The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  No one, aside from Tim, was currently married—that would leave matters less complicated. Dumone, the Stork, and the twins had no current addresses, which didn’t surprise Tim. Like him, they’d dug themselves in somewhere, safe and protected, before embarking on a project like the Commission.

  At a discount furniture store up the street, Tim purchased a mattress and a flimsy dresser and desk. The store owner’s son helped him unload the items from the delivery truck and get them upstairs. The kid moved gingerly, clearly having strained his shoulder on a recent delivery, so Tim tipped him handsomely. Then he bought a few more essentials, like sheets, pots, and a nineteen-inch Zenith TV, and unpacked what little he’d brought.

  Flipping through the L.A. Times obits, he found a Caucasian male, thirty-six, who’d just died of pancreatic cancer. Tom Altman. That was a name Tim could live with. He cross-indexed the name with a phone-book he borrowed from Joshua, and found a West L.A. address. On his way over he stopped at a Home Depot and bought some heavy-duty gloves and a long-sleeved rain slicker. Dumpster diving could be a messy affair.

  His concerns proved unnecessary, however. The house was empty, and the trash cans, hidden behind a gate in the side yard, weren’t too filthy. He found a stack of medical bills under a used coffee filter, Altman’s Blue Cross subscriber number—the same as his Social Security number—featured prominently on each form. As Tim had fortuitously hit the cans just after the midmonth billing cycle, further digging revealed a utilities bill, a phone bill, and a few canceled checks, all of them presentable. On his way to Bank of L.A., he stopped at the post office and retrieved a change-of-address form, useless in its own right, but official-looking when filled out and presented atop a stack of other documents.

  The woman at the bank was pleasant enough when he explained he’d misplaced his driver’s license. His Social Security number and current bills sufficed, and, feeling grateful that Altman had been considerate enough to leave behind a solid credit rating, he left with paperwork confirming his new checking and savings accounts and a rush-processed ATM card that doubled as a Visa.

  These he took with him on a pleasant late-morning drive to Parker, Arizona, a grenade toss from the border, where he presented his information and explained to the peevish DMV clerk that he’d misplaced his California license but had been looking into getting an Arizona one anyway, as he summered in Phoenix. He spent the four-hour drive back marveling at the massive emptiness composing the majority of California and thinking how the sun-cracked barrens were a pretty damn good metaphor for what his insides felt like since Bear had showed up on his doorstep eleven days earlier.

  Nightfall found Tim sitting on the floor of his apartment with his back to the front door, watching the neon lights blink through the wide window and throw patterns on the ceiling. He attuned himself to a cacophony of new sensations—thin, susceptible walls, conversations in foreign tongues, the back-kitchen stench of day-old fowl. He missed his simple, well-tended house in Moorpark and, more glaringly, he missed his wife and daughter. His first night in this new place confirmed what he’d already known: that nothing would be the same. He’d fallen into a new life, like a second birth, like a death, and with it came a sensation of suspended numbness, of underwater drifting. In this small womb of a room, linked to the outside world by no record, no trail, no necessity to leave, he felt at last safe from whatever corrosiveness the outside world was brewing and preparing to hurl in his face. From here he felt strong enough to begin his counterassault.

  He gazed at the three major items he’d purchased—mattress, desk, dresser. There was no comfort in their arrangement, no lessening of what they were, things-in-themselves, rectangular practicalities that sat on carpeting. He thought of the gentler touches a woman—even Dray with her tomboy sensibilities—could bring to a room. Some softening of the lines, some notion that a space was to be lived with, not merely in.

  He thought of Ginny’s head-thrown-back hysterics at the Rugrats, the sense of joyful—yes, joyful—anticipation he got when he could sneak off work early to pick her up at school, like a date, and how he’d sit in his car and watch her for a few appreciative moments before getting out and claiming her. Ginny painted the world with child excesses—openmouthed smiles, floor-shaking tantrums, vividly colored candy and clothing. He realized how gray and inert she’d left the world with her departure, and how he was all abstinence and temper-ance—he was all lesser shades.

  He was unsure he could abide a world that weathered her absence so easily.

  He blinked hard, and tears beaded his eyelashes. Loneliness crushed in on him.

  He found himself holding his phone, found himself dialing his house.

  Dray picked up on a half ring. “Hello? Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I thought you would’ve checked in last night. Not today.”

  “I’m sorry. I haven’t stopped moving.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I got a little place downtown.”

  He heard the air go out of her. “Jesus,” she said. “A place.” The line hummed, then hummed some more.

  He opened his mouth twice during the ensuing silence but could not figure out what needed to be said. Finally he asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Not really. Are you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Where do I get you if I need you?”

  “This is my new cell-phone number. Memorize it. Don’t give it to anyone: 323-471-1213. I’ll have it on twenty-four/seven, Dray. I’m ten digits away.”

  He heard the receiver rustle against her cheek and wondered what expression she was wearing. He thought about the phone nuzzled in close to her face, then about him here in this cold apartment.

  “I already talked to some of our friends,” she said. “But we should tell Bear together. I thought we could have him over tomorrow. At the house. One o’clock?”

  “Okay.”

  “Timothy? I, uh…I…”

  “I know. I do, too.”

  She clicked off. He snapped the phone shut and pressed it to his mouth. He sat, dumbly inert, phone against his mouth for the better part of twenty minutes, trying to figure out if he was actually going to follow through with the preparations he’d been laying.

  He rose and turned on the TV to cut his lonesomeness, and Melissa Yueh’s familiar voice filled the room.

  “—Jedediah Lane, the alleged fringe terrorist, was released today to much fanfare. He was standing trial on charges of releasing sarin nerve gas at the Census Bureau, a terrorist act which claimed eighty-six lives. The Census Bureau attack was the biggest act of terrorism on U.S. soil since 9/11, and the largest perpetrated by a U.S. citizen since Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 assault on Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building. Despite the fact that his courtroom antics provoked the judge on several occasions, Lane was found not guilty by the jury. The prosecutor claimed that Lane benefited from having had much of the physical evidence against him suppressed. Lane’s post-trial comments have unleashed a whirlwind of anger in the community.”

  The screen cut away to a shot of Lane being escorted through a crush of news reporters, ducking lenses and mikes. “I’m not saying I did it,” he mumbled in a quiet, almost affable, voice. “But if I did, it was to assert the rights upon which this nation was founded.”

  Back to Yueh’s expression of barely concealed disgust. “Tune in Wednesday at nine when, in a KCOM special event, I’ll be interviewing this controversial figure live. Watch it as it happens.

  “In related news, construction continues on the memorial honoring victims of the Census Bureau attack. A one-hundred-foot metallic sculpture of a tree, the monument was designed by renowned African artist Nyaze Ghartey. Located on Monument Hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles, the tree will be lit at night, each branch representing a child who died, each leaf an adult victim.”

  An architect’s sketch showed the tree looming large on the federal park, light emanating in the trunk’s interior sending beams o
ut through myriad holes in the metal hide. It was Christmas-tree hopeful. Very gaudy, very over-the-top, very L.A.

  “Ghartey, who generated some controversy during the trial as an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, is the uncle of one of the seventeen child victims of the sarin nerve-gas attack, eight-year-old Damion LaTrell.”

  A school photo of a boy wearing overalls and a forced smile flashed on the screen.

  Tim turned off the TV and grabbed his Sig from the kitchen counter. The door closing behind him sent a hollow echo down the hall.

  He parked around the corner from Rayner’s. The wrought-iron gates were more show than security; Tim slipped over them easily due to a vanity break to accommodate the dipping bough of a venerable oak. The front doors and windows were well secured, but the back door had only a simple wafer lock that he picked easily with a tension wrench and a half-diamond pick.

  He prowled the downstairs, keeping his Sig tucked into his pants. Beside the stairs was an impressive conference room, complete with banker’s lamps and leather chairs arrayed around an obnoxiously long table. A solemnly rendered oil of a boy roughly the age Spenser, Rayner’s son, had been when he was killed, hung on the far wall. The portrait had an eerily posthumous affect, as if it had been done from a photo. A TV was suspended from the ceiling in the far corner of the room.

  After getting the lay of the other first-floor rooms, Tim entered the library. He found the cherry box in the desk and claimed the .357 nestled within.

  He headed upstairs.

  •Tim clicked on his Mag-Lite and shone the harsh beam on the two lumps beneath the covers of Rayner’s bed. The Mag-Lite, which packed four D cells in its hefty metal shaft, provided one part illumination, three parts intimidation. Tim sat backward on a chair he’d moved silently from its place in front of the bathroom vanity, his feet on the plush velvet seat, his ass atop the back. His Sig and the .357 flared out from either side of his jeans like linebacker hip pads.

  The larger form shifted and raised an arm to the light. Rayner’s squinting face appeared when the expensive sheets slid down to his pajamaed chest. Confusion predictably turned to panic, then he was fumbling in his nightstand drawer and pointing a shaking revolver in Tim’s direction.

  Tim clicked off the flashlight. A silence. Rayner reached over and turned on the lamp, illuminating the nightstand telephone with a sleek accompanying recording device Tim had seen previously only in the homes of Secret Service acquaintances. Rayner’s face, sweaty and tense, relaxed. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me. I thought you’d call.”

  Tim’s eyes went to the recording device by the phone, positioned to capture his acceptance call. If Tim ever got inconvenient, Rayner could edit the recording however he pleased and drop it in the wrong hands. Not-so-mutual assured destruction.

  At Rayner’s voice the bulge in the bed beside him wriggled up out of the sheets. Her face was sleepy and full, her dark hair lank and down across her eyes. Though Rayner’s face was colored to the ears, she didn’t look the least bit scared or embarrassed. A bit pleased, maybe, which didn’t surprise Tim from what he knew of her. Rayner was still frozen with shock, gun clutched in both hands like an unruly garden hose.

  “These are my conditions,” Tim said. “Number one: I get uncomfortable—the least bit uncomfortable—and the deal is off. I walk. Number two: I have full operational control. If anyone on my team starts stretching their britches, I reserve the right to slap them back into place. Number three: Stop pointing that gun at my head.” He waited for Rayner to comply, then continued. “Number four: My privacy is to be respected. As you can see, it doesn’t feel so nice when the shoe’s on the other foot. Number five: I’ve already taken the .357 you tempted me with the other night, and I’m keeping it. Number six: First meeting of the Commission will be in the conference room downstairs, tomorrow night at twenty hundred hours. Inform the others.”

  He slid off the chair.

  “I could’ve…could’ve shot you,” Rayner said.

  Tim walked over to the foot of the bed and opened his fist. Six bullets plinked down on the comforter at Rayner’s feet.

  Heading back down the stairs in the darkness, he couldn’t help but crack a smile.

  15

  PULLING INTO THE driveway of his—Dray’s—house felt like a return to comfort. Tim threw the car into park and sat for a moment, admiring the perfect alignment of shingles he’d hammered row by row onto the roof, the uncracked concrete blocks of the walkway that he’d reset and resmoothed after last year’s tremors. Tad Hartley, mowing his lawn next door in jeans and his trademark FBI windbreaker, raised a hand in silent greeting, and Tim felt like a liar when he waved back.

  He got out of the car, walked up the front path, and rang his own doorbell—a weird sensation.

  Dray’s voice came with her footsteps before she opened the door. “Shoot, Bear, you’re early. I wanted to—”

  She pulled the door open and did a poor job blinking back an upset expression. “What are you doing, Timothy? You’ve been entering this house through the garage every day for the last eight years.”

  He had a difficult time deciding where to look. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to…I didn’t know what to do.”

  She stepped back. She was wearing her uniform—probably working a P.M., which meant she’d report to briefing at three. “Very well, Mr. Rackley. Won’t you please come in?” She moved quickly back to the kitchen, leaving him to trail. Once she was out of sight, he tidied up the newspaper sections strewn across the couch.

  “Can I get you a drink, Mr. Rackley?”

  “Dray. Point taken. And yes, water.”

  She entered, bearing the glass on a plate she held up like a cocktail tray, a dishtowel over her arm like a waiter’s service napkin. They both started laughing.

  Their smiles faded. Tim rubbed his hands together, though he wasn’t cold.

  Dray handed him the water and sat opposite him on the love seat. “I got Kindell’s court transcripts yesterday. They’re fat as hell—I was up half the night reviewing them.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing of interest on the weenie wagger. But both of his lewd acts were with an accomplice—rare for child molesters, from what I know—so that puts a bit of fuel behind your theory.”

  “The previous accomplices?”

  “Both in the clink. They didn’t get to cop out with the cuckoo plea. They were the brains both times out—there to arrange and watch the show. Both white-collar—one guy was an accountant. Kindell’s the freak, not a capable planner.”

  “So we have an accomplice who wanted in on the fun, but Kindell took it too far.” Hearing his own words brought on a wave of nausea, which he fought away.

  “Right. Which might explain why the guy sounded so upset when he made the anonymous call. He was in for a show, not a murder.”

  “An ethicist.”

  “And calling the private line to the station, covering his ass on the call—that matches a planner profile. More organized.”

  They sat with their respective thoughts for a few moments. Tim still hadn’t adjusted to the seesawing emotion that each new development in Ginny’s case brought. It occurred to him he might not ever.

  When he looked up, Dray’s face had shifted to sadness. “I know we agreed to take some time apart, but I didn’t sign on for this,” she said. “The vanishing act. The secret phone number. The move downtown. We went through this kind of stuff enough when you were a Ranger.”

  “This isn’t us having to be apart because I’m deployed somewhere. This is us saving this marriage by taking a break from it.”

  He could tell from the set of her mouth that she knew he was right. She’d put on the faintest touches of makeup, something she normally reserved for weekend evenings, and Tim found it delightful and desperate all at once. Especially since he knew she’d wipe it off before heading to the station.

  “Being alone in this house.” She shook off a chill. “And the quiet. And the nightti
me.” She had a tendency to tick off on her fingers points she wasn’t listing by number, an endearing break from the usual precision of her demeanor.

  “It’ll get easier,” he said gently. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Don’t want to what?”

  “Get used to living without you. And…” She wedged her legs beneath her. “Maybe I don’t want to get used to Ginny being gone. A part of me wants to carry that…that pain all the time, because it keeps her with me at least. And if it fades, then what do I have? Last night I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t remember what color her school shoes were. Those stupid Keds she wanted so bad. So I was up at four in the morning, digging through her closet, her things.” She pursed her lips. “Red. They were red. Someday I won’t remember that anymore. Then I won’t remember what her favorite cartoon is, or what size pants she wore, and then I won’t be able to remember what her eyes looked like when she smiled, and then I won’t have anything left of her.”

  “There’s got to be a middle ground. Between comfort and disregard.”

  “But where is it?”

  “I think we each have to find that for ourselves.”

  Across the five-foot stretch of carpet, they studied each other.

  The doorbell rang. After the second ring, Dray broke off her gaze and answered the door. Bear gathered her up in an immense hug. She tapped his ribs. “How’s the side?”

  “It’s nothing. But you two…” Bear thunked into Tim with a hug. Tim braced himself for the double back pat, which came like a tank cannon firing. Bear shoved him away. “Where the hell have you been? I left you two messages yesterday.”

  “We’ve…we’ve been having some problems.”

  Bear’s body seemed to settle like an old piece of machinery shuddering off. “Oh, no.”

  He trudged over to the love seat, which left Dray nowhere to sit but beside Tim on the couch. Tim and Dray took each other’s hand, nervously, then released it. Bear watched these proceedings with dread.