The Kill Clause tr-1 Read online

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “I told them we’re no longer in touch. That I hadn’t seen you since Thursday morning. Mac never saw you when you came back here after Rayner’s.”

  Dray upheld fire-forged allegiances above all else, a trait Tim was forced to attribute to her four brothers or at least to her growing up with them. She was your strongest ally, once you had her.

  “And Bear believed you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Any progress on the safety-deposit key?”

  “No. I’ve been flatfooting my ass to different bank branches every spare moment I have, but nothing so far. I’ll match it up, just a matter of when.”

  “Listen, Dray, I don’t want to involve you further in this, but-”

  “What do you need?” Her voice said, Shut up and tell me.

  “Chrysler PT Cruiser, black, registered somewhere in El Segundo. Give me a ten-mile radius around city limits. There can’t be that many of them-I think they just started making it in 2001. Pull up license photos, cross-check them against a picture of Edward Davis, former FBI sound agent, Caucasian, Quantico, New Agent Class Two of ’66. Strange-looking guy-you’ll know him when you see him.” He heard her pen scratching on paper. “Also run the alias Daniel Dunn, see if anything rings the cherries.”

  “Check.”

  “You have any good intel?”

  “Bear’s being pretty tight-lipped around me, but he’s also checking in every few hours, I think just to hear my voice. It must remind him of saner times.”

  “Or to press you for info.”

  “He did mention Tannino’s leaning toward a press conference this evening, though he wouldn’t say what they’re releasing. My guess is they’ll put out a shout to Bowrick, who they still haven’t located. If he’s not dead already. Oh-and they had to release that retarded guy. The janitor, accused of molesting those kids.”

  “What? When?”

  “Just a few hours ago. It’s tough to keep protective custody on someone against their will-you know that. He was agitated as hell the whole time. You can probably understand why.”

  Tim felt his heartbeat pounding at his temples. “I gotta go.”

  “I’ll get on the car for you. I’ll need some time to get it done quietly.”

  “Thank you.” He moved to hang up, but then an image caught him-Ananberg back at Rayner’s after the break-in, dead eyes hidden beneath her sleek hair. He brought the telephone back up to his face. “Dray, I really…thank you.”

  “I’m a deputy in Moorpark. What the hell else am I gonna do?”

  •Something in the Acura’s dash started to rattle at ninety miles per hour. As Tim screeched off the freeway exit, it occurred to him that he might be heading into a cleverly devised setup. Dray would never betray him-that he knew-but if Bear wanted to disseminate misinformation to Tim, she was a plausible route. And Dobbins a plausible lure.

  Not Bear’s style, but it was a possibility Tim couldn’t ignore.

  When he reached the vicinity of Mick Dobbins’s apartment, he was torn between urgency and caution. He did a quick drive through the surrounding blocks, closing on the building, but in the end his foot approach left him ambush-vulnerable.

  No answer when he rang Dobbins’s bell. No one visible through the window.

  He turned at a slight movement beside him, expecting to see Bear and a legion of deputy marshals, but instead it was the same old woman from before, wrapped in the same fluoride-blue bathrobe, her hair still contorted in curlers. She drew back in a posture of exaggerated caution, one liver-spotted hand clenching her bathrobe closed at the throat.

  “Look who’s poking around here again. Mr. Twenty Questions.”

  “Where’s Mickey?” Tim asked.

  “There you go again.” Her eyes flashed heavenward, her hands shaking twice, an exasperated plea for divine intervention. “What do you want with him? Everyone pulling and shoving at him-it’s enough already. Leave him in peace.”

  “I’m a friend of Mickey’s, remember? I got the police to release him. Did someone else take him?”

  “No one else has been nosing around”-she squinted at him-“except you. Mickey probably went down to the park. It’s after-school time. He likes to watch the children play. He misses them, because those schmucks took it away from him, his work at the school, those kids he adored so.”

  Tim fought to maintain a facade of patience. “Which way is the park?”

  She pointed an unsteady finger. “Just up the street.”

  When Tim flashed past her, she let out a little shriek. He hit a dead sprint, sighting the park ahead, a half block rimmed with sycamores. Fluorescent Frisbees drifted over the abbreviated field, mothers chatted beside strollers, infants kicked up sand in a play box. Tim pulled up in the picnic area, trying to condense the whirlwind of motion, scanning the area for Dobbins. A mother sat with a notepad across her knees, her gold pen flashing in the sunlight. Children kicked and screamed from swings. Colorful clothing. The smell of baby powder. Cell phones chirping.

  Across the park Dobbins sat on the edge of a wide brick planter, watching a group of kids play tag, his face heavy with sadness.

  As Tim started to cut through the crowd, Dobbins rose and began to head in his direction. He walked with a deliberate gait, his beak nose pointed down, watching his shoes.

  A movement from his left side, a thick plug of a man parting the crowd, solid and purposeful, seeming to glide through the bustle. Black jacket, low baseball cap, head ducked, hands in pockets. Mitchell.

  Tim ran, cried out, his voice lost with the shouts of gleeful children.

  Despite all else that had gone down, he was shocked that Mitchell would attempt a shooting in an area crowded with kids. The thought barely had time to register when Mitchell’s hand flashed up from his pocket, gripping a plastic flex-cuff. One tough plastic strip was curved around to make a dinner-plate-size circle, the notched end already snared through the catch. Just waiting to be tightened.

  Mitchell swept behind Dobbins, who continued walking toward Tim, studying the ground at his feet, oblivious. Tim yelled, shoving a father out of the way. Dobbins’s head was just rising to check out the commotion ahead when the loop of the flex-cuff dropped over his head like a snare.

  Even over the low rumble of the crowd, Tim heard the shrill zippering sound of the plastic pulling through the catch, and then Dobbins sucked in a creaking gasp, hands at his throat, and fell to his knees. A little girl screamed, and there was a flurry within the already-moving crowd, people running away, kids dashing to parents.

  Mitchell was several strides from Dobbins now, but he turned as Tim approached, now fifteen yards away. Their eyes locked. Mitchell’s expression of utter tranquillity never gave way, not even as he drew, a quick, reflexive lift of his. 45 that rivaled Tim’s own. Tim’s weapon was clear of his waistband but pointed directly down at the ground; he didn’t dare raise it with children and parents streaming through his line of sight, crying and shouting.

  Splitting the distance between them, Dobbins lay on the ground, now flat on his back, expelling great, abbreviated choking sounds. His body was remarkably still, save for one foot that ticked back and forth, pendulum-steady, the untied laces brushing asphalt. Over Mitchell’s shoulder Tim saw a tan Cadillac coast into view on the street behind the park, Robert at the wheel.

  Tim stared down the bore of Mitchell’s gun, a hypnotic black dot that sucked in all his thoughts, leaving him with only a nonspecific buzz in his head. Mitchell’s right eye was closed, his left focused on Tim’s face over the lined sights. Children flashed between them.

  Mitchell lowered his gun and took two jogging backward steps, then turned and sprinted to the car. Tim raced after him but got only a few steps past Dobbins before his conscience leash-jerked him back.

  He slid to Dobbins, the asphalt scraping his knees even through his jeans. Dobbins’s neck sported deep scratch marks above the tight band of the flex-cuff; Tim could see the
corresponding flesh stuck beneath the nails of his scrabbling fingers.

  A cluster of people had gathered, watching warily from a few feet. Children were crying and being pulled away. The mother Tim had observed earlier looked shell-shocked, her weighty purse slung over one shoulder, her notepad flat against her thigh. Three people were on cell phones, anxiously providing the park’s address and a queasy description of the emergency.

  The mother stepped forward, pulling an overburdened key chain from her purse and letting it dangle. “I have a knife.”

  Tim grabbed the key chain and snapped off the pocketknife-an elegant sterling-silver trinket from Tiffany. The blade was thin, which would help, but not serrated, so sawing against the thick plastic would be tough going.

  Tim moved Dobbins’s hands away, but they shot back to his bloody throat, obscuring Tim’s view. He pinned one of Dobbins’s arms beneath a knee and slapped the other away until a man stepped from the crowd and held it down.

  Dobbins’s face was tomato red. A vein bulged on his forehead, and the skin around his neck was sucked in tight, leaving hollows.

  Tim slid the blade under the embedded band, cutting through a thin layer of Dobbins’s skin in the process. He tried to turn the knife to get the cutting edge up against the flex-cuff, but there was not enough give; Mitchell had yanked it incredibly tight, smashing down the top half of Dobbins’s Adam’s apple.

  Beneath him Dobbins jerked and expelled a ticking gurgle.

  Tim turned the knife, fingering through the blood to find Dobbins’s larynx. He walked his fingers down until he felt the soft give of the cricothyroid membrane, then cut a lengthwise slit through Dobbins’s flesh. A burst of air shot out through the hole, accompanied by a spray of blood.

  “Your pen. Give me your gold pen.” Tim snapped his fingers, his hand out to the mother. Anticipating him, she unscrewed the pen barrel and shook it so the rollerpoint ink cartridge fell. She handed him the hollow tube of the top half of the pen, and he turned it and inserted the tapered end into the bloody gap. It slid in smoothly.

  The sound of sirens, still distant.

  Tim sucked once to clear the tube and spit a mouthful of blood on the pavement, fighting off images of hepatitis and HIV, and then Dobbins’s body lurched forward as he drew air through the pen barrel directly into his throat. His sloped eyes gave off no anger, just a panicked disorientation.

  “Come here,” Tim said. The woman came forward and crouched. “Hold this. Hold this.” She took the pen barrel from Tim’s blood-moist fingers, tentatively at first. He firmed her hands with his own, then rose.

  The crowd parted, leaving him a few feet on either side. A crimson spray decorated the front of his shirt; his hands were stained to the knuckles. He jogged out of the park, back down the sidewalk to his car, spitting a bit of blood every few steps.

  Driving away, he passed an ambulance and two cop cars just turning onto the block.

  38

  TIM CHANGED OUT of his shirt and took a prolonged shower, scrubbing his hands and under his nails, letting the bathroom fill with steam. Turning the dial almost all the way to “hot,” he stood beneath the stream, shoulders slumped, head hung, letting the water strike him at the crown and run down over his face. It felt blissful and clean and painful.

  Once dressed, he went to the corner booth and called Hansen at the Nextel office to check what cell site had been routing Robert’s and Mitchell’s outgoing calls.

  “Your boys are smarter than you think. Not a single call. I’d say either they dumped the phones or they’re using another phone for outgoing.”

  Before he could express his doubt that Robert and Mitchell were sufficiently technologically sophisticated to take those countermeasures, a thought struck him: The Stork was. Having a second phone exclusively for outgoing calls was a brilliant idea-one that none of Tim’s fugitives had ever come up with.

  “Well, I just had a little run-in that may provoke a phone call,” Tim said. “Will you mind keeping on it, just in case they slip up?”

  Tim thanked him and walked up the street to the store from which he’d rented his Nokia. The diminutive store owner didn’t so much as comment on the last phone he’d rented Tim, now scattered in pieces at the side of the 110. Tim selected the same model, and the owner word-lessly started the paperwork for the identical financial arrangement they’d agreed upon previously. Money doesn’t just talk; it silences.

  Tim would keep the Nextel, too, because that was the number Robert and Mitchell knew and the only means they had of getting in touch with him. His elaborate game of musical phones would have made a mutt like Gary Heidel proud.

  Tim charged his phones side by side near the outlet and sat Indian style on the floor staring at exactly nothing.

  He recalled Mitchell’s expression of confusion on the playground-he’d truly been surprised Tim had come after him. Depending on whether their surveillance on Dobbins had overlapped with the police’s picking him up last night, they might not even be aware that the authorities had been alerted.

  If Tannino went ahead with the press conference, they’d know soon enough.

  Within a few hours Robert Masterson, Mitchell Masterson, Eddie Davis, and Tim Rackley would be names known coast to coast. Tannino would likely keep Dumone’s, Ananberg’s, and Rayner’s deaths separate, at least for the time being. Tim turned on the television to see if any word had leaked, but aside from a nothing-new update about Rayner’s murder and Melissa Yueh’s announcement that KCOM would be airing a special report at seven o’clock, there was zilch.

  Yueh collected her papers, tapping them once neatly on her anchor desk to line the edges. “In other news, Mick Dobbins, the formerly accused child molester, was attacked today in a Culver City park by an unidentified man who cinched a hard plastic garbage-bag tie over his head. He nearly asphyxiated, but another man performed an emergency tracheotomy, then fled the scene. Eyewitnesses helped the police compile this sketch of the assailant.”

  A composite flashed up on the screen that looked more like Yosemite Sam than Mitchell Masterson.

  “Police would not reveal whether this attempted murder is linked to the Lane and Debuffier executions, but they did indicate they were considering the possibility.”

  A shot of the park showed Culver City PD pushing bystanders back from a circle of asphalt marked with crime-scene tape. To the side the back of Bear’s wide frame was readily apparent. He’d sweated through his sport coat at the armpits. The impromptu huddle around him included Maybeck, Denley, Thomas, and Freed.

  Colleagues turned adversaries.

  “Local authorities are looking for both men. Dobbins was taken to Brotman Medical Center, where he is reported in stable condition.”

  Tim turned off the TV and sat at his desk. He’d have to give Dray at least twenty-four hours on the car. The safety-deposit key could take hours, could take weeks.

  His thoughts, once turned to his wife, didn’t readily depart. Dray, who kept her nails short and unpainted. Dray, who always held other people’s babies awkwardly away from her body, like leaking trash bags. Dray, two-ring shooter on a Transtar target with a Beretta at fifty yards.

  He folded his hands in his lap and sat in the relative silence because that was what’d he’d heard that people seeking peace did. He closed his eyes, but spotlit in the dark was Kindell’s bent hacksaw, worn to the nubs, still sticky with Ginny’s blood. He wondered what other items waited in the surrounding blackness.

  He set the VCR to record the seven o’clock press conference, in case he wasn’t back in an hour. He left down the fire escape, for practice, and so he could keep the doorstop wedged in place while he was gone.

  Erika Heinrich’s bedroom light was on. Tim parked four blocks away and duplicated his previous cautious approach to the house. Her sash window was open, the blurry whites and blues of a television screen poorly reflected in the upper pane. Tim squatted beneath the window just as the KCOM news jingle wound up.

  Marshal Tannino’s
televised voice carried outside in bits and pieces. “…these three men…renegade law-enforcement officers…wanted for questioning in connection with the Jedediah Lane and Buzani Debuffier killings…repeat: No charges have been brought…”

  Tim rose to a crouch, bringing his eyes level with the sill. Terrill Bowrick sat beside Erika on her bed, both of them staring at the small TV on her dresser. Bowrick’s adolescent slump rounded his back, his hands dangling between his thighs. He looked even younger than Tim remembered, his face pale except where dotted with acne, his neck and arms thin like a girl’s. He looked incredibly weary, as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  In contrast the televised Tannino looked stiff in his best suit-a navy blue number-and his Regis Philbin tie. His hair, lit with dozens of camera flashes, seemed exceedingly blow-dried. He gestured to an easel, on which sat enlarged photographs of Robert, Mitchell, and the Stork. “Any sighting of these three men should be reported to…”

  No picture of Tim. No mention of Tim.

  They probably wanted to nab the Medal of Valor winner quietly, spare the L.A. law-enforcement community another public debacle.

  Bowrick’s mouth, fringed with a meager mustache, was thin and bent down in a slightly open frown that suggested tears would not be long in coming. His face had whitened to an extraordinary degree. Erika was rubbing him between the shoulders in a repetitive, soothing motion. Their faces both held an exhausted calm, as if fright and worry had worn away all vitality.

  The door to the adjoining bathroom was ajar. Pink tile. Lights off. Empty. A chair was backed to the bedroom door, wedged under the knob. Mommy didn’t know about the special houseguest.

  “…suspected of targeting alleged murderers and child molesters, suspects who were released by the criminal-court system.”

  A flurry of waving hands and pens. An explosion of questions, one winning out.

  “Was the Mick Dobbins assault today related?”

  “We believe so, yes.”

  “How are the Vigilante Three choosing their victims?”