The Kill Clause

13

AS TIM TURNED into his cul-de-sac, he spotted Dumone leaning against a parked Lincoln Town Car at the far curb, arms crossed, like a waiting chauffeur. Tim pulled up beside him and rolled down his window.

Dumone winked. “Touche.”

Tim glanced around to see if any of the neighbors had taken note of them. “Touche yourself.”

Dumone gestured to the backseat with a tilt of his head. “Why don’t you come for a ride?”

“Why don’t you get off my street?”

“I wanted to apologize.”

“For being rude?”

Dumone’s laugh was worn, and it crackled around the edges like an old LP. “Christ no. For underestimating you. That hard-sell, tough-cop bit. At my age I should know better.”

Tim’s lips pressed together in a half grin.

Dumone jerked his head again. “Come on. Hop in.”

“If it’s just the same, why don’t you take a ride with me?”

“Fair enough.” When Dumone pulled his frame into Tim’s passenger seat, he let out a textured groan like a bellows collapsing. He removed a Remington from his hip and a small. 22 from an ankle holster and set them in the center console. “Just so you can listen without being distracted.”

Tim drove a few blocks, pulled into the deserted back parking lot of Ginny’s old elementary school, and killed the lights. Dumone’s chest jerked with a held-in cough. Tim gazed out the windshield so he could pretend for Dumone’s sake he didn’t notice.

“This that school where those three teenagers went on that shooting spree?”

“No,” Tim said. “That was at the other Warren, a high school south of downtown.”

“Kids shooting kids.” Dumone shook his head, grunted, then shook his head again.

For a while they watched the unlit school in silence.

“When you get on in life,” Dumone said, “you start viewing the world a bit differently. Your idealism doesn’t die, but it’s mitigated. You start thinking, hell, maybe life’s just what we make it, and maybe our job is to leave this place a little better than it was when we came in. I don’t know. Could be all old-man disconnect. Maybe that poet was right, that youth holds knowledge and everything we learn as we get older takes us away from it.”

“I don’t read poetry.”

“Yeah. Neither do I. The wife…” Even in the dark his eyes shone jarringly blue, the blue of newborns and summer skies and other things discordant and mawkish. He worked at a hangnail, his head down-bent, skin texturing in rough folds beneath his chin. He reminded Tim of an old lion. “You see, Tim-is it all right if I call you Tim?”

“Of course.”

“To try to find meaning, give meaning, to shape things and people for the better, you have to navigate through a gray zone. And to do so you need ethics. You need to be even and just. You are both.”

“What about the others?”

“Rayner is vain, and dumb in the ways vanity makes you, but he’s also brilliant. And he’s extremely competent at reading people and cases.”

“And Robert?”

“You have a problem with Robert?”

“He just seems a little”-Tim searched for the most displeasing adjective he could conjure-“nonlinear.”

“He’s a great operator. Loyal to a fault. Some of his connections are a touch loose, but he always falls in.”

“He and his brother don’t seem particularly eager to play betas to my alpha.”

“They need to learn from you, Tim. They just don’t know it yet. They felt their operating skills were sufficient. They didn’t see a need for you, but me, Rayner, and Ananberg made clear we weren’t willing to free them up or even review cases without someone like you in place. We need this thing to run not just well but seamlessly. And you’re really the only candidate within our reach who has the skill set to make that happen.”

“How did you determine that?”

Dumone’s lips set in a manner to suggest mild annoyance. “Rayner found you after Ginny’s death-he’d been putting together profiles of all-stars in the L.A. law-enforcement community. Running psych assessments and whatever other mad-scientist crap he gets up to at that office of his. Once he zeroed in, the boys went to work gathering intel as best they could. The more we saw, the more we liked.”

“Who’s to say ‘the boys’ will fall in under my command?”

“Because I’ll tell them to.”

“They’re afraid of you.”

“No. Respectful. Intimidated, maybe. I met them right after their sister’s death, helped them find a way through some of their grief. Not the grief-group couch-lay crap, but the real deal. How I handled it. Cops. How cops deal. You help someone when they’re raw like that, they never forget. They’re always grateful. And they might look up to me a bit more than I deserve. They’re different from you, different from me, even. They need guidance. I keep them close at hand, keep an eye on them.”

“Sounds like a case of keeping your enemies nearer.”

“An overstatement,” Dumone said. “They’re solid men.”

“For what you’re proposing, they need to be more than that.”

“No. They need a leader.” He coughed again, moistly, into a fist. “A new leader.”

“That might not be a role I want.” Tim reached for the keys and turned the engine over.

“I know. That’s why I chose you.” Dumone sighed heavily but without theatricality. “What none of the others understand is that joining the Commission for you would be a sacrifice, not a release. You’d have to be willing to renounce your values, your righteousness. You’d be vilified by precisely the kinds of organizations and individuals you’ve always valued.” He reached over and tapped two knobby fingers against Tim’s chest. “And even worse, you’d feel a hypocrite in your own heart. But in calmer moments, when flag waving and slogans no longer seem quite so weighty, you’ll also realize that you took direct action that had direct results. It’s tough to lead the way when you’re standing on a soapbox, even if that soapbox is platinum or sterling or made of the wood of the True Cross.” He shifted noisily to face Tim, bearing his weight on his hip. “If you do this, there will be fewer girls raped, fewer people murdered. And maybe at twilight, in our final reckoning, that’s all we’ll really have to hold on to.”

It struck Tim that in the respect Dumone so naturally commanded, in his gravity and acumen, resided a deep moral authority, and that any hope for justice apart from and beyond the law resided precisely in such integrity embodied in like individuals.

“When someone is mugged, raped, killed, society is the victim,” Dumone continued. “Society has a right to assert its position. We don’t represent the victims, we represent our community. We can be that voice. What you want to try to accomplish, it can be done here.” He smiled, warmly, and it attenuated the pain in his eyes. “Something to think about at least.”

•“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Dray leaned over the table, her eyes the same cornered-cat intensity they were when she lifted weights or ran. A piece of popcorn fell from the fold in her sweatshirt; she’d just gotten back from a Meg Ryan movie with Trina, the most girlie of her friends and the only one with whom she indulged her occasional appetite for maudlin movies and pedicures and other things she thought unbefitting a POST-certified female range master with a hundred-fifty-pound bench press.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Tim leaned back in the chair, crossing his arms.

The wind kicked up outside, whooshing off the east side of the house, making the dimly lit kitchen seem a small and quiet place of shelter.

“Have you talked to Bear about this?”

“Absolutely not. I’m not talking to anybody.”

“Why me?”

Tim felt a sudden pressure in his face. “Because you’re my wife.”

Dray grabbed his hand. “Then listen to me. These people are preying on your pain. Like a cult. Like some screwed-up self-help group. Don’t let them make your decisions. Make your own.” Her tone held an anomalous note of pleading.

“I am making my own. But I’d rather act within some context. With some element of order. Of law.”

“No. The institutions we’re part of are the law. What they’re creating, in there, is not.”

“And what you and Fowler were advocating? That was lawful?”

“At least it was authentic. At least I don’t need a roomful of fat men to tell me what to do.”

Tim pursed his lips. “They’re not all fat.”

But Dray’s face held no levity. “I never told you this, because you’re vain enough already. And even though I love it, your vanity, I don’t think it needs any help. But the pride you took in being a deputy marshal, it was infectious. I love the way you talked about it, like a calling, like you were a priest or something. And I bought into it, that energy. The marshals who have no hidden agenda, not like the Feebs or the Company. The marshals who are there for the raw enforcement of federal law. Upholding individual constitutional rights. Keeping abortion clinics open. Escorting black first-graders to school in desegregated New Orleans.” Her face held an atypical note of shyness before it returned to a harder cast. “And so this thing with this house in Hancock Park, I just can’t believe that you, who swore to uphold and protect the courts, would consider it.”

“I’m not a deputy anymore.”

“Maybe not, but this…Commission”-she nearly spat the word out-“it has no checks and balances. If you want some outlet for your rage, at-at Kindell, at Ginny, at yourself, I understand that. Believe me, I do. But take a real one. Go shoot Kindell and face the music. Why build all this…scaffolding around it?”

“It’s not scaffolding. It’s justice. And order.”

Dray’s expression shifted to a weary exasperation, a look he had grown to anticipate and dread. “Tim, don’t be impressed with straw ethics and ten-cent words.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “So if no accomplice pops up and you rule against Kindell, you get to kill him.”

“Justly. He’ll have had a trial-one that focuses only on his guilt, not procedure. And if we uncover evidence that an accomplice was involved, I could always elect to leak that information into the right hands and have Kindell and the accomplice prosecuted. Remember, there’s no double jeopardy, since Kindell never went to trial. It’s not about getting him killed, it’s about having Ginny’s murder addressed.”

“And where will this magical evidence come from?”

“I’ll have access to the PD and DA investigative reports. And Kindell probably shared with his PD what went down that night. Let’s just hope it’s indicated somewhere in the notes.”

“Why not go to the PD directly?”

“There’s no way a PD would betray confidentiality to me. But Rayner’s got the inside line on that file. And that file might get us closer to the accomplice.”

“It sure as hell isn’t the straightest distance between two points.”

“We never had the option to take the straightest distance. Not judiciously.”

“Well, I’ve been poking around the case a bit already. Peeks took the anonymous call the night of Ginny’s death-he was the deputy working the desk. And he said the caller sounded highly agitated, really upset. It was his gut that it wasn’t an accomplice or someone who could be in on it. Just a hunch, but Peeks is pretty buttoned-down.”

“Any description of the voice?”

“Nothing helpful. You know, male adult. No accent or lisp or anything. Might’ve just been what it was.”

“Might’ve been a good performance.” Not until he felt the wave of disillusionment did he realize how much he’d been hanging on his accomplice theory. “Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe I misinterpreted. Maybe it was just Kindell.”

Dray took a deep breath and held it before exhaling. “I’ve been debating having a little chat with Kindell.”

“Come on, Dray. The PD would have advised him strenuously not to say a word about the case-a new confession could open him up again.”

“Maybe I could get him to talk.”

“What, are you gonna beat it out of him?” He was all reason and circumspection right now, but the thought had occurred to him with alarming frequency.

“I wish.” She grimaced. “No. Of course not.”

“All talking to Kindell will do is alert his accomplice-if there is one-that we’re looking. And then the accomplice will know we’re coming, and he’ll cover his tracks or disappear. And you’ll wind up with a restraining order slapped on you. What we have going for us is the fact that no one knows we’re exploring this.”

“You’re right. Plus, if you idiots end up taking him out, I’d be a key suspect if word leaked I’d visited him.” She laced her fingers and reverse-cracked her knuckles. “I ordered the preliminary-hearing transcripts from Kindell’s previous cases.”

“How did you do that?”

“As a citizen. They’re public record. Evidently the stenographer doesn’t type up the actual trial transcripts unless the case gets appealed, but the prelim hearings should be enough for me to get a handle on the specifics. I debated contacting the LAPD detectives who worked the cases, seeing what they had in their logs, but there’s no way they’d talk to me. Not after interfacing with Gutierez and Harrison, and not given who I am.”

“How long will it take to get the transcripts?”

“Tomorrow. Court clerks don’t quite snap to when it’s not an official request.”

“It looks like we’re both being unofficial.”

“You can’t put this in a category with what you’re considering. Don’t even try.”

“Everything’s imperfect, Dray. But maybe the Commission can be closer to justice than what we’ve gotten. Maybe it can be that voice.”

“You really want to rededicate your life to this? To hate?”

“I’m not doing it because of hate. The opposite, actually.”

She drummed her fingers on the table, hard. Her hands were small and feminine; her delicate nails recalled the girl she had been before she put on a sheath of muscle and enrolled in the academy. Tim had met her only after she’d become a deputy. At his first Thanksgiving with her family, when her older brothers had proudly and with some silent element of warning shown him Dray’s high-school yearbook, he’d hardly recognized the pixie face in the photos. She was now bigger and more powerful, and she’d taken on a toughened sexuality. The first time they’d gone to the range together, Tim had watched her from the shade of the overhang, her hips cocked, holster high-riding her hip, a squint drawing her cheek high and tight beneath a water-blue eye, and he’d thought for not the first time that she’d been spun from the daydream of some sugar-buzzed, comic-book-gorged adolescent.

Her lips were pursed, perfectly shaped, and chapped. Gazing at them, he realized that he wanted them not to be dry from crying, and in that he felt the depth of his continued love for her. He had told her about Rayner’s proposal because she was the second leg on which he moved forward through life, and that reality, that trust that had been forged and built upon through eight solid years of their marriage, held true regardless of circumstance or even estrangement.

“Come here,” he said.

She stood and trudged around the table as he scooted his chair back. She sat in his lap, and he leaned forward, pressing his face to the bare fan of skin revealed beneath the back collar of her stretched T-shirt. Warmth.

“I know you feel like you’ve lost so much so quickly. I do, too.” Dray shifted in his lap so she was looking down at him across the bulge of her shoulder. “But there’s more we can lose.”

Tim ached with an uncharacteristic fatigue. “I’m tired of sleeping on the couch, Dray. We’re not helping each other here.”

She stood abruptly and walked a half turn around the kitchen. “I know. I’ve got all this…all this anger. When I pass the bathroom, I see her on her stool brushing her teeth, and in the backyard I see her trying to get that damn kite untangled, the yellow one we got her in Laguna, and every time I get that ache, I’ve got a need to blame someone. And I don’t want us to keep on tearing at each other in the middle of all this. Or worse, I don’t want us to go numb around each other.”

Tim rose and rubbed his hands. A childish urge gripped him-to scream, to yell, to sob and plead. Instead he said, “I understand.” His throat was closing, distorting his voice. “We shouldn’t stay on top of each other if we’re winding up hurting each other in small, spiteful ways.”

“But a part of me feels like we should. I mean, maybe that’s something we need to do. Hate each other. Slug it out. Fight and scream until the blame’s gone and there’s just…us.”

He could see in her eyes that she knew otherwise, that she was just trying to convince herself. “I can’t fight that kind of fight,” he said. “Not against you.”

“I can’t either.” She shook her head, roughly, like a child. The chair creaked when she sat again. She dipped her head and let out a sigh. “If you’re gonna do this thing, with those men, you’re gonna need a safe house. Because I’m not getting implicated in it.”

“I know.”

“That crew sounds pretty geared up on surveillance.”

“They are. And I don’t want their eyes on you or this house. I’m gonna be in it pretty good with the criminal element, too, and I won’t put you one inch at risk if one of my targets catches wind of me coming.”

She sighed, the heel of her hand sliding from cheek to forehead. “So where’s that leave us?”

They faced each other across the kitchen, both of them knowing the answer. Tim finally mustered the courage to say it. “We need some time off anyway.”

A tear arced down her cheek. “Uh-huh.”

“I’ll get my things together.”

“Not permanently. It’s not permanent.”

“Just enough for us to catch our breath. Get some perspective back on each other.”

“And for you to kill some people.” She looked away when he tried to meet her eyes.

He packed in twenty minutes, amazed at how little he had amassed over the years that he held to be essential. His laptop, some clothes, a few toiletries. Dray followed him silently from room to room like a heartsick dog, but neither of them spoke. With a stack of shirts draped over his arm, he stood in the threshold of Ginny’s room. Moving out of the house where his murdered daughter grew up seemed to constitute some formal trespass, and he feared the unknown emotional consequences it might bring.

As he loaded up his car, Dray watched him from the porch in her bare feet, shivering. The after-scent of a neighbor’s barbecue lingered in the air, smoky and domestic. He finished and walked over and kissed her. Her mouth felt both moist and dry.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.” He cleared his throat once, hard. “We have a little over twenty grand in our savings account. I’m gonna take out five probably, soon. But don’t worry, I’ll leave the rest until we figure out what to do.”

“Of course. Whatever.”

He got in his car and shut the door. The clock on the dash read 12:01. Dray knocked on the window. She was shivering hard now, her whole body shaking.

He rolled down the window.

“Damn it, Timothy.” She was crying now, openly. “Damn it.”

She leaned over, and they kissed again, a quick one on the mouth.

He rolled up the window and backed out into the street. It wasn’t until he turned the corner that he remembered it was Valentine’s Day.