Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

Bear gave a cough of disgust. They walked back to the vehicles, their breath visible in the cold air.

“You’re a lucky little motherfucker,” Gutierez said to Kindell, who’d finally found his feet. He poked him hard where his chest met his shoulder. “Did you hear me? I said you’re a lucky motherfucker.”

“Lee me alone.”

Bear circled his truck, climbed in, and turned over the engine.

Mac cleared his throat. “Tim, man, I am so sorry about…everything. You send Dray my condolences. I’m really sorry.”

“Thanks, Mac,” Tim said. “I’ll tell her.”

He climbed into the truck and they drove off, leaving the four deputies and Kindell behind them, standing out from the night in carnival flashes of watery blue.

BEAR pulled up to the curb, and Tim moved to get out, but Bear grabbed his shoulder. It had been a silent ride home. “I should have stopped you. Stepped in. You were in no shape to make that kind of decision.” He squeezed the wheel.

“It wasn’t your responsibility,” Tim said.

“It’s my responsibility to do more than stand around while my partner maybe kills some mutt in a moment of justifiable rage. You’re a federal agent, not some yokel deputy.”

“The boys just got a little fired up.”

Bear struck the steering wheel hard with the heels of his hands, a rare display of anger. “Stupid pricks.” His cheeks were wet. “Stupid, stupid pricks. They shouldn’t have dragged you into it. They shouldn’t have jeopardized the investigation.”

Tim knew Bear was turning his grief to anger and throwing it at the nearest target, but he also knew he was right. Tim spoke to the words, because he knew if he touched the grief right now, he’d come apart. “Nothing happened.”

“It’s not done happening yet.” Bear wiped his cheeks roughly. “And we don’t know what those idiots did before we got there, how well they secured the scene. They weren’t looking for accomplices. They weren’t looking to build a case. It’s not like they were dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s for the DA. It’s not like they were expecting a trial.”

“They’re gonna have to be aboveboard now. After we’ve been there.”

“Great. So in addition to the case being tied to their competence or tremendous lack thereof, we are, too.” Bear shuddered hard, like a dog shaking off water. “Sorry, I’m sorry. You got enough on your plate.”

Tim managed a faint smile. “I better go check on my yokel-deputy wife.”

“Shit, I didn’t mean that.”

Tim laughed, and then Bear joined him, both of them still wiping their cheeks.

“Do you want me to…Can I come in?”

“No,” Tim said. “Not yet.”

Bear was still idling at the curb when Tim closed the front door behind him. The house was dark and empty. Two holes had been kicked through the living room wall, leaving jagged edges in the dry-wall. Though Tim had left Dray with two of her friends who’d come over to help with Ginny’s party, he was not surprised to find the house silent. When Dray was upset, she handled it alone. Another trait she’d learned from four older brothers and six years and counting on the job.

He passed through the small living room into the kitchen. The simple interior had been improved upon over the years by Tim’s meticulous attention. He’d torn up the floors and laid down hardwood in the halls and bedrooms and replaced the brass-plated and faux-crystal chandeliers with recessed lighting.

On the counter sat Ginny’s cake, uncut, the top puddled with wax. Dray had insisted on baking it herself despite her lack of prowess in the kitchen. It was uneven, sloping left, and the frosting had been applied and reapplied in a failed attempt at smoothness. Judy Hartley, their next-door neighbor and a recent empty-nester, had offered to assume baking duties, but Dray had refused. As she did each year on Ginny’s birthday, she’d taken the day off work to pore over borrowed cookbooks, determined and stubborn, pulling cake after cake out of the oven until she’d produced one she deemed acceptable.

Dray wasn’t there, though the cabinet where they kept the liquor stood open. The handle of store-brand vodka was missing.

Tim walked quietly down the hall to their bedroom. The bed, neatly made, stared back at him. He checked the bathroom-also no luck. He tried Ginny’s room next, across the hall. Dray was sitting in the darkness, the half-gallon bottle between her legs, the glow of a Pocahontas night-light discoloring one side of her face. On the carpet before her sat the cordless phone and her PalmPilot, the backlight still glowing.

Her face was gaunt, drawn in by grief. Three years ago she’d red-handed a fifteen-year-old kid fleeing a Ventura office building with an armload of laptops. He’d tried to throw down with a nickel-plated. 22, and she’d double-tapped him; when she got home, her face looked not quite so bad as it did now. Her head was bowed slightly, in thought or drunkenness.

Tim closed the door behind him, crossed the room, and slid down the wall beside her. He took her hand; it was sweaty and feverish. She didn’t look up, but she squeezed his fingers as if she’d been barely holding on for his touch.

He stared at Ginny’s twin bed. The wallpaper, unrestrained yellow and pink flowers now muted by the darkness, had been perfectly aligned so it didn’t mess up the repeat at the room’s corners.

Tim thought about Ginny’s last few minutes of life, then about where he might have been at the corresponding times. Putting his weapon away in the gun safe when she was snatched from the street. Driving to the store for pink candles when the dismemberment began.

That he couldn’t give Kindell’s partner a face was an added torment, another mockery of his imagined control over his world. The notion of kinship to this end was beyond sickening-two men bent on the destruction of a child, two men joined in ripping apart a young body. He pictured Kindell’s dopey face and wondered if there was a special place in hell for child-killers. He indulged himself in imagined tortures. He had never been a religious man, but the thoughts found their way out from the darker recesses of his mind, the shadowed corners hidden from the light of reason.

Dray’s voice, calm, but hoarse from crying, forced him from his thoughts. “I was here alone tonight, this night, sitting with Trina and Joan and Judy fucking Hartley, getting the other kids off home, waiting to hear about the positive ID, calling our relatives so they wouldn’t have to hear it from…or read about it in…” She raised her head sluggishly, bangs sweeping over her eyes. She took another slug from the bottle. “Fowler called.”

“Dray-”

“Why didn’t you come to me?”

He wouldn’t have thought his grief would have left room for shame, but there it was, undiminished. “I’m sorry.”

The distance between them he registered as an aching in his stomach. He remembered how they’d fallen in love, hard and terrifyingly fast. Neither of them had ever learned to need as adults-both had endured childhoods that had disappointed them, punishingly, for relying on anyone-yet there they were, fixed on each other with an unyielding, constant focus, staying up all hours talking and pressing against each other in the flickering blue glow of the muted TV, driving across town to meet for lunch because they couldn’t make it from morning to evening without each other’s touch. Every detail of the first months shone with clarity-how he’d steer and shift with his left hand so he wouldn’t have to let go of hers with his right in the car after dinner, a movie, a night walk on the beach; the soft noise she made when she smiled, just short of a laugh; the way her face hurt when she blushed after a compliment-pins and needles, she claimed-and she’d have to massage out the bunched cheeks above the grin with her fingertips until he finally started doing it for her. Just last week he’d pulled her in for a slow dance when Elvis came crooning on late-night reruns; Ginny had alleged nausea and retreated to her bedroom.