Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

The hammering of boots through his apartment above seemed to vibrate the entire building. The deputies were yelling “Clear” as he hit the third landing, and then he could make out Bear’s deep rumble of a voice hurling profanities. Ignoring his throbbing shoulder, Tim slid down the ladder to the second landing. Two spotlights angled up from the cars in the alley blanketed him, moving with him. Raising an arm to shield his eyes, he ran to the outfacing bathroom window, the flimsy landing shaking with his steps. It was still screenless, still inched open.

He threw it open and, using the landing overhead, swung himself in. He hit the toilet hard. When he shoved out through the bathroom door, two bodies jerked upright in bed, startled faces and flying paperbacks bathed in the light of dueling reading lamps. He was through the living room in a flash and out into the hall.

Flashing blue and red reflected in the windows at either end of the corridor-LAPD backup. The door to Room 213 was unlocked, as he’d left it. He sprinted through the apartment, out the living-room window onto the fire escape. The alley on this side of the building was too narrow to accommodate a car, but sure enough a vehicle was waiting thirty yards down on the main street. Good work, Thomas and Freed.

He slid down the ladder and hung from the bottom rung, his shoulder screaming, his feet dangling a few inches from the ground. He dropped and hit the ground running. Down the alley two car doors opened and closed, and for a brief moment he and Thomas and Freed were sprinting directly at each other. In the lead, Thomas stopped, raising his shotgun. Freed pulled up at his side as Tim froze, hands half spread, staring down the bore from about thirty yards. Water dripped from a leaky pipe to Tim’s left. Freed’s head rotated slightly, just enough for his eyes to fall on Thomas, questioning, then Tim sprang forward, running toward them again. Thomas shouted, thighs flexing, shotgun firming at his shoulder but not firing.

Tim banked hard down the alley ten yards north of the fire escape and hurtled forward over boxes and fences with a nearly out-of-control momentum, the noise of his pursuers following him. After two forced turns, he came out on Third, only a half block from his building, practically skidding to halt himself. He flagged a cab and ducked into the backseat. An opera singer wailed from both speakers, her voice piercing and wobbly.

“Go. That way.”

The cab driver pulled out sharply. “I can’t flip a U here, pal.”

Tim slid low in the seat as the cab passed the front of his building. Two cop cars were parked at the entrance, flanking the Beast, which idled at the curb. Bear’s broad frame was immediately evident among the other Arrest Response Team deputies, cut from the headlights’ glow like a dark statue. Joshua stood facing him, wearing a plush bathrobe, shaking his head. They did not look his way as the cab passed.

“Get to a freeway,” Tim said. “The 101. Hurry up.”

The cabbie waved a meaty hand dismissively, his other busy keeping time with the aria, sweeping back and forth as though spreading butter on toast.

One block away, a block and a half. Tim felt no abatement of his unease. When they turned the corner onto Alameda, he experienced the suffocating sensation of moving into an ambush, his second in less than twenty-four hours. The city seemed to pull in and around him-random, disparate movement suddenly given direction and meaning, a car here, a bystander’s turned head, the glint of binocs from a passing apartment building-and Tim thought again, How? How are they still on me?

Behind the wheel of a dark Ford sedan parked curbside, a face glowed with the light of a GPS screen. Coke-bottle glasses, pasty skin-the archetypal electronic-surveillance geek. Tim’s eyes tracked up a telephone pole, spotting a cluster of cell-site tubes.

Beaten at his own game. Somewhere, through his quickening alarm, a phrase rose into consciousness: the Revenge of the Nerds.

Several blocks away, the whine of sirens became audible, closing in.

Tim dug in his pockets, pulling out the Nextel and the Nokia. The Nokia was certainly clean-he’d just gotten it, and no one had the number. The Nextel’s top button glowed green, showing a good connection to network.

The cab was surrounded by trucks and cars and two other taxis. The cabbie accelerated to make a green light, and they started up the ramp to the freeway, the other lanes and traffic peeling off. Tim leaned out the window and took his best shot, tossing the Nextel through the open back window of the taxi beside them as it drifted away, its lane veering right.

The cell phone struck the sill and bounced in, landing in the lap of a surprised matron wearing an excess of makeup. Oblivious, Tim’s cabbie turned up the radio and kept humming, kept conducting. Tim twisted in his seat, looking out the rear window. A wall of vehicles with blaring sirens swept right, hard, just before the exit, following the other taxi and closing in hard. Down on the patchwork streets below, he made out the flashing lights of two vehicle checkpoints he’d narrowly missed.

It wasn’t until they’d passed two exits without any sign of a tail that he relaxed.

He had his weapon, loaded with six bullets, his Nokia phone, the clothes on his back, and a little over thirty dollars in cash. The rest of his stuff was in the trunk of the Acura, which he’d go back for tomorrow, if the area was clear. He’d signed the lease on his apartment as Tom Altman, so that meant his bank account was either frozen or soon would be. He had the cabdriver drop him off at an ATM and succeeded in pulling out six hundred dollars-the maximum withdrawal.

He walked up the block and made a call from a phone booth. Not surprisingly, Mason Hansen was in the office.

“Working late?”

A long pause. “Rack, listen, I…Look, they told me what was going on. I had to…”

“They pulled my phone number from the records of the cell phone you sourced for me, didn’t they? And you confirmed it for them.” A cop car drove by, and Tim turned away, hiding in the phone booth like a down-at-heel Superman. “You knew mine was the number dialed at 4:07 A.M.”

“Your colleagues came in with warrants. What was I supposed to do?” His voice picked up anger. “And you didn’t exactly come clean with me either. You’re in deep shit.”

“You can stop your trace. I won’t be on long enough.”

In the background Tim heard the faint chirp of another line-probably Bear calling in. He was about to hang up, but Hansen’s voice caught him.

“Uh, Rack?” A nervous pause. “You’re not gonna come after me, are you?”

The note of anxiety in Hansen’s voice shot straight through Tim, leaving him wobbled. “Of course I’m not going to hurt you. What do you think I am?”

No answer. Tim hung up.

His palms had gone slick with sweat, a reaction his body reserved not for fear or strain or even sadness, but for shame.

The Kill Clause

SINCE HE FIGURED Bear would have deputies all over Dray’s for the night, Tim cabbed back and checked into a shitty motel downtown, a few miles from his old apartment building. He’d be able to scout the Acura first thing in the morning and maybe reclaim it.

The bedspread smelled like shaving cream. He called her from the Nokia, knowing they couldn’t be set up to trace it. “Andrea.”

A sharp intake of air. “Bear said you’d been shot. They found blood, bandages in the bathroom when they flushed you out.”

“Superficial. It’s nothing.”

She heaved a sigh that kept going and going. “Say it again,” she said. “I thought I might not…Say my name again.”

He hadn’t heard relief like that in Dray’s voice since he’d phoned her from base after a deployment to Uzbekistan went a week over. “Andrea Rackley.”