The Kill Clause

29

BOWRICK SPENT A good forty minutes on the 7-Eleven phone before emerging, spitting once on the sidewalk and walking back up Palms. Tim had pulled the car over on Palms in anticipation of Bowrick’s heading back in the direction from which he’d arrived. He’d assumed Bowrick would show up on foot due to his history without a car; his new residence couldn’t be far away.

Bowrick walked with a distinctive slouch, shoulders humped, hips tucked slightly like a spanked dog’s, favoring his right leg. His black-and-white flannel hung open, fringing his thighs like a skirt. Tim waited for him to turn the corner onto Penmar before following on foot. Two blocks down, Bowrick lifted the latch on a waist-high fence and slipped into a ragged front yard with an oval of dirt that used to be a lawn. The house itself, a prefab with tract-home simplicity, sat slightly crooked on the lot, its Ty-D-Bol turquoise clapboards water-warped and misaligned. By the time Tim strolled past, Bowrick had disappeared through the front door.

Tim retrieved his car, parking a few houses up from Bowrick’s, and sat pretending to study a map. After about five minutes a tricked-out Escalade pulled up and honked despite the late hour. Bowrick emerged holding a small duffel bag and hopped into the car. As it passed Tim, he caught a glimpse of the driver-a Hispanic kid in a wife-beater tank top with orange fire tattoos on his shoulders and neck.

Probably off to do a late-night drop.

Tim waited until the sound of the engine faded, then grabbed the camera from his backseat and approached the house. He searched the front yard for dog shit and, not noticing any, hopped the fence. Six strides, then he flattened himself against the side wall and pulled on latex gloves. The neighboring houses were a good thirty feet away, not because the yards were ample but because Bowrick’s house was so small it couldn’t fill even its modest plot. Tim edged over and peered through the window. The house, basically a single large room, recalled Tim’s apartment in its bare functionality. A desk, a flimsy bureau, twin bed, sheets thrown back. Tim made his way to the rear and peeked through the bathroom window to ensure that the house was empty. The back door housed a mean Schlage and two dead bolts, so Tim returned to the bathroom window, popped the screen, and wormed his way through, coming down with his hands on the fortunately closed toilet seat.

No toothbrush in the toothbrush holder. No toothpaste.

Tim slipped into the main room. Two folded shirts and a pair of socks waited on the bed, as if Bowrick had set them there to be packed, then decided against them.

Bowrick was clearly gone for an overnight, probably longer.

Tim pulled the chair out from the desk, placed it in the middle of the room, and stood on it. It took eight Polaroid shots to provide panoramic documentation of the interior. Tim set the hazy white photos on the bed to resolve, crossed to the desk, and began rifling through the drawers. Bills and a checkbook belonging to David Smith. Five twenties hidden under a paper tray in the top drawer said Bowrick wasn’t gone for good.

A tacky shrine had been set up on an overturned crate in the corner. Fake gold cross, a miniature oil painting of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns, a few burned-down candles. Its presence in Bowrick’s house served only to reinforce Tim’s distrust of men who turned their moral compass over to a God who tolerated Joe Mengele and Serb death squads. He cut short his condemnatory thoughts, recognizing he’d come to the case with prejudice. He refocused on taking in information before filtering it.

Tim searched the closets, drawers, mattress, cupboards beneath the sink. Two hard hats-one cracked-and Carhartt overalls were mounded on the closet floor. The carpet curled up from the wall seams, and he pulled it back farther to see if it hid a gun safe embedded in the floor. No weapons in the house. Largest blade was a steak knife on the brief run of counter tile that passed for a kitchen. Two doors, two windows-great kill zone.

He meticulously replaced everything to its original position. He smoothed his footprints out of the carpet, left the second desk drawer halfway open as it had been, adjusted the bottom right corner of the comforter so it drooped to touch the ground just so.

The Polaroids had dried on the bed, and he checked the room against them. He’d replaced the sole Bic pen too close to the edge of the desk. The top sheet needed to be folded over just under the pillows. A Car and Driver magazine on the bureau required a quarter rotation to the right. He retouched and reskewed until everything in the room perfectly matched the photographs again.

Then he slid out the bathroom window, replaced the screen, and eased back out onto the sidewalk. He contemplated calling the Stork, but the man’s distinctive looks made for dangerous stakeout material. He called Mitchell from the car, but Mitchell kept his cell phone turned off even when unnecessary, as was the habit of any smart EOD bomb tech. He reached Robert with his next call and had him hand the phone off to his brother, which he did angrily.

“I’ve just left Bowrick’s place.”

“Holy shit, you found him alrea-”

“Listen to me. He lives at 2116 Penmar, but I believe he headed out for a few nights. I’ve been on it for the past three days, and I need to sleep. I want you to head down here and keep an eye on the house-very low-profile. Just you. Alone. Do not get spotted. And don’t bring weapons. Do you understand me? No pistol, no nothing. Just sit on the house and alert me if he returns. I’ll be back at nine hundred tomorrow to take over for you. Can you do that?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll keep the Nextel on.”

Tim felt slightly euphoric, as he always did on the trail. To celebrate he debated allowing himself the indulgence of returning Dray’s call, the thought calling forth a crisp picture of his daughter’s room waiting still furnished across the hall. With the image came the bristling of imbedded thorns, a sudden crashing return from the salve of numbness. Now that he was off task, his thoughts became his enemies again; it was as if, finding nothing else on which to teethe, they turned cannibalistic. His mind nosed around his vulnerabilities, moving deliberately from Ginny to Dray to Robert to all other things that had recently spun from his grasp. When he emerged from his thoughts, he was a few blocks from his building. He anticipated stepping into the apartment’s empty embrace and how different it would feel from his house, which would smell of wood and lingering barbecue and ketchup-stained paper plates in the trash can. Thoughts of the myriad compelling security and safety concerns managed to put a pretty good damper on his yearning for a spontaneous visit.

He took a pull off the bottle of water left over from lunch, but it didn’t help dissolve the sourness at the back of his throat. It remained, firm-rooted and dry-most likely the aftertaste of death and murder, both of which he’d been steeped in for the past month. Maybe he needed something stronger to wash it away.

A neon martini glass beckoned from a dark-tinted window, and he jerked the Beemer left into a parking lot and coasted up to the white valet stand.

The thrumming bass from the car pulling out and the all-black attire of the couple whisking in indicated that Tim had accidentally arrived at a club rather than a bar. He disliked hip in most of its variations, but it was too late now, and besides, a drink was a drink.

As he got out of his car, a kid with slicked-back hair presented a ripped stub from an effluvium of bad cologne, then slid behind the wheel and screeched around the corner. Tim looked at the five blank spaces in front of the club and turned a befuddled glance at the remaining valet. “Is there some reason you can’t leave the car right here?”

The valet coughed out a snicker. “Uh, yeah. It’s a ’97.”

A bouncer manned a maroon rope in front of the door. He was fit, half white, half Asian, and handsome as fuck. Tim disliked him instantly, blindly.

Tim approached and flicked his hand at the dark door, from which issued cigarette smoke and a tune heavy on beat and metallics. The bouncer kept his head tilted back as if in a constant state of boredom or appraisal. “Get in line please, pal.”

Tim looked around at the empty entrance. “What line?”

“Over there.” The bouncer pointed to a red roll-up carpet-some night promoter’s brainchild-that stretched to the right of the rope. Tim exhaled hard and stepped over onto the carpet. He made for the rope, but the bouncer didn’t move.

“You want me to wait here?”

“Yes.”

“Even though there’s no one in line?”

“Yes.”

“Is this Candid Camera or something?”

“Man, you are clueless.” Something vibrated on the bouncer’s waist, and he took a long look at a row of colorful, belt-adhered pagers. He squeezed the banana yellow one and glanced at the backlit screen. “How’d you get your black eye?”

“Freak badminton accident.”

The guy’s head rolled to its usual back-tilted perch on his wide neck. “You gonna start trouble at my club?”

“If you keep me out here, I might.”

The guy’s laugh smelled like gum. “I like your style, pal.” He unclipped the rope and stepped aside, but not far enough that Tim didn’t have to lean to get past him.

Tim entered and spotted a stool at the bar. As he headed over, a guy in clay-colored jeans with endless pockets eyed him derisively. “Nice shirt, pops.”

Behind the bar a translucent rise of shelves glowed phosphorescent blue. Tim ordered a twelve-dollar vodka on the rocks from an attractive redheaded bartender wearing a rubber vest with a zipper teased down to reveal cleavage.

A couple of girls were grooving up on a light box out on the dance floor. The crowd swelled and ebbed around them, wafting Tim’s way the smell of designer cologne and clean sweat. A couple lay sideways in a booth, licking each other’s faces, e-ravenous for sensation. The surge of sex and exuberance charged the air, approaching-storm strong, and in the middle sat Tim, immobile and square, watching the proceedings like a chaperon at a mixer. He found his glass empty and gestured to the bartender for a fresh one.

A girl beside him leaned curve-backed, elbows propped on the bar, facing the noise. He accidentally caught her eye and nodded. She smiled and walked off. Two guys in rumpled shirts sidled up in her place, their faces ruddy and moist from the dance floor, and ordered shots of tequila.

“…my old boss Harry, you could smell the burnout on him. He was your classic dump truck, barely followed up any leads for his clients. When I started in the public defender’s office, he had a guy in custody for a murder two, said his alibi was this bartender he was hitting on all night, a hot girl with red hair somewhere off Traction. Didn’t know where. Harry stopped by a few places, found shit, they convicted his client the next week. Fifteen to life. A few months later we come in here-God knows why, Harry’s brother-in-law invested in the joint or something-and guess what?”

The guy pointed behind the bar at the redhead in the zippered vest. “There she is. And she remembers the client. Only problem is, our boy got shanked in the yard at Corcoran two days before.” He exhaled hard. “There’s only justice for the rich. If you have a house to put up for ten percent of bail, can get your ass out of custody and working on your own case, your alibi, you’re all set. If you’re broke and you can’t remember, if your PD can’t find the hot redhead bartender somewhere off Traction…well, then.” He threw back another shot. “I come in here now, when I’m close to burnout. It reinvigorates me, inspires me to cover every damn angle.” The bartender served another round of shots, and he slid a once-folded twenty toward her. “She’s my muse.”

His friend said, “It’s a stupid fucking job we do.”

This declaration was followed by a clink of glasses, thrown-back shots, sour-faced head shakes. The talker caught Tim watching and leaned over to offer a sweaty hand.

“Name’s Richard. Why don’t you join us for a shot?” His slur was just noticeable above the pumping music.

“No thanks.”

“No offense, but I don’t see any better options around for you.” Richard turned to his friend. “Oh, well, Nick, guess our friend here doesn’t want to join us. Guess he’s busy being his own man.”

“I’m not big on public defenders.” Alcohol had loosened Tim’s tongue-he remembered anew why he rarely drank.

“Don’t see why not. We get paid shit, we burn out young, and we represent mostly reprehensible pricks. That’s a pretty appealing package, no?”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been on the other end of the equation you’re bitching about. Seen people walk free who shouldn’t have.”

“Lemme guess. You’re a cop. Shoot first and ask questions later.” Richard snapped off a drunken salute. “Well, Officer, I’ll tell you, for however many cases you’ve seen go down wrong, Nick and I here have got you beat. I got a kid today-”

“I’m not interested.”

“I got a kid today-”

“Take your hand off me, please.”

Richard stepped back while Nick got busy securing their next round. “When this kid was sixteen, he broke into his cousin’s house to steal a VCR.” He held up a finger. “One strike. Goes to a high school football game, talks some shit after, tells a teacher’s kid he’s gonna beat the crap out of him if he catches him talking to his girlfriend again. Strike two. Threat of immediate assault with intent to commit GBI. That’s grievous bodily injury-”

“I know what GBI is.”

“Now, the third strike, the third strike, my friend, can be any felony. This kid goes into Longs Drugs and steals a toilet-paper holder-a goddamn toilet-paper holder. That’s 666, petty theft with a prior. It’s a wobbler, but they file it as a felony. Guess what? Strike three. Twenty-five to life. No negotiation, no judicial discretion, nothing. It’s fascism.”

“His dad used to beat him. He didn’t really mean to shoot up his school.”

Richard sighed. “Not so simple. Not so specious. But you do have to look at the individual. Then the angles and distances between him and his surroundings become measurable. What those angles compose is what constitutes perspective. And perspective is exactly what you need to pass judgment on an individual’s actions.” Though his words were running together drunkenly, Richard was still articulate as hell. A practiced drinker.

“How about passing judgment on an individual?”

“Leave that to God. Or Allah, or karma, or the Great Pumpkin. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if someone is evil. It matters what they’ve done and how we deal with it.”

“But we have to carry out our judgment on individuals.”

“Of course. So what determines the strictness of punishment? Irredeemability? Lack of contrition? Unfitness to participate in society? No one so much as examined these factors for my client today. This kid is screwed. He’s gonna have to punk for some gangbanger for the rest of his life over a thirty-seven-cent fucking toilet-paper holder.” Richard’s voice wavered, either from rage or grief, and his face contorted once, sharply, presaging a sob that never came. Instead he grinned. “That’s the reason for our little party tonight, my friend.” He raised a shot glass. “Celebrating the system.”

His buddy put a hand on his shoulder and steered him down onto the barstool.

“It goes both ways,” Tim said.

Richard looked up, his eyes red-rimmed and drooping. “Yeah, yeah, it does.”

“I’ve seen guys walk through loopholes I’d never even dreamed of. Chain of custody. Speedy trial motions. Search and seizure. It’s not justice. It’s bullshit.”

“It is bullshit. But why can’t we have good procedure and justice? So the court spanks the cop for”-his hands fluttered, seeking a phrase-“illegal search and seizure or whatever, and next time around the cop does his job right, with respect for civil liberties. The trial goes clean. Guy gets convicted, receives a fair sentence. Then it’s right all the way around-we have our cake and eat it, too.”

Nick slumped forward, his forehead thumping against the bar. Tim thought it had to be a joke, but Nick remained there. Richard didn’t notice. He leaned in, his breath carrying a sickening combination of breath mints and tequila. “Lemme let you in on a little secret. PDs don’t like their clients, generally. We don’t want to see them go free. We want them to get convicted.” He held up a wobbly finger. “However. More important than that, we want tough guy cops like you and hard-on DAs to respect the Constitution, the Penal Code, the Bill of Rights. And everyone chips away at them, these rights, slowly over time. Detectives, prosecutors, even judges. But not us. We’re fucking zealots. Zealots for the Constitution.”

“Jews for Jesus,” Nick muttered from his facedown slump on the bar.

“And we protect…we protect that thing, that stupid, distant, abstract fucking piece of parchment, despite the scum we represent, despite the crimes they may have committed or may commit after we get them off because some dumb-ass cop doesn’t fulfill the oral announcement of intent to search after the knock and notice and puts us in the fuckdamned position of having to point it out and let some mouth-breathing reprobate walk out the fucking door, in all likelihood to do whatever he’s done again.”

Richard tried to stand but fell back onto the stool. Nick was making raspberry noises against the bar.

“We fight fascism in the petty details.” Richard pivoted to face the bar, letting his hands slide up, covering his face. “And it’s awful. And we lose sight of the prize, the aim, sometimes, because we just wallow in this…in this…” A jerking inhalation led to a sob, but when he lowered his hands, he was smiling again. “We need a shot. Another shot.”

“Trying to break the Breathalyzer record and win a Kewpie doll?”

“What, are you gonna arrest me, Officer? Drunk and disenfranchised?”

“If I do, I’ll be sure to Mirandize you.”

“Funny, that’s funny.” Richard laughed hard. “You’re okay. I like you. You don’t talk much, but you’re okay. I mean, for a cop.” He leaned heavily on the bar, his shirtsleeve soaking up spilled alcohol. “Lemme let you in on a little secret. I’m leaving my office. Going across the street to federal-believe it or not, federal sentencing is even more draconian. I’m gonna go throw myself against that wall for a change.”

“Why do you do it?” Tim asked. “If you hate it so much?”

Nick raised his head, and his face looked startlingly sober. “Because we’re worried no one else will.”

Richard drummed the bar with his forefingers. “And it makes us pretty unpopular. Didn’t used to be that way, not with Darrow and Rogers. The greats. Now a PD’s just a knee-jerk apologist. A pushover. A softie. Dukakis. We’re Dukakises. Dukaki.”

“And Mondale,” Nick said. “We’re Mondale, too.”

“And guys like me feel like guys like you are running the show these days,” Tim said.

“Are you kidding me?” Richard spun around on the barstool, twirling a full rotation before stopping himself. His head jerked back with a hiccup. He looked distinctly nauseous. “Have you been watching the news? This vigilante business-it’s meeting with general societal approval.”

“The people who have been executed are hardly-”

Richard bellowed out a bad imitation of a game-show buzzer, tilting from the stool onto his feet. “Wrong answer.”

“Right. Just have faith in the system. The system you just described to me from your angle and I described to you from mine. Why should we hold on to that faith? Why shouldn’t someone try something better? Take matters into their own hands?”

Richard clutched Tim’s arm, and for the first time his voice was soft and cracked, not giddy or deadened with tired irony. “Because it represents such hopelessness.”

He leaned over and vomited on his shoes.

A girl two stools over looked down at her splattered capris and screamed. The smell rose from the puddle, rank and heated. Richard grinned, his chin stained with puke, and raised his arms, Rocky style.

The bartender was cursing a blue streak, and a gym-enhanced security bozo was closing fast, barking into a radio. The bouncer from outside plowed through the crowd and grabbed Richard.

“All right, asshole, I told you before, you get hammered in my club again, you’re fucking finished.” He threw a full nelson on Richard, bending his head forward and making his arms stick up like a scare-crow’s. The other guy seized Nick’s shoulder and jerked him back off the bar.

“Take it easy,” Tim said. The bouncer slammed Richard against the bar. Tim’s hand shot out and grabbed the bouncer’s thick neck, thumb digging into his sternal notch. The bouncer gagged out a sound and froze. “It wasn’t a suggestion,” Tim said.

He waited for the bouncer to release Richard. The other guy let go of Nick and stepped wide, eyes on Tim, looking for an angle. Several people were watching, but for the most part loud music covered the sound of the commotion. The dance floor remained a swirl of oblivious motion.

Tim removed his hands, holding them up in a calming gesture. The bouncer took a quick step back, coughing.

Tim said, “I don’t much like to fight, and I’m sure you could kick my ass anyway, so what do you say we just do this the easy way. These guys are going to pay their tab-” he nodded at Nick, who fumbled a few bills out of his pocket and onto the counter “I’ll walk my acquaintance out of here, and you’ll never hear from us again. Sound good?”

The bouncer glowered at him.

“Okay.” Tim shouldered Richard and half dragged him to the door, Nick scurrying close behind. They stepped outside, and the cool air hit them like a chest-high wave.

“That asshole,” Richard slurred, rubbing his elbow. “Why didn’t you badge him?” He fumbled in his pocket for his valet ticket, but Tim dragged him to the curb and hailed a passing cab. He deposited Richard inside and stepped back to let Nick slide in.

Richard opened his mouth to say something, but Tim rapped the window with his knuckles, and the cabbie pulled away. Tim headed back to the valet stand and handed off his ticket. The bouncer was back at his post by the rope, rubbing the raised red mark on his neck. “You all right?” Tim asked.

“You’d better get the fuck out of here. Fast.”

They stood in tense silence, waiting for Tim’s car to be pulled around.