Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

And now he was in the same room with his wife but could barely sense her through the darkness, which had grown soupy, infused with hurt and foulness and stopped-up grief.

He struggled to find words, to reconnect. “I got the call. We were three miles away. I had to go, to see.”

“Okay. So you went.”

He took a deep breath. “And he confessed.”

She was trying to soften her voice, but he could hear the frustration in it. “Tim, you’re the father of the victim. You were illegally called to the crime scene to commit a vengeance killing. Explain to me how him confessing to you is the least bit useful.” She lowered the bottle to the floor with a thunk. “That man took our daughter and violated her. Took her apart. And you went to him, you risked the crime scene and the arrest, and then you let him walk away.”

“I think he had an accomplice.”

Her eyebrows rose and spread. “Fowler didn’t mention that.”

“Kindell said he wasn’t supposed to kill her, as if there had been some previous understanding between him and someone else.”

“He could have just been saying he didn’t mean to kill her. Or that he knew it was illegal.”

“Maybe. But then he started to refer to someone else-a he-but he caught himself.”

“So why aren’t Gutierez and Harrison looking into that?”

“They weren’t aware of it, obviously.”

“Are they looking into it now?”

“They’d better be.”

Ginny’s bedside clock emitted a soft chime, announcing the hour; the sound struck Tim sharp and unexpected, a stab to the heart. Dray’s face seemed to crumble. She quickly took another pull off the bottle. For a moment they’d indulged the illusion that they’d set aside the personal, that they’d been two cops talking.

Dray wiped tears from her cheeks with her sweatshirt cuff, which she’d pulled over her hand like a girl. “So the crime scene is muddled up, and now there’s a possibility that the killer isn’t the only killer.”

“That’s about right, unfortunately.”

“You’re not even angry.”

“I am. But anger is useless.”

“What isn’t?”

“I’m trying to figure that out.” He wasn’t looking at her, but he heard her take another gulp from the bottle.

“All your training-Spec Ops and Combat Engineering and FLETC-you should have known to prioritize under pressure. You should’ve known not to go there, Timmy.”

“Don’t call me Timmy.” He stood and wiped his palms on his pants. “Look, Dray, we’re both wrecked right now. If we keep this up, it’s not gonna go anywhere we want it to.”

Tim opened the door and stepped out. Dray’s voice followed him out into the cool hall. “How can you be so calm right now? Like she’s just another victim, someone you never knew.”

Tim halted in the hall and stood, his back to the open door. He turned and walked back in. Dray’s hand was over her mouth.

He ran his tongue across the points of his teeth and back, waiting for his breath to stop hitching in his chest. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet it was barely audible. “I understand how upset-how destroyed you are. I am, too. But don’t ever fucking say that.”

She lowered her hand. Her eyes were shell-shocked. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He nodded and withdrew gently from the room.

•In the bedroom Tim spun the dial on his gun safe, then removed a Spec Ops-issue p226 nine mil, his favored. 357 Smith amp; Wesson, a hefty Ruger. 44 mag, and two fifty-round boxes of nine-mil and. 44. He kept a broader ammo range on hand for his. 357, as it was his duty weapon; he opted for the wad cutters over the copper-jacketed rounds and the duty 110-grain hollow-points. The service issued the S amp;Ws with three-inch barrels, as they were often carried concealed.

When he entered Ginny’s room, Dray still had not moved. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. “What a fucking thing to say.”

He knelt, placed his hands on her knees, and kissed her on the forehead. It was damp. The sharp smell of alcohol lingered about her face. “It’s okay. What’s that they say about rocks and glass houses?”

Her lips pursed, not quite a smile. “Don’t throw glass houses if you live in a rock.”

“Something like that.”

“You need to go shoot.” She wasn’t asking; she was offering.

He nodded. “Come with me?”

“I need to sit here for a while and look at nothing.”

He moved to kiss her forehead again, but she tilted back her head and caught his lips with hers. The kiss was hot and dry and edged with vodka. If he could have crawled into it and lived there, he would have.

The garage housed Tim’s silver M3 BMW-a car confiscated by the service under the National Asset Seizure and Forfeiture Program-and his workbench. Tim threw his ordnance in the trunk and backed out, careful to dodge Dray’s Blazer, parked in the driveway. He drove to the outskirts of town, then turned onto a dirt road and followed it up a few hundred yards.

He pulled the car onto a flat dirt apron and left it running, angling the high beams downrange, where a cable stretched between two stakes, about five feet off the ground. Tim removed a stack of targets, a mix of color-coded Transtars and old B-27s, and strung them along the cable. Then he sat in the dirt, jammed the Sig mags, and readied the speedloaders for the wheel guns. Six bullets locked into the cylindrical base of each speedloader, tips sticking up like fangs, spaced to correspond with the caliber holes in the wheel.

He was left-eye dominant but right-handed, so he drew from a high-ride right-hip holster. Shoulder holsters were discouraged by the service because the cross-draw presented a hazard on the firing line, but Tim preferred the up-and-out anyway, not liking the time given up on a cross-draw. They didn’t call shoulder holsters widow-makers for nothing. He started with the Sig, doing some quick-draw plinking at three yards to warm up his reactive shooting. Then he moved to seven yards. Then ten.

His shooting was remarkably precise, having been learned in urban-warfare courses and perfected in Malibu’s Maze at Glynco. The aptly named shooting course features pop-up and swinging targets that prospective deputies attack with live ammo through a confusion of strobing lights, blaring music, and amplified screams. The vibe is so invasive, the surroundings so surreal, that grown men have emerged weeping. Once outside, deputies subdue actors playing felons; a Juilliard dropout had once gotten a little too method with Tim, jawing off and sinking his teeth into Tim’s forearm, and Tim had knocked him cold.

His breath misting in the sharp February cold of the higher altitude, Tim shot and shot. When he’d burned through the nine-mil ammo, he switched to his. 357 and toed the concrete ledge at twenty-five yards.

He struck a modified Weaver, a forward-leaning fighting stance, his feet shoulder width with his left leg forward. The landscape reflected his mood-the barren stretch of dirt and rocks, the twinning cones of the headlights boring through the night, brief throws of light in a vast, dismal universe. The paper targets alone picked up the glow, floating rectangles of white, bobbing like fruit on a tree. The emptiness of the dark opened him up like a gutted beast, and he stared into the void. All that stared back was a row of eyeless, two-dimensional combat silhouettes, fluttering on the cable.

His right hand shot down, breaking his perfect stillness, and grabbed the pistol. As soon as the barrel cleared leather, he rotated it, punching it forward, his left hand already coming, grabbing his right at its junction with the butt. He lined the sights even as his arms were extending. His right arm locked, his left staying slightly canted. The trigger split the precise middle of the pad of his right index finger so he wouldn’t group high and right or low and left, and he applied quick, steady pressure through the double action, not anticipating recoil, not flexing too hard. The gun barked and a hole punched through the thoracic region of the Transtar, center mass. He fired five more times in rapid succession, regaining front sight focus between each shot almost instantly. The cordite still rising, he thumbed the left-side lever forward, releasing the well-lubed wheel. His left hand dug for the speedloader in his belt pouch as he tilted the gun back, the casings spinning to the dirt like brass hail. In a single smooth gesture, he angled the gun down and filled the wheel, the six new bullets sliding neatly into place. He got off six more rounds, Swiss-cheesing the five-ring of the Transtar before the empty speedloader hit dirt.