Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

Heidel yelled at the closed door, “Anyone comes through here, I shoot the fed! I’m not fucking around.” He turned, panicky, and shoved the big man toward the fire door. “Move it, Carlos.”

Carlos flung open the fire door and stepped through. Another bedroom, another long hall. Heidel pushed Tim forward, following Carlos’s trail. The big man had a revolver tucked in the back of his jeans, the pearl handle glimmering. Tim slowed a bit, falling back. Heidel and his girlfriend fired idiotically at the walls behind them.

“Move it, cabron,” Lydia screamed. She shoved him, and Tim faked a fall.

Carlos kept running, disappearing around the corner.

“Get up! Get the fuck up!” Lydia stood over Tim, unbound breasts swaying fat and free beneath a stretched-out man’s undershirt. Heidel was behind her, providing rear cover.

Tim pushed up onto his hands and knees, then rose. His holster hung empty from his belt. “Get him the hell up and moving!” Heidel shouted.

Tim crossed his arms, his left hand high on his biceps. When Heidel raised the Ruger to his forehead, as Tim knew he would, he snapped his hand over, grabbing the wheel tightly so it couldn’t rotate, and kicked the girlfriend in the stomach as hard as he could. She grunted loudly and dropped, maintaining her clutch on the pistol.

Heidel was yanking the trigger, not yet realizing that the cylinder couldn’t turn, the barrel digging into the middle of Tim’s forehead. With his right hand Tim reached across and pulled his own Smith amp; Wesson from its limp dangle in Heidel’s shoulder holster, then calmly fired a shot into Heidel’s chest. The back-spray of blood misted Tim’s face, and Heidel fell away, arms spreading out and up like a kid’s first pass at a snow angel. Tim kept his grip on the Ruger, still held up and backward, aimed at his own head. He pivoted quickly, saw that Lydia had found her feet, and he fired a shot through her chest and one through her face before her upswinging pistol arm reached horizontal.

She collapsed with a gurgle, a shudder of flesh and ripped cotton jersey.

Tim spun the Ruger and holstered it, keeping his Smith amp; Wesson at the ready. He ran down the hall, shoulder scraping a wall, and entered the front room just as Carlos banged through the sliding door onto the hotel’s pool deck. With the exception of Freed and Thomas, all the cover rifles were out front, and the LAPD’s secondary perimeter was a block away. Tim sprinted through the sliding door in pursuit, but Carlos was gone. Thomas was running toward Tim, shotgun at his side, while Freed kept rear cover by the pool. Having unexpectedly moved the length of four rooms and two hallways, Carlos had caught them off guard.

Without slowing, Thomas gestured to a still-swinging gate to Tim’s left. “Come on!”

Tim followed after him into a narrow alley. Puffs of smoke rose from the window of a restaurant kitchen, clinging to the walls. Carlos was halfway down the alley in a dead sprint for the traffic-heavy street ahead. Tim passed Thomas quickly. Carlos burst out onto the street and saw the LAPD vehicle at the far curb, the small crowd of bums and passersby drawn to the police perimeter, now pointing and shouting. Twenty yards behind, Tim cleared the alley just as Carlos froze up in surprise. The two young cops at the perimeter looked more shocked than Carlos.

Carlos reached for the revolver tucked in the small of his back, and Tim stopped running, raised his Smith amp; Wesson, and sighted on center mass. He double-tapped Carlos between the shoulder blades, then put his last bullet through the back of his head in case he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

When Carlos slapped the pavement, what was left of his head sent out a spray like a dropped melon.

WHEN TIM ARRIVED back at Room 9, two deputies were hauling Joaquin out. They’d hoisted him by his ankle and wrist cuffs and were carrying him horizontally, facedown. A length of nylon cord cuff ran around his ankles and back up to his arms. He continued to resist violently, jerking and trying to bite the deputies’ legs. The mule evidently had gone more peacefully.

Five LAPD patrol cars cordoned off the area, lights flashing. A sizable crowd had gathered; in the distance Tim spotted the panning dishes atop the first news vans to pick up the story. The chop of a copter was audible, though the visible sky was empty.

Bear sat propped against the outside wall, clutching his ribs, Miller and a paramedic bent over him. Tim felt his pulse quicken once again. “Everything all right?”

Miller opened a fist dramatically, revealing the flattened slug he’d just picked out of Bear’s vest. Tim exhaled hard and slid down the wall to plunk beside Bear.

“You’ve got nine lives, Bear.”

“Only seven left. The first I owe to you, this one to Kevlar.”

Freed, Thomas, and a cop milled around the hoopty, peering hun-grily through the tinted windows. Sweat stains on Freed’s T-shirt outlined the pattern of a bulletproof vest.

“What are they doing?” Tim asked.

“Waiting for the U.S. Attorney’s office to call back,” Miller said. “She’s tracking down a judge at home so they can get a telephonic search warrant for the car.”

“We stumble in on a Top 15 exchanging cash with convicted drug traffickers who then try to kill us, and that doesn’t constitute probable cause to search the fucking car?” Bear deteriorated into a coughing fit.

“I guess not anymore,” Miller said.

“You mean my night classes at the South West LA Legal Training Academy weren’t wellsprings of infallibility? How ’bout that?”

Tim shrugged. “We have the guys, we have the vehicle. Nothing’s going anywhere. They might as well wait another twenty minutes and cover their asses.”

They sat watching the commotion in the parking lot and the street beyond, a windstorm trying to quiet. The younger deputies were circled up by the door to Room 9, trying to joke off the bitter aftertaste of mortality.

“You could toss a cat through Motherfucker’s chest cavity.”

“Nice hit, nice hit.”

“Rack shot that fuck, he was DRT: Dead Right There.”

A few of them swapped high fives. Tim noticed that Guerrera was gripping his wrist hard to keep his arms from shaking.

“That’s the way to do it, Rack,” someone called out. “Fuckin’-A yeah.”

Tim raised a hand in a half wave, but his eyes were on the marshal’s Bronco, just pulling through the police perimeter. Marshal Tannino hopped out and approached in a jog. A stocky, muscular man who’d come up through the ranks, Marco Tannino had joined the service at twenty-one. His recommendation last spring by Senator Feinstein paved the way to his marshalship, one of the few appointments made on genuine merit. The majority of the ninety-four marshals were big contributors to Senate campaigns, trust-fund babies whose dads rubbed elbows with Beltway brass, or sycophantic bureaucrats from other government agencies. Much to the chagrin of the street deputies, one of the marshals out of Florida was a former professional clown. Tannino, on the other hand, had logged plenty of trigger time in his distinguished career, so he was respected from bottom to top in the district office and elsewhere.

He wore a focused expression, running a hand through his coiffed salt-and-pepper hair as Freed filled him in.

Miller squeezed Tim’s shoulder. “We need to get you a paramedic?”

Tim shook his head. The aftermath of the adrenaline kick had left his mouth dry and sour. The area smelled of sweat and cordite.

One of the police officers crouched over Tim and flipped open his black notebook. He started to talk, but Tim cut him off. “I have no statement.”

Tannino stepped in hard, his knee brushing against the cop so he had to stand to regain his balance. “Get out of here,” he said. “You know better than that.”