Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

Robert’s words drew Tim from his thoughts. “She had the look, man,” he continued, “the one that the motherfuckers must get after, like she was too pure to stick around this shitty planet too long.” He drained his beer and hurled the bottle. It shattered against a pile of stacked metal sheets. “Beth Ann had that look, too.”

He tipped his face down into the waiting points of his thumb and forefinger, and he stayed like that, squeezing his eyes, silent. Mitchell leaned over, hooked his brother’s neck with a hand, and pulled him forward until the tops of their heads were touching, just above their foreheads.

Tim watched them, his face numb with dread. “It doesn’t get any easier,” he said. He had intended it as a question.

Robert pulled his head back. His eyes were red from being rubbed, yet they held not tears, but rage. The dark scaffolding creaked behind him in the wind.

Mitchell leaned back, propped on two elbow-locked arms, his face barely visible in the darkness. “The average sexual assault by an anger-excitation rapist lasts four hours,” he said. “Beth Ann wasn’t so lucky.”

After that they drank in silence.

•After Mitchell dropped him at his car, Tim drove back to his apartment cautiously, watching his signals and abiding the speed limit. The radio was abuzz with talk of the execution. From the faces of other drivers, he could tell who was listening to the news and who was discussing it on their cell phones. He even thought he sensed a different mood in the air, as if the city itself had received an adrenaline jolt, absorbed by osmosis from the fallout caused by Lane’s death. The night seemed exciting and excited, alive with the animation of risk and high stakes. A proximity to death always brought with it an attendant heightening of the senses.

Joshua was struggling across the lobby with an ornately carved picture frame. He paused when Tim entered, setting it on the floor. Blue TV light flickered in his tiny office, as always.

“Wait, wait!” he shrieked, as if Tim were fleeing. “I have paperwork for you.” He leaned the frame against the wall and disappeared into his small office, reappearing with a rental agreement made out to the ever-reliable Tom Altman.

He waited as Tim reviewed it, a finger bearing an immense agate stone coming to rest on the side of his chin. “Cute beard.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you hear about the guy who got his head blown up on the news?”

“There was something about it on the radio.”

“Right-winger.” Joshua’s hand rose to his mouth, shielding a stage whisper. “One down, fifty million to go.”

Upstairs Tim entered his apartment, taking note of the deadness of the air within. It took him about ten minutes with lukewarm sink water and a razor to eradicate his emergent beard.

He opened the window, then sat cross-legged on the floor and thought about what, at age thirty-three, he had in his life. A mattress, a desk, a gun, bullets. A car with fraudulent plates previously owned by a drug runner.

He cleaned his gun again, though it was already clean, oiling, polishing, punching the bore brush through the holes in the cylinder. Each punch of the brush he accompanied with a word describing what he could have done to Kindell in the garage. Murder. Slay. Execute. Sacrifice. Destroy. Slaughter.

The Lane execution had not just righted a judicial wrong, he reminded himself, it had brought him one case closer to Kindell. And to the secret of Ginny’s death.

After checking the Nokia, he was surprised by the keenness of his disappointment that he had no messages. Dray had not called since he’d left the notes at the house, which stung like hell. It also meant she’d gathered no further information on the case. When he called, he got the machine. He called back just to hear her voice again, then hung up.

He found himself dialing Bear’s number.

“Where the hell you been, Rack?”

“Sorting things out, I guess.”

“Well, sort faster. The disappearing act isn’t sitting so hot with Dray. Or with me.”

“How is she?” Only now did Tim grasp his true motivation for phoning Bear. Tim Rackley, Master of High School Social Dynamics.

“Ask her yourself,” Bear said. “And while we’re at it, what’s your new phone number?”

“I don’t have one yet.” Tim walked over near the open window. “I’m calling from a pay phone. Still lining out a more permanent place.”

“I want to see you.”

“Now’s not the greatest-”

“Listen, either you can agree to see me, or I’ll come track your ass down. And you know I will. What’s it gonna be?”

A breeze, contaminated with heat from the alley-backing kitchen below, swept away the dusty smell of the room, if only temporarily. Tim breathed in the amalgam of cool and breath-hot air. The distant touch of a headache cramped him at the temples.

“All right then,” Bear said. “Yamashiro, early dinner, tomorrow at five-thirty.”

He hung up before waiting for Tim to agree.

Tim lay on the mattress, enveloped in darkness. When he dozed off, he dreamed of Ginny. She was laughing at him, petite fingers covering her child-spaced teeth.

He couldn’t figure out why.

YAMASHIRO,a japanese restaurant perched atop a hill in East Hollywood, looks down over its steep-sloped front gardens to the distant neon flash of the Boulevard and Sunset. Through the miasma of smog and car exhaust spread low along the Strip, Britney Spears threw a five-foot gaze from a building-side banner ad, all wide grin and vacant eyes, a Dr. T.J. Eckleburg for the aught decade.

About two years back, Tim and Bear had collared a fugitive who’d injured Kose Nagura’s wife in a jewelry-store heist, and the restaurant manager had shown his gratefulness in the form of ceaseless imploration for them to dine at his restaurant free of charge. Despite their discomfort at the place’s specious high-class ambience and raw-fish fare, they tried to take him up on his offer at least once every few months to avoid insulting him. Besides, the drinks were good, the view from the hilltop bar was the most spectacular in all of L.A., and the building-an exact replica of a grand Kyoto palace-had a certain majestic appeal.

Tim wound his car up the precipitous snaking drive to the restaurant and left it with the valet. As usual, Kose seated him at the best table immediately upon his entering, a four-top at the restaurant’s southeast apex, where glass wall meets glass wall, providing a panoramic view of the smoldering billboard-and smog-draped buildings below-a view of the L.A. that the Mastersons deplored. The crass money-and fame-grubbing sprawl of middle-class aspiration for stardom, an asphaltopolis that raised child stars as tall as buildings and rewarded greed and ruthlessness, a town where rapists and child-killers could gorge their appetites in like company.

Tim played with the straw in his water glass, waiting for Bear, rehearsing all the dumb things he knew he was going to say in hope of discovering better wording. A couple to his left was holding hands across the table, casually, as if their easy-found affection were something to be taken for granted, something found everywhere, like frustration, like smog, like aspiring actors. He sensed the deep tug of his need to be with his wife. He reframed his thoughts, deciding what he would impart to Bear, the messenger. A white flag, perhaps.

Bear appeared, a large form in gray polyester pants and a just-mismatched blazer, stretching past one of the sliding shoji walls leading from the inner courtyard. Tim stood, and they embraced, Bear holding him for an extra beat before sliding into his chair.

Tim nodded at Bear’s rumpled suit. “You’d better hurry up and get that thing back on the body. The wake’s at seven.”