Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

“You sure you’re ready to work?”

Tim’s eye flicked to the scattering of cards on the wood tabletop. Garlands in muted inks on taupe paper. “I don’t know what else to do. I’m going out of my mind. If I don’t work, I might do something stupid.”

Dray dropped her eyes. He knew she sensed his eagerness to get out of the house. “You should go, then. I think I’m just upset that I’m not ready yet.”

“You sure you’re okay? I could call Bear-”

She waved him off. “It’s like what you said to me that first awful night.” She mustered a faint grin. “At least one of us should get some sleep.”

He paused for a moment in the doorway before leaving. Dray leaned over the card she was writing, her jaw set just slightly as it got when she concentrated. Early sunlight shone through the window, turning the edges of her hair pale gold.

“Of course I remember that day at the picnic, with her and the airplane,” Tim said. “I remember everything about her. Especially when she was bad-for some reason those memories bring her the closest. Like when she drew on the new wallpaper in the living room with crayons-”

Dray’s face lightened. “And then denied it.”

“Like I might have done it. Or you. Or that time she put the thermometer against the lightbulb to get out of going to school-”

She matched his smile. “I came back in the room, and the mercury was redlined at a hundred six degrees.”

“The princess tyrant.”

“The little shit.” Dray’s voice, loving and soft, cracked, and she pressed a fist to her mouth.

Tim watched her fighting tears, and he looked down until his own vision cleared. “That’s why I can’t…why I avoid it. When we talk about her, it’s too…vivid…and it…”

“I need to talk about her,” Dray said. “I need to remember.”

Tim made a gesture with his hand, but even he wasn’t sure what it was meant to convey. He was again struck by the ineffectiveness of language, his inability to digest his feelings and shape them into words.

“She’s a part of our lives, Tim.”

His vision grew watery again. “Not anymore.”

Dray studied him until he looked away. “Go to work,” she said.

TIM sped downtown, reaching the cluster of federal and courthouse buildings surrounding Fletcher Bowron Square. The squat cement and glass structure that passed for the Federal Building housed the warrant squad’s offices. Embedded in the front wall was a mosaic mural of women with square heads, which Tim had never quite grasped. The few times he’d taken Ginny to the office, she’d found the seemingly inoffensive mural unsettling; she’d keep her face turned into his side as they passed. Tim had always had a tough time deciphering her fears; also on her list were movie theaters, people over seventy, crickets, and Elmer Fudd.

He badged himself at the entrance, took the stairs to the second floor, and headed down a white-tiled corridor with spotty patchwork on the walls.

The office itself wasn’t much to look at, a haphazard throw of cubicles with metal schoolboy desks and fabric walls the color of Pepto-Bismol-laced vomit. For months admin had been promising the deputies a move to the more upscale Roybal Building next door, and for months it had been delayed. The bitching had reached a daytime-talk-show high, but it did little good; the deputies weren’t the first to note that federal bureaucracy moved like an arthritic tortoise, and, to be fair, shoddy office space had never been an impediment for deputies who preferred the street anyway. The walls were covered with newspaper clippings, crime stats, and most-wanted mug shots. John Ashcroft peered out from a portrait, all beady eyes and weak chin.

As Tim threaded through the cubicle labyrinth to his desk, the other deputies mumbled condolences and averted their eyes, precisely the type of reaction he’d come to work to avoid.

Bear approached him at a half sprint, filling the narrow space between desks. He was geared up-ballistic helmet under an arm, goggles around his neck, thin cotton gloves, a mike-mounted portable radio, two sets of matte black cuffs, a gaggle of hard plastic flex-cuffs fanning back off his shoulder, black steel-plate boots, a Beretta in a hip holster, a can of Mace, extra mags dangling from a shoulder rig on his right side, and a Level III tactical vest, more flexible than the old Christmas-platter trauma-plate specials, but still able to stop most rounds. Forty-plus pounds, not counting his primary entry weapon, a cut-down twelve-gauge pump-action smoothbore Remington, charged with double-aught buck and fitted with a fourteen-inch barrel and pistol-grip stock. Because of its absence of a shoulder stock, the shotgun kicked back thirty-five pounds of recoil to be absorbed by the arms; this was nothing for Bear, but Tim had seen more slender deputies get knocked ass over teakettle.

Like the rest of the Arrest Response Team members, Tim preferred the shoulder-mounted MP-5, which could better pinpoint targets. He thought Bear’s shotgun an unwise choice because it tied up both hands and presented penetration problems in a confined area, but Bear had grown partial to the Remington in his Witness Security days, and the shuck it gave when he racked a round could up a fugitive’s pucker factor considerably.

ART was composed of the best-trained deputy marshals. When the bell rang, they came off regular duty, threw on Kevlar, and enacted precision strikes to extract fugitives. Because of Tim’s Spec Ops background and his early record working up warrants, he’d been fortunate to make ART almost immediately after graduating the academy. During one fugitive roundup in his second month, his team had been hitting as many as fifteen hideouts a day, guns drawn on each entry. They kicked in the door half the time, and more than half the arrests were of armed men.

Bear hardly slowed as he reached Tim, and Tim turned and moved with him to keep from getting run over.

“We’re waiting on you. Downstairs. Now. We’ll have our pre-op briefing on the way over.”

“What happened?”

“Our CI dropped dime on a buddy who was supposed to mule a shipment of imported wine, clear it through customs, port of entry San Diego. His meet is with a guy who fits Heidel’s description.”

“Where?”

Bear’s gold marshal’s star flashed on its leather belt clip as he walked. “Martia Domez Hotel. Pico and Paloma.”

The mule would probably leave the drugs in a truck in the parking lot to eliminate the risk of getting caught with them in the room. At the motel he’d receive his first payment and get directed to the stash house, where the water would be extracted from the “wine,” leaving behind cocaine.

“How’d you pin location?”

“ESU. Heidel’s a smart bastard, been phone-swapping about every other day, but the CI coughed up his new number and it tripped a cell site right at Paloma and Twelfth.”

The Electronic Surveillance Unit had a unique set of tricks at its disposal when it came to tracking fugitives. Every cell phone emits a locating burst in its own distinct radio frequency, identifying itself to its network. If a top-clearance government agency like the Marshals Service or NSA is willing to commit outrageous resources, a nationwide cellular system can be programmed to pinpoint that burst to a local cell-system coverage area within a radius of less than three hundred yards. Because of the expense-a live cell-phone trace requires men and cars and global positioning satellite handsets-the obvious problems gaining legal clearance, and the reliance on private-sector telecommunication cooperation, the technology is used sparingly. They were going all out for Heidel.

“Martia Domez is the only hotel on the block, and the CI knew the meet was in a hotel Room 9,” Bear continued. “The meet wasn’t supposed to be until six P.M., but Thomas and Freed did a drive-by about twenty minutes ago and said someone’s already in the room. Two more men just showed up.”