The Kill Clause by Gregg Hurwitz Read Free Book Online Page B

Heidel.
    Tim had known that Heidel would need money quickly, and so he’d turn to the one place guys like him got money quickly. Since Heidel’s MO was a distinctive one—he acquired diluted cocaine from Chihuahua and had mules drive it across the border hidden in wine bottles—it had been easier for Tim and Bear to press the street for related information. Finally their vigilance had paid off. If their CI had given Bear reliable intel, a forty-key deal was going down sometime that afternoon or night.
    “You sure you’re ready to work?”
    Tim’s eye flicked to the scattering of cards on the wood tabletop. Garlands in muted inks on taupe paper. “I don’t know what else to do. I’m going out of my mind. If I don’t work, I might do something stupid.”
    Dray dropped her eyes. He knew she sensed his eagerness to get out of the house. “You should go, then. I think I’m just upset that I’m not ready yet.”
    “You sure you’re okay? I could call Bear—”
    She waved him off. “It’s like what you said to me that first awful night.” She mustered a faint grin. “At least one of us should get some sleep.”
    He paused for a moment in the doorway before leaving. Dray leaned over the card she was writing, her jaw set just slightly as it got when she concentrated. Early sunlight shone through the window, turning the edges of her hair pale gold.
    “Of course I remember that day at the picnic, with her and the airplane,” Tim said. “I remember everything about her. Especially when she was bad—for some reason those memories bring her the closest. Like when she drew on the new wallpaper in the living room with crayons—”
    Dray’s face lightened. “And then denied it.”
    “Like I might have done it. Or you. Or that time she put the thermometer against the lightbulb to get out of going to school—”
    She matched his smile. “I came back in the room, and the mercury was redlined at a hundred six degrees.”
    “The princess tyrant.”
    “The little shit.” Dray’s voice, loving and soft, cracked, and she pressed a fist to her mouth.
    Tim watched her fighting tears, and he looked down until his own vision cleared. “That’s why I can’t…why I avoid it. When we talk about her, it’s too…vivid…and it…”
    “I need to talk about her,” Dray said. “I need to remember.”
    Tim made a gesture with his hand, but even he wasn’t sure what it was meant to convey. He was again struck by the ineffectiveness of language, his inability to digest his feelings and shape them into words.
    “She’s a part of our lives, Tim.”
    His vision grew watery again. “Not anymore.”
    Dray studied him until he looked away. “Go to work,” she said.

5
    TIM SPED DOWNTOWN, reaching the cluster of federal and courthouse buildings surrounding Fletcher Bowron Square. The squat cement and glass structure that passed for the Federal Building housed the warrant squad’s offices. Embedded in the front wall was a mosaic mural of women with square heads, which Tim had never quite grasped. The few times he’d taken Ginny to the office, she’d found the seemingly inoffensive mural unsettling; she’d keep her face turned into his side as they passed. Tim had always had a tough time deciphering her fears; also on her list were movie theaters, people over seventy, crickets, and Elmer Fudd.
    He badged himself at the entrance, took the stairs to the second floor, and headed down a white-tiled corridor with spotty patchwork on the walls.
    The office itself wasn’t much to look at, a haphazard throw of cubicles with metal schoolboy desks and fabric walls the color of Pepto-Bismol-laced vomit. For months admin had been promising the deputies a move to the more upscale Roybal Building next door, andfor months it had been delayed. The bitching had reached a daytime-talk-show high, but it did little good; the deputies weren’t the first to note that federal bureaucracy moved like an arthritic tortoise, and, to be fair,