Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

He slid down the wall to a crouch, pistol dangling between his spread legs, and listened.

Complete silence.

He stood again, fighting away the pain, fighting for focus. Pivoting, he kicked the door just to the side of the knob. It did not give. He stumbled back a few steps, gripping his ankle, cursing. His foot hurt like hell.

He crept back down the hall, careful to avoid the trip wire, retrieved a pair of channel locks from his bag, and returned. Trying to keep his body to the side of the door, he gripped the knob in the vise and twisted hard, snapping the pins and raking through the cylinders. Then he flattened himself again against the hinge-side wall, willed away his various aches, and prepared for the pivot.

Take two.

This time the door gave with the force of the kick. He barged in, . 357 sweeping left, then right.

The Stork was backed against the far wall, drawn up in a huddled ball beneath the window, the Luger on the floor before him. His legs were curled under him, an arm gripping a knee, one hand clutching his chest. His face was deep red, awash in drying sweat, his mouth slightly ajar. His glasses had come unhooked from one ear and sat crooked across his face.

Tim kicked the gun away, checked a pulse and got nothing but tranquil, clammy flesh. The Stork’s feeble heart had given out.

Tim stood and regarded the room, a bizarre mishmash of spinster antiques and old-fashioned toys. A quilted comforter draped over a wooden sleigh bed. A Silvertone windup record player sat on a varnished table beside a stack of old LPs, a pile of stray hundred-dollar bills, and a Lone Ranger tin lunch box with the lid open. The lunch box was filled with neatly banded hundreds.

Tim leaned to peer behind the sole print on the wall-capless Lou Gehrig, head bowed, the luckiest man on the face of the earth confronting the packed stands of Yankee Stadium-and caught the gleam of the steel wall safe behind. The view from the other side revealed wiring and plastic explosives. Thinking of his ART teammates, Tim found a Sharpie permanent marker in the nightstand drawer and wrote BOOBY TRAP in block letters on the wall with a big arrow pointing at the frame.

He cautiously slid open the closet door, revealing several hundred old children’s lunch boxes, stacked floor to ceiling. He pulled the top one off-the Green Hornet and Kato-and opened it cautiously. Filled with cash, mostly fives and tens. The money by the record player Tim figured to be the latest payment, perhaps for the Stork’s part in planning Tim’s own assassination. Or for a murder still to come. Kindell.

The bathroom counter was barely visible beneath a blanket of pill bottles. A rubber ducky stared at Tim from the tub’s rim. Strung up on the tile were dozens of photos, most of them surveillance shots of Kindell about his business-emerging from a supermarket, tying his shoes on a sidewalk, brushing out his garage shack like a suburbanite on a Sunday afternoon. Tim wondered which were shot before Ginny’s death. He was overtaken with a fierce, fantastic urge-to travel back in time so he could fill Kindell’s head with bullets before the calendar lurched forward to February 3.

A photo of Tim and Ginny at the monkey bars, her expression one of apprehension, his of affectionate impatience. She’d been gripping his hand tightly, as if in fear that the monkey bars would mount an assault. Next to it hung a shot of Ginny walking home from school, backpack snug on both shoulders, face downturned, lips pursed-she was whistling to herself, as she often did, lost in that reverie children her age seem to fall into when alone.

He stared at the picture, feeling his grief again thaw and resolve, his mind clicking and whirring, trying to contend with the colossal unfairness that Ginny, in her mere seven years, had been targeted and risked and ultimately dismembered because of Tim’s own talent and recruitability. A pilot light of guilt flickered, ready to catch and blaze. How much responsibility did he, his training, his psychological profile, bear? How much of Ginny’s death had to do with the traits and skills embedded in Tim’s own character? Guilt could reach startling depths, he’d learned, even when not attached to fault.

He moved back down the hall, again stepping over the booby-trap wire, and into the dining room.

Gizmos and gadgets of all sorts lay about the floor in various stages of development and disuse. Tim recognized Betty, the conical digital-tone renderer, and Donna, the modified peeper. Betty had been altered, the keypad removed and a single Walkman earpiece inserted. Tim picked it up, inserted the earpiece, and swung the sound-gathering parabola around the dining room. He picked up nothing. He angled it through the open laundry-room and back doors, and the Doberman’s panting, hot and slobbering, burst into his ear. He let out a startled yell and tugged the earpiece free, his heart racing. The Doberman was still lying out near the fence, nearly fifty yards away. Tim was regarding the long-range mike with renewed admiration when he became aware of Robert’s sandpaper chuckle, feet away.

He dropped Betty, his. 357 drawn before she hit the floor.

Robert’s malicious laughter continued. Muscles tensed, weapon readied, Tim followed the sound toward the kitchen. He swung into the room, back pressed to the jamb, but there was nothing there, just an empty kitchen table, the Stork’s cup of juice on the counter, the red light of the telephone.

Tim slowly realized that the laughter was issuing from the still-active speaker on the wall-mounted phone. His assault on the back door had interrupted the Stork’s call.

Robert’s abrasive voice boomed out into the kitchen, over what sounded like low-level radio static issuing from the line. “Something scare you, princess?”

Tim spoke loudly in the direction of the speakerphone. “I’m quaking in my stilettos.” Talking compounded the throbbing in his stomach.

“You put on quite a show. It’s like old-time radio. ‘The Shadow knows.’ I bet the Stork would have appreciated it. Did you kill him?”

“He’s dead.”

“I figured.”

In the background Tim heard a distinctive, familiar chime rise out of the static. “You have Kindell.”

“You’re a quick study.”

“Have you killed him?”

“Not yet.”

The barely audible static from the speakerphone found resonance in the kitchen, the sudden depth of stereo sound. The matching murmur issued from the direction of the kitchen table. As Tim walked over, a radio-frequency scanner came into view on the seat of one of the chairs. The distinctive chime he’d overheard on the line-LAPD’s dispatch prompt. He felt his stomach tighten but pulled his focus back to the conversation. “What are you going to do with him?”

“I’m gonna violate his constitutional guarantees. And hard.”

A digital counter on the phone ticked off the length of the ongoing call: 17:23. The clock on the stove showed 10:44 P.M. Bowrick was safe only for a little more than an hour; then he’d likely be turned out of the clinic and put back on the street.

“You set Kindell up to kidnap my daughter.”

The air left Robert; Tim heard it across the mouthpiece like a burst of static. The rustle of the phone being covered. The murmur of the brothers conversing.

“We didn’t mean for it to go down that way.”

“Yeah? Well, then, why don’t you tell me how you meant for it to go down? Because, hey, maybe once I hear this, I’ll just forgive you and we can all go home.”

“We needed an executioner. We’d been waiting for months, almost a year, while Rayner tinkered with psychological profiles. Ananberg was being an uptight cunt. Dumone was…well, Dumone moves slow. Us and Rayner, we needed to get the plan in motion. The problem was, Rayner said, a guy with your profile wasn’t likely to say yes to something like the Commission. Needed a more personal motivation. So we thought we’d give you a little shove.”