The Kill Clause

19

RAYNER’S conference room was all postsweat chills and high energy. Robert and Mitchell paced on opposite sides of the conference table while the Stork, kneading out a cramp in his left hand and basking in an almost postcoital glow, sat calmly between Rayner and Ananberg.

Ananberg wore the sleeves of her thin black sweater pushed up to her elbows, her collar tips peeking out with J. Crew perfection. Tim caught her staring at him a few times, her dark, shiny eyes flashing quickly away.

Dumone stood with one hand resting paternally on Tim’s shoulder-which Tim allowed and even didn’t mind-the other holding a remote with which he slow-advanced the explosion of Lane’s head on the overhead TV.

First Lane’s eyeballs ejected from their orbits. The skin covering his scalp and face balloon-swelled, then split, his mandible blown off in a single piece. Then his entire head seemed to dissipate at once, to crumble with the slow-motion horror of an avalanche starting. Lane’s body remained stiffly in the seat, perfectly headless, tie still set firmly against the collar, one finger vehemently stabbed down into the table.

The camera did a Blair Witch swing, catching scrambling techs, militia goons, and Melissa Yueh watching with an expression of unadulterated wonder, a plasma splat of gray matter clinging to her cheek just beneath a mascara-heavy eye.

Dumone froze the screen. Ananberg inhaled sharply, her chest jerking a bit, her lips parting. She caught herself quickly, her usual seen-it-all complacency again taking hold of her features, an expression of icy amusement. Rayner’s face was white, save for disks of color at the heights of his cheeks. He propped his elbows on the table, resting his chin on the bridge of his laced fingers, and exhaled loudly.

Robert passed Mitchell, and the two slapped hands. “Motherfucking genius.”

Mitchell’s face, softer than Robert’s, was flushed with excitement. “Brilliant. I’d forgotten-the slightest explosion in the external acoustic meatus can induce massive intracranial pressure. Open a head right up.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. Right there.” Robert strode over and grabbed Tim in a forceful embrace, giving him a faceful of rough shoulder fabric laced with nicotine. He shook Tim once, hard, and set him down. Though Robert was a good several inches shorter than Tim, he was undeniably more solid, his thick arms and legs seeming part of a single, immutable block.

Tim took a step back, away. “What’s next? A victory lap, then we douse Rayner with the Gatorade cooler?”

His comment was lost in the excitement; Dumone alone took note, fixing Tim with his solemn blue eyes.

Rayner clicked through the channels. News updates all around.

“-perhaps from a rival militia group or an FBI operative-”

The Stork raised his arms like a traveling preacher. “It has begun.”

“This will certainly raise public visibility,” Rayner said. “And contribute to the execution’s deterrence potential.”

Robert cracked a pleased smile. “Yeah, I’d say blowing Motherfucker’s head off during prime time will sure as shit get the message out.”

“It’s sufficiently high-profile that now we can back off and do safer, isolated hits,” Dumone said. “Everyone will still know it’s us.”

Robert finally sat, his knee hammering up and down, his hands curling the thick phone book.

The Man on the Street-this incarnation a puffy-jacketed one with a goatee-offered his opinion to an out-of-frame reporter. “I say good riddance, man. A scumsuck like that, sneaks through the law on some”-his next two words, presumably too colorful for the airwaves, were bleeped out-“got the death penalty he deserves. I’m a father of three children, and I don’t want some guy like that out there, who we all know killed a bunch of kids.” He leaned toward the camera now, in hi-mom posture. “Hey, I say whoever smoked the guy, if you’re out there, good job, man.” He flashed dueling thumbs-ups before the camera cut away.

“Well,” Ananberg said, “now we have our moral sanction.”

“Don’t be a snob, Jenna,” Rayner said. “We don’t just want to hear from judges and slick media commentators.”

“Yes, how we loathe slick media commentators.”

Rayner ignored the barb. “I’ll have a full media report ready by the time of our next meeting. Friday evening, shall we say?”

Tim glanced at the painting of Rayner’s son, behind which the safe and Kindell’s case binder waited. Rayner followed his gaze and winked. “Two cases down. Five to go.”

“You boys did well,” Dumone said. “You should feel great.”

“Right,” Tim said.

•Robert and Mitchell were waiting by the Toyota truck. As Tim passed, he took note of the tiny clean circles on the otherwise-dirty back license plate, right around the screws, indicating a recent change. Robert caught his arm and gave a squeeze. It seemed as if a good clench could snap Tim’s humerus.

“Let’s go for an unwinder,” Robert said.

The Stork stood for a moment, as if waiting for an invitation to be extended, then climbed into his van and drove away.

Tim stood by his car.

“Come on,” Mitchell said. “The post-op drink. A tradition we dare not break.”

Robert held up the phone book he’d taken from inside, letting it fall open to the section he’d marked with a thumb. LIQUOR STORES.

Robert stepped aside, and, after a hesitation, Tim slid across the front seat to the middle. The brothers climbed in on either side of him, the doors slamming in unison. Mitchell drove fast and skillfully. Tim sat hunched in the middle, the breadth of two sets of Masterson shoulders leaving him little torso space. Deltoids poked into him unforgivingly on the turns, pounding from Tim’s subconscious his relief that Robert and Mitchell were-ostensibly-on his side.

Mitchell stopped at a liquor store off Crenshaw and headed into the store. He emerged with a brown paper bag, about two six-packs wide, which he threw in the back. He pulled off his black Members Only jacket, rolled a pack of Camels in his white T-shirt sleeve, and climbed back in.

“That was a hell of a bang you built,” Tim said.

Mitchell kept his eyes on the road. “I know a few things.”

He drove the speed limit, threading through downtown. When he turned off Temple, Tim realized where they were going. They arrived at a grand metal gate, the sole break in the ten-foot fence surrounding Monument Hill. Three parallel wires ran atop the fence at one-foot intervals, emitting a low hum. Mitchell rolled down the window, removed an electronic access-control card from the glove box, and held it out the window before the post-mounted pad of the proximity reader. The card emitted a series of blips as it searched for the matching frequency, and then the gate clicked open with a resonant shifting of inner bolts.

Mitchell tapped the access-control card against his thigh. “The keys to the city. A little gift from the Stork.”

They left asphalt behind, driving up the well-worn dirt path, the Census Memorial’s one-hundred-foot silhouette breaking the purple-black sky above. On the radio Willie Nelson was crooning about all the girls he’d loved before.

When Mitchell put the truck in park, neither he nor Robert made to get out. It was dead quiet up here, just the darkness and the wind whistling through the monument.

“You did a fine job,” Robert said slowly. “But we don’t like being kept out of the loop like that.”

Tim sat crushed between them, keeping his unease from showing, deciding whose throat he’d throw an elbow into first if the situation got ugly, which it looked like it might.

Robert tossed the phone book into Mitchell’s lap. “Show our friend your trick.” He nodded at Tim. “You’ll like this. Come on, Mitch. Let’s see it.”

A faint scowl etched Mitchell’s face. He picked up the phone book and balanced it on the points of his upturned fingers, a magician’s show of its three inches of thickness. Then he gripped it along the cut side in both hands, his thumbs a few inches apart. He flexed, and the book buckled. His arms began to shake. Veins stood out on his neck. His eight knuckles went white. A split snaked through the cover, a thin white river on a yellow sea. His lip was curled, a fringe of flesh and mustache, his teeth exposed like a snarling dog’s. His breath came harder. The muscles popped up on his forearms, distinct and stone-hard, peaks on mirrored mountain ranges. His entire torso was quaking.

A sound escaped Mitchell-deeper than a cry, more controlled than a grunt-and the book gave with a pleasing whoosh, ripping apart, the rent edges layered with brief ledges of page like compressed sandstone in a cliff wall. He tossed the two chunks of phone book on the dash, red draining from his face, and took the sweat off his forehead with a wipe of his T-shirt. He and Robert glanced at Tim from either side with a certain schoolyard smugness.

Mitchell kneaded one forearm, then the other. Lightly freckled and covered with blond hair, they were nearly as thick as Tim’s biceps.

“Whatever blows your dresses up, ladies.” Tim’s shirt was sweat-pasted to his lower back, but he kept his voice casual and unimpressed. “Now that the arts and crafts are over, what do you say we have that drink and call it a night?”

After a tense pause, Mitchell smiled, and Robert followed his lead. They climbed out, the truck creaking with relief, and stood on the hilltop. Industrial-tire imprints crushed the dirt into patterns. The ground up here was malleable, the dirt auburn red, like finely milled clay. A scattering of sawhorses and pallets broke up the head-high piles of metal sheets. Thick plastic drop cloths snapped in the breeze.

Nyaze Ghartey’s concept-a metallic tree, each branch representing a child killed, the crown outstretched protectively like an umbrella-had seemed to Tim pompous and distastefully abstract, but he had to admit now that there was a certain resonance to the sculpture. The framework of the piece was largely complete, though the metal planes had fleshed out only about two-thirds of it. Wood scaffolding covered the structure from top to bottom; the design itself emerged, organic and mysterious, a darker self lurking within the ordered rectangles. The leaves, metal and Bernini-thin, seemed mid-flutter on the branches.

Half a quotation had been chiseled into a flat-sided boulder at the front of the monument: AND THE LEAVES OF THE TREE WERE FOR

To its left a turned-off Sky-Tracker spotlight, the type that shot a mile-high beam of beckoning light at movie premieres and cheesy car sales, sat dormant. Tim could barely make out the small hatch in the trunk of the tree through which the spotlight would slide and illuminate the tree from the interior with the proverbial thousand points of light.

An ambitious task, to outdo the Hollywood sign, but a task accomplished.

Tim walked over and pulled three Buds from the bag. He handed one to Mitchell and offered another to Robert, who shook his head. “Can’t,” he said, rustling in the bag himself and coming up with a Sharp’s.

Robert popped the top and took several deep gulps, draining half the bottle. He gazed at the tree before them. “I usually don’t like modern crap,” he said. “But this, this is all right.”

“It’s like Braque,” Mitchell said. “All planes and different perspectives. Do you know Braque?”

Robert and Tim shook their heads, and Mitchell shrugged off the reference self-consciously. Robert circled slowly, his boots kicking up puffs of dust, drawing close to his brother’s side as if by genetic pull. Mitchell lit two cigarettes and handed one to Robert, and they smoked and stood side by side, solid and immobile like two inverted triangles of hammered steel, sucking Camels, Mitchell with his sleeve-cuffed pack of cigs, Robert with his jacket collar turned up, both of them humming along to “Georgia on My Mind” beneath bristled mustaches as if no one had bothered to show up and tell them the seventies were over. Mitchell’s face, though less severe than Robert’s, held a certain acuteness, a sharpness of perception that Tim had not previously seen. The brothers were beside each other, but Mitchell’s elbow was in front of Robert’s, and he stood square-shouldered while Robert’s shoulders tilted slightly toward him in a vague hint of deference.

Robert raised his beer, and the three bottles clinked, a somber toast.

“A glowing tree is nice, but it ain’t gonna solve dick,” he said. “I’ll tell you what would make a good memorial. One guilty and unconvicted fuck swinging from each branch. That’s what I’d like. That’s the kind of memorial we oughta build for those victims.”

“Water the tree with the blood of retribution,” Mitchell said.

He and his brother laughed at the formality, the bad poetics.

The twins’ standing to either side of Tim made him claustrophobic, not just because of their bulk and proximity but because their sameness was disorienting. Mitchell sat on the dirt. Robert and Tim followed suit.

“It wears you down,” Robert said, “seeing good people take it from the wrong end, seeing the motherfuckers reign supreme, no remorse, no hesitation, no…”

“-accountability,” Mitchell said.

“Yeah. A part of me decided after our sister died that I wouldn’t lie down no more, and so now I’m standing up, even though it’s not what I would of stood up for before. Lesser of two evils and all that. And I’ve made my decision, and it’s the right one, and I’ll tell you what-I won’t lose a second’s sleep over the pieces of shit we execute. Not a fuckin’ second. We gotta stay firm and committed, guys like us. Not give in to cunts like Ananberg.” Robert tilted his face back and shot a stream of cigarette smoke at the moon, patches of dirt coloring his denim jacket at the elbows. “I guess I see things clearer now, about what needs to get done. It’s like we’re stuck in this…in this…”

“-conundrum-” Mitchell said.

“-where we’re fucked if we do and we get fucked if we don’t.”

“They say the worst cynics are frustrated idealists,” Tim said.

Mitchell drained his beer and popped a new one. “You think we’re cynics?”

“I don’t know what you are.”

The wind kicked up, making the scaffolding groan, sending red puffs up off the ground.

“We couldn’t wait to get started,” Robert said. “It’s the waiting that kills you. You find out that your little sister was brutally murdered, and then you’re…”

“-mired-”

“-in nothingness. Waiting for the investigation, waiting for a suspect to be produced, waiting on forensics, the first court appearance, then the next, then the next…” Robert shook his head. “It’s what we hate most of all.”

“Now, finally,” Mitchell said, “we don’t have to wait anymore.”

Tim mused on this silently.

“Let us in more next time around,” Mitchell said. “We can handle it. We’ll win your trust.”

The phone-book intimidation tactic hadn’t yielded, so they’d moved to Plan B: ingratiation. Tim was no more swayed by it. “We’ll see.”

Robert leaned forward abruptly. “What, our work wasn’t good enough for you?”

“Your work was fine. Excellent, even.”

“Then we want in on the kill. You can’t deny us that. We won’t be denied.” Mitchell shot Robert a sharp look, but he didn’t catch the hint because he was watching Tim closely. “We can help you with your daughter’s case,” he continued. “With Kindell. Before we vote even, me and Mitch can pay him a little visit. Rattle his cage, bend his elbow, pop a testicle or two. We’ll get you whatever answers you want. Who knows-we could even have a hands-on chat with that prick public defender of his.”

Tim stared at them in disbelief, trying to order his thoughts. “That’s exactly the opposite of how we need to conduct ourselves.” If their faces were any indication, the anger in his voice was startling. “This is not a proceed-at-any-cost operation. It’s not about rashness and lawlessness. Neither of you have the first idea what the Commission is actually about, and you’re wondering why I’m reluctant to cut you into the action.”

To Tim’s surprise neither brother matched his anger. Robert dug at the ground with a stick. “You’re right,” he said softly. “It’s just that your little girl’s case, Virginia’s case, really”-his cheeks drew up in a half squint, half grimace-“really tore us up. It about broke my fuckin’ heart.”

Robert’s reaction was completely genuine-it had none of the manipulation Tim had sensed in so much of the brothers’ previous maneuvering. The expression of empathy surprised him so thoroughly that his anger deflated at once, leaving him with only the sorrow he saw mirrored back at him from both faces. He got busy playing with his bottle cap so his eyes would have something to look at.

“Now and then, no matter what you’ve seen, a case sails through all the chinks in your armor and strikes home.” Mitchell’s throat gave off a rattle when he spoke. “At least our sister lived a few years before getting taken. Not like your little girl.”

Robert’s face, lit with the distant glow of downtown, was stone-hard with either rage or sclerosed sorrow. “I saw her picture on TV, that clip they ran. The one of her in a pumpkin costume, too big, kept falling down.”

“Halloween 2001.” Tim’s voice was so soft it was barely audible. “My wife tried to stitch the costume. She’s not very domestic.”

“She was a great kid, Virginia,” Robert said with an almost aggressive adamancy. “I could tell, even just from what I saw.”

Tim understood for the first time that the brothers weren’t simply justifying their desire to kill criminals, but that they’d taken Ginny’s death personally, as they took each of the Commission’s cases personally. Their sister remained frozen in time, locked in a hellish script, to be rekilled in their minds every time a murderer escaped justice. While this made them flawed participants for a cause that called for objectivity and circumspection, Tim couldn’t deny a certain gratitude for their brute emotionality. He grasped at last the note of affection, even admiration, hidden in Dumone’s voice when he spoke of them. They mourned with a hurt-animal purity uncomplicated by law or ethic. Maybe they mourned as Tim and Dumone wished they themselves were capable of doing.

Robert’s words drew Tim from his thoughts. “She had the look, man,” he continued, “the one that the motherfuckers must get after, like she was too pure to stick around this shitty planet too long.” He drained his beer and hurled the bottle. It shattered against a pile of stacked metal sheets. “Beth Ann had that look, too.”

He tipped his face down into the waiting points of his thumb and forefinger, and he stayed like that, squeezing his eyes, silent. Mitchell leaned over, hooked his brother’s neck with a hand, and pulled him forward until the tops of their heads were touching, just above their foreheads.

Tim watched them, his face numb with dread. “It doesn’t get any easier,” he said. He had intended it as a question.

Robert pulled his head back. His eyes were red from being rubbed, yet they held not tears, but rage. The dark scaffolding creaked behind him in the wind.

Mitchell leaned back, propped on two elbow-locked arms, his face barely visible in the darkness. “The average sexual assault by an anger-excitation rapist lasts four hours,” he said. “Beth Ann wasn’t so lucky.”

After that they drank in silence.

•After Mitchell dropped him at his car, Tim drove back to his apartment cautiously, watching his signals and abiding the speed limit. The radio was abuzz with talk of the execution. From the faces of other drivers, he could tell who was listening to the news and who was discussing it on their cell phones. He even thought he sensed a different mood in the air, as if the city itself had received an adrenaline jolt, absorbed by osmosis from the fallout caused by Lane’s death. The night seemed exciting and excited, alive with the animation of risk and high stakes. A proximity to death always brought with it an attendant heightening of the senses.

Joshua was struggling across the lobby with an ornately carved picture frame. He paused when Tim entered, setting it on the floor. Blue TV light flickered in his tiny office, as always.

“Wait, wait!” he shrieked, as if Tim were fleeing. “I have paperwork for you.” He leaned the frame against the wall and disappeared into his small office, reappearing with a rental agreement made out to the ever-reliable Tom Altman.

He waited as Tim reviewed it, a finger bearing an immense agate stone coming to rest on the side of his chin. “Cute beard.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you hear about the guy who got his head blown up on the news?”

“There was something about it on the radio.”

“Right-winger.” Joshua’s hand rose to his mouth, shielding a stage whisper. “One down, fifty million to go.”

Upstairs Tim entered his apartment, taking note of the deadness of the air within. It took him about ten minutes with lukewarm sink water and a razor to eradicate his emergent beard.

He opened the window, then sat cross-legged on the floor and thought about what, at age thirty-three, he had in his life. A mattress, a desk, a gun, bullets. A car with fraudulent plates previously owned by a drug runner.

He cleaned his gun again, though it was already clean, oiling, polishing, punching the bore brush through the holes in the cylinder. Each punch of the brush he accompanied with a word describing what he could have done to Kindell in the garage. Murder. Slay. Execute. Sacrifice. Destroy. Slaughter.

The Lane execution had not just righted a judicial wrong, he reminded himself, it had brought him one case closer to Kindell. And to the secret of Ginny’s death.

After checking the Nokia, he was surprised by the keenness of his disappointment that he had no messages. Dray had not called since he’d left the notes at the house, which stung like hell. It also meant she’d gathered no further information on the case. When he called, he got the machine. He called back just to hear her voice again, then hung up.

He found himself dialing Bear’s number.

“Where the hell you been, Rack?”

“Sorting things out, I guess.”

“Well, sort faster. The disappearing act isn’t sitting so hot with Dray. Or with me.”

“How is she?” Only now did Tim grasp his true motivation for phoning Bear. Tim Rackley, Master of High School Social Dynamics.

“Ask her yourself,” Bear said. “And while we’re at it, what’s your new phone number?”

“I don’t have one yet.” Tim walked over near the open window. “I’m calling from a pay phone. Still lining out a more permanent place.”

“I want to see you.”

“Now’s not the greatest-”

“Listen, either you can agree to see me, or I’ll come track your ass down. And you know I will. What’s it gonna be?”

A breeze, contaminated with heat from the alley-backing kitchen below, swept away the dusty smell of the room, if only temporarily. Tim breathed in the amalgam of cool and breath-hot air. The distant touch of a headache cramped him at the temples.

“All right then,” Bear said. “Yamashiro, early dinner, tomorrow at five-thirty.”

He hung up before waiting for Tim to agree.

Tim lay on the mattress, enveloped in darkness. When he dozed off, he dreamed of Ginny. She was laughing at him, petite fingers covering her child-spaced teeth.

He couldn’t figure out why.