the Kill Clause (2003)

by Gregg - Rackley 01 Hurwitz

  "Thank you," Tim said. "Thank you."

  "I have a wife and two kids, Rack. If you're involving me in something shady, you're gonna hear about it."

  The morning light broke through a scattering of cumulus clouds, throwing broad shafts of grainy light that seemed to dissipate on their way down. Morning dew misted the asphalt, the freeway resembling a still, black river. The occasional puddle threw a calming patter against the car's undercarriage.

  Tim parked three blocks over and approached Dickens through two adjoining backyards, high-stepping between rows of rhododendron. Studio City, a mishmash of strip malls and residential blocks, basked in an early-morning tranquillity. No barking dogs, no slamming doors, just the chopping of sprinklers across well-trimmed lawns and the soft whir of traffic on Ventura one long block away. Tim scanned the nearby rooflines and picked out the cell site, six abbreviated metal tubes perched atop a phone pole.

  Robert would not have called Tim to make idle threats in the middle of an operation; in all likelihood the 4:07 A.M. call had come from wherever he and Mitchell were bedded down for the night. Or, Choice B--it had been bait for an ambush.

  Tim came out between two houses and their shared driveway, sticking low to the ground in a rotar-ducking crouch. From behind the safety of a gargantuan garbage can, he surveyed the block. Perfect stillness. He eased out onto the sidewalk and moved down the street, taking it in.

  Ford Explorer in the first driveway, hood cool. GTE phone junction box at the corner. A blue gardening truck parked curbside, the hump of a lawn mower poking up the tarp. Tim pulled up the tarp to make sure. A stack of newspapers outside the door of the second house across the street. Fresh mud in the tire tread of an Isuzu. One mailbox flag up. A house with wooden slat blinds, all closed. Tim drew nearer, peeked in a side window, and saw a little boy sleeping in a race-car bed.

  Tim made his way around the corner, up the west side of the block. Six houses down, the residential street spilled onto Ventura Boulevard, where a guy in a store apron was lugging some cardboard boxes to a Dumpster. A Honda Civic coasted by, two blondes in gym clothes bobbing to muffled music. Up ahead the stoplight changed to red. Someone yakked away in the corner phone booth, wearing a sweat suit, hood pulled over his head like a boxer. More garbage cans at the curb. Two newspapers on the doorstep of house three. A Pacific Bell van at the curb across the street, empty, windshield misted with condensation.

  Tim eased forward, alive with heightened perception. An alarm clock buzzed one house up and was quickly turned off. Something from his thoughts edged up, out of place, and he fanned through the images he'd freeze-framed in his head to see if he could identify what was troubling him. Fresh mud in the tread. Gardening tarp. GTE junction box. Newspapers on the doorstep. Boy asleep. Nothing rang a dissonant note.

  Up the street the chubby guy in the phone booth shifted, and the sun glinted off something square at his waist. Tim strained to make it out. The man's face was still shadowed by the sweatshirt hood.

  Pac Bell van. Dumpster. Slat blinds. Mailbox flag. GTE junction box.

  In the phone booth, the guy's hand rose, touching his shadowed face with a knuckle, as if he were starting to cross himself. The thing at his belt glinted again. A cell phone.

  Tim felt his stomach clench twice, hard. Why the hell was a guy with a cell phone making a call from a phone booth? The hand to the face--not the start of a prayer but a gesture of habit, the Stork sliding his glasses up the insignificant slope of his nose. Tim's mind whirred, a slide show of images.

  Store apron. GTE junction box. Alarm clock. GTE junction box. Pac Bell van. GTE. Pac Bell. A shift and a click as the tumblers aligned in Tim's mind. A Pac Bell van had no business servicing a GTE region. Tim slowed, slowed, stopped. He half turned, bringing the back door of the Pac Bell van into sight, now about fifteen yards behind him. For an empty van it was sitting too low on its shocks.

  Tim wasn't sure what happened first, his dive or the rear doors of the van kicking open, but he was fully extended to his left, angling for the gap between two cars at the curb when the first dull crack of a bullet sounded. He hit hard on his shoulder, his face grinding asphalt as his momentum carried him into a graceless roll. The cars to both sides of Tim rocked on their tires, their windows shattering in rapid succession, two distinct paths of holes and veined glass leading to the gap and Tim's body. Car alarms beeped and whined all up the block.

  Tim popped up in a shooter's stance on the sidewalk, .357 drawn, using the trunk of the rear car as a shield. He fired twice, his bullets punching holes in one of the van's outswung rear metal doors.

  The van screeched out from the curb, laying down five feet of rubber, one rear door secured, the other swinging on its hinges. Tim glanced down to Ventura--the Stork had disappeared from his stakeout post in the phone booth--then stepped into the street. He fired once more as the van rounded the corner, the bullet sparking off the wheel well of the right rear tire.

  The sound of the van's engine faded, leaving Tim with bleating car alarms and the raw, cool pain of road stain on his face. Locks were being turned, doors opened.

  Tim jogged back up the block, favoring a tender knee. As he made his way through the adjoining backyards to his car, he called Bear, speaking quickly and concisely to convey all relevant information about the ambush. Bear confirmed the specifics in a voice strained with impatience and anger, then hung up to get on it.

  On his way to the 101, Tim passed three cop cars with screaming sirens, and he turned slightly in his seat to hide whatever damage might be visible on his face.

  It wasn't until he'd merged onto the freeway that he realized he'd been shot.

  Chapter 40

  HE BLED THROUGH his T-shirt high on the right sleeve. At a stoplight he peeled it back, revealing two slits in the ball of his shoulder. They were small enough that he figured them to have been caused by fragments rather than direct hits, maybe from a bullet breaking apart when it skipped off the asphalt. He walked his fingers across his back but could feel no exit wounds. Though his right hand could still clench--a good sign--he steered with his left to avoid any unnecessary strain. A dull throbbing took hold of the shoulder, more an ache than a sharp pain. It was manageable.

  He parked several blocks from his apartment building and sifted through his war bag in the trunk. He found the appropriate medical supplies and threw them into a plastic grocery bag the car's previous owner had left wadded up in the far corner of the trunk.

  He didn't have a clean T-shirt or any way to hide the bloody sleeve, so he walked swiftly, head lowered, keeping to the edge of the sidewalk. Crossing the lobby, he heard Joshua's voice ring out, but he kept walking. Footsteps approached as he waited for the elevator. Grimacing, he slung the bag over his shoulder, letting the two layers of plastic cover the wound. Though the resultant pain wasn't excruciating, he had to concentrate not to grit his teeth. He turned just barely, keeping the abraded flesh of his right profile out of view.

  Joshua was standing at a polite distance, arms folded, hands flattened and pressed against his biceps. "So what do you think of all this business in the news?"

  "I haven't been watching."

  "The Vigilante Three?"

  "I heard something about it on the radio."

  Joshua's expression changed, and he took a step to the side for a better vantage. "Jesus, your face. What happened?"

  "I fell off my bike."

  "Motorcycle?"

  "Yeah--it's fine. Happens all too often. I just gotta clean it out."

  "Let me take a look."

  "No. That's all right. It's not pretty."

  "You people always think fags are fragile. You forget we've seen it all. The eighties were not a kind decade for us."

  The elevator arrived, and Tim stepped on, pivoting to keep his shoulder out of view.

  "Last offer," Joshua said. "I can give you a ride to the emergency room."

  "No, really. I'm fine." Tim punched the fourth-floor button, and the doors start
ed to slide shut. "Thanks, though."

  Once in his apartment, he wedged the doorstop back into place to secure the front door and gingerly pulled off his T-shirt. A look in the bathroom mirror confirmed there were no exit wounds; the frags were embedded in the dense ball of muscle composing his anterior deltoid. He popped four Advil, then rotated his arm at the shoulder to ensure that it had full range of motion. It did.

  He drew a wet rag across the area to clarify the wounds' edges, then gritted his teeth and sank the tweezer prongs into the first laceration. They went in a good inch before clicking metal. He withdrew the copper sliver easily. It took some rooting in the second wound before he located the fragment. Because it was irregular, the frag came out slow and rough, tearing flesh on the way. He had to stop twice and wipe his forehead to keep sweat from running into his eyes.

  He held the squirt top of a bottle of distilled water inches from his shoulder and squeezed hard, sending a probing jet into the wound to flush any smaller particles.

  Repeating the process for the second laceration was predictably more painful.

  After irrigation with hydrogen peroxide, the wounds looked like two tiny pink mouths. Feeling Terminator-tough, he regarded his work with a measure of satisfaction before bandaging it.

  His face was another matter. The flesh all around his right eye was scraped up, leaving what looked like a bloody pirate patch. Tim had to scour out the dirt and bits of gravel with a washcloth.

  After putting on a fresh shirt, he used his new outgoing phone to check his old Nokia voice mail. Dray had left a message saying she was still working the leads, no luck yet. The message's time stamp reminded him that Bowrick had just thirty-six hours left before the recovery center required a reassessment or put him back out on the street.

  Lying back on his bed, he exhaled deeply and let his muscles relax.

  The Stork, clearly aware of cell-phone-tracking technology, had probably orchestrated the call from Studio City. With his help, Robert and Mitchell had walked Tim into a well-orchestrated trap. It had not occurred to him what a strong team the three made, even without him--the Mastersons providing operational muscle and strategy while the Stork played technological puppet master.

  He vowed not to underestimate them again.

  He popped four more Advil and fell into a deep, sound sleep--no nightmares, no images of Ginny, no thoughts of Dray, just a blank white corridor of unthought. He woke abruptly after nightfall, sweaty and still veiled in a dream haze. The room was dark, the alley below surprisingly peaceful. The needling question as to what had awaked him sharply from so deep a slumber helped clear his head. His shoulder pulsed impatiently, eager to heal.

  He sat up in bed, his legs hanging off the mattress in front of him. He felt constrained in his clothes, which had sleep-shifted around him. His watch showed 9:13 P.M. He stood and went to the window. At the end of the alley, a dark car waited, visible through the steam of the broken pipe. The passenger door opened, but no dome light went on.

  Bad news.

  Tim turned back, facing the door across his dark apartment.

  The slightest scuffling sound in the hall. The pinpoint scratch of dog nails against floor.

  Tim thought, How?

  His eyes tracked down to the doorstop wedged hard beneath the door, then up to the decoy knob that he'd detached completely from the surrounding jamb. With excruciating slowness, he reached behind him, slid the window open.

  A shattering impact shook the apartment. The entire doorknob, propelled by an unseen battering ram, flew from the frame, striking the floor once and smashing into the wall beside Tim. The door itself, pinned by the doorstop, bent in but did not swing open.

  From the flurry of shouting, Tim could somehow discern distinct voices--Bear and Maybeck, Denley and Miller. He leapt through the window onto the fire escape as the door splintered and gave way behind him. Immediately the alley below lit with headlights--the car he'd spotted before and another at the south end. As he flew down the ladder, they screeched forward, closing on the fire escape from either side.

  The hammering of boots through his apartment above seemed to vibrate the entire building. The deputies were yelling "Clear" as he hit the third landing, and then he could make out Bear's deep rumble of a voice hurling profanities. Ignoring his throbbing shoulder, Tim slid down the ladder to the second landing. Two spotlights angled up from the cars in the alley blanketed him, moving with him. Raising an arm to shield his eyes, he ran to the outfacing bathroom window, the flimsy landing shaking with his steps. It was still screenless, still inched open.

  He threw it open and, using the landing overhead, swung himself in. He hit the toilet hard. When he shoved out through the bathroom door, two bodies jerked upright in bed, startled faces and flying paperbacks bathed in the light of dueling reading lamps. He was through the living room in a flash and out into the hall.

  Flashing blue and red reflected in the windows at either end of the corridor--LAPD backup. The door to Room 213 was unlocked, as he'd left it. He sprinted through the apartment, out the living-room window onto the fire escape. The alley on this side of the building was too narrow to accommodate a car, but sure enough a vehicle was waiting thirty yards down on the main street. Good work, Thomas and Freed.

  He slid down the ladder and hung from the bottom rung, his shoulder screaming, his feet dangling a few inches from the ground. He dropped and hit the ground running. Down the alley two car doors opened and closed, and for a brief moment he and Thomas and Freed were sprinting directly at each other. In the lead, Thomas stopped, raising his shotgun. Freed pulled up at his side as Tim froze, hands half spread, staring down the bore from about thirty yards. Water dripped from a leaky pipe to Tim's left. Freed's head rotated slightly, just enough for his eyes to fall on Thomas, questioning, then Tim sprang forward, running toward them again. Thomas shouted, thighs flexing, shotgun firming at his shoulder but not firing.

  Tim banked hard down the alley ten yards north of the fire escape and hurtled forward over boxes and fences with a nearly out-of-control momentum, the noise of his pursuers following him. After two forced turns, he came out on Third, only a half block from his building, practically skidding to halt himself. He flagged a cab and ducked into the backseat. An opera singer wailed from both speakers, her voice piercing and wobbly.

  "Go. That way."

  The cab driver pulled out sharply. "I can't flip a U here, pal."

  Tim slid low in the seat as the cab passed the front of his building. Two cop cars were parked at the entrance, flanking the Beast, which idled at the curb. Bear's broad frame was immediately evident among the other Arrest Response Team deputies, cut from the headlights' glow like a dark statue. Joshua stood facing him, wearing a plush bathrobe, shaking his head. They did not look his way as the cab passed.

  "Get to a freeway," Tim said. "The 101. Hurry up."

  The cabbie waved a meaty hand dismissively, his other busy keeping time with the aria, sweeping back and forth as though spreading butter on toast.

  One block away, a block and a half. Tim felt no abatement of his unease. When they turned the corner onto Alameda, he experienced the suffocating sensation of moving into an ambush, his second in less than twenty-four hours. The city seemed to pull in and around him--random, disparate movement suddenly given direction and meaning, a car here, a bystander's turned head, the glint of binocs from a passing apartment building--and Tim thought again, How? How are they still on me?

  Behind the wheel of a dark Ford sedan parked curbside, a face glowed with the light of a GPS screen. Coke-bottle glasses, pasty skin--the archetypal electronic-surveillance geek. Tim's eyes tracked up a telephone pole, spotting a cluster of cell-site tubes.

  Beaten at his own game. Somewhere, through his quickening alarm, a phrase rose into consciousness: the Revenge of the Nerds.

  Several blocks away, the whine of sirens became audible, closing in.

  Tim dug in his pockets, pulling out the Nextel and the Nokia. The Nokia was
certainly clean--he'd just gotten it, and no one had the number. The Nextel's top button glowed green, showing a good connection to network.

  The cab was surrounded by trucks and cars and two other taxis. The cabbie accelerated to make a green light, and they started up the ramp to the freeway, the other lanes and traffic peeling off. Tim leaned out the window and took his best shot, tossing the Nextel through the open back window of the taxi beside them as it drifted away, its lane veering right.

  The cell phone struck the sill and bounced in, landing in the lap of a surprised matron wearing an excess of makeup. Oblivious, Tim's cabbie turned up the radio and kept humming, kept conducting. Tim twisted in his seat, looking out the rear window. A wall of vehicles with blaring sirens swept right, hard, just before the exit, following the other taxi and closing in hard. Down on the patchwork streets below, he made out the flashing lights of two vehicle checkpoints he'd narrowly missed.

  It wasn't until they'd passed two exits without any sign of a tail that he relaxed.

  He had his weapon, loaded with six bullets, his Nokia phone, the clothes on his back, and a little over thirty dollars in cash. The rest of his stuff was in the trunk of the Acura, which he'd go back for tomorrow, if the area was clear. He'd signed the lease on his apartment as Tom Altman, so that meant his bank account was either frozen or soon would be. He had the cabdriver drop him off at an ATM and succeeded in pulling out six hundred dollars--the maximum withdrawal.

  He walked up the block and made a call from a phone booth. Not surprisingly, Mason Hansen was in the office.

  "Working late?"

  A long pause. "Rack, listen, I...Look, they told me what was going on. I had to..."

  "They pulled my phone number from the records of the cell phone you sourced for me, didn't they? And you confirmed it for them." A cop car drove by, and Tim turned away, hiding in the phone booth like a down-at-heel Superman. "You knew mine was the number dialed at 4:07 A.M."

  "Your colleagues came in with warrants. What was I supposed to do?" His voice picked up anger. "And you didn't exactly come clean with me either. You're in deep shit."