The Kill Clause

39

TIM’S ATTEMPT AT sleep was just that. He drifted off with a mind full of dead Ginny and woke from a vision of himself standing knee-deep in bodies with his hands stained red past the wrists, which he thought pretty uninventive.

Four A.M. found him sitting on his chair with his feet on the windowsill, watching steam drift up from a busted pipe in the alley below. The Nextel rang.

He walked over slowly, picking it up on the third ring.

Robert this time-the voice rough like unpolished metal. “Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

“Depends on the day.”

“If you are, you’ll heed a word of advice: Get the fuck out of Dodge. You’re on our list.”

“And you’re on mine.” In the background Tim could make out wisps of a television news report. He turned on the TV, hit mute, and clicked through the channels until the newscaster’s lips matched the faint words he was picking up through the phone: KCOM.

The photos of the Stork and the Mastersons flashed off the screen, replaced by a singing guy in a bird suit advertising a chicken joint. Still no mention of Tim, no photo.

“I can’t believe you’d be so fucking irresponsible to force a confrontation on a playground,” Robert said. “We had guns drawn, with kids around. Someone could have gotten hurt.”

“Someone did get hurt.”

“Not hurt enough.” The snap of a Zippo punctuated his point, followed by the sound of smoke blowing across the receiver. “The press now, our faces-shit. Why’d you have to go and do that? You fucked us all.” Something in Robert’s voice gave way, revealing his sense of betrayal and a measure of desperation. “And Dumone-” His voice cracked, and the words shut off like water from a fast-turned spigot.

Tim was unsure how to respond, so he didn’t. He wasn’t eager to prolong the call-he wanted to get off and call Hansen.

“I don’t hear your name on these reports,” Robert said. “What’d you cut a deal?”

“No. I’m going down, too. On a slight delay.”

“This won’t stop us.”

“I didn’t figure.”

“You just turned this into an endgame. We got shit to lose now.” Robert’s laugh sounded part cough, though it wasn’t. “If you or any other piece-of-shit L.A. law-enforcement flunkies get in our way, you’re gonna eat lead. This is our one true deed. We get nothing from it. No cash, no fame. It’s public-service work. We’re gonna…”

“-restore-” Mitchell’s voice came faintly in the background.

“-a bit of sanity to this world. We’re gonna get this done, then we’re gonna regroup and do it all over again, do it until someone stops us. And if we go out, shit, at least we take a bunch of pukes with us.”

“Option B,” Tim said. “We turn ourselves in together. We work out something, something fair and just.”

“You don’t get it, do you, you double-crossing fuck? No one’s turning themselves in. You’d better be grateful there were kids on that playground today, or Mitch would have capped your ass and we’d be laughing at the expression on your dying face right about now.”

Click.

Tim was already walking to the door, stuffing the Nextel and Nokia into his front pockets. He half jogged to the corner phone booth.

Hansen sounded duly irritated. “This better not be Rackley.”

“I just got a call. I need you to go in and check if it came from either of the numbers I gave you.”

“First of all, this is a favor I’m doing you, so don’t order me around. Second, I can’t do that. I’m in at six o’clock, and I’ll see what we have then.”

“Please, this is-”

“Call me at six or fuck off.”

The next two hours passed with excruciating slowness. Just in case the lead panned out, Tim loaded up his gear and sat waiting in his car, the Nokia in his lap, number already input and waiting on the phone’s tiny screen.

The dashboard clock switched from 5:59 to 6:00 A.M., and Tim clicked ‘send.’

“What do you have for me?”

Hansen spoke in a slightly lowered voice. “There’s only one person who can retrieve this intel from Nextel, and you’re talking to him, so I’m not turning over shit unless you give me your word it goes no further than this call.”

Tim bit his lip-no dealing with Bear until he could corroborate the location independently. “You have my word.”

“One outgoing phone call. 4:07 A.M. Tripped a cell site at Dickens and Kester. The cell sites are especially close there, so you’re working with about a one-block radius.”

“Thank you,” Tim said. “Thank you.”

“I have a wife and two kids, Rack. If you’re involving me in something shady, you’re gonna hear about it.”

•The morning light broke through a scattering of cumulus clouds, throwing broad shafts of grainy light that seemed to dissipate on their way down. Morning dew misted the asphalt, the freeway resembling a still, black river. The occasional puddle threw a calming patter against the car’s undercarriage.

Tim parked three blocks over and approached Dickens through two adjoining backyards, high-stepping between rows of rhododendron. Studio City, a mishmash of strip malls and residential blocks, basked in an early-morning tranquillity. No barking dogs, no slamming doors, just the chopping of sprinklers across well-trimmed lawns and the soft whir of traffic on Ventura one long block away. Tim scanned the nearby rooflines and picked out the cell site, six abbreviated metal tubes perched atop a phone pole.

Robert would not have called Tim to make idle threats in the middle of an operation; in all likelihood the 4:07 A.M. call had come from wherever he and Mitchell were bedded down for the night. Or, Choice B-it had been bait for an ambush.

Tim came out between two houses and their shared driveway, sticking low to the ground in a rotar-ducking crouch. From behind the safety of a gargantuan garbage can, he surveyed the block. Perfect stillness. He eased out onto the sidewalk and moved down the street, taking it in.

Ford Explorer in the first driveway, hood cool. GTE phone junction box at the corner. A blue gardening truck parked curbside, the hump of a lawn mower poking up the tarp. Tim pulled up the tarp to make sure. A stack of newspapers outside the door of the second house across the street. Fresh mud in the tire tread of an Isuzu. One mailbox flag up. A house with wooden slat blinds, all closed. Tim drew nearer, peeked in a side window, and saw a little boy sleeping in a race-car bed.

Tim made his way around the corner, up the west side of the block. Six houses down, the residential street spilled onto Ventura Boulevard, where a guy in a store apron was lugging some cardboard boxes to a Dumpster. A Honda Civic coasted by, two blondes in gym clothes bobbing to muffled music. Up ahead the stoplight changed to red. Someone yakked away in the corner phone booth, wearing a sweat suit, hood pulled over his head like a boxer. More garbage cans at the curb. Two newspapers on the doorstep of house three. A Pacific Bell van at the curb across the street, empty, windshield misted with condensation.

Tim eased forward, alive with heightened perception. An alarm clock buzzed one house up and was quickly turned off. Something from his thoughts edged up, out of place, and he fanned through the images he’d freeze-framed in his head to see if he could identify what was troubling him. Fresh mud in the tread. Gardening tarp. GTE junction box. Newspapers on the doorstep. Boy asleep. Nothing rang a dissonant note.

Up the street the chubby guy in the phone booth shifted, and the sun glinted off something square at his waist. Tim strained to make it out. The man’s face was still shadowed by the sweatshirt hood.

Pac Bell van. Dumpster. Slat blinds. Mailbox flag. GTE junction box.

In the phone booth, the guy’s hand rose, touching his shadowed face with a knuckle, as if he were starting to cross himself. The thing at his belt glinted again. A cell phone.

Tim felt his stomach clench twice, hard. Why the hell was a guy with a cell phone making a call from a phone booth? The hand to the face-not the start of a prayer but a gesture of habit, the Stork sliding his glasses up the insignificant slope of his nose. Tim’s mind whirred, a slide show of images.

Store apron. GTE junction box. Alarm clock. GTE junction box. Pac Bell van. GTE. Pac Bell. A shift and a click as the tumblers aligned in Tim’s mind. A Pac Bell van had no business servicing a GTE region. Tim slowed, slowed, stopped. He half turned, bringing the back door of the Pac Bell van into sight, now about fifteen yards behind him. For an empty van it was sitting too low on its shocks.

Tim wasn’t sure what happened first, his dive or the rear doors of the van kicking open, but he was fully extended to his left, angling for the gap between two cars at the curb when the first dull crack of a bullet sounded. He hit hard on his shoulder, his face grinding asphalt as his momentum carried him into a graceless roll. The cars to both sides of Tim rocked on their tires, their windows shattering in rapid succession, two distinct paths of holes and veined glass leading to the gap and Tim’s body. Car alarms beeped and whined all up the block.

Tim popped up in a shooter’s stance on the sidewalk,. 357 drawn, using the trunk of the rear car as a shield. He fired twice, his bullets punching holes in one of the van’s outswung rear metal doors.

The van screeched out from the curb, laying down five feet of rubber, one rear door secured, the other swinging on its hinges. Tim glanced down to Ventura-the Stork had disappeared from his stakeout post in the phone booth-then stepped into the street. He fired once more as the van rounded the corner, the bullet sparking off the wheel well of the right rear tire.

The sound of the van’s engine faded, leaving Tim with bleating car alarms and the raw, cool pain of road stain on his face. Locks were being turned, doors opened.

Tim jogged back up the block, favoring a tender knee. As he made his way through the adjoining backyards to his car, he called Bear, speaking quickly and concisely to convey all relevant information about the ambush. Bear confirmed the specifics in a voice strained with impatience and anger, then hung up to get on it.

On his way to the 101, Tim passed three cop cars with screaming sirens, and he turned slightly in his seat to hide whatever damage might be visible on his face.

It wasn’t until he’d merged onto the freeway that he realized he’d been shot.