Patriot games - Tom Clancy [132]
"No problem getting the job done," he assured Miller.
"Excellent," Miller agreed. "Good work, Alex." Even if you do have a big mouth.
Cathy always drove more sedately with Sally aboard. The little girl craned her neck to see over the dashboard, her left hand fiddling with the seat belt buckle as it usually did. Her mother was relaxing now. It generally took her about this length of time to settle down from a hard day-there were few easy ones-at the Wilmer Eye Institute. It wasn't stress so much. She'd had two procedures today and would have two more the next day. She loved her work. There were a lot of people now who could see only because of her professional skill, and the satisfaction of that was not something easily communicated, even to Jack. The price of it was that her days were rarely easy ones. The minute precision demanded by ophthalmic surgery denied her coffee-she couldn't risk the slight tremor in her hands that might come from caffeine-and imposed a degree of concentration on her that few professions demanded. There were more difficult medical skills, but not many. This was the main reason she drove her 911. It was as though in pushing through the air, or taking a tight corner at twenty-five in second gear, the car drained the excess energy from the driver and spread it into the environment. She almost always got home in a good mood. Tonight would be better still since it was Jack's turn to fix dinner. If the car had been built with a brain, it would have noticed the reduced pressure on accelerator and brakes as they took the Route 2 exit. It was being pampered now, like a faithful horse that had jumped all the fences properly.
"Okay?" Alex asked, keeping west on Route 50 toward Washington.
The other man in the back handed Miller the clipboard with the new time notation. There was a total of seven entries, all but the last complete with photographs. Sean looked at the numbers. The target was on a beautifully regular schedule.
"Fine," he said after a moment.
"I can't give you a precise spot for the hit-traffic can make things go a little funny. I'd say we should try on the east side of the bridge."
"Agreed."
Cathy Ryan walked into her house fifteen minutes later. She unzipped Sally's coat and watched her little-"big"-girl struggle out of the sleeves, a skill she was just beginning to acquire. Cathy took it and hung it up before getting out of her coat. Mother and daughter then proceeded to the kitchen, where they heard the unmistakable noise of a husband trying to fix dinner and a television tuned to the MacNeil-Lehrer Report.
"Daddy, look what I did!" Sally said first.
"Oh, great!" Jack took the picture and examined it with great care. "I think we'll hang this one up." All of them got hung up. The art gallery in question was the front of the family refrigerator. A magnetized holder gave the finger painting a semi-permanent place over the ice and cold-water dispenser. Sally never noticed that there was a new hanging spot every day. Nor did she know that every such painting was saved, tucked away in a box in the foyer closet.
"Hi, babe." Jack kissed his wife next. "How were things today?"
"Two cornea replacements. Bernie assisted on the second one-it was a bear. Tomorrow, I'm scheduled for a vitrectomy. Bernie says hi, by the way."
"How's his kid?" Jack asked.
"Just an appendectomy, she'll be climbing the monkey bars next week," Cathy replied, surveying the kitchen. She often wondered if having Jack fix dinner was worth the wreckage he made of her room. It appeared that he was fixing pot roast, but she wasn't sure. It wasn't that Jack was a bad cook-with some things he was pretty good-he was just so damned sloppy about it. Never kept his utensils neat. Cathy always had her knives, forks, and everything else arranged like a surgical instrument tray. Jack would just set them anywhere and spent