The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  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 and 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.

  He moved back down the hall, again stepping over the booby-trap wire, and into the dining room.

  Gizmos and gadgets of all sorts lay about the floor in various stages of development and disuse. Tim recognized Betty, the conical digital-tone renderer, and Donna, the modified peeper. Betty had been altered, the keypad removed and a single Walkman earpiece inserted. Tim picked it up, inserted the earpiece, and swung the sound-gathering parabola around the dining room. He picked up nothing. He angled it through the open laundry-room and back doors, and the Doberman’s panting, hot and slobbering, burst into his ear. He let out a startled yell and tugged the earpiece free, his heart racing. The Doberman was still lying out near the fence, nearly fifty yards away. Tim was regarding the long-range mike with renewed admiration when he became aware of Robert’s sandpaper chuckle, feet away.

  He dropped Betty, his .357 drawn before she hit the floor.

  Robert’s malicious laughter continued. Muscles tensed, weapon readied, Tim followed the sound toward the kitchen. He swung into the room, back pressed to the jamb, but there was nothing there, just an empty kitchen table, the Stork’s cup of juice on the counter, the red light of the telephone.

  Tim slowly realized that the laughter was issuing from the still-active speaker on the wall-mounted phone. His assault on the back door had interrupted the Stork’s call.

  Robert’s abrasive voice boomed out
into the kitchen, over what sounded like low-level radio static issuing from the line. “Something scare you, princess?”

  Tim spoke loudly in the direction of the speakerphone. “I’m quaking in my stilettos.” Talking compounded the throbbing in his stomach.

  “You put on quite a show. It’s like old-time radio. ‘The Shadow knows.’ I bet the Stork would have appreciated it. Did you kill him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I figured.”

  In the background Tim heard a distinctive, familiar chime rise out of the static. “You have Kindell.”

  “You’re a quick study.”

  “Have you killed him?”

  “Not yet.”

  The barely audible static from the speakerphone found resonance in the kitchen, the sudden depth of stereo sound. The matching murmur issued from the direction of the kitchen table. As Tim walked over, a radio-frequency scanner came into view on the seat of one of the chairs. The distinctive chime he’d overheard on the line—LAPD’s dispatch prompt. He felt his stomach tighten but pulled his focus back to the conversation. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “I’m gonna violate his constitutional guarantees. And hard.”

  A digital counter on the phone ticked off the length of the ongoing call: 17:23. The clock on the stove showed 10:44 P.M. Bowrick was safe only for a little more than an hour; then he’d likely be turned out of the clinic and put back on the street.

  “You set Kindell up to kidnap my daughter.”

  The air left Robert; Tim heard it across the mouthpiece like a burst of static. The rustle of the phone being covered. The murmur of the brothers conversing.

  “We didn’t mean for it to go down that way.”

  “Yeah? Well, then, why don’t you tell me how you meant for it to go down? Because, hey, maybe once I hear this, I’ll just forgive you and we can all go home.”

  “We needed an executioner. We’d been waiting for months, almost a year, while Rayner tinkered with psychological profiles. Ananberg was being an uptight cunt. Dumone was…well, Dumone moves slow. Us and Rayner, we needed to get the plan in motion. The problem was, Rayner said, a guy with your profile wasn’t likely to say yes to something like the Commission. Needed a more personal motivation. So we thought we’d give you a little shove.”

  “A shove.”

  “It was supposed to go down easy. Kindell picks up Virginia, we bust in, cap his ass before he so much as touches a hair on her head. We save her, deliver her back to you in secret. We tell you the system let a child molester off the hook three times and placed him right there in your sunny little neighborhood. We tell you he had designs on your little girl—designs that would have been fulfilled if things were just left up to the system. We tell you we’re guys with a plan, and since that plan just saved your daughter’s life, why don’t you come to a meeting?”

  “I’m overcome with gratitude and, after subsequent bonding, I join the Commission.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You put my daughter in the hands of a convicted child molester.” The venom in Tim’s voice must have set Robert back on his heels, because he took a few moments to respond.

  “Look, I’m sorry it went down that way, but desperate times and all that. Rayner was looking at Kindell closely since he’d gotten off for his priors—the insanity-plea bullshit, a loophole that made him a potential Commission target even before Ginny. Rayner did the profile on him. He wasn’t a killer. None of his priors took that turn. We thought we’d just approach him, say, ‘Hey, here’s a girl you might like. Grab her and keep an eye on her, don’t do nothing till we show.’”

  “Didn’t work out that way, did it?”

  “No it didn’t. And after, we figured Kindell would wind up in jail. We were gonna try to use Ginny’s death to pull you aboard, but when he got off because of the deafness…well, shit, that made you a sure thing. Hey, man, life gives you lemons…”

  “Then you slowly win my trust, Rayner doctors up Kindell’s case binder so I’m convinced Kindell acted alone, and we vote to execute him. I do the job. I clean up your mess, the one remaining witness.”

  “Right. Once we off Kindell, there’s nothing linking us to Ginny. Or to anything around the Commission. It’s just your word against ours.”

  They had no idea that Rayner had taped their call from Kindell’s. A sound escaped Tim, a creaking, eerie laugh that caught him off guard.

  “What’s so fucking funny?”

  “You’ve become just like them. This plan of yours, it led you to kill a girl. A seven-year-old girl.”

  “Don’t put that shit on our heads.” Robert’s voice rose, to the verge of yelling. “We don’t own what Kindell did. That wasn’t what we wanted.”

  From the beginning Tim had tried to understand the Mastersons’ odd mix of resentment toward Tim and horror over Ginny’s death. The resentment was guilt gone bad; the horror was their own revulsion at having her blood on their hands. He recalled Mitchell’s words on the telephone: We were gonna cut you a break, leave you be. Part of us figures we owe you.

  “Well, Kindell’s gonna pay now,” Robert said. “We’ll do him for you. It’ll be a statement, even, to this hellhole of a city. A little…”

  “—tribute—” Mitchell’s muffled interjection.

  “—for all the other pukes out there to see. The first step of the next phase, our phase. It’ll say, ‘We got him. And you’re next, motherfucker.’”

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  Robert’s voice was shot through with intensity and menace. “Are you really gonna fight to save the life of the man who killed your daughter? This piece of shit deserves to die.”

  Kindell’s image came to Tim quickly and vividly, as it always did. The crop of fuzzy hair, so much like animal fur, capping the flat forehead. The wet, insensate eyes, devoid of emotional comprehension. He thought of the relief Kindell’s absence from the world would afford him. At the moment he could imagine nothing more disagreeable than extending himself to save his life. “I happen to agree. But that call isn’t ours to make.”

  “Oh? He’s bleeding here in Mitch’s hands. So tell me, whose call is it if it ain’t ours?” He chuckled. “And lemme warn you while we’re at it—we know you’re double-dealing with the marshals. Any sign of any car, we cap Kindell and shoot our way out. And believe us, we’ll know. We got our ears to the ground.”

  Tim looked at the radio scanner on the chair.

  “You forget, Rackley, we surveilled you for the better part of a year. We know when you were toilet trained. We knew how you’d react when Ginny died, how to fold you right into the Commission. We predicted you and played you like a fucking board game. We go head-to-head, you’re gonna lose. We know you, Rackley.”

  “Like you knew Kindell?”

  “Better. We operated side by side with you. Next time we see you, we’re gonna break it off in you.”

  “Vivid image.”

  “Don’t get in the way of what we’re accomplishing here.”

  “Your righteousness is a joke,” Tim said. “And if you think I’m gonna leave this city at the mercy of you or your brother, you’re even more deranged than I thought.”

  Robert let out a sharp hiss of disgust.

  Tim’s rage narrowed to a single point of calm, the eye of the hurricane. “I’m coming for you.” He raised his pistol and shot the telephone. It shifted and crumpled a bit. No sparks, no flying shrapnel—it was far less satisfying than he’d anticipated. He stood a few minutes in the quiet kitchen, waiting for his anger to burn itself out.

  Clicking through the radio scanner’s settings confirmed his worst suspicions—the Stork had managed to get ahold not only of LAPD tactical frequencies but also those of the marshal duty-desk radio, which corresponded with all deputies in the field. The radio echo he’d heard over the telephone meant that the Masterson boys—wherever they were—were well apprised of in-progress law-enforcement movement throughout the city. He could
n’t know if Bear’s cell-phone frequency was also being monitored; for the time being he’d have to assume that any communication with the authorities would tip his hand.

  Returning to the dining room, he finished glancing through some of the Stork’s oddly animated inventions before turning his focus to the copper cage. No keyboard vibrations going anywhere through that thing.

  He leaned over and stared at the bizarre jumble of words on the computer screen.

  “What the hell?” he murmured.

  Letters scrolled across the screen as if they’d been typed: what the hell

  Tim found the outpointed microphone atop the monitor and spoke into it. “You’re a speech-to-typing program.”

  The screen responded again: you’re a speech to typing program

  He scrolled up the screen. It had picked up the majority of his conversation with Robert in the kitchen, though only his own utterances.

  I’m quaking in my still echoes he’s dead you have kindle

  The speakerphone must not have been loud enough for the mike to pick up Robert’s responses.

  He scanned up farther, taking in the Stork’s frantic remarks to him through the bedroom door, the computer hypothesizing about unclear words: please just go I’m sorry I tried two shoot you missed her rackety I can’t go with you and bereft I can’t

  Scrolling all the way to the top, Tim discovered that the Stork had turned on the speech-recognition software to compose a letter.

  Joseph Hardy

  P.O. Box 4367

  El Segundo, CA 90245

  Dear Mister McArthur,

  I do have an interest in your recent shipment of young adult original classics, particularly Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober, 1962, and Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker, 1964. I am only interested if they are near mint or better. The last book you shipped to me, The Radio Boys’ First Wireless, was badly yellowed hello hello Robert doughnut use this lie I tolled you the new foams are clear your second payment was off buy too hunter I counted it twine I’m out I doughnut car this has gotten crazy since mister rackety leek too the press I wow leaf my house you done need me for survey lands the money mint is clear at night good line of site done the kill on all side I’m not coming especially too night too much heat no surrey and even if Ida considerate it would cost you more than that hang on Jesus hang on mister rackety I’m glad you fund me since I could nut find you