The Kill Clause tr-1 Read online

  The gap opened up again between their hips. Her mouth tensed. “The house was empty and haunted.”

  “You trying to hurt me, Dray?”

  “Is it working?”

  “Yes. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Believe it or not, everything I’m going through isn’t about you. Mac is staying on the couch because I’m scared of the dark right now, like a little girl. I know, pathetic, but you’re certainly not around to help me with the problem.”

  “Mac has a thing for you, Dray. Always has.”

  “Well, I don’t have a thing for Mac. He’s staying as a friend. No more.” She reached over and took Tim’s hand, keeping her left hand wedged in her pocket.

  A sudden dread gut-checked him. “Take your hand out of your pocket, Dray.”

  Unwillingly, she withdrew her hand. Her ring finger was bare. A deep-lit pain took hold in Tim’s chest and spread out and out, brushfire-fast. He turned away, looking at the house of the man who had consumed his daughter, but Kindell had quieted within and could provide no distraction.

  Dray’s lips quivered ever so slightly, the pre-quake warnings of anger, of self-loathing, of sorrow-a triple cocktail with which Tim had recently grown familiar. Her face, gloomy and frozen in a halfcringe, matched nothing he’d ever known of her. She knuckle-scratched the top of her nose, a gesture she made when distressed or deeply sad. “I feel like you don’t want me anymore, Timothy.”

  “That’s not true.” His voice rose a bit with the inflection, but it was just him and Dray and a deaf man at thirty yards.

  “It’s too hard for me to wear it right now. I’ve looked at that ring every day of our marriage, first thing when I wake up, and it always made me grateful.” Dray seemed small and vulnerable sitting in the darkness, her arms hooked across her knees the way Ginny used to hold hers when she watched TV. “Right now it just reminds me of your absence.”

  He plucked up a weed by its roots and tossed it. Its mud-caked cluster of roots hit the foundation a few feet away with a satisfying splat. “I have to see this through. The Commission. Get my hands on that case binder. I can’t do that if I’m living at home, in plain sight. It puts me at too much risk. It puts you at too much risk. I need to protect Ginny at least in her death, so the men who did this…” When he raised his hand to wipe his nose, he saw it was trembling, so he lowered it into his lap and squeezed it, squeezed it hard.

  “Timothy.” Her tone approached pleading, though for what, he did not know. She started to reach for him but withdrew her hand.

  It took another minute or so before he could trust his voice again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t said her name in a while.”

  “It’s okay to cry, you know.”

  Tim bobbed his head a few times, an intimation of a nod. “Right.”

  Dray stood up, dusted off her hands. “I don’t want to not see you right now,” she said. “I don’t want to not have you in my life. But I understand why you have to do this for you, for us. I guess we just wait and hold on and hope what we are is strong enough.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her hand, her bare finger. The hole that had opened up in his chest continued to dilate, claiming his lungs, his voice.

  Something fluttered nearby, settled, and began to chirp.

  Dray turned and started the long walk back to the road.

  •Halfway home, Tim pulled over and sat, hands on the wheel, breathing hard. Though it was February-cold, he had the AC on high. He thought of his waiting apartment, its barrenness and bleak functionality, and realized how ill equipped eight years of marriage had left him for being alone. He pulled Ananberg’s address out of his pocket and studied the edge-ripped slip of paper.

  Her apartment building in Westwood was security-intensive- controlled access, double-locked glass front door, security cam in the brief stretch of tile that passed for a lobby. Turning from the camera, Tim ran a finger down the directory beside the call box outside and was not surprised to see the numbers listed by last name, not apartment number. He punched the button and waited as the metal speaker harshly projected a buzz.

  Ananberg clicked on, sounding wide awake though it was nearly four in the morning. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Tim. Tim Rackley.”

  “First and last name. How wonderfully unassuming. I’m in 303.”

  A loud buzzing issued from the heavy glass door, which Tim yanked open. He took the elevator up. The third-floor carpet was clean but slightly worn. When he knocked lightly on Ananberg’s door, he heard soft footsteps, then the sounds of two locks and a chain being undone. The door swung open. Ananberg wore a thigh-length Georgetown T-shirt. One hand held a thick-necked Rhodesian Ridgeback at bay by the collar, the other gripped a little Ruger, the muzzle of which she was using to scratch her leg.

  “You should check the peephole. Even if you just buzzed someone up.”

  “I did.”

  He knew she was lying, as he hadn’t seen the darkness of her eye through the lens. The dog moved forward and nuzzled his nose moistly into Tim’s cupped hand.

  “Impressive. Boston usually hates people.”

  “Boston?”

  “I inherited him from an ex-boyfriend. Harvard asshole.”

  She turned and headed back into the oversize studio. Past the kitchenette, diminutive dining table, and TV-facing couch, two bureaus cordoned off the sleeping area, which was no more than a full-size bed wedged beneath the room’s single large window. She snapped her fingers, and Boston trotted to a fluffy disk of a dog bed and lay down. The pistol she slid into the right bureau’s top drawer.

  She stepped closer to the bed, leaving them a few steps’ space. They eyed each other across a frayed throw rug. Crossing her arms, she lifted her T-shirt off over her head. Her body, thin and wonderfully shaped, was unexploited by weights or vigorous training. Modest, firm breasts rose above the in-curve of her stomach. Her gaze held the sapient matter-of-factness of examining nurses and prostitutes. It was frank and distressingly genuine, a sad, doleful ritual in a sad, doleful apartment.

  Tim’s eyes strayed uncomfortably to the single place mat on the dining table, the T-shirt puddled by the box of Kleenex on the floor. He understood more concretely that she’d been touched by death and loss, as had they all.

  “I’m afraid you misunderstood me. I can’t…” His hand described an arc of some sort but failed to extract better words. “I’m married.”

  “Then why are you here, Rackley?” She pulled a cigarette out of a pack on her nightstand and lit it.

  “I need a favor.”

  “I offered to give it to you, or hadn’t you noticed?” She winked at him, and he returned her smile. She stubbed out her just-lit cigarette in a candle on the bureau, fell back on the bed, and pulled a blanket across her body neither shyly nor modestly.

  “I’d like you to get me the public defender’s notes from the Kindell file. As a good-faith gesture. I know you have access to it. It’s too hard to wait without…something.”

  “I can’t break policy. Bring it up at a meeting, we’ll take a vote.”

  “We both know Rayner will never let that fly.”

  Her eyes never broke from his; for a moment it seemed they were looking straight into each other. He knew that his suffering lay exposed and vulnerable, and there was little he could do to shield it from her gaze. He cleared his throat softly. “Please.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m making no promises.” Reaching over, she clicked the bedside light down a notch. “Come here.”

  He walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. She hooked an arm around his waist and tugged him until his back was propped against the curved wooden headboard. She poked him until he shifted slightly left, then raised his arm and adjusted it out of her way. Content, she burrowed into his side, her head at the base of his chest.

  “Comfortable?” he asked.

  She strung a delicate arm across his stomach, and he was taken by how thin it was at the wrist
. “You love her, huh?”

  “Deeply.”

  “I’ve never loved anyone. Not like that. My shrink says it’s the result of an early loss. My mom, you know. I was fifteen, just entering sexuality. It’s all linked, death and sex. Fear of intimacy, blah, blah, blah. That’s probably why I like being with Rayner. He takes care of me and doesn’t make me feel too much.”

  “How was she killed? Your mother?”

  “A motel-room murder/rape. There were lots of headlines and prurient speculation. Sort of glamorous, come to think of it. I came home from school, and my dad was sitting there in the kitchen, waiting for me, the smell of formalin coming off his clothes from the ME’s. To this day, I smell formalin…” She shuddered.

  Tim stroked her hair, which was even finer and softer than he’d imagined.

  “He looked utterly broken, my dad. Just…defeated.”

  “What happened with the case?”

  “They caught the guy a few weeks later. The jury was, for the most part, white trash, unemployed, and utterly incompetent. They ruled ‘not guilty.’ The evidence was so overwhelming that the Post speculated openly about bribery. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just plain inanity, like most things are.” She shook her head. “Defense attorneys with deep pockets and jury consultants. Not technically a loophole in the law, more like sanctioned corruption.” She made a noise of disgust deep in her throat. “They say it’s better for one hundred guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be put to death. How long does that sententious bullshit bear weight? After the one hundred guilty men commit one hundred more murders? A thousand?”

  “No,” Tim said. “It holds weight when the one innocent man is you.”

  She grinned faintly. “I know that. I know it-I just don’t always feel it.” Her face felt warm and comforting against his chest. He kept listening, kept stroking her hair. “My dad sold real estate, but he was on a mortar crew in Korea, and some of his old platoonmates had become cops. One night a few of them and my dad rounded the guy up, took him for a drive to a warehouse in Anacostia. I’m fuzzy on details, but I know that when they found the body, they had to print it to make the ID because there wasn’t much left in the way of dentals.”

  Tim remembered how Rayner had claimed that her mother’s killer had died in a gang beating, and he wondered if he knew the real story. That depended on how deep the intimacy ran between Rayner and Ananberg.

  “I remember when my dad came home that night and told me what he’d done. He sat at the edge of my bed and woke me. He smelled of grass and his knuckles were split and he was shaking. He told me. And I felt nothing. I still feel nothing.” Her voice was quieter now, muffled against Tim’s chest. “Maybe I’m just not wired that way or I’m missing that gene, the conscience gene. Maybe when I get to the gates of heaven or whatever you Christians believe in, they’ll turn me away.”

  She shook off a shiver, then turned her face up to him. She pressed her lips together, working up the courage to ask something. Her voice shook a little when she finally did. “Will you stay with me until I fall asleep?”

  He nodded, and her face softened with relief. She settled back into him. Soon enough her breathing grew regular, and he sat with the warmth of her face against his chest and stroked her hair. After twenty minutes he slid carefully out from under her and slipped out so silently Boston didn’t even raise his head.

  23

  TIM pulled up to Dumone’s apartment a little before 7:00 A.M. A graceless stucco complex that exemplified bad seventies architecture, the building was less than a block off the 10 at Western. Next door, the ampm threw off fumes of gasoline and shitty coffee. The just-risen sun gave out a pale straw light to which Tim felt unfamiliarly attuned. He still had not slept.

  His surprise at Dumone’s early-morning cell-phone summons was surpassed only by the fact that Dumone had given him his home address rather than picking a public spot to meet. Had Tim not felt a strong intuitive trust for Dumone, he would have speculated about an ambush.

  Tim walked down the concrete walk that threaded along the building. A whistle called out, and there was Dumone, waiting for him behind a dusty screen door. They shook hands, Dumone’s mouth twitching in response to the formality of the greeting, and he stepped aside and allowed Tim to enter.

  It was a ground-floor, single-bedroom job that smelled of stale carpet. A budget laminate bookcase and desk housed awards, plaques, and a few guns encased in glass. Dumone swept his arm grandly around the interior. “Get you something? Pellegrino? Mimosa?”

  Tim laughed. “Thanks, I’m fine.”

  Dumone gestured for Tim to sit on the couch, then sank into a dusty brown La-Z-Boy. His eyes seemed unusually shadowed, his skin stretched tight across his temples.

  Tim raised his hands, let them fall back into his lap. “So?”

  “I didn’t really call you here for a reason. Just wanted to see you.” Dumone raised a handkerchief and coughed into it, and again Tim noticed faint specks of blood on the cloth.

  “You okay? Want me to get you some water?”

  Dumone waved him off. “Fine, fine. I’m used to it.” The handkerchief settled in his lap, clutched in a knuckle-thick hand. “Early on, when I was first married, I worked construction some weekends. The job didn’t pay so hot, the wife and I had just gotten hitched. Extra dough, you know? They had me swinging a sledgehammer, knocking down plaster in these old houses in Charlestown. The ceilings-” He coughed again, one finger twirling in the air, indicating the ceiling, holding the strain of the story. “Asbestos. Of course, we didn’t know then.” He shook his head. “Not good. I was invincible anyway, dodging bullets by day.” He smiled, and again his eyes gathered that gleam that said he was astute enough to find amusement in all matters.

  “We were all invincible once. And smarter.”

  “Yes,” Dumone said. “Yes.” A wistfulness touched his features. “I’m sorry that I haven’t known you longer, Tim. Rob and Mitch, hell, those two are like sons to me. The kind of sons you worry about a little-you smooth down their hair and send them out into the world hoping to God they’ll do okay. And they have,” he added quickly. “They’ve done real fine. But you. I hardly know you well enough, but I’d guess you’d be the kind of son you’d want to pass things on to, if you had anything worth passing on.”

  “That’s quite a compliment,” Tim said.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “I’ve enjoyed meeting you, too. Our…friendship…” “Friendship” seemed an odd word for whatever they shared. “I’m glad you’re in there steering the ship during our meetings.”

  Dumone nodded, a thoughtful frown on his face. “I suppose someone has to.”

  They sat not much longer, enduring the awkward silence.

  “Well,” Dumone said. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  24

  THE nextel chirped annoyingly, pulling Tim from the sweaty daytime sleep into which he had finally drifted. He rolled over on his mattress and grabbed the phone.

  Robert’s Marlboro voice came too loud through the receiver. “Motherfucker hasn’t left the house since we got here last night. Spends all his time tinkering around in that basement downstairs, where they found all that voodoo shit.”

  Tim rubbed his eyes hard, knowing it would leave them red and bloodshot but not caring. “Uh-huh.”

  “His house is over by the garment district downtown. How far away are you?”

  “About a half hour,” Tim lied.

  “All right. Well, the Stork got us tapped in to his phone lines from a junction box up the street. Debuffier’s mother just called to remind his ass not to forget their lunch. Noon at El Comao. Know where that is?”

  “Cuban joint on Pico near the Federal Building?”

  “That’s the one. So he’ll be peeling out of here in about twenty minutes. I thought you’d want to swing by, take a sneak-and-peek through the house with us. Mitch is gonna bring some explosive sheet along in case we decide to set a charge now.”
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  “I made clear you were doing surveillance only,” Tim said.

  “I know, I know, but we’re all getting the sense that Motherfucker stays bedded down. We just thought it wouldn’t hurt to have some explosives on hand, in case the…”

  Mitchell’s voice in the background: “-optimal-”

  “-opportunity arose. It might be our only window for a while.”

  “No way. You just started surveillance yesterday. All we’re doing today is taking a look through the interior to get the lay.”

  “All right, fine. We’ll just take a gander, then. Motherfucker’s at 14132 Lanyard Street. Oh, and Rackley? How are you gonna know where to find us?”

  “I’ll find you,” Tim said.

  “We’re blended into this block like a panther in the jungle, my friend. We’re-”

  “Let me guess. Service van with tinted rear windows.”

  A long silence.

  “I’ll see you soon.” Tim hung up, slid his gun into his waistband, grabbed the Nextel but not the Nokia, and headed for the door. He paused with his hand on the knob. Backtracking, he retrieved a pair of black leather gloves from the bag beside his mattress. With lead stitched into the lengths of the fingers and positioned strategically across the bands of the knuckles, the gloves could put horse-kick power behind a simple punch. Tim threw them into his pocket and headed downstairs to his car. Once he got to within a mile of Debuffier’s house, he pulled over and idled at the curb.

  Both sides of the street were lined with garment sellers’ stalls, elongated rooms jammed into the same structure like piano keys. Many of the booths had roll-up, storage-style doors, opening the entire storefronts to the sidewalks. The district had a Third World feel to it-drab functionality and cheap, raw product offset by bright colors and excess. A young boy burrowed into a chest-high heap of Dodgers shirts. Enormous spools of fabric were propped against walls, doorways, tables. A mound of moccasins spilled out onto the curb. The air smelled of candy and burnt churros.