Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

These he took with him on a pleasant late-morning drive to Parker, Arizona, a grenade toss from the border, where he presented his information and explained to the peevish DMV clerk that he’d misplaced his California license but had been looking into getting an Arizona one anyway, as he summered in Phoenix. He spent the four-hour drive back marveling at the massive emptiness composing the majority of California and thinking how the sun-cracked barrens were a pretty damn good metaphor for what his insides felt like since Bear had showed up on his doorstep eleven days earlier.

Nightfall found Tim sitting on the floor of his apartment with his back to the front door, watching the neon lights blink through the wide window and throw patterns on the ceiling. He attuned himself to a cacophony of new sensations-thin, susceptible walls, conversations in foreign tongues, the back-kitchen stench of day-old fowl. He missed his simple, well-tended house in Moorpark and, more glaringly, he missed his wife and daughter. His first night in this new place confirmed what he’d already known: that nothing would be the same. He’d fallen into a new life, like a second birth, like a death, and with it came a sensation of suspended numbness, of underwater drifting. In this small womb of a room, linked to the outside world by no record, no trail, no necessity to leave, he felt at last safe from whatever corrosiveness the outside world was brewing and preparing to hurl in his face. From here he felt strong enough to begin his counterassault.

He gazed at the three major items he’d purchased-mattress, desk, dresser. There was no comfort in their arrangement, no lessening of what they were, things-in-themselves, rectangular practicalities that sat on carpeting. He thought of the gentler touches a woman-even Dray with her tomboy sensibilities-could bring to a room. Some softening of the lines, some notion that a space was to be lived with, not merely in.

He thought of Ginny’s head-thrown-back hysterics at the Rugrats, the sense of joyful-yes, joyful-anticipation he got when he could sneak off work early to pick her up at school, like a date, and how he’d sit in his car and watch her for a few appreciative moments before getting out and claiming her. Ginny painted the world with child excesses-openmouthed smiles, floor-shaking tantrums, vividly colored candy and clothing. He realized how gray and inert she’d left the world with her departure, and how he was all abstinence and temper-ance-he was all lesser shades.

He was unsure he could abide a world that weathered her absence so easily.

He blinked hard, and tears beaded his eyelashes. Loneliness crushed in on him.

He found himself holding his phone, found himself dialing his house.

Dray picked up on a half ring. “Hello? Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“I thought you would’ve checked in last night. Not today.”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t stopped moving.”

“Where are you?”

“I got a little place downtown.”

He heard the air go out of her. “Jesus,” she said. “A place.” The line hummed, then hummed some more.

He opened his mouth twice during the ensuing silence but could not figure out what needed to be said. Finally he asked, “Are you okay?”

“Not really. Are you?”

“Not really.”

“Where do I get you if I need you?”

“This is my new cell-phone number. Memorize it. Don’t give it to anyone: 323-471-1213. I’ll have it on twenty-four/seven, Dray. I’m ten digits away.”

He heard the receiver rustle against her cheek and wondered what expression she was wearing. He thought about the phone nuzzled in close to her face, then about him here in this cold apartment.

“I already talked to some of our friends,” she said. “But we should tell Bear together. I thought we could have him over tomorrow. At the house. One o’clock?”

“Okay.”

“Timothy? I, uh…I…”

“I know. I do, too.”

She clicked off. He snapped the phone shut and pressed it to his mouth. He sat, dumbly inert, phone against his mouth for the better part of twenty minutes, trying to figure out if he was actually going to follow through with the preparations he’d been laying.

He rose and turned on the TV to cut his lonesomeness, and Melissa Yueh’s familiar voice filled the room.

“-Jedediah Lane, the alleged fringe terrorist, was released today to much fanfare. He was standing trial on charges of releasing sarin nerve gas at the Census Bureau, a terrorist act which claimed eighty-six lives. The Census Bureau attack was the biggest act of terrorism on U.S. soil since 9/11, and the largest perpetrated by a U.S. citizen since Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 assault on Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building. Despite the fact that his courtroom antics provoked the judge on several occasions, Lane was found not guilty by the jury. The prosecutor claimed that Lane benefited from having had much of the physical evidence against him suppressed. Lane’s post-trial comments have unleashed a whirlwind of anger in the community.”

The screen cut away to a shot of Lane being escorted through a crush of news reporters, ducking lenses and mikes. “I’m not saying I did it,” he mumbled in a quiet, almost affable, voice. “But if I did, it was to assert the rights upon which this nation was founded.”

Back to Yueh’s expression of barely concealed disgust. “Tune in Wednesday at nine when, in a KCOM special event, I’ll be interviewing this controversial figure live. Watch it as it happens.

“In related news, construction continues on the memorial honoring victims of the Census Bureau attack. A one-hundred-foot metallic sculpture of a tree, the monument was designed by renowned African artist Nyaze Ghartey. Located on Monument Hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles, the tree will be lit at night, each branch representing a child who died, each leaf an adult victim.”

An architect’s sketch showed the tree looming large on the federal park, light emanating in the trunk’s interior sending beams out through myriad holes in the metal hide. It was Christmas-tree hopeful. Very gaudy, very over-the-top, very L.A.

“Ghartey, who generated some controversy during the trial as an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, is the uncle of one of the seventeen child victims of the sarin nerve-gas attack, eight-year-old Damion LaTrell.”

A school photo of a boy wearing overalls and a forced smile flashed on the screen.

Tim turned off the TV and grabbed his Sig from the kitchen counter. The door closing behind him sent a hollow echo down the hall.

He parked around the corner from Rayner’s. The wrought-iron gates were more show than security; Tim slipped over them easily due to a vanity break to accommodate the dipping bough of a venerable oak. The front doors and windows were well secured, but the back door had only a simple wafer lock that he picked easily with a tension wrench and a half-diamond pick.

He prowled the downstairs, keeping his Sig tucked into his pants. Beside the stairs was an impressive conference room, complete with banker’s lamps and leather chairs arrayed around an obnoxiously long table. A solemnly rendered oil of a boy roughly the age Spenser, Rayner’s son, had been when he was killed, hung on the far wall. The portrait had an eerily posthumous affect, as if it had been done from a photo. A TV was suspended from the ceiling in the far corner of the room.

After getting the lay of the other first-floor rooms, Tim entered the library. He found the cherry box in the desk and claimed the. 357 nestled within.

He headed upstairs.

•Tim clicked on his Mag-Lite and shone the harsh beam on the two lumps beneath the covers of Rayner’s bed. The Mag-Lite, which packed four D cells in its hefty metal shaft, provided one part illumination, three parts intimidation. Tim sat backward on a chair he’d moved silently from its place in front of the bathroom vanity, his feet on the plush velvet seat, his ass atop the back. His Sig and the. 357 flared out from either side of his jeans like linebacker hip pads.