Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

“Yeah,” Dray said. She wiped the blood from her nose. “I was winning.”

“We have everything under control now,” Tim said. “Thanks for stopping by.” He started to swing the door closed, but Fowler got a foot in.

Mac peered past him at Dray. “Are you okay?”

She made a limp gesture with her arm. “Dandy.”

“I’m serious, Dray. Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“None of us wants a report filed,” Fowler said. “Can we leave you two without you going at it again?”

“Yes,” Dray said. “Absolutely.”

“All right.” Fowler looked from Dray’s face to Tim’s. “I know you’re going through some hard-core shit right now, but don’t make us come back here.”

Mac’s gaze shifted to Tim, his expression changing from concern to anger. The scene didn’t look good, Tim knew, but he couldn’t help resenting the accusatory edge in Mac’s eyes.

“We’re not kidding, Rack,” Mac said. “If we hear so much as a yelp out of this house, I’m hauling you in myself.”

They shuffled back to their car, hunching in the rain. Tim closed the door.

“It’s not my fault I didn’t pick her up.” Dray’s voice cracked. “Don’t fucking lay that on me. There’s no way I could have known.”

“You’re right,” Tim said. “I’m sorry.”

She wiped her nose again, leaving a dark stain on her sweatshirt sleeve, then walked past him out the front door. Standing out in the rain, she turned to face him. Her hair was pasted to her cheeks, her chin smeared with blood, and her eyes were the most exquisite shade of green they’d ever been. “I still love you, Timothy.”

She slammed the door so hard that a painting slipped from the wall at Tim’s side, the frame breaking on the hard tiles of the entry.

He walked back through the wrecked living room, grabbed a chair from the kitchen table, and spun it around to face the rain splattering against the sliding doors. He sat, leaning forward until his forehead pressed against the cool glass. The storm had resumed with added fury. Stray palm fronds littered the backyard. Ginny’s bicycle lay on its side on the lawn, one of the training wheels spinning listlessly in the wind. The darkness seemed to have a malignant consistency, drawing itself around the house like a shroud, but Tim recognized the perception as little more than his own self-flagellating need for gloomy, second-rate imagery.

The wheel continued to spin, its rusty shrilling audible even over the sound of the rain. Its banshee cry underscored each betrayal of the past two weeks. It was as though an altered light had been cast across Tim’s life, revealing its order for precisely what it was: scaffolding lending false form to chaos. He had no daughter to assure him a future, no vocation to moor him, no wife to confirm his humanity. The stark unjustness of his losses struck him. He’d done everything to uphold his contracts with the world, and yet he’d been set adrift.

He lowered his face into his hands, inhaling the moisture of his breath. The chair made a screech when he shoved back. He drew in a deep lungful of air, and it hitched twice, caught on the raised edge of a sob.

The doorbell rang.

He felt an overwhelming relief. “Andrea,” he said. He jogged across the living room, almost slipping on a book.

He threw open the front door. A man’s shadowy form stood at the far edge of the porch, rain tapping down on his slicker. A dark green southwester curled down around his face, hiding it in darkness. His posture was slightly stooped, almost indiscernibly so, an indication of age or the dawn of some illness. A strobe of light flickered across him, illumination lent by an unseen lightning bolt, but it revealed only the band of his mouth and chin. A rush of thunder permeated the air, sending its vibration up through Tim’s feet.

“Who are you?”

The man looked up, water falling in tendrils from the sloped brim of his vinyl hat. “The answer,” he said.

“I’Mnot big on pranksters, well-wishers, or rubberneckers,” Tim said. “Take your pick-the grieving father, the bloodthirsty deputy marshal. You’ve seen him now. Go back to your news station, your Rotary Club, your church, and tell them you gave it the college try.”

He moved to shut the door. The man raised a fist, ungloved and callused with age, and coughed into it. There was an immense fragility in the gesture that made Tim pause.

The man said, “I share your disdain for those types. And for many more.”

Despite the rain and the fluttering of his clothing around him, the man remained still, standing there like a PI cut from a dime novel. Tim knew he should close the door, but something stirred within him, akin to curiosity and compulsion, and he heard himself saying, “Why don’t you come in and dry off before you get on your way?”

The man nodded and followed Tim in, stepping over the fallen books and pictures without comment. Tim sat on the couch, the man on the facing love seat. The man took off his hat, rolled it like a newspaper, and held it in both hands.

His face was textured with age and sharply intelligent. Two vivid blue eyes stood out as the only points of softness in his rugged features. His hair, black given over to steel, he wore short and well trimmed. He displayed the kind of gaunt, confused musculature of a man whose body had changed rapidly with age; Tim imagined he’d once been a hulking presence. His hands rasped when he rubbed them together, trying to work some of the cold out of his broad fingers. Tim put him in his late fifties.

“Well?”

“Ah, yes. Why am I here? I’m here to ask you a question.” He paused from rubbing his hands and looked up. “How would you like ten minutes alone with Roger Kindell?”

Tim felt his heartbeat notch up a few levels. “What’s your name?”

“That’s not important right now.”

“I don’t know what kind of games you’re playing, but I’m a federal deputy.”

“Ex-federal deputy. And that’s beside the point. This”-his hands flared, indicating the room around them-“is just speculative talk. No more. You’re not plotting a crime or even commissioning one. The question is hypothetical. I have neither the means nor the intention to carry anything through.”

“Don’t con me. I don’t mind cruelty, but I hate a con. And believe me, I know every one in the book.”

“Roger Kindell. Ten minutes.”

“I think you’d better leave.”

“Ten minutes alone with him. Now that you’ve had time to think. Your marriage is on the rocks-”

“How do you know that?”

The man glanced at the sheets and bed pillows heaped beside Tim on the couch, then continued. “You’ve lost your job-”

“How long have you been watching me?”

“-and the man who murdered your daughter has been set free. Say you could get your hands on him now. Roger Kindell. What do you think?”

Tim felt something within him yield, giving way to anger. “What do I think? I think I would love to beat Kindell’s face into an unrecognizable pulp, but I’m not some jackass cop bent on street justice or a backwater deputy who can’t see farther than the end of his gun. I think I want the truth about what happened to my daughter, not just reckless vengeance. I think I’m tired of seeing individual rights trampled by people who are supposed to be upholding the law on the one side, and seeing mutts and pukes hide behind those rights on the other. I think I’m furious watching a system I spent my life fighting for fall apart on me and knowing there’s no better alternative out there. I think I’m tired of people like you who poke and pry and criticize and offer nothing.”

The man didn’t quite smile, but his face rearranged itself to show he was pleased with Tim’s response. He deposited a business card on the coffee table between them and slid it over to Tim with two fingers, like a poker chip. When Tim picked it up, the man rose from his seat. There was no name on the business card, just a Hancock Park address in plain black type.