The Kill Clause

40

He bled through his T-shirt high on the right sleeve. At a stoplight he peeled it back, revealing two slits in the ball of his shoulder. They were small enough that he figured them to have been caused by fragments rather than direct hits, maybe from a bullet breaking apart when it skipped off the asphalt. He walked his fingers across his back but could feel no exit wounds. Though his right hand could still clench-a good sign-he steered with his left to avoid any unnecessary strain. A dull throbbing took hold of the shoulder, more an ache than a sharp pain. It was manageable.

He parked several blocks from his apartment building and sifted through his war bag in the trunk. He found the appropriate medical supplies and threw them into a plastic grocery bag the car’s previous owner had left wadded up in the far corner of the trunk.

He didn’t have a clean T-shirt or any way to hide the bloody sleeve, so he walked swiftly, head lowered, keeping to the edge of the sidewalk. Crossing the lobby, he heard Joshua’s voice ring out, but he kept walking. Footsteps approached as he waited for the elevator. Grimacing, he slung the bag over his shoulder, letting the two layers of plastic cover the wound. Though the resultant pain wasn’t excruciating, he had to concentrate not to grit his teeth. He turned just barely, keeping the abraded flesh of his right profile out of view.

Joshua was standing at a polite distance, arms folded, hands flattened and pressed against his biceps. “So what do you think of all this business in the news?”

“I haven’t been watching.”

“The Vigilante Three?”

“I heard something about it on the radio.”

Joshua’s expression changed, and he took a step to the side for a better vantage. “Jesus, your face. What happened?”

“I fell off my bike.”

“Motorcycle?”

“Yeah-it’s fine. Happens all too often. I just gotta clean it out.”

“Let me take a look.”

“No. That’s all right. It’s not pretty.”

“You people always think fags are fragile. You forget we’ve seen it all. The eighties were not a kind decade for us.”

The elevator arrived, and Tim stepped on, pivoting to keep his shoulder out of view.

“Last offer,” Joshua said. “I can give you a ride to the emergency room.”

“No, really. I’m fine.” Tim punched the fourth-floor button, and the doors started to slide shut. “Thanks, though.”

Once in his apartment, he wedged the doorstop back into place to secure the front door and gingerly pulled off his T-shirt. A look in the bathroom mirror confirmed there were no exit wounds; the frags were embedded in the dense ball of muscle composing his anterior deltoid. He popped four Advil, then rotated his arm at the shoulder to ensure that it had full range of motion. It did.

He drew a wet rag across the area to clarify the wounds’ edges, then gritted his teeth and sank the tweezer prongs into the first laceration. They went in a good inch before clicking metal. He withdrew the copper sliver easily. It took some rooting in the second wound before he located the fragment. Because it was irregular, the frag came out slow and rough, tearing flesh on the way. He had to stop twice and wipe his forehead to keep sweat from running into his eyes.

He held the squirt top of a bottle of distilled water inches from his shoulder and squeezed hard, sending a probing jet into the wound to flush any smaller particles.

Repeating the process for the second laceration was predictably more painful.

After irrigation with hydrogen peroxide, the wounds looked like two tiny pink mouths. Feeling Terminator-tough, he regarded his work with a measure of satisfaction before bandaging it.

His face was another matter. The flesh all around his right eye was scraped up, leaving what looked like a bloody pirate patch. Tim had to scour out the dirt and bits of gravel with a washcloth.

After putting on a fresh shirt, he used his new outgoing phone to check his old Nokia voice mail. Dray had left a message saying she was still working the leads, no luck yet. The message’s time stamp reminded him that Bowrick had just thirty-six hours left before the recovery center required a reassessment or put him back out on the street.

Lying back on his bed, he exhaled deeply and let his muscles relax.

The Stork, clearly aware of cell-phone-tracking technology, had probably orchestrated the call from Studio City. With his help, Robert and Mitchell had walked Tim into a well-orchestrated trap. It had not occurred to him what a strong team the three made, even without him-the Mastersons providing operational muscle and strategy while the Stork played technological puppet master.

He vowed not to underestimate them again.

He popped four more Advil and fell into a deep, sound sleep-no nightmares, no images of Ginny, no thoughts of Dray, just a blank white corridor of unthought. He woke abruptly after nightfall, sweaty and still veiled in a dream haze. The room was dark, the alley below surprisingly peaceful. The needling question as to what had awaked him sharply from so deep a slumber helped clear his head. His shoulder pulsed impatiently, eager to heal.

He sat up in bed, his legs hanging off the mattress in front of him. He felt constrained in his clothes, which had sleep-shifted around him. His watch showed 9:13 P.M. He stood and went to the window. At the end of the alley, a dark car waited, visible through the steam of the broken pipe. The passenger door opened, but no dome light went on.

Bad news.

Tim turned back, facing the door across his dark apartment.

The slightest scuffling sound in the hall. The pinpoint scratch of dog nails against floor.

Tim thought, How?

His eyes tracked down to the doorstop wedged hard beneath the door, then up to the decoy knob that he’d detached completely from the surrounding jamb. With excruciating slowness, he reached behind him, slid the window open.

A shattering impact shook the apartment. The entire doorknob, propelled by an unseen battering ram, flew from the frame, striking the floor once and smashing into the wall beside Tim. The door itself, pinned by the doorstop, bent in but did not swing open.

From the flurry of shouting, Tim could somehow discern distinct voices-Bear and Maybeck, Denley and Miller. He leapt through the window onto the fire escape as the door splintered and gave way behind him. Immediately the alley below lit with headlights-the car he’d spotted before and another at the south end. As he flew down the ladder, they screeched forward, closing on the fire escape from either side.

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