the Kill Clause (2003)

by Gregg - Rackley 01 Hurwitz

  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.

  Chapter 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."

  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 sho
wed 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.