The Kill Clause (25 page)

“Look,” Robert said, not bothering to whisper, “we’ve been on the house all night, all morning. There’s no one else—”

“Do it,” Tim said. He disappeared through the doorway toward the front of the house, moving through several rooms stuffed with oddities—boxes of auto calendars, overturned tables, stacks of bricks. A pile of bright fabric curled around the base of the stairs; Debuffier had probably bought it on garment row. Tim searched the upstairs rooms, which reeked of backed-up plumbing and incense. All the mirrors had been covered, draped in swatches of colorful cloth. Debuffier either fancied himself a vampire or feared his own reflection; from his booking photo, Tim would’ve put money on the latter. Each room was empty and uninhabited; the master bedroom was probably downstairs. Tim took care not to leave footprints where dust had collected more heavily on the floor.

Robert and Mitchell were waiting for Tim in the kitchen.

Tim’s watch showed 12:43. “Clear?”

“Except for the basement door,” Mitchell said. “Solid steel set in a steel frame. Locked.”

“We’ll get the Stork on it in a minute.” Tim snugged the .357 against the small of his back. “Let’s take a slower turn through the ground floor. Focus on details so we can draw up a full blueprint of the place later.”

Another sound, a metallic moan, this one undeniable. Tim felt his stomach constrict, his mouth cotton. He inched in the direction from which the sound had come, through the other doorway, the twins just behind him.

“What was that?” Robert asked.

Mitchell adjusted the strap of his det bag, which was slung over his shoulder. “Sounds like a furnace straining.” His tone was unconvincing.

Tim turned the corner into a back hall that dead-ended in a bathroom and came face-to-face with the enormous steel rise of the basement door. Its placement within the drywall indicated that it had been newly installed. Tim tapped it lightly with a knuckle—solid and thick as hell. Leaning forward, he placed his ear to the cold steel but got back nothing except the quiet hum of the water heater. The hall was dark—pink, flowery curtains had been pulled shut over the single window overlooking the side yard.

“Robert, run out and get the Stork. Tell him I want through that door into the basement.”

12:49. If Debuffier had left early, he’d have been gone an hour now. His transit time to the restaurant was at least ten minutes, so he’d likely be home within ten or fifteen minutes, depending on how much he disliked spending time with his mother. As Tim waited tensely, Mitchell sized up the door with a breacher’s imprecise precision, spread fingers pressing into the steel as if it would give.

Struggling under the weight of his bag, the Stork returned with Robert. He thunked down the bag, gave one glance at the large bolt of the door lock, and proclaimed awfully, “That’s a Medeco G3. I’m not tangling with her.”

Another sound, paradoxically guttural and high-pitched, issued faintly through the door. Tim noted from the sheen of sweat across Mitchell’s forehead that the sound was having the same unnerving effect on him.

Half-moons of sweat had darkened Robert’s T-shirt under the sleeves. “Probably just some mumbo-jumbo crap. A tied-up lamb or some shit.” His thumb flicked nervously back and forth across his forefinger, as if trying to make a cigarette materialize.

“I could blast the door,” Mitchell offered.

“No way,” Tim said.

Mitchell had one of the blasting caps out of his pocket and was working it in his hand. “I want to know what’s down there. That’s where they uncovered all the weird shit on the house search.”

The Stork’s mouth shaped into his crescent of a smile. “I could let Donna have a look around.”

Robert’s and Mitchell’s brows furrowed with humorous synchronicity. “Donna?”

“Bust her out,” Tim said. “Whatever she is.”

“
Whoever
she is.” The Stork removed a shoebox-size unit with a protruding black-plastic-coated rod and a blank liquid-crystal TV screen the size of a Post-it. The rod, a flexible fiber-optic minicam, had a fish-eye lens embedded in the tip. He clicked a switch, and the screen reflected back their three drawn faces in a washed-out blue light.

“Big deal,” Robert said. “It’s a Peeper—we’ve all used ’em. It’ll never fit under the door. Gap’s not big enough.”

“That’s not Donna.” The Stork extracted a tiny Pelican case from the bag and laid it lovingly open. Inside was an incredibly slender rod, almost a black wire, that ended with a wafer-thin rectangular head. “
This
is Donna.”

He removed the Peeper’s protruding rod and screwed Donna in its place, pausing to knead a knot from one arthritic hand. The head slipped under the door effortlessly, and they caught an up-close glimpse of a dead mouse bunched on the splintering wood of the top stair. The screen blinked out, then back on. “Come on, baby.” He looked up at them apologetically. “She’s a little finicky.” His hands were shaking, and he flexed and unflexed them, grimacing. He tried to clutch the thin rod and exhaled hard in frustration.

“We got it from here,” Tim said. “Leave her with us, go post out back. Remember, two-tap the horn.”

“But—”

“
Now,
Stork. We’re unprotected in here.”

With a sad parting look at Donna, the Stork hoisted his bag and retreated. His footfall was so silent that when he turned the corner, it was as if he’d vanished.

Robert and Mitchell crowding around him, Tim worked the wire, trying his best to angle the unseen lens. They took in the basement in vertiginous flights as the lens swept back and forth. The screen blinked off again.

“Goddamnit, Donna,” Tim said, “work for me.” As soon as he realized, with needling embarrassment, that he’d personified and pleaded
with a minicam, the screen bloomed anew, and he found himself thinking that maybe the Stork had something. His prognostication of a bleary future—himself and the Stork double-dating twin upright vacuums bedecked with wigs—was quickly interrupted by the steady basement view his firmer grip on the wire granted.

A stretch of stairs, maybe ten, leading down into a cold concrete box of a room. Urns and drums were scattered about, as well as dribbles of red and white powders. From atop a mound of melted wax protruded a chorus of still-lit candles, reflected back in a mirror leaning against the wall. In the middle of the room sat a refrigerator/freezer, the freezer compartment above. Feathers were strewn across the floor, lending it a fuzzy, organic texture like a tight-stretched hide. A single wobbly and scarred table held a few more candles, two headless roosters, and an incongruous pencil sharpener. It was hard to picture Debuffier sitting down here puzzling over the Sunday crossword.

Robert exhaled tensely. They all started when the sound—now even more clearly a moan—rose again into faint audibility. The jerk of Tim’s hands brought the inside of the door into view, along with the thick steel bolt thrown through hasps drilled into studs on either side. No kicking down that door.

Relinquishing Donna to Mitchell, Tim stood, frustrated. He fingered aside the clingy pink curtain and peered into the side yard. Partially in view, the Stork was flattened against the far fence in a position of cover halfway to the van. Hiding.

Tim snapped back from the window. “Let’s go, let’s go.” He yanked Donna out from under the door, tucking the entire unit under his arm like a football. The det bag already looped over his shoulder, Mitchell followed Robert down the hall. Their best evac path was through the kitchen and out the back door.

Leading the twins, Tim entered the kitchen just as Debuffier’s shadow fell across the laundry room through the window of the back door. With a violent flare of his hand, Tim gestured a retreat, but the key had already hit the lock. Robert and Mitchell ducked into a closet, and Tim rolled beneath the kitchen table just as Debuffier yanked the door open and stepped inside.

An empty rum bottle, knocked by Tim’s shoulder, tilted, but he snatched it, stretched over himself in an awkward, twisting supine position. A grumbling filled the kitchen as Debuffier fussed over the alarm, presumably to see why it didn’t go off. Then he crossed the kitchen, his enormous legs drawing into upside-down view, size-seventeen black loafers halting mere feet from Tim’s head. A stack of
mail hit the table with a slap. Debuffier wore no socks; the dark strips of his ankles were just visible between his shoes and the frayed bottoms of his jeans. Tim’s breath pushed a flurry of crumbs into a two-inch roll beneath the table.

Debuffier’s hand swung down into view, holding—of all things—a carton of pencils. Then he trudged out of sight, down the dimly lit back hall. Tim heard the enormous basement door swing open, then closed. The dead bolt slid home, then Debuffier’s footsteps down the stairs came rumbling silently through the kitchen floor into Tim’s cheek.

Tim rolled out just as Robert and Mitchell were emerging from the closet.

“Let’s di-di-mau,” Robert hissed.

Before Tim had time to turn, the sound came up through the floor-boards as if suddenly enhanced, liberated, an echoing, distinctly human groan. The three men froze in the kitchen.

Tim wanted to say, “We go”—the words were almost out of his mouth when they evanesced, and Robert and Mitchell fell into silent line behind him, heading into the house interior.

Tim had Donna unwound and ready by the time they reached the door, and he slid her through the gap. Debuffier had draped black sheer cloth over the mirror and tied a white handkerchief over his head. Wearing overalls with no undershirt, he stood with his back to the door, stooped slightly, his enormous shoulders rippling with some unseen motion. Whirring. Pause. Whirring. Pause.

Tim barely had time to realize that he was sharpening pencils when a tinny human voice echoed in response, it seemed, to the whirring.
“God no. God, God no.”

All three men stiffened, but there was no one else in sight in the small screen. Tim swung the lens, taking in the entire basement, but it was empty, save the tureens and bricks and feathers now kicked up and swirling. They remained on all fours above the small TV screen, blind men searching for a dropped penny.

Debuffier turned, his face powdered in white streaks. Testing the point of a pencil with the pad of one huge finger, he crossed to the refrigerator and swung open the top door of the freezer. A woman’s head, framed perfectly by the box of the freezer, gaped out at the room, her mouth stretched wide and screaming. Alive. Sweat-darkened wisps of hair lay pasted down across her forehead. What appeared to be open sores dotted her face. Her head had been fit through a hole cut into the partition between fridge and freezer.

Debuffier slammed the top door shut, muffling the piercing screams, and opened the refrigerator door. The woman’s body was curled into the lower unit, shivering and naked, also covered in small circular wounds. From her clawing feet to the abbreviated stretch of her neck, she seemed to hang suspended in the deadening white glow of the refrigerator light, the formaldehyde float of a primordial creature on a scientist’s shelf.

Debuffier bent over, reaching for the soft flesh above her collarbone with the pointed end of the pencil. He shifted his massive weight, blocking their view of the woman, then the screaming ratcheted up a level, the sound numbed, like the woman’s head, in the tomblike box of darkness, disassociated from the body, the inflicted torment, the world.

Robert stood up, trembling, in full-body drench. He drew his gun and aimed at the lock. Before Tim could respond, Mitchell grabbed Robert’s wrist and said in a harsh whisper, “No. We don’t get through that lock with a bullet.”

As Robert came increasingly unwound, Mitchell seemed to grow more collected; nearly two decades’ experience defusing live bombs served him well in the face of an active horror.

Sweat streaked in great droplets down Robert’s temples. “We do
not
walk away.”

“No,” Tim said. “We don’t.” He turned and snapped his fingers, his voice a loud-whispered rush of urgency. “Ten-second hold, boys. Focus. New game plan, new priorities. I call 911. We blast through the door. We neutralize Debuffier, nonlethally if we can. We secure the victim. Then, if we have the luxury, we consider our own position.”

Mitchell dug through the det bag, his razor knife out, a blasting cap having magically appeared, held between his teeth so his hands were free. He pulled the explosive sheet out and unrolled it a few turns. Working with rapid efficiency, he sliced out a disk of PETN, leaving behind a cookie-cutter hole.

Tim jogged into the kitchen before turning on his cell phone, so as not to trip Mitchell’s blasting caps. Stretching his T-shirt across the receiver, he spoke in a scratchy voice. “I have a medical emergency at 14132 Lanyard Street. In the basement. Repeat: in the basement. Please send an ambulance immediately.” He snapped the phone shut, turned it off, and headed back down the hall.

The screaming reached an unbelievably high pitch, drawn thin and fine like a silver wire. Unshaken, Mitchell dug a can of spray-on glue from the bag, misted the back of the disk, and slapped it on the door over the lock.

“God oh God stop please stop.”

Robert was moving from foot to foot in an odd kind of hot-coal dance, as if alleviating the burn from the screams, his face colored with rage and excitement. “Move it move it move it move it move it.”

Mitchell ripped off a strip of explosive sheet and dropped the blasting cap from his mouth onto it. As Tim stretched the protruding wires down the hall, Mitchell finished priming the sheet, sandwiching it around the blasting cap and sticking it to the door. Driven by the screams, Robert and Mitchell followed Tim around the corner, Mitchell clutching a nine-volt in the vise of his fist. Tim handed off the wire ends to him.

Robert was breathing too hard, his nostrils flaring. “Do it. Do it. Do it.”

Tim had to dispense with his whisper now, to be heard over the woman’s screams. “Now, listen. We need to do this right. I’ll be the first through the—”

“Please. Please. Oh God please.”

Robert seized the wires from Mitchell and touched them to the battery. Tim had time only for an instinctual reaction, opening his mouth so his lungs could vent and flex air, preventing the possibility of rupture in the face of the overpressure. The house seemed to jump with the explosion, drywall dust clouding the air, and already Robert was up and running for the stairs, weapon drawn.