The Clause

by Brian Wiprud

  Copyright Information

  The Clause © 2012 Brian Wiprud

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2012

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-7387-3543-6

  Book design by Donna Burch

  Cover art: Motorbike: iStockphoto.com/narvikk

  Dark alleyway: iStockphoto.com/Denis Jr. Tangney

  Mafia: iStockphoto.com/Nebojsa Bobic

  Somebody in the city: iStockphoto.com/tunart

  Man in black leather jacket: iStockphoto.com/Michelle Gibson

  Ruthless: iStockphoto.com/Chris Schmidt

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover illustration: Steven McAfee

  Interior image—Eagle: iStockphoto.com/PixelEmbargo

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  DEDICATION

  For Joanne

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Terri Bischoff and the fine graphics team at Midnight Ink for indulging the intricacies of this novel; Alex Glass, my intrepid literary agent; Sean Daily, my persevering film agent; my first readers, Skip, Chris, Ted, Liz, and Kerry—you were a huge help. And, as ever, special thanks to Helen Hills for copy-editing the first draft.

  One

  My hand was pressed to Trudy’s breast. I felt her heart faltering, tripping, stumbling. My heart was galloping ahead of hers, like it was trying to pull her heart along, keep it in the race.

  I’d given up trying to stop the bleeding; all I could do was will her to stay alive.

  If only for a few more minutes. Or seconds. And then my life would be over, too, at least as I’d known it.

  A hospital? That wasn’t part of The Clause, what you signed onto without signing anything when you enlisted in this business. It was the pact; that was the way it was. If you got compromised on an operation, that was pretty much it: you’d been compromised and were a liability to the team. You didn’t expect your partner to do anything except maybe watch you die or kill the bastard that shot you. At the hospital was heat, questions, and no answers that would keep you out of prison or contain the collateral damage. There was the temptation to leave an injured party where the cops could deliver him to the hospital and maybe save his life. It happened now and again. But alive or dead, the injured party was a link to the rest of the crew and the operation. Cops and reporters would figure out who the patient is and find out who that person knows, and next thing they know the crew is arrested and being questioned and it hits the evening news. If you took an injured party to the hospital, you risked bringing heat down on everybody. You didn’t let mistakes or bad luck multiply like that; it only spread it around. That was what The Clause was all about: limiting liability. Everybody is expendable.

  I could feel Trudy’s heart squeezing for all it was worth, about to burst, trying to make what little blood might have still been in those adorable curves keep making those laps in the veins, keep life’s race going. Then her heart would pause.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi …

  It was as if it was taking a breather. It couldn’t keep up but would stumble a few beats more. I put Trudy’s hand on my chest.

  “Feel it, sugar, keep going.”

  She gasped, tiny bubbles of blood on her lips. Her big browns opened and focused on mine. Yellow street light through the SUV’s back window cast deep shadows on her face.

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  “I know, I know, I know.”

  “We got it?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “We got it?”

  “We got it, and there was a lot, a whole lot. We could go away to the beach house for a while. I don’t even know who did this to you, it’s completely nuts.”

  Trudy’s lips twisted into a half-smile. Her eyes were clear and bright with tears that ran down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Gill.”

  “I know, sugar, I know, I know. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.”

  Her heart tightened like a fist. Then I felt it slowly loosen its grip, like a reluctant hand dropping a flower onto a grave.

  Trudy’s lips parted, exhaling. I looked deep into the canyon of those big browns and the shadow of forever filled them, never again to warm with a sunrise. The eyes were no longer eyes. They didn’t see.

  “Trudy!”

  The blood gurgled in her throat. Her whole body became heavier. I put my lips to her forehead and inhaled the last of her, along with a tangy whiff of acidic reality. She was dead.

  This was the deal, this was the pact, this was the way it was. This was the risk, the price you knew you might one day pay and not realize it was too much, that none of it was worth it.

  But she was also my love. The Clause makes no special provisions for that. Except maybe that love was my mistake.

  I knew in that instant that my life from then on would be filled with regret, for all the things I might and might not have done.

  Yet in the yellow shadows of the SUV, I felt my soul get lighter, like Trudy’s was pulling mine along with her. My soul wanted to go, too. It didn’t want to stay here without her, to stay in a world of regret, to stay and be alone. My heart actually skipped a beat, like it was considering calling it quits and letting my soul go with hers. My chest ached from my spirit struggling to escape.

  My mind stepped in—it wasn’t going to give up that easy. It told my body that we were staying, that we had to stay, that I had to follow policy. Why? Because following policy is what I did, that’s how an operation doesn’t go south, that’s how Trudy and I got this far and always got the gems free and clear. I had to be smart, I had to have a clear head. I knew what I had to do.

  Since her bad luck was contained and didn’t compromise the operation, I felt like it was mine to use. I was going to aim Trudy’s bad luck at the people who needlessly took her life, and mine. We never hurt anybody by lifting sparks. Boosting jewelry for us was stealing into dark places at night and slipping out without anybody seeing us. There was no smash-and-grab and no gunplay.

  Then out of nowhere: this.

 
Trudy dead in my arms.

  I wanted to explode into a jillion pieces, to scream and shatter the dark sky, to thunder and crack the earth, to pull my own heart out of my chest and rain. And rain and rain and rain, the gutters swollen with my agony, my anguish, my regret.

  I trembled in the yellow light of the SUV, Trudy’s lifeless, flat eyes looking at mine.

  Releasing her body, I felt like I’d been embracing a sack of mulch, like it had never even been alive. The inside of the SUV filled with an organic, tinny smell like lawn fertilizer, and the windows were steaming up. Maybe it was from my sweat, her blood, the smell of death. My shirt and pants were warm with Trudy’s blood. I couldn’t drive like that, much less spread it all over the SUV. If I got pulled over, there’d be no explaining it away.

  Self-preservation and policy began to edge out my regret, rage, and self-pity.

  I stripped off my shirt and used the back of it to wipe the blood from my chest, neck, and face. I slipped out of my pants and draped them and the shirt over the body. Then I rolled over the seat into the rear passenger seats, next to our black knapsacks. There was a compartment under the seat, and inside was a change of clothes. Believe me, in this business, you have to have lots of spare sets of clothing around. You get dirty, you get sweaty, and witnesses ID you by your clothes more than anything else. Out came the pack of clothes, in went the knapsack, the ones with the sparks and our tools.

  Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sneakers, I climbed into the driver’s seat, keys still in the ignition. I put the windows down to air out the SUV. Sultry summer washed over me, the smell of grass, trees, and cooling asphalt.

  I was parked on a side street in West New York, and drove to Boulevard East, a busy two-lane that runs along the edge of a cliff called the Palisades across the Hudson River from Manhattan. At the stop sign I watched as two townies raced by with their lights rolling, no sirens. I knew where they were headed, toward the Grand Excelsior condos, toward where Trudy got unlucky.

  I made a left, in the opposite direction, midtown Manhattan shimmering in the summer heat a half-mile below and to my right. On my left were a jumble of three-story row houses and plain brick apartment buildings. About a mile up, I made a right turn, down one of the few steep roads that leads down the cliff. At the bottom of the cliff is River Road, a four-lane commercial with strip malls, townhouses, high-rises, and lousy Italian restaurants. River Road took me to a small, dark side street next to the pollution control plant. I killed my lights and swung into the gated entrance to the plant, careful to position the SUV in front of a row of metal plates, but also to block the view of any possible cameras pointed my way from the plant. Cameras are everywhere these days. Someone in a passing car could see what I was doing if he looked carefully into the shadows, so my idea was to work fast.

  With a tire iron, I pried open one of the steel hatches in the driveway and heaved it up until it leaned against the bumper of the SUV. Below in the darkness was the gush of water and the roar of the grinders, their carbide teeth meshing. This was the spot where raw sewage came into the plant, and it was the grinders that removed solids, made them into slurry, and took them out of the sewage before treatment. I opened the SUV’s back and pulled my bloody shirt and pants off of the body, tossing them into the grinding chamber. Hands under the body’s armpits, I lifted the torso. It didn’t look a lot like Trudy anymore, and it helped not to think of it that way. Trudy was gone. This was no more Trudy than her clothes; it was just something she wore when she was alive.

  Then I made the mistake of taking a last look at her face, remembering the time we actually talked about this moment. That was almost like a joke, but we talked about what if one of us were the injured party, what we would do with the body, how we would follow policy. And we came up with this. I never in a jillion years thought that it might happen, that it would be me dropping her into the grinder.

  “Fucket, sugar, I am so sorry. I love you, baby.” I started to cry then. I just couldn’t keep it bottled up anymore. I pulled, stepped aside, and heard her thud on the pavement and then pitch down into the manhole: splash. The pavement shuddered as the grinders ate her. I pulled out the bloody splash mat from the back of the SUV and dropped that down into the grinders, too, before closing the back of the SUV and the steel hatch.

  Life really sucks sometimes.

  For me it was never worse.

  Two

  Driving north on River Road, I was numb. I rubbed my face with my shirt to wipe away the tears. I thought maybe I should have stepped into Outback Steakhouse at the mall, to be seen in a public place, to establish some kind of alibi in case I needed it. That was too much; I just couldn’t risk drawing attention to myself by suddenly bawling. I wasn’t in complete control and had to make sure I didn’t let Trudy die because of The Clause only to get caught doing something stupid. Lying low until daylight was more important than an alibi so I could check out the SUV and make sure there was no blood, inspect the sparks, and then stash the take in one of the lockers. Like having lots of sets of clothes around, it was good to have various stashes. Going home was not a good option. If you don’t have a solid alibi, it’s best that nobody sees you and can verify your comings and goings to conflict with your story. Sometimes it’s better to have been nowhere than somewhere.

  As you drive north on River Road through Edgewater, you come to an older part of the coast, a part that wasn’t a giant real estate scheme, just a place to live since back when. There’s a park next to the river with ball fields and crappy little houses across from them. Yeah, there are a couple high-priced townhouse developments, but when those are gone the road starts to go up and away from the river. On the left you pass a steakhouse called River Palm, the kind of place where the governor and TV anchors are seen, followed by a little bar called Rusty Kale’s, the kind of place with a shamrock in the window where the governor and TV anchors would never be seen. On the right, between the road and the river, is a forest crisscrossed with twisty little cracked roads linking a jumble of houses, some nice, some not. Back in there I rented a wood garage I called “the barn.” It used to be part of a house until the house fell down and only the garage was left. A neighbor bought the land where the house used to be and kept it wooded so he wouldn’t have to look at the neighbors. But he rented me the barn, and the way it was in the thick woods of August, nobody could really see me come and go.

  The SUV safely parked inside, I swung the wood barn doors closed. I pulled a lamp string and a shaded bulb popped on, swinging overhead.

  Out came the knapsacks and onto the workbench they went. I pulled the string to another lamp. I had done this a jillion times. It was an old routine, but mostly back when I worked solo. Funny, how suddenly I was solo again, and I was right back doing what I used to do. I guess sometimes patterns help a guy do what needs doing when life sucks that bad.

  Like old times, I opened the cabinet and found the bottle of Old Crow with the glass over the top. Next to it was half a pack of Winston Lights. I’d smoked the first half of the pack five years back, before Trudy. Inside the pack was a black lighter, black because white lighters were bad luck. Every kid knew that back in the day.

  I blew the dust off the bottle, wiped the glass with my shirttail, and dropped a couple fingers of bourbon into it. The cigarettes were dry and crunchy when I rolled one between my thumb and forefinger, and when I matched one it eagerly glowed red, crackling softly.

  I took the bourbon down in two quick slugs, and shuddered, exhaling smoke.

  The SUV’s engine ticking and cooling behind me, I closed my eyes and ran through those last moments with Trudy. How many times would I have to do that? How often before I stopped having to relive her death? They say grieving is a necessary process. I say grieving is self-pity and regret. It’s masochism, like beating yourself up as a guilty pleasure. When someone dies, you don’t cry for that person, you cry for yourself, partly be
cause you miss the person, but mostly because you looked death in the face and oblivion has you scared. Real scared. There’s a grinder in all of our futures.

  There would be a lot of sleepless nights, and the best I could do was keep my head straight, stay on policy, and know that once Trudy was compromised there was nothing anybody could do, and Trudy was cool with that. I was sure of that.

  I opened my eyes, wiped the tears off my face, and dropped in a few more fingers of Old Crow but set the glass aside. Out of habit, it was time to do a little inventory.

  The roll of cash from the sock drawer totaled eight thousand four hundred and twenty dollars. That would come in handy.

  I slid Trudy’s knapsack toward me, unzipped it, and dumped the contents onto the bench.

  In a dark apartment, a burglar doesn’t spend a lot of time looking at what he lifts. Especially not in this apartment, because there were a lot of sparks in the safe. I could tell by the weight and the sound of it that it was quality. But on the bench before me were some really nice pieces. I plugged a jeweler’s loupe into my eye.

  Too nice.

  Too nice?

  Yeah, like a four-carat ruby pendant in a filigree platinum setting. A gold necklace set with maybe thirty one-carat lemon-and-lime diamonds. A red diamond rose broach that filled my palm. A cabochon emerald ring the size of the end of my thumb. Marquis blue ruby earrings, matching aqua sapphire teardrop earrings and pendant, and an elaborate tanzanite necklace that must have weighed two pounds.

  All of it marked Britany-Swindol. That’s a high-end international jeweler, appointment only, and you have to be both rich and famous. They turn away mobsters. They can afford to. Harry Winston is almost as good as Britany-Swindol.

  My knapsack contained the pedestrian Tiffany, Cartier, and Mikimoto stuff that was easy to fence for a high return. It was the kind of stuff I sold to jewelry stores, which in turn sold to rich slobs I might one day take it back from. It was the stuff from the jewelry box. I knew because the sack had the Patek Philippe watch in it, the one from the dresser.