The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Tim nearly broke a sterling letter opener prying the lock from the desk’s enormous bottom drawer. A tall stack of canary yellow files filled it to the rim. Tim raised the first and thickest file, and his own name stared back at him from the tab.

  His pulse quickening, he opened it.

  A stack of surveillance photographs. Tim heading into the Federal Building. Tim and Dray at a window table at Chuy’s, each gripping an oversize burrito. Tim’s father at the Santa Anita track, leaning over the home-stretch rail, a spray of betting slips protruding from a tense fist. Tim walking Ginny into Warren Elementary on her first day, the WELCOME,YOUNG SCHOLARS sign flapping overhead. In September. Six months ago.

  As he flipped through them, a sense of outrage burst through the numbness, heating his face, pinching him at the temples. Robert and Mitchell had stalked him for months, with notepads and cameras, capturing him and his intimates at work, at school, brushing their teeth.

  The next ten files also bore his name. He scattered them across the desktop, turning pages. Medical records. Elementary-school grades. Drug testing going back to age nineteen. Bullet-riddled Transtar targets. Endless assessment tests from each stage of his career—army enlistment, Rangers qualifying, the Marshals Service application.

  Snippets jumped out at him from the paperwork montage:

  20/20 vision.

  No Axis 1 or Axis II disorders.

  1.5-mile run qual time—9:23.

  Bench press—310 lbs. for two reps.

  Disturbed sleep post Croatia tour, some reported anxiety.

  Toilet trained at 2 years, 1 month.

  Seclusive, but high level of sociability.

  Assertive, dominant, takes the initiative, confident.

  Childhood family atmosphere—unstable and unpredictable.

  Deserted by mother, age 3.

  Facial expressions indicate control and reserve, but not absence of feelings.

  No history of drug or alcohol abuse.

  Unimpaired impulse control, unimpaired decision making.

  Antisocial practices—extremely low.

  No adolescent conduct problems. Despite father.

  His eyes caught on a thick sheaf of questions titled “The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.” He vaguely recalled filling out the five-hundred-question assessment during one application process or another.

  Item 9. If I were an artist, I would like to draw flowers. The “false” bubble darkened by a #2 pencil.

  Item 49. It would be better if almost all laws were thrown away. False.

  Item 56. I sometimes wish I could be as happy as others seem to be. True.

  Item 146. I cry easily. False.

  And then the sheets of interpretation, written in Rayner’s hand:

  0 for 15 on the Lie Scale—extremely reliable reporter.

  F Scale moderate—consistent and reliable, but reflects aptitude for nonconventional thinking.

  High score on Responsibility Scale indicates subject possesses high standards, a strong sense of fairness and justice, self-confidence, dependability, trustworthiness.

  Strong (even rigid) adherence to values.

  Good little soldier—a phrase Robert had used with Tim during the intel dump outside the KCOM building.

  Low depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviates.

  Low hypomania.

  Conscientious to the point of being moralistic, but flexible, creative, independent thinker.

  Healthy balance of acquiescing and disagreeing response styles.

  Paranoia—moderate.

  Father wound leaves subject susceptible to intense bonding with father figure. Important Dumone remains unpolluted, must have pure interaction with subject.

  Tim looked at the spread before him on the desk, a montage of the most intimate pieces of his life, a construction of the most private parts of his brain. His father’s rap sheet. I sometimes tease animals. His reason for military discharge underlined in red—to spend more time with family.

  Rayner—Mussolini of the Information Age—had managed to compile a remarkable range of confidential information, enough to lay Tim as bare as a split frog on a dissecting slab. A hot burst of intense, little-boy shame faded back into anger and a sense of deep and profound violation.

  Tim thought about Robert’s immense skill in bringing back information about the floor-to-roof inner workings of the KCOM building. Robert and Mitchell had applied that skill to Tim, bringing Rayner back every inch of him.

  With a trembling hand, Tim lifted the last file from the drawer. It contained a sheaf of paper listing literally hundreds of other potential recruitment candidates. A few names Tim recognized from the Company, the feds, the SEALs. On the twentieth page, he ran across a spate of his former colleagues.

  George “Bear” Jowalski—too old, slowing down operationally.

  Jim Denley—just moved from Brooklyn, unfamiliar with Los Angeles.

  Ted Maybeck—anxiety disorder potential.

  Glancing back at the drawer, Tim saw that its bottom contents were, at last, revealed. Seven black binders.

  His stomach clenched when he saw the white label on the last spine. ROGER KINDELL.

  He pulled out the binder, alarmed by its lightness, and opened it.

  Empty.

  He stared for a moment at the blank binder interior, as if the enormity of his disappointment might force documents to materialize.

  Rayner must have anticipated Tim’s coming after the Kindell file at some point. He certainly had amassed enough personality data on Tim to make precise projections of his future behavior. Since Rayner believed that the Kindell file was the key item he’d need to keep out of Tim’s hands to assure Tim’s continued cooperation, he would have placed it in a location even more secure than a locked drawer in a locked office.

  The thin plastic film of the cover’s inside flap bumped slightly up. Tim dug in the pocket, his fingertips touching metal. A safety-deposit key, #201—of course, no bank name imprinted on the brass. He pocketed it.

  Clearing his head, he refocused on his objective. Not how he’d been maneuvered. Not the ways Rayner, Robert, and Mitchell had pried into his personal life. Not Kindell.

  Protecting the targets. Particularly the one likely next in line.

  With a sweep of his forearm, he cleared the desk of papers bearing his name. He slid Rhythm Jones’s binder before him, pleased to note its heft. He spent about an hour and a half hunched over the desk, flipping through Rhythm’s file and biting his bottom lip à la Bill Clinton in empathy mode.

  Almost every character appearing in the court transcript and eyewitness testimonies linked to Rhythm was a transient or a nothing-to-lose punk who’d be tough to leverage. Druggies, pimps, low-rent dealers. It made for tough tracking. The best angle Tim could come up with was a Jones cousin, Delroy, who’d made good, graduating high school and heading off to USC on a track scholarship. Rhythm’s defense attorney, in a rare moment of adequacy, had dragged the kid in as a character witness. The prosecution had tried to discredit Delroy by outing him as a lookout on a convenience-store stickup when he was twelve, a juvy transgression the DA had managed to get unsealed.

  Tim slipped out of Rayner’s office, assorted binders and files rising from the cradle of his hands, secured by his chin. Hurrying to his car, he ignored the parking ticket adhered to the windshield and dumped the paperwork in the trunk.

  He drove over to USC, pulled aside one of the many free-roving security guards, drowned him in law-enforcement patois, and asked him to be a team player and call HQ to get a dorm-room number. The guard complied all too willingly. After relaying the information, he shook his square head, drowsy eyes dulled with either stupidity or the friction wear of walking a foot beat in South Central, and muttered, “Black kids,” with equal parts lassitude and disdain.

  Delroy’s dorm-room door was opened by a cute, dark-skinned girl clutching a fat science textbook and wearing Delroy’s track jersey like a dress. She didn’t ask to see Tim’
s badge when he identified himself. He took note of the uneasiness that flickered across her face, her rigidly polite tone, and added impersonating an asshole white cop to the list of reasons he disgusted himself today.

  Yes, this was Delroy’s dorm room. No, he wasn’t here. He’d gone door-to-dooring in the West Side, collecting donations for an adult-literacy program he volunteered for in South Central. He’d gone alone. He had no cell phone, and he’d left his pager behind. She didn’t know where he’d started or what section of the city he was covering, but she did know he’d be back to run the football coliseum stairs at around 6:00 P.M., as he did every preseason night. Tim told her not to answer any questions about Delroy to anyone else and always to ask to see a badge before opening the door, and she’d regarded him with barely restrained annoyance until he’d left.

  Outside, he called the adult-literacy program’s offices, but they were closed Thursdays through Sundays, which Tim thought might have made a good joke were he in a better mood.

  At Doug Kay’s salvage yard, Tim traded out the BMW for a ’90 Acura with a dented side and clean plates. Kay received the Beemer keys with a pleased little smile, handed Tim an Integra key on a bent paper clip, and scurried off, losing himself among cubes of metal before Tim could change his mind.

  Tim spent the next two hours stopping in at hardware stores, costume shops, and pharmacies, assembling what veteran deputies and crotchety old-schoolers call a war bag. Then he went home for his gun.

  When he pulled up, he saw Dray sitting at the kitchen table sipping coffee and reading the paper as she always did afternoons when she got home from the graveyard shift. He got out of the car and stood on the walk regarding her, his house, for a moment of relative calm. Mac was nowhere in sight. Ginny could have been at school.

  Dray looked up, saw him standing outside momentarily intoxicated by the spell of what once was, and she was up and at the front door, ushering him in to the kitchen table as he cleared his head, self-exorcising the Ghost of Christmas Past and returning to reality like an autodefenestrated body slapping sidewalk.

  “What the hell happened? Bear’s called three times. He’s onto you, I think.”

  “Yes. And in an hour and a half, he’s going to know everything.” Tim shot a nervous glance down the hall. “Where’s Mac?”

  Dray gestured at the window. At the far side of the backyard, Mac was sitting up on the picnic table, feet on the bench, facing away from the house. Three empty bottles of Rolling Rock were lined beside him; he was working on a fourth. “He’s busy sulking—got cut from SWAT today.”

  “Shocking.”

  “What went down?”

  He relayed the events of the past fifteen hours, and she listened in silence, though her face spoke prolifically. He finished, and they sat together a moment.

  When she studied him, he braced himself against the heat of judgment in her stare, but it was absent. Maybe she was too tired to give it. Maybe he was too tired to pick it up. Or maybe her concern had mellowed her anger into a sort of weary contemplation.

  “Why the hell would they kill Rayner and Ananberg?” she said. “They didn’t have to. They could’ve gotten those files without killing them.” She pressed the skin at her temples. “Those men, who would kill just like that. Unnecessarily. For barely a motive. Those men have been watching us for months? Surveilling us with our daughter?”

  His throat was so dry it hurt when he spoke. “Yes.”

  “Jesus, they put their time in to get you.” Her hands balled into fists, and she thunked the table so hard her coffee cup jumped and hit the floor tile a good four feet away. In her face he saw the expression mothers of fugitives wore when he came to haul their sons away. It was a funereal expression—extrapolated loss, sorrow compounded with inevitability. She pressed the flat of her fist square against her forehead, hiding her eyes. “If you do what’s right, if you come clean to protect those targets, you’re going to wind up in prison,” she said.

  “Probably.”

  When she lowered her hand, four strokes of white remained on her skin where her fingers had been. “Do you feel like a hypocrite?”

  He tried to gauge her anger by reading her eyes. “Yes. But I’d rather try to be right than consistent.” The reason he felt as if he hadn’t slept in days, he realized, was that he hadn’t. He slid his hand into the empty pocket of his hip holster; he’d put the holster back on during the drive over.

  Dray smiled the kind of smile that said nothing was funny. “Fowler worked on a ranch growing up, in Montana. There was a job, he said, on the slaughterhouse killing floor—a guy had to stun the cows with a prod, then cut their throats.” She leaned forward on the table. “They had to rotate the job every Monday. Not because it was tough to live with. Because the men started liking it too much. They wanted their turn.”

  “You’re saying Robert and Mitchell got a taste of something they liked?”

  “I’m saying release comes in a lot of flavors, and most of them are addictive.”

  They studied the puddle of coffee on the linoleum.

  Tim cleared his throat. “I need my gun.”

  “Your gun,” she said, as if she were unfamiliar with the word. She rose and headed down the hall to the bedroom. Tim heard the chuck of the gun safe unlocking, and then she returned and set his .357 on the table between them as if she were up for a nice, casual game of Russian roulette.

  He placed the safety-deposit key from Kindell’s case binder on the table and slid it over to Dray. “I’m not going to have time to pursue this right now. And even if I did find which box this key fit, I couldn’t get at the contents without a subpoena.”

  She picked up the key and clenched it in a fist. “It’s just legwork. I’ll figure out which bank, go in at lunchtime in the uniform when the managers are on break, flash badge, intimidate a junior banker into opening up.” She nodded once, gravely. “You do what you have to do.”

  Tim felt the need to convince, to justify. “If Robert and Mitchell get on this spree,” he said, “who knows when it’ll end. I can’t sit in a jail cell and let it go down.”

  “You can’t play Lone Ranger–hero either. Not in good conscience.”

  “I won’t. I’ll keep disseminating information through Bear so the service and local PD will have as much as I do. Given my responsibility for this mess, I don’t mind being the one on the line, in the crosshairs.”

  “Bear can handle it. The marshals, LAPD—they can track these guys down.”

  “Not like I can.”

  “True,” she said. “True.” She let out a sigh, angling it up so it puffed out her bangs. She glanced at the pistol, then at him, then away. “You have no authority behind you, Tim. No sanction of the U.S. Marshals, no weight of the Commission. It’s just you now.” She looked up from the coffee-cup fragments, her face holding equal parts concern and daring. “Can you be your own judge and jury?”

  He took his gun from the table and holstered it on his way out.

  34

  TIM GOT TO Yamashiro a full hour early and surveilled it as best he could, in case Bear was planning to spring a trap. Rather than taking the winding, no-options road up the hill to the restaurant, Tim squeezed his car into an out-of-sight meter between two preposterously large SUVs down on Hollywood Boulevard. He checked the area in a closing spiral, finally walking up the steep drive and drawing strange looks from the valets who had no doubt never seen anyone arrive at the hilltop restaurant by foot.

  As always he was greeted warmly by Kose Nagura and whisked to his and Bear’s usual table overlooking the hillside Japanese gardens and the Strip below. After the waiter came by and deposited two lemonades, Tim withdrew a tiny brown bottle, released a thin stream into Bear’s drink, and gave it a swirl with a chopstick.

  Bear arrived at five-thirty on the button, sliding into the seat opposite Tim and gripping the small tabletop at both sides like a giant serving platter. “You’d better give me some answers pronto here, bud, because I’m not liking w
hat’s adding up.”

  “You have the targets under protection?”

  Bear spoke slowly, as if this alone held back his growing anger and unease. “We got Dobbins in protective custody. Rhythm and Bowrick we can’t seem to find. You want to tell me what the fuck’s going on?”

  “You see Rayner’s?”

  “Came straight from there. As ugly as you promised. You want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  The waiter dropped off a complimentary dish of pickled vegetables, and Bear shooed him off without removing his eyes from Tim.

  “Do you want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  A sea of heads took a tennis-match swivel, then went back to talking and dipping toward tweezer-thin lacquered chopsticks. Great drops of perspiration stood out on Bear’s forehead. His face looked weighty, intensely vulnerable. Tim felt like Travis come to shoot Old Yeller.

  He took a sip from his glass, braced himself, and began, interrupted only by Bear’s terse dismissals of the oversolicitous waiter. When he finished, Bear cleared his throat, then cleared it again.

  Tim said, “Have some lemonade.”

  Bear complied. He mopped his brow with a napkin, and it came away dark with sweat. He munched a few bits of pickled vegetable, made a face, and spat them out.

  Tim slid a sheet of paper toward him with carefully prepared notes. “These are all the leads I can think of, which are admittedly not many. Get after them. And find Bowrick. And Rhythm.”

  “News flash, Rack, but the U.S. Marshals and LAPD have different priorities in the face of all this than running down a guy like Rhythm Jones to tell him his life might be threatened. Guess what? When you push drugs and turn out girls, you’re generally aware people are gunning for you. We’ll visit Dumone ASAP and suss out Rayner’s office. And we’ll send a car by Kindell’s, but I’m with you—if the Mastersons shredded his file, they ain’t interested, and keeping him alive with the secret to Ginny’s death rattling in his misshapen head fucks with you worse and is therefore preferable to them.” He folded Tim’s list into his pocket. “As for the targets, we’ve contacted those we can contact, but we’re gonna focus on finding Eddie Davis and the Mastersons, not them.”