The Kill Clause tr-1 Page 36

  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 a 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.”

&
nbsp; “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 what’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.”

  “There’s no difference.”

  “You gonna teach me strategy, lawman?”

  “There’s a team gunning for Rhythm Jones.”

  “Not the whole team, Rack. They’re missing you.” His righteousness was undercut by a piece of spinach clinging to his incisor. Tim gestured and Bear buffed it off with his napkin.

  “You’ve known since you heard that taped 911 call what I’ve been doing, Bear.”

  Bear looked away, letting out a jerking sigh. “You’ve been as much a father to me as anyone’s ever been-”

  “You’re older than me, Bear.”

  “I’m talking right now, and you’re listening.” Bear’s anger was working its way into his face, coloring the rims of his eyes, turning his face an unhealthy white. “You were an officer of the federal courts. A law-enforcement agent of the attorney general. This is going to wreck Marshal Tannino. He loves you like family.” Bear’s voice was disdainful but also morose, even sorrowful. He gave off a hurt betrayal, that of an unjustly smacked dog. Tim felt his self-loathing anew in Bear’s expression, and the anger, once present, bled through him until its bearing was unclear.

  At the table beside them, two Hollywood agents, dressed like affluent Mormons, talked indecipherable industry babble over sashimi.

  “About half a million criminal cases go through the L.A. court systems a year,” Bear continued, his voice rising at a healthy clip. “Half a million. And you found what? Six you didn’t like? So you’re willing to shitcan the system because here and there something don’t work its way through like it should? Jedediah Lane was acquitted by a jury. It was your job to protect people like him. Congratulations. You’ve just added your name to the proud tradition of mob violence. Revenge killings. Street justice. Lynchings.” He was shaking hard enough that he spilled some of his lemonade over his knuckles when he took a sip. “You don’t deserve to call yourself a former deputy.”

  “You’re right.”

  “You swore you’d never be like him,” Bear said. “Your father. If there was one fucking thing I knew in the world, it was that people could rise above the shit they were brewed in. I knew that because of you. I thought I knew that because of you.”

  Tim’s face numbed, and he felt a sheen of moisture gloss his eyes. “I wanted to take something back. After Ginny. Do you understand that?”

  “I don’t agree with it. I do not fucking agree.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Do you understand?”

  Bear swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple jerking up, then down like a piston. “Of course I understand. But that has nothing to do with what you’ve done. I also wanted to take something back after Ginny. I also loved her. She was my niece, practically. I wanted to shoot a trucker who was manhandling a woman in a bar where I stopped that night, the night she was killed. Guess what? I didn’t. Just that simple. I fucking didn’t. There is no right way to take something back like that. You just stare at it and you learn it’s empty, you’re empty, and that’s the hard fucking painful fact of the goddamn catharsis-which is a word I’m sure you thought I didn’t know-that you don’t get anything back. Life ain’t a Spiegel catalog. You just go on with that part of you missing, period, the end.”

  Tim started to say something, but Bear raised one hand violently. “I’m just getting started. If every father killed three men to get at who killed his daughter, where would we be? These killings of yours. Lane. Debuffier. Were they unlawful? Yes. Was there malice? Yes. Willful? Yes. Deliberate and with premeditation? Yes, yes. You’re eye-to-eye with two murder ones. And don’t think I’m not gonna bring you in. Right here, right now.” His left cheek twitched up in a squint, physical discomfort’s overture. He belched quietly into a raised fist.

  “You can bring me in, Bear. Just not now.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “I need to finish the job. The Mastersons are out of control, on a rampage. I’m uniquely positioned to deal with them-I know their MO, their habits and patt
erns. You need me in the field, feeding you information. I can cooperate-through you-with the service, with LAPD. Let’s deal. Once we reign in this…”-Tim took a moment to search for the phrase-“lethal force I’ve helped to unleash, I’ll come back and face the music.”

  “Oh, sure. After all this, Tannino’ll happily turn you out on the streets to keep up with your vigilante activities. You’re a civilian now, Rack. What are you thinking?”

  Though Tim already knew what Bear’s answer would be, he kept laying groundwork for later. “My cooperation, intel, ass on the line, and eventual surrender. That’s what you get. I don’t care if Tannino wants the deal-you don’t have to work it out now. It’s what I’m offering. It’s the basis on which I’ll be working.”

  “No. Why should the marshal trust you now? Why should I trust you now?”

  “I’m finding my way back-to society and to what’s right. You can trust that.”

  “Forgive me for needing more.”

  “We’ve cut deals with mutts before.”

  “Can you imagine the shit Tannino would catch if things get worse and it comes out we had you and turned you loose? Or that we didn’t come after you full steam? No way. No deal.” Bear leaned forward, his right arm across his stomach, clutching. The cramping was just getting started. “Give me your weapon.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “We’ll have a showdown. Do you want that here, at Kose’s place?”

  “I’ll come in. You’ll get me. You have my word. But I’m finishing this thing.”

  His arm tightening across his stomach, Bear lurched forward, his elbow thunking the table, knocking over his glass. He studied the spreading stain for a moment, then looked up at Tim, realization giving way to fury. He cross-drew with his left hand, a single, economical gesture that ended with the barrel pointed at Tim’s head. “You piece of shit,” Bear gasped. “You fucking mutt.”

  A woman shrieked across the room, but surprisingly, nobody moved. Tim scooted back in his chair and dropped his napkin on the floor. “It’s just hydrogen peroxide. Don’t worry-it’ll break down into oxygen gas and water in your stomach.”