Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

In the backseat, gloves and black balaclavas peeked out from Mitchell’s olive-drab duffel. Tim grabbed a hood, rolled it, and slid it into his back pocket. He pulled two flex-cuffs from the rubber-banded bundle as well.

Curved in dueling loops like mouse ears, flex-cuffs worked like heavy-duty garbage-bag ties. Once they were cinched around an arrestee’s wrists, there was no easy release; they could only be notched tighter. The hard plastic strips were so unforgiving that detention-enforcement officers sometimes had to use pruning shears to cut them off. They were standard issue for ART raids, and Tim always liked having a few handy to restrain the unforeseeable.

“Did he have a lunch with him? A brown paper bag or a lunch box or something?”

“No.”

“All right. So lunch is probably provided, but he might be back between twelve and one-if not, I’d guess between four and six. I’m gonna slip inside, be there waiting for him. If he’s not alone when he returns, give me a double tap on the horn. You are not to leave this post. Where’s Robert?”

“Not here.”

“I do not want him on-site. Clear?”

Mitchell used two fingers of each hand to smooth his mustache. “Clear. I’m gonna split and switch out the car. I don’t want to be sitting here in this thing much longer.”

Tim nodded and got out. He strode down the cracked sidewalk, letting his elbow dip to touch the handle of his. 357, which felt reassuringly solid beneath his T-shirt. He passed two beautiful Mexican girls jumping rope, an old-timer walking a pit bull, a low rider with tinted windows. He circled the block and ducked through two backyards so he could approach Bowrick’s house from the rear.

He wriggled through the bathroom window again and sat at the desk. Bowrick’s checkbook lay out, and Tim flipped through it. Bowrick made semimonthly paycheck deposits, each around five hundred bucks. A series of check entries caught Tim’s eye-two hundred dollars a week, every week, to the Lizzy Bowman fund. The name fluttered through Tim’s memory awhile before striking a cord. The coach’s daughter shot during Bowrick’s assault on Warren High.

The kid was making his amends, working victim memorials, donating cash.

The parents of the twelve kids who ate lead from an SKS would probably be touched.

Tim pulled the chair around to the shadowed west wall, held his gun in his lap, and sat with his thoughts, which he found bad company. Lunchtime came and went with no sign of Bowrick. The shadows shifted in the room as afternoon came on, and Tim scooted the chair over to keep it in the dimness, staying on the hinge side of the door.

Bowrick did not show up at five, or six, or eight.

Tim found his mind drifting to Richard, the beaten-down PD who could see through the cracks and fissures of the system to the unbroken foundation beneath. The insurge of Tim’s own grief last night had scalpeled open a part of him, and the freshness of his sorrow, he found, had dulled his anger, his conviction. If there was anything objective towering out of the morass of his grief, he’d lost sight of it. To steel himself he thought of the child-killer he awaited. He thought of eleven dead students and one dead little girl. He thought of the closed casket at Ginny’s funeral, and why it had been.

But matching his emotion step for step was the steady advance of another, more rational force. The cracked bedrock beneath the Commission. Lane’s and Bowrick’s pursuit-like Tim’s-of an idiosyncratic ideal they thought of as justice. The ways in which they’d all failed. Were failing.

A little after nine Tim heard a key scratch its way into the front lock. He pulled his balaclava from his rear pocket and rolled it over his head. It covered everything but the crescent of his mouth, the spots of his eyes. The smell of dirt, sweat, and cigarette smoke preceded Bowrick into the room. He slammed the door and crossed to his closet, not noticing Tim in the darkness. Bowrick tossed his hard hat into the closet and pulled off his shirt. His back was marred with pocks, crescents of shiny, tight-pinched flesh.

He was just lowering his arms when he noticed that the chair was not in its place by the desk. His eyes closed in a long blink. He turned calmly, expectantly, saw Tim sitting in the darkness. His shirt was balled at the end of his fist like a mop.

He took note of the. 357 aimed at his head. His hands rose, fell to his thighs. “Go on then,” he said. “Shoot me.”

His upper lip held the scraggly strands of a mustache forced before its time. Up close he was so slight as to suggest preadolescence. His appearance impressed upon Tim that the legal definition of adulthood was stunningly arbitrary, as preposterous as bar mitzvah manhood; some males are boys at twenty-two, some are men at sixteen. It was all in the gathering of focus, the shouldering of responsibility, the potential for menace. Tim had not counted on Bowrick’s seeming so much younger than himself, but why this was a sudden, essential criterion escaped him. In Bowrick’s frailty Tim sensed for maybe the first time the space between culpability and punishment.

Tears eased down his cheeks, but Bowrick was otherwise completely unaltered-no jerky breathing, no reddening of the face, just the silent flow of tears, like thin faucet streams. His mouth set in a suggestion of a smile, of sadness and expectation, of weary relief.

Tim’s grip remained perfectly firm on the gun, but his trigger finger did not recoil.

“What are you? Dad of a kid who got shot? Uncle? Priest?” Bowrick’s bangs, greasy, long and thinned in tendrils, dangled over his eyes. “Fuck, man, if I was you, I’d shoot me. Go for it.” He tossed his shirt aside, his lame arm pulling back to his stomach like a snail retracting. His chest bore a bad Pink Floyd tattoo-the face from The Wall.

Tim sorted through his legal arguments, his abstractions about justice, his ethical conclusions, but couldn’t find a mainstay. He searched for anger next, couldn’t locate it.

“Well, go on, then.” Bowrick’s voice stayed tough, but the tears kept coming.

“Why so eager?” Tim asked.

“You don’t know what it’s like, fucking waiting for it. Always waiting for it.”

“My violin’s in the car.”

“Hey, fucker, you asked.” He rolled his head back. Took a deep breath. “It ain’t so clean like you think. I don’t know if one of the guys who got shot is your kid brother or something, but those guys were mean as shit. Ran that school like it was their own party, coach looked the other way ’cause he didn’t want to lose Sections.”

“So you help two thugs shoot his daughter in the eye. Sounds like justice to me.”

Bowrick laughed, high-pitched, his voice breaking, tears still running. “There ain’t no way back from something like I did, but I tried to set my shit straight. Tried to get my accounts balanced before I meet the Big Guy.” He nodded at Tim’s gun, wiped one cheek hard. “Let’s find out if I did.”

Tim firmed his lips, lined the sights, but his trigger finger still disobeyed him. All five feet eight inches of Bowrick winced and trembled. Tim slid the gun back into his waistband and rose to leave.

Both doors splintered in simultaneously. Balaclava hoods lowered, Robert and Mitchell burst into the room, guns leveled, Mini Mag-Lites strapped to their right forearms, shooting thin beams of light parallel with the barrels of their. 45s.

“Everything okay?” one of them said. He nodded at Tim reassuringly as the other stutter-stepped toward Bowrick, gun-facing him.

Tim’s rage flared hard. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

“You took awhile. We thought something might be wrong.” Tim recognized the coarser voice as Robert’s, which meant Mitchell was the one closing hard on Bowrick. An abrupt aggression role reversal that was mind-baffling but gut-logical. That Mitchell had appeared was an inexcusable breach of conduct; that Robert was present was worse. Tim’s mind went immediately to the lies surrounding the digital transmitter’s appearance in his watch. Maybe the Commission had always played by its own rules behind his back.