Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

Bowrick’s eyes shifted across the dash. “A mirror. Right.”

“Look at me. Don’t look down, away. That’s just arrogance.”

Bowrick held his gaze, though his face paled and his hands fidgeted in his lap.

“You think you’re so bad nobody else can look you in the eye. Well, I can. We’ve both killed people for the same reasons. And I see that you’re at the beginning of a process that just might be redemption. And I’m betting on that.”

“What if I don’t want that responsibility?”

“If you screw up, I can always come back and shoot you later.”

Bowrick let out a short stutter of a laugh. His grin faded when he saw Tim wasn’t smiling. “Okay.” He nodded, his pale face flecked red with acne. “Redemption. Hell. I never had anything like this I’m supposed to carry until now.”

“And?”

“That’s fine by me. But you better keep studying it, too. Redemption. Because if you’re just gonna look at me and think, ‘Hell, that kid ain’t as bad as I’ve been convincing myself, so maybe I’m not either,’ then, shit, you haven’t learned a damn thing. It’s a path not a status.” He let out a jerky breath. “And I don’t know shit about redemption, but I been walking that path long enough to know you gotta keep walking.”

They came around a bank in the freeway, and there it was, its dark silhouette visible even against the black sky, overlooking both downtown and the 101 like a guardian angel. They reached the base of Monument Hill within minutes, left the car on the street, and crept to the gate. Bowrick flashed his access-control card at the pad, and the gate whirred slowly open. They slipped inside and vectored east of the path, Bowrick leading, Tim clutching his binoculars so they wouldn’t make noise brushing against his chest. He’d taken Betty from the collection of tech treats in the Stork’s dining room, and he held her respectfully at his side, the earpiece coiled around her handle. The Stork had been correct about one thing: There was a good line of sight down the hill on all sides.

Bowrick extended his hand like a shark fin, tracing the route Tim should take up the rugged hillside. Tim nodded, then handed him the car keys and the Nokia, catching his eye so his meaning was conveyed. Gesturing Bowrick to stay put, he began his cautious approach. After a while he bellied back toward the path, forging through a stand of chaparral that blocked his vantage, the speedloaders in his pocket digging into his thigh.

He emerged about a hundred yards from the hilltop. Up ahead loomed the monument, now a complete tree, the metal hide having been laid over the skeletal supports of the tree’s final branches. It remained ensconced within the web of scaffolding, a harmony of primitive planes and angles, a rudimentary form eager to emerge and shake off its shell. On the plateau at the monument’s base sat a Ford Expedition and a Lincoln, parked nose to nose, visible between stacks of metal sheets. Though no one was in evidence, Tim discerned the faint murmur of voices. The uphill breeze quickened, just slightly, but enough to overpower any sound from the hilltop. He aimed Betty up-slope in the direction of the cars, but she picked up little aside from the rumbling of wind across the parabola.

One of the Mastersons stepped into view between two tall piles of metal, and then the other. The dark figures were unmistakable, the swollen chests, the hard taper of the sides, all top-heavy muscle and bellicose posture. The first put his foot up on a sawhorse and lit a cigarette, arm bent across the raised knee. Through the binoculars Tim watched the ribbon of smoke unspool from the dark face. The glowing point of the butt lowered; the mouths moved in conversation. The mood of the twin shadows was stern, focused, decisive.

One pulled open the trunk of the Expedition and yanked a bound man to the edge of the tailgate.

Kindell.

Gripping him with a fistful of fabric at the shoulder blades and a clench of the belt, the man steeled his muscles. Kindell remained limp and contracted, hands bound behind his back, knees curled to his stomach. His captor tugged him hard from the tailgate, letting him drop the four feet to the dirt, doing nothing to break his fall.

Kindell landed flat on his chest and face. Despite the breeze, Betty picked up his pained gasping.

Robert and Mitchell were discussing something. Beneath their voices Tim made out a few spats of radioed correspondence from the service desk officer, in all likelihood issuing from a portable radio that was a counterpart to the one in the Stork’s kitchen.

Through the earpiece Tim heard “…under wraps until…then come back…”

The first shadow had his foot resting on Kindell’s back, as naturally as it had rested atop the sawhorse a few minutes ago. They seemed to arrive at some conclusion, for the second figure picked up Kindell and, swinging him once to pick up momentum, tossed him into the trunk of the Lincoln. He slammed the lid. Tim watched closely-no sign of either Masterson setting a booby trap in the trunk.

The two turned and disappeared into the maze of pallets and junked wood.

Tim crept out from cover and inched toward the two cars, but it wasextremely slow going since the sawhorses and heaps of building materials concealed myriad hiding places, and he had to zigzag back and forth to ensure he wasn’t leaving open a vulnerable angle. He reached the brink of the plateau and lay still in the waving foxtails, taking in the area in a long, slow sweep of the parabolic mike, earpiece snug in place, his right hand firm-gripping the. 357. He got nothing back from Betty but a tinny whimpering from the Lincoln’s trunk.

He popped up and did a quick run to the nearest cover, diving behind a mound of jagged metal refuse, the bulletproof vest and clayred dirt not softening his fall enough to keep pain from screaming through his stomach.

Still no sign of Robert or Mitchell. Plastic drop cloths fluttered everywhere-between stacked metal planes, beneath sawhorse legs, around corded bundles of boards. Tim scanned up the dark monument with the binocs, but it was hard to make out much more than the tree’s outline through the scaffolding. He could see the open hatch at the base of the trunk where the Sky-Tracker spotlight had been slid into the tree.

He low-crawled to a rusting sandblaster about ten yards from the two vehicles, close enough that he could hear Kindell’s desperate thumping in the car trunk. Again Tim surveyed the plateau, his eyes picking through the heaps of gnarled metal and discarded cuttings, the resting machinery, the boxy rise of scaffolding.

Kindell in the car trunk could very well be a baited trap. Tim rustled the Stork’s new Nextel from his pocket. Since Mitchell, as a demolition expert, was accustomed to keeping his cell phones turned off, Tim clicked the preset number to “R,” readied Betty, and hit “dial.” The faint chirping ring of a phone was immediately audible, and Tim fanned the parabolic mike back and forth, searching for the strongest signal. The cone climbed the trunk of the tree, fanned out over one of the branches. Robert was not visible, because the wooden platform of the scaffolding cut off almost the entire branch from view, but Tim got a strong ring through the earpiece. He figured Robert was probably up there preparing a noose for Kindell.

The expected rough voice answered. “Robert.”

Tim clicked the phone shut.

Robert appeared at the edge of the branch scaffolding, as Tim hoped he might. Raising his fingers to his mouth, Robert whistled a single harsh note. There was movement to the side of the monument, and then Mitchell’s head poked up from a throw of scrubby brush; he’d been walking a surveillance patrol around the base of the monument while Robert readied the branch above.