The Kill Clause tr-1

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He certainly had his work cut out for him.

  He was just pulling back when a light clicked on deeper within the house, revealing a dining table overburdened with keyboards and computer monitors and surrounded by a copper-mesh cage. The Stork shuffled into sight, wearing a pair of baby blue pajamas, entered the cage, and plopped down in front of the cluster of equipment.

  Tim lay in the darkness, his eyes resting on this man who had played a part in his daughter’s dismemberment. He felt his heartbeat in his fingertips, his ears; his entire skin seemed to move to the heightened pulse. He pictured the Stork behind a telescopic lens, calmly focusing as Kindell stumbled out from his shack, Ginny’s blood across his thighs to…what? Bay at the moon? Breath the crisp air? Catch his breath for continued sawing? The Stork wouldn’t have cared; he’d have taken apart his camera lovingly, nestled its parts in foam, collected his paycheck.

  The Stork typed for a few moments, then paused to rub out knots in his cramped hands. Through the well-barred window, Tim briefly watched him resume work before withdrawing back up the hill.

  It took him nearly ten minutes to extract without tripping any alarms or crossing any lenses. He sat in his car a few blocks away, plotting, regretting he’d given up dipping tobacco again, since he felt like working something over physically to mirror the activity in his head.

  Though he was competent with a pick and a torsion wrench, he had none of the Stork’s finesse or training. He didn’t stand a chance against those locks.

  Finesse would have to go out the window.

  •He paid cash at the Ace Hardware counter, spending most of what Dray had given him. The checkout woman, an old biddy with the rough hands of an inveterate gardener, whistled over a strapping coworker to help Tim get his purchases out to his car. Tim waved him off, loading up the equipment in an enormous black duffel bag he’d pulled from an overstuffed wire bin in Aisle 5.

  “Must be a hell of a project.” The woman’s breath smelled of Polident.

  Tim hefted the bag up on a shoulder. “Yes, indeed.”

  •Moving along the prescribed path through the Stork’s front yard was trickier with the bulky duffel in tow, especially in the full dark of night. There was no way he’d get through the dueling motion sensors at the side of the house, and he didn’t have the patience or tools to size out a mirror to bounce the IR beam back on itself. Instead he pulled a small shaving mirror from the bag, shattered it, and deflected the beam with a shard momentarily so he could smear Vaseline over the housing.

  After some tedious creeping and hauling, he reached his post in the hillside. The effort and the heavy vest left him damp with sweat. Down below, the Stork was still working away in his blue pajamas at the computer. He appeared to be talking to himself. After a few minutes Tim heard the shrill ring of a telephone, and the Stork picked up a cell phone from the table but seemed to get no response. He shook his head, realizing he’d grabbed the wrong line, and set the cell phone back down. Rising from his perch behind the monitors, he walked into the adjoining kitchen.

  Tim checked the bag to make sure everything was accounted for and well arranged, then began a silent descent to the back fence. He clipped a small canister of mace to his belt, checked his gun, and removed a length of blanket insulation from the bag. The Stork was visible in the kitchen, sitting on a stool, sipping juice through a straw and leaning to talk into the speaker of a wall-mounted phone. He fussed the cap off a bottle and took a few pills, continuing to massage his arthritic hands as he spoke.

  Taking took a deep breath, Tim heaved the duffel over the fence. The grass cushioned its landing, but still he heard a startled movement within the doghouse. He unfurled the blanket insulation over the concertina wire and scrambled over the fence as a Doberman streaked toward him, snarling. He hit the ground, reaching for the mace as the dog took flight in a long snarling leap. He got off a blast and ducked the dog as it sailed into the cloud, growl already turning to whimper. The dog rolled on the ground, pawing at its eyes, emitting a drawn-out whine like a horse’s whinny.

  Tim shouldered the bag and began a jogging approach to the back door. He crowbar-torqued the security screen, which popped with a satisfying clang and swung out on its hinges. He dropped to a knee, pulling gear from the duffel. As he fitted his electric drill with a wide circular bit, he heard movement within-the Stork’s scrambling approach.

  The Stork pushed through the laundry-room door and stood, watching through the back-door window. “Mr. Rackley, I’m glad you found me, since I couldn’t find you. Robert and Mitchell have gone completely out of their heads.”

  “Open up and let’s have a talk.”

  “Somehow I’ve been implicated, but I-”

  “I know you were involved. I know you picked the lock for them at Rhythm’s.”

  “I was just going to say, Robert and Mitchell coerced me into helping them. I didn’t want to, but threat of death and whatnot. I did it with a gun to my head. I told them I’d never help them again.”

  “I also know you were involved in my daughter’s death.”

  The Stork’s entire body sagged, his shoulders rolled forward, his head dipped. “That wasn’t my idea. Or my choice. I tried to warn them off, told them it could only come to-”

  “Where are they? Where’d they take Kindell?”

  “I haven’t been in touch with them. I swear, Mr. Rackley. I don’t know where they are.” The Stork’s eyes went to the Doberman, still rolling on the lawn far away at the back fence. “W-what did you do to Trigger?” His breathing quickened. “God, my house, how did you…?” He shuddered. “Why should I trust you any more than them?”

  “It ends here, Stork. You come clean with me. And the authorities.”

  “I won’t let you in. I won’t be turned in.” The Stork’s squeaky voice did little to disguise his panic.

  Tim raised the drill. With a grating whine, it eased through the bulletproof glass, leaving a neat hole the size of a coaster next to the handle side of the wood stile. Next he revved up a pistol-grip saber saw.

  “You’re making a terrible mistake!” the Stork screamed.

  Tim released the trigger, let the noise from the hammering blade fade to silence.

  “I have dirt on you, Mr. Rackley, or don’t you care?” Drops of sweat ran down the Stork’s cheeks, having originated somewhere high on his bald head. “You were the actual assassin. I was just the tech guy. If you turn me in, I spill, and your life is over, too.”

  Tim started the saw again, and the Stork stepped forward, shrieking, tripping over a neat row of shoes beside the washing machine. His face was approaching tomato red. Tim starting cutting a line up the bulletproof glass, which yielded easily. He hit the wood of the top rail, and the saw’s buzz kicked into high. The blade had started to gum up; chain saws worked better on bulletproof glass, but they were significantly louder.

  The Stork had pressed himself to the glass, inches away from Tim, pleading. Tim stopped the saw, changing the blade. “You helped set up my daughter’s death. You sat back and took pictures as she was being cut to pieces. I’m coming in. I’m making you talk. And I’m not going to sleep or eat or pause until the three of you have answered for the role you played.”

  “Stop it! Oh, God, stop it!” The Stork pressed his hands and forehead to the bulletproof glass, leaving smudges. He was gasping now, the mist from his breath clouding the pane in splotches. His shoulders were shaking, his curiously flat nose a white stroke on his flushed face. He appeared to be crying. “I just want to be left alone. I can’t go out anyways, not since you released my name to the press. I won’t do anything. I won’t even leave the house. I just want to live here alone.”

  Tim started the saw again and leaned forward.

  The Stork’s face flicker-changed back to its usual inscrutable blankness-his performance was over. He leaned back, pulled a Luger from the back of his pajama waistband, and fired through the drilled hole of the glass directly into Tim’s upper stomach.

&
nbsp; The force of the shot knocked Tim off the concrete step. He fell back another two paces and landed flat on the lawn. Despite the screaming pain, he forced a double roll to the side, putting him out of the limited range the hole permitted the Luger. He tried to cry out but could not, tried to suck air but could not.

  His mouth open, he lurched and bobbed, his insides a dense knot of pain that permitted no breath. A guttural creaking emerged from his mouth, foreign to his own ears. He kicked and flopped like a fish on a boat deck. The Stork watched him with curiosity, occasionally knuckling his glasses back up into place.

  “I wasn’t about to permit you to go to the authorities once you knew where I lived, Mr. Rackley. Surely you understand.”

  Tim tried to fight his jacket off, still straining, still struggling, still locked up from neck to bowels. At once his insides spasmed and eased, and he drew in a hard cool breath and immediately fell to coughing. He pushed himself up on all fours, nearly hyperventilating, coughing and snorting and sucking air. Snot dangled from his nose, saliva from his lower lip. It felt as though someone had swung a wrecking ball into his gut.

  Tim stood. The Stork watched with amazement.

  Tim pulled off his jacket, grimacing to get each shoulder free, and the Stork saw for the first time the bulletproof vest beneath. His eyes bulged in a nearly comic show of fresh-started panic, and he emitted a weak scream. Turning, he ran back through the laundry-room door and slammed it. Tim heard bolts turning, chairs being slid.

  He approached the door again with firm, angry footsteps. His throbbing stomach made itself known each second as he sawed down from the hole, through the bulletproof glass, through the bottom wooden rail. He kicked the door, and it parted, one half flying open, leaving a length of wooden stile, a thin strip of bulletproof glass, and the myriad locks perfectly in place in the doorjamb. He stepped through the gap, dragging his bag.

  Three steps in, the solid laundry-room door stopped him. It was steel-reinforced, and both locks were Medecos, as Tim had guessed.

  Behind it he heard the Stork’s panicked movements. “I’m sorry. You alarmed me, though, you really alarmed me. I have money here, lots of money. In cash. That’s how I keep it mostly. You can take…can take whatever.”

  Tim popped the circular bit off the drill and fitted a carbide tip. The Medecos featured fortified ball bearings and hardened-steel inserts, which would render a normal bit all but useless.

  Tim gripped the doorknob, and a jolt of electricity knocked him to the ground. He slid to a stop near the split back door, shaking his head, his tongue and teeth gone numb. He gripped his arm to stop it from shaking.

  The clever bastard had wired an electric charge to the doorknob.

  Tim stood up, leaning on the dryer until the spell of light-headedness passed. A faint nausea washed through him, then departed, leaving him only with the pain in his abdomen, a pulse that spread down to his bladder and up through his chest each time he inhaled.

  The Stork had gone silent on the other side of the door.

  Tim dug through the mound of footwear, tossing aside the Stork’s tiny sneakers, a worn pair of loafers. A street-hiking boot at the bottom, layered with rubber and stained with red dust, would do the trick. Tim slid the drill handle into the boot, gripped it as best he could, and used a lace to tie down the trigger.

  At the drill’s renewed whine, the Stork’s frantic pleading started again. “Just give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll clear out of town. You’ll never see me again. Please.”

  Tim aimed the carbide tip into the cylinder core directly over the keyway. Sparks flew out in a continuous firecracker blaze as the drill progressed, eliminating the lock pins, bringing the tumblers and springs down out of place. When he paused to wipe his heated hands on his jeans, they left red smudges from the dirty rubber boot. Gripping the drill through the boot made for slow going; by the time he’d finished the second lock, the drill chuck was steaming and his forearms were cramped.

  He drew his pistol and kicked the door. It banged in, sending a propped chair spinning into the dining room. A severed lamp cord ran from an electrical outlet, its end stripped and duct-taped to the door-knob.

  No sign of the Stork.

  Tim heard whimpering farther back in the house, so he moved through the dining room toward the rear hall, elbows locked,. 357 extended. The house was cluttered. Three laundry baskets full of padlocks that had been shot and drilled. A row of key-cutting machines sitting side by side, each one a menacing confusion of arms, levers, teeth. Safety goggles hanging from buffing wheels. Soldering irons. Tackle boxes filled with switches and sockets and washers. A multi-antennaed apparatus with an oddly vital appearance.

  Tim moved with extreme caution, assessing everything around him, looking for booby traps.

  The Stork’s voice echoed down the hall at him. “God, don’t take me in. I couldn’t last in prison, a guy like me. Not for a second.” The words deteriorated back into unintelligibility.

  A thin trip wire gleamed about eight inches off the hall floor, just before the turn. Tim took care in stepping over it.

  The bathroom on the far side of the elbow was empty, as was the small opposing study. Tim sourced the faint moaning to the hall’s terminus. Another locked door, this one solid-core wood. Tim flattened against the wall to the hinge side of the door. When he ventured a hand and knocked, the moaning flared up into a shriek.

  “Please just go. I’m sorry I tried to shoot you, Mr. Rackley. I can’t go with you and be arrested. I can’t.”

  “Where did Robert and Mitchell take Kindell?”

  “I won’t say anything. I’m not going to go to jail. I won’t go to jail. I swear I just-” His words cut off abruptly. Dead silence.

  “Stork? Stork? Stork!”

  No answer.

  After another minute of silence, Tim shuffled his feet in place to see if he could draw fire. He smacked his heel against the door, but this brought no response either. His stomach ached. He might have broken a lower rib. The skin on the roof of his mouth still tingled from the shock. His shoulder throbbed.

  He slid down the wall to a crouch, pistol dangling between his spread legs, and listened.

  Complete silence.

  He stood again, fighting away the pain, fighting for focus. Pivoting, he kicked the door just to the side of the knob. It did not give. He stumbled back a few steps, gripping his ankle, cursing. His foot hurt like hell.

  He crept back down the hall, careful to avoid the trip wire, retrieved a pair of channel locks from his bag, and returned. Trying to keep his body to the side of the door, he gripped the knob in the vise and twisted hard, snapping the pins and raking through the cylinders. Then he flattened himself again against the hinge-side wall, willed away his various aches, and prepared for the pivot.

  Take two.

  This time the door gave with the force of the kick. He barged in, . 357 sweeping left, then right.

  The Stork was backed against the far wall, drawn up in a huddled ball beneath the window, the Luger on the floor before him. His legs were curled under him, an arm gripping a knee, one hand clutching his chest. His face was deep red, awash in drying sweat, his mouth slightly ajar. His glasses had come unhooked from one ear and sat crooked across his face.

  Tim kicked the gun away, checked a pulse and got nothing but tranquil, clammy flesh. The Stork’s feeble heart had given out.

  Tim stood and regarded the room, a bizarre mishmash of spinster antiques and old-fashioned toys. A quilted comforter draped over a wooden sleigh bed. A Silvertone windup record player sat on a varnished table beside a stack of old LPs, a pile of stray hundred-dollar bills, and a Lone Ranger tin lunch box with the lid open. The lunch box was filled with neatly banded hundreds.

  Tim leaned to peer behind the sole print on the wall-capless Lou Gehrig, head bowed, the luckiest man on the face of the earth confronting the packed stands of Yankee Stadium-and caught the gleam of the steel wall safe behind. The view from the other side revealed wiring a
nd plastic explosives. Thinking of his ART teammates, Tim found a Sharpie permanent marker in the nightstand drawer and wrote BOOBY TRAP in block letters on the wall with a big arrow pointing at the frame.

  He cautiously slid open the closet door, revealing several hundred old children’s lunch boxes, stacked floor to ceiling. He pulled the top one off-the Green Hornet and Kato-and opened it cautiously. Filled with cash, mostly fives and tens. The money by the record player Tim figured to be the latest payment, perhaps for the Stork’s part in planning Tim’s own assassination. Or for a murder still to come. Kindell.

  The bathroom counter was barely visible beneath a blanket of pill bottles. A rubber ducky stared at Tim from the tub’s rim. Strung up on the tile were dozens of photos, most of them surveillance shots of Kindell about his business-emerging from a supermarket, tying his shoes on a sidewalk, brushing out his garage shack like a suburbanite on a Sunday afternoon. Tim wondered which were shot before Ginny’s death. He was overtaken with a fierce, fantastic urge-to travel back in time so he could fill Kindell’s head with bullets before the calendar lurched forward to February 3.

  A photo of Tim and Ginny at the monkey bars, her expression one of apprehension, his of affectionate impatience. She’d been gripping his hand tightly, as if in fear that the monkey bars would mount an assault. Next to it hung a shot of Ginny walking home from school, backpack snug on both shoulders, face downturned, lips pursed-she was whistling to herself, as she often did, lost in that reverie children her age seem to fall into when alone.

  He stared at the picture, feeling his grief again thaw and resolve, his mind clicking and whirring, trying to contend with the colossal unfairness that Ginny, in her mere seven years, had been targeted and risked and ultimately dismembered because of Tim’s own talent and recruitability. A pilot light of guilt flickered, ready to catch and blaze. How much responsibility did he, his training, his psychological profile, bear? How much of Ginny’s death had to do with the traits and skills embedded in Tim’s own character? Guilt could reach startling depths, he’d learned, even when not attached to fault.