The Kill Clause tr-1 Read online

  “You were crying last night,” Dray said.

  He clasped his hands, pressed the knuckles to his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you dare apologize for that.” She leaned her head back until it thumped softly against the wall. “Maybe you should have done more of it.”

  He blinked hard, kept his eyes closed. “I don’t know what to do to diminish the hurt. There’s got to be something, some outlet for the victims. If not, if we don’t get anything from the courts, from the laws, what are we supposed to do?”

  “Mourn, stupid.” She propped her chin on the union of her fists. “And, Tim?” She waited for him to look up. “We’re not the victim. We’re related to the victim.”

  He sat with that one for a few minutes. Then he said quietly, “That is a damn powerful insight.”

  Dray took a deep breath, as if preparing for an underwater plunge. “You and I, we have a tough time starting conversations, not having them.” She lowered her arms until they stuck straight out, her elbows resting on her kneecaps. “I went to the grocery store today for the first time. Shopping not for three, not even for two. I skipped the candy aisle because Ginny, you know, and I bought less stuff, just for me, and I got to the checkout counter, and it was thirty-something dollars. So cheap I almost started crying.” Her voice cracked, a seam of vulnerability. “I don’t want to shop for one.”

  He felt something break inside him and spill relief. “Andrea, I-” He sat up sharply. “Wait a minute. You didn’t go to the grocery store the day I went in to work, the day of the Martia Domez shooting?”

  “I couldn’t get off the couch that day. What’s going on?”

  “The Stork said that’s when he broke in and bugged my watch. I left it at home.”

  “No way. I was here all day.” She let a sigh puff out her cheeks. “They must have had their eye on you longer than they’re letting on. You knew they were manipulating you from the get-go-”

  “I’ll have to talk to Dumone. I know I can trust him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do. I know it in my bones.”

  “Well, maybe the Stork and Rayner wanted a transmitter on you a week early, and they didn’t let on.”

  “Maybe.” His mind seethed with troubling thoughts. He vowed to get some answers from Dumone or in the next meeting at Rayner’s, to learn the precise parameters of the Commission’s stalking of him. His unease had been ratcheted up another notch-if his trust had indeed been violated, he’d be forced to implode the Commission.

  Dray remained backed against the wall, watching him with moist eyes. Her neck bore the mark of her nails from earlier scratching. “Come here,” he said.

  She rose with a groan, knees cracking, and crossed to Ginny’s bed. She lay down, her face on his chest, a wisp of hair falling to frame the outer edge of her eye. He put his spread hand over the back of her head and cradled it to him. She nuzzled into him like an animal, like a baby. They breathed together, then breathed some more.

  He pulled her hair back out of her face, and their eyes met, held. Her hand tightened on his chest.

  “I feel like we just found each other again,” he said.

  His phone, wedged in the front pocket of his jeans, vibrated against them both. Dray backed up off him, her knees and elbows pressing into the mattress, her chin resting on his stomach.

  He flipped the phone open. “Yeah.”

  Mitchell’s voice came with the staccato fire of cop argot. “The subject’s at the ten-twenty.”

  “Okay.” Tim turned off the phone and regarded Dray, savoring a final trace of comfort and, beyond that, feeling the stone edge of need bulldozing through him.

  She raised her eyebrows. He nodded. She pushed herself off him and stood, straightening her shirt.

  He wanted desperately to put his mouth on hers, but he feared if he started, he wouldn’t stop. He had to be across town, and he hated himself for it.

  On his way past her, they pulled together in a spontaneous embrace, caught sideways, her hands clasped around his waist, his arm down over her back, her face pressed to the side of his neck, chin resting on his shoulder.

  It was all he could do not to turn his head and kiss her.

  31

  TIM spotted MITCHELL behind the wheel of a parked pizza-delivery car halfway up the block from Bowrick’s. A lit Domino’s sign was adhered to the roof, but the doors weren’t painted with the logo, a minor but noticeable lapse. Tim pulled open the passenger door and slid in. The interior smelled of cheap vinyl and stale breath.

  In the change in Mitchell’s face, Tim saw the toll the Debuffier incident had taken on him. His eyes and cheeks had darkened somehow, as if stopped-up thoughts had bled into them and grown stagnant. A vein had broken in his left eye, a dead snake zigzagging out from his pupil.

  “He was dropped off by a gold Escalade, new plates at 0557, looked like he’d tied a few on last night. He stayed inside until 0624, then emerged in worker’s coveralls with a hard hat under one arm. Caught the bus two blocks north at the corner.”

  “Bus number?”

  “He took the 2 to the 10. I tried to call you, couldn’t get through, so I followed him through the connection, then downtown.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “You’ll love this. The memorial. The new one going up downtown, for the people killed in the Census bombing. They have Bowrick and a few other community-service monkeys sandblasting metal for the sculptor. Some genius figured they could reform criminals and get the thing built at the same time. Irony or something. He can’t operate the sandblaster much with his lame arm, but they have him gofering around. Him and a bunch of convicts. They even break for prayer sessions. It’s like some fucked-up penance cult. As if sandblasting metal gets you off the hook for shooting up a school.”

  In the backseat, gloves and black balaclavas peeked out from Mitchell’s olive-drab duffel. Tim grabbed a hood, rolled it, and slid it into his back pocket. He pulled two flex-cuffs from the rubber-banded bundle as well.

  Curved in dueling loops like mouse ears, flex-cuffs worked like heavy-duty garbage-bag ties. Once they were cinched around an arrestee’s wrists, there was no easy release; they could only be notched tighter. The hard plastic strips were so unforgiving that detention-enforcement officers sometimes had to use pruning shears to cut them off. They were standard issue for ART raids, and Tim always liked having a few handy to restrain the unforeseeable.

  “Did he have a lunch with him? A brown paper bag or a lunch box or something?”

  “No.”

  “All right. So lunch is probably provided, but he might be back between twelve and one-if not, I’d guess between four and six. I’m gonna slip inside, be there waiting for him. If he’s not alone when he returns, give me a double tap on the horn. You are not to leave this post. Where’s Robert?”

  “Not here.”

  “I do not want him on-site. Clear?”

  Mitchell used two fingers of each hand to smooth his mustache. “Clear. I’m gonna split and switch out the car. I don’t want to be sitting here in this thing much longer.”

  Tim nodded and got out. He strode down the cracked sidewalk, letting his elbow dip to touch the handle of his. 357, which felt reassuringly solid beneath his T-shirt. He passed two beautiful Mexican girls jumping rope, an old-timer walking a pit bull, a low rider with tinted windows. He circled the block and ducked through two backyards so he could approach Bowrick’s house from the rear.

  He wriggled through the bathroom window again and sat at the desk. Bowrick’s checkbook lay out, and Tim flipped through it. Bowrick made semimonthly paycheck deposits, each around five hundred bucks. A series of check entries caught Tim’s eye-two hundred dollars a week, every week, to the Lizzy Bowman fund. The name fluttered through Tim’s memory awhile before striking a cord. The coach’s daughter shot during Bowrick’s assault on Warren High.

  The kid was making his amends, working victim memorials, donating cash.


  The parents of the twelve kids who ate lead from an SKS would probably be touched.

  Tim pulled the chair around to the shadowed west wall, held his gun in his lap, and sat with his thoughts, which he found bad company. Lunchtime came and went with no sign of Bowrick. The shadows shifted in the room as afternoon came on, and Tim scooted the chair over to keep it in the dimness, staying on the hinge side of the door.

  Bowrick did not show up at five, or six, or eight.

  Tim found his mind drifting to Richard, the beaten-down PD who could see through the cracks and fissures of the system to the unbroken foundation beneath. The insurge of Tim’s own grief last night had scalpeled open a part of him, and the freshness of his sorrow, he found, had dulled his anger, his conviction. If there was anything objective towering out of the morass of his grief, he’d lost sight of it. To steel himself he thought of the child-killer he awaited. He thought of eleven dead students and one dead little girl. He thought of the closed casket at Ginny’s funeral, and why it had been.

  But matching his emotion step for step was the steady advance of another, more rational force. The cracked bedrock beneath the Commission. Lane’s and Bowrick’s pursuit-like Tim’s-of an idiosyncratic ideal they thought of as justice. The ways in which they’d all failed. Were failing.

  A little after nine Tim heard a key scratch its way into the front lock. He pulled his balaclava from his rear pocket and rolled it over his head. It covered everything but the crescent of his mouth, the spots of his eyes. The smell of dirt, sweat, and cigarette smoke preceded Bowrick into the room. He slammed the door and crossed to his closet, not noticing Tim in the darkness. Bowrick tossed his hard hat into the closet and pulled off his shirt. His back was marred with pocks, crescents of shiny, tight-pinched flesh.

  He was just lowering his arms when he noticed that the chair was not in its place by the desk. His eyes closed in a long blink. He turned calmly, expectantly, saw Tim sitting in the darkness. His shirt was balled at the end of his fist like a mop.

  He took note of the. 357 aimed at his head. His hands rose, fell to his thighs. “Go on then,” he said. “Shoot me.”

  His upper lip held the scraggly strands of a mustache forced before its time. Up close he was so slight as to suggest preadolescence. His appearance impressed upon Tim that the legal definition of adulthood was stunningly arbitrary, as preposterous as bar mitzvah manhood; some males are boys at twenty-two, some are men at sixteen. It was all in the gathering of focus, the shouldering of responsibility, the potential for menace. Tim had not counted on Bowrick’s seeming so much younger than himself, but why this was a sudden, essential criterion escaped him. In Bowrick’s frailty Tim sensed for maybe the first time the space between culpability and punishment.

  Tears eased down his cheeks, but Bowrick was otherwise completely unaltered-no jerky breathing, no reddening of the face, just the silent flow of tears, like thin faucet streams. His mouth set in a suggestion of a smile, of sadness and expectation, of weary relief.

  Tim’s grip remained perfectly firm on the gun, but his trigger finger did not recoil.

  “What are you? Dad of a kid who got shot? Uncle? Priest?” Bowrick’s bangs, greasy, long and thinned in tendrils, dangled over his eyes. “Fuck, man, if I was you, I’d shoot me. Go for it.” He tossed his shirt aside, his lame arm pulling back to his stomach like a snail retracting. His chest bore a bad Pink Floyd tattoo-the face from The Wall.

  Tim sorted through his legal arguments, his abstractions about justice, his ethical conclusions, but couldn’t find a mainstay. He searched for anger next, couldn’t locate it.

  “Well, go on, then.” Bowrick’s voice stayed tough, but the tears kept coming.

  “Why so eager?” Tim asked.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, fucking waiting for it. Always waiting for it.”

  “My violin’s in the car.”

  “Hey, fucker, you asked.” He rolled his head back. Took a deep breath. “It ain’t so clean like you think. I don’t know if one of the guys who got shot is your kid brother or something, but those guys were mean as shit. Ran that school like it was their own party, coach looked the other way ’cause he didn’t want to lose Sections.”

  “So you help two thugs shoot his daughter in the eye. Sounds like justice to me.”

  Bowrick laughed, high-pitched, his voice breaking, tears still running. “There ain’t no way back from something like I did, but I tried to set my shit straight. Tried to get my accounts balanced before I meet the Big Guy.” He nodded at Tim’s gun, wiped one cheek hard. “Let’s find out if I did.”

  Tim firmed his lips, lined the sights, but his trigger finger still disobeyed him. All five feet eight inches of Bowrick winced and trembled. Tim slid the gun back into his waistband and rose to leave.

  Both doors splintered in simultaneously. Balaclava hoods lowered, Robert and Mitchell burst into the room, guns leveled, Mini Mag-Lites strapped to their right forearms, shooting thin beams of light parallel with the barrels of their. 45s.

  “Everything okay?” one of them said. He nodded at Tim reassuringly as the other stutter-stepped toward Bowrick, gun-facing him.

  Tim’s rage flared hard. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  “You took awhile. We thought something might be wrong.” Tim recognized the coarser voice as Robert’s, which meant Mitchell was the one closing hard on Bowrick. An abrupt aggression role reversal that was mind-baffling but gut-logical. That Mitchell had appeared was an inexcusable breach of conduct; that Robert was present was worse. Tim’s mind went immediately to the lies surrounding the digital transmitter’s appearance in his watch. Maybe the Commission had always played by its own rules behind his back.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Good,” Mitchell said. “Then let’s do him and split.”

  Bowrick had back-stepped to the desk, his head ducked in anticipation of the shot. His thin arms crossed his chest, hands outspread over the balls of his shoulders.

  “No,” Tim said.

  Mitchell regarded him in disbelief, his eyes two white-shining orbs beneath the black fabric of the hood. “What?” The gun inched over, aimed now somewhere between Bowrick and Tim. “We’re doing this whether you like it or not.”

  Before he could think, Tim’s hand was down and through the draw. He center-sighted on Mitchell’s head and saw Mitchell’s sights staring him back in the face. Robert swung his gun at Tim, then back at Bowrick, agitated in the unfamiliar role of mediator. “Let’s calm the fuck down here. Let’s calm down.”

  Bowrick’s eyes were closed, his head still recoiled. Tim eased slowly over until he stood between Mitchell and Bowrick, squinting against the light of the Mini-Mag. When he leaned back, he felt the heat of Bowrick’s fear emanating from less than a foot behind him. He kept his eyes on the muscles of Mitchell’s forearm, reading them. His finger lay on the side of the gun parallel to the barrel, just outside the trigger guard, ready to flick and squeeze at the slightest prompting.

  “Move. I’m not fucking around here. Fucking move!” Mitchell pulled his gun sharply right and fired, the bark matched by a flash of flame at the barrel. The bullet bit out a chunk of closet frame. Bowrick muttered something low and fearful behind Tim. Robert was yelling, but right now it was just Tim’s eyes and Mitchell’s eyes peering out from the depths of dark wool, locked on each other.

  Tim stayed perfectly still, gun trained on Mitchell’s head. “If you make one more movement with your gun hand except to lower your weapon, I will shoot you.” He spoke softly, but he knew Mitchell heard every word, even over Robert’s yelling. “Believe me, you don’t want to exchange bullets with me at close range.”

  They faced each other over their respective barrels.

  Finally Mitchell rode the hammer forward and half spun his gun so it sat sideways in his hand, uncocked. He slid it into a hip holster and thundered out the rear of the house, boots pounding on the floor. Tim looked at Robert and jerked his head toward the d
oor. Robert took a deep breath, then holstered his weapon and jogged out after his brother.

  Tim half turned to keep an eye on Bowrick, then slid his own gun back into his waistband. Bowrick slid down to the floor, milk-pale and trembling, his eyes and nostrils red at the rims. His teeth were chattering.

  “You’re gonna want to leave. Right now. Don’t wait for them to come back.” Tim’s footsteps broke the near silence. The rear door hung crooked on its frame, and Tim pushed past it and into the shitty backyard.

  He was almost to the fence line when he heard Bowrick retching. He stopped, exhaled deeply.

  A minute and a half later, Bowrick emerged, stuffing crumpled bills into his pocket, wiping his nose on his sleeve. He started when he saw Tim waiting, still wearing the hood; he turned to run but stopped when Tim made no motion.

  “Oh. It’s you. I just…I just called a buddy, gonna pick me up in five minutes.” Bowrick’s eyes darted nervously to the yard’s perimeter, which Tim had been scanning assiduously. “Will you wait with me till he shows?”

  Tim nodded.

  32

  TIM had barely exited into Moorpark when he noticed the flashing lights behind him. He eased over to the curb. It was a sheriff’s car, not CHP, but on the off chance he didn’t know the deputy, he turned on the dome light and kept both hands in sight on the wheel.

  The deputy angled the spotlight into his rearview, so he squinted as the dark form approached. He waited for the knuckle tap, then rolled down his window. Dray leaned over, resting both hands on the sill, smirking. “License and registration.” She took note of his expression. “What’s wrong?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “I figured. I pulled you over before you raced home and got into it with Mac.”

  “Are you solo?”

  “Yeah. Why don’t you follow me. Let’s get off the road.”

  Tim followed her car. Eventually they pulled off onto a dirt road that crested the top of a little canyon, then rolled a few meters, gravel crunching under the wheels. Tim got out and joined Dray, sitting on the hood of her car. He’d forgotten how well she wore her uniform. Down below, a wedge of eucalyptus and a freestanding garage took shape in the darkness. Through a dimly lit window, Tim could see Kindell’s figure stooping and rising, as if moving items from the floor to a counter, and he was simultaneously surprised and not surprised that they had wound up here.