elevated an angle, giving very little vantage into Rhythm’s kitchen, so Tim returned to the third floor and gave it a closer perusal.

  He knew he wouldn’t be so lucky as to find a shell, since .308s were manual action—one had to jack the bolt to kick out the shell after firing. Robert had fired only a single shot, Tim assumed—no need to fuss with the bolt at all. And even if Robert had reloaded, he was too much of a professional to have left anything behind, especially a .30-caliber shell with a nice thumb spread across the brass.

  Nothing caught Tim’s eye in the two end rooms on the third floor. He thought about how quickly Robert had showed up at Rhythm’s in the getaway vehicle—less than two minutes. The second floor would have put him that much closer to his vehicle downstairs. Tim headed down another flight and crouched in the doorway of the room on the right to get a better angle with his flashlight. The pan of dust near the window, darkened with stray ash, was scuffed up in two points.

  A bipod.

  He eased over to the window, sat where Robert had sat, and breathed awhile. He thought about what he knew.

  If given a choice, Robert took the sniper position offset right from a frontal view.

  He preferred the tactical advantage of the elevated position.

  He used a bipod. Sitting stance versus prone.

  Mitchell liked a knob-side approach on a kick-in.

  They weren’t leaving behind witnesses.

  Tim closed his eyes, thought about the shot, the dash downstairs, the quick drive to the house to pick up Mitchell. He turned the Masterson strategy over in his mind, working at it like a tough knot.

  Robert and Mitchell knew they didn’t stand a chance on a dynamic entry with the AK-47-toting doorman there and waiting. All windows to the front of the stash house were blocked by the stucco wall. The only sniper angle was on the kitchen window.

  How do you move the muscle to the kitchen?

  The doorman had picked up the front telephone, his usual telephone, and found it broken. He’d had to move to the kitchen to get the second-nearest phone, which had brought him into the crosshairs.

  Not just a lucky break.

  Tim thought of Mitchell’s entry, how he’d moved into the room confidently, aggressively. Not even a split-second hitch to get a read on the space.

  Robert and Mitchell had broken in earlier, disabled the front phone, and gotten the lay of the pad. The stash house’s back door was triple-barred, so they’d picked the front-door lock.

  Tim felt a tingle of sweat springing up on the back of his neck when he thought about what that meant.

  He walked downstairs, around the block, through the front gate of the stash house. The door remained slightly ajar, as he’d left it. He squatted and eyeballed the doorknob lock—a Medeco double cylinder, six tumblers waiting inside to ruin your day. There was no way Robert and Mitchell could get through a lock like that without help from a pro.

  Tim ran a gloved fingertip over the keyway, and it came away shiny with spray lubricant.

  36

  “THE DEAL’S ON.” Tim leaned against the payphone interior. He’d contacted Bear through the operations desk. “I’m still offering my cooperation. I don’t need yours.”

  “Good, because you’re not getting it.” Bear’s voice sounded cracked and dehydrated. “Excuse my irritation, but I just finished vomiting.”

  “You can be furious with me later—and you’ll be right to. But for now grab a pen and listen.” Tim talked quickly, alerting him to the mess awaiting him at Rhythm’s stash house and to the Stork’s involvement. The Stork would be better hidden than a Nazi in an Argentine forest; he wanted the service on it full bore.

  When he finished, Bear said, “Listen. I’ll deal with you, like this, but you gotta understand something. Tannino ain’t gonna play ball on this one. He wants you, and the boys are tracking hard. I’m Tannino’s deputy. When he says fetch, I fetch.”

  “I get it,” Tim said. “Play it both ways.”

  The faint beat of a one-note chuckle. “No other way I can help you.”

  “So help me.”

  A long pause. “Not much in the way of evidence at Rayner’s house. His office had a bunch of surveillance shit on you—as you know—but not much else. Cr
eepy to look at it. Speaking of, I didn’t know you had anxiety attacks after Croatia.”

  “They weren’t att—” Tim took a deep breath. “C’mon, Bear. What else?”

  “Kindell was safe and sound. He didn’t want to come in—doesn’t trust police custody, imagine that—and we couldn’t really justify it anyway, as he’s not looking like a target. And the big news—Dumone suck-started his revolver this afternoon in his hospital room.”

  Though he’d braced himself for the news, it still took Tim a moment to speak again. “Is Tannino taking the case public?”

  A long pause. “Tomorrow night.”

  “How much of it? Am I gonna make the news?”

  “That I will not answer.” Tim heard Bear hawk up some phlegm and spit. “I got work to do.”

  “Fine. Do me one more favor.”

  “I think we’re well over the limit already.”

  “Ananberg had a Rhodesian Ridgeback. Damn fine dog. He’s probably trapped in her apartment right now, starving and full of piss. If the investigators find him, they’ll dump him at the pound. Go pick him up. You need the company anyway.”

  Bear grunted and hung up.

  Tim tried Robert’s and Mitchell’s Nextels again—immediate voice mail—then called the Stork and got a message saying the number had been disconnected. The Stork was too technologically savvy even to have the old Nextel in service; he’d shitcanned it already and moved on to a new phone.

  The freeway was surprisingly empty at 11:30 P.M. Wisps of fog collected around Tim’s headlights. He exited and parked nearly four blocks from Erika Heinrich’s on the off chance someone else—deputy or hit man—was sitting on the house. It took him half an hour, but he cleared the two surrounding blocks, checking out parked cars, roofs, and bushes.

  Erika’s bedroom window was not only uncurtained, it was open.

  Kids.

  Tim crept to the sill, just beneath one of the outswung shutters, and eased up for a look. Erika lay prone on a bright yellow comforter, flipping through a glossy magazine, legs bent up behind her, sandal dangling from a cocked toe. Alone.

  Bowrick was a smart kid—he’d disappeared convincingly once before. Maybe he had a second safe house. If so, Tim hoped it was as well hidden as his first.

  Watching Erika on her bed flipping pages and humming to herself, Tim vowed to find Bowrick before Mitchell or Robert could put a hole in his head that matched the one they’d left in Rhythm’s. It wasn’t that he had felt a softening of his disdain for Bowrick—though he had—but because he could not watch a seventeen-year-old girl in the safety of her own bedroom and not want the world to adhere to its obligations to her. Admirable piousness from a former deputy–cum–Peeping Tom.

  If he talked to her, she’d convey his appearance to Bowrick, who would steer clear of her house. Tim wanted to see Bowrick, to convince him to leave the state or go into police custody. He didn’t want to scare him farther afield in the city, where the Mastersons might flush him out.

  On the drive home, Tim listened to the radio to see whether there was any breaking news about the Commission or himself. There was not. The service would guard their information, deploying it when strategic. The command post in the Federal Building would probably go full steam through the night, with everyone from Tannino to the assistant U.S. Attorney to Analytical Support Unit reps lost in a haze of coffee fumes and speculation.

  His building was deathly silent. Off the lobby Joshua started humming to himself with vibrato and shuffling through some papers in his ersatz office. Tim paused about ten feet from the door, eyeing the keys on their pegboard hooks behind Joshua’s desk. Most of the apartments had been rented, but Tim took note of the few remaining keys: 401, 402, 213, 109.

  Joshua looked up and waved, a simple raise of his hand that Tim returned. He wondered if Bear had told the truth about the press conference or if Tannino was going to leak the news early.

  “Any good true-crime stories on TV?”

  Joshua shrugged. “They’re regurgitating the same pap about Jedediah Lane.”

  On the elevator ride up, Tim mused on the gloom that moved through buildings such as this. People either running from something or on their way down in the world. And Joshua was the gatekeeper; he exhibited not only sadness but the morose authoritativeness derived from extensive exposure to sadness. Like a mortician. Like a cop.

  Once upstairs Tim took apart his doorknob and spread the parts on a towel before him. Sitting back on his heels, he dialed yet again and pressed the Nextel to his cheek as he worked.

  He got a ring.

  “So,” Mitchell said.

  “So,” Tim said.

  A long pause, broken only by the faint sound of Mitchell’s breathing and the rustle of his mustache against the receiver.

  “You’ve been keeping busy,” Tim said.

  “We have a plan for this city. Always have. And we’re not letting the Rayners and Ananbergs stand in the way anymore.”

  “Clearly.” Tim waited but got no response. “You and Robert cut quite a wake.” Mentioning the Stork would dull a possible tactical advantage. “I saw Rhythm. Or what’s left of him.”

  The beat of silence gave away Mitchell’s surprise. “You wouldn’t be coming after us, would you, Rackley? We were gonna cut you a break, leave you be. Part of us figures we owe you.”

  “I also saw the three other guys you killed—”

  “Crack dealers and gunrunners.”

  “—including the kid you shot in the back.”

  “Oh, come on. Can you really tell me a kid hanging out in a crack house with Rhythm Jones would ever have been anything but a burden to society?”

  “Probably not. But, you see, you can’t punish someone before they commit a crime. The Constitution’s quite specific about that.”

  “Don’t wrap yourself in the flag. We’ve seen what you’ve done, you fucking hypocrite.”

  “I’ve wised up.”

  “Yeah? To what?”

  “Punishment is not justice. Vengeance is not a way to grieve. And whatever justice is, it isn’t ours to administer.”

  “Maybe not. But I’ll tell you this—something crossed over in me when I saw that girl in Debuffier’s basement. When I held her in my arms, watched her die. Well, we’re done with it. We’re done with school shooters and child molesters and terrorists. There are more people behind bars in this country than who live in the entire state of Hawaii. We’re losing the war, my friend, in case you haven’t noticed, and Robbie and I are gonna launch a counterassault. We’re gonna put the plan into overdrive. And we don’t need votes or case history or any of that bullshit.”

  “That was never the deal.”

  “Never the deal? You’re the one who broke up our party. You defaulted on your responsibility, your obligation to the Commission. We voted on Bowrick. We found him guilty. The kill clause, Rack, or don’t you remember? It goes into effect the instant a member of the Commission breaks any protocol. Who broke the rules first? Who broke protocol by not executing Bowrick as we’d ruled?”

  “I did.”

  “You bet your ass you did. So now anything goes. Our agenda moves forward with you dead or alive.”

  A jiggle of the screwdriver, and Tim removed the latch bolt from the doorknob assembly. “Anything goes? Including shredding Kindell’s file?”

  A chuckle. “Yup. We offered to help you with that motherfucker. We could have found out who was in on it with him and cleaned them both up. You could have been on board with us. But, no, you were too good for us. So it only makes sense you wouldn’t want any part of that case binder now. Hell, you don’t want to dirty your hands with that, Your Honor.”

  Mitchell shifted the phone, and Tim strained to make out any background noise but could not. The ensuing silence had the air of a standoff.

  “You never answered my question,” Mitchell said.

  Tim fitted the last puzzle piece of the altered doorknob in place. “Yes, I’m coming after you. Here’s another
answer: Yes, I’m going to find you.”

  Tim snapped the phone shut and set it down. He reinserted the knob without its latch bolt back into the front door. Though it looked perfectly ordinary, it was now just a freestanding core of metal, unattached to the jamb. He wedged a wooden doorstop tight beneath the gap, driving the end gently with a hammer so the solid-core door had no give or sway within the frame. Countermeasures against a battering ram.

  He’d thought about picking up a motion sensor, but it would have been nearly impossible to hide in the bareness of the hallway. He made a note to look for a small IR unit he could angle beneath the door gap. He’d lay the beam diagonally to the knob side of the door, the side from which Mitchell preferred to pivot on a kick-in.

  His window screen popped out easily. His fire escape looked down directly on the wide alley where backup cars would most likely be positioned to catch him in the event of a raid. He climbed silently down one level and stood staring into the apartment below his. Unlike Tim’s unit, it had a distinct bedroom and living room; the latter and a bathroom faced the escape. Putting his face to the living-room window, he noticed that the inside latch had a built-in lock. The bathroom pane was opaque, so he couldn’t see the inside mechanism, but the window didn’t budge under pressure.

  The second-floor living room was equally secure, but the bathroom window had been inched open to let the room air. Tim slid it the rest of the way. No screen. He leaped up, grabbing the bars of the fire-escape landing above, and eased himself through the window. The toilet provided a nice step down to the cheap linoleum.

  He eased the bathroom door open and stood, regarding the two bodies sleeping side by side in the master bed. His footsteps to the bedroom door were completely silent. He didn’t exhale until he reached the living room. The front doorknob was the same as his had been before he’d altered it—standard Schlage single-cylinder lock. He thumbed the embedded button until it popped out, then opened the door and stepped into the hall. The hall ran north-south—both end windows looked out onto busy streets. The stairwell was located at the north end.