Without remorse - Tom Clancy [102]
'Thanks, Sandy.'
'Well, John, you're healthy, too. Put your shirt on before Sandy starts blushing,' Rosen added with a chuckle.
'Where do you get lunch around here?' Kelly asked.
'I'd show you myself, but I have a conference in about ten minutes. Sandy?'
She checked her watch. 'About time for mine. You want to risk hospital food or something outside?'
'You're the tour guide, ma'am.'
She guided him to the cafeteria, where the food was hospital-bland, but you could add salt and other spices if you wanted. Kelly selected something that might be filling, even healthy, to compensate for the lack of taste.
'Have you been keeping busy?' he asked after they selected a table.
'Always,' Sandy assured him.
'Where do you live?'
'Off Loch Raven Boulevard, just in the County.' She hadn't changed, Kelly saw. Sandy O'Toole was functioning, quite well in fact, but the emptiness in her life wasn't qualitatively different from his. The real difference was that he could do something; she could not. She was reaching out, she had a capacity for good humor, but her grief overcame it at every turn. A powerful force, grief. There were advantages in having enemies you could seek out and eliminate. Fighting a shadow was far more difficult.
'Row house, like they have around here?'
'No, it's an old bungalow, whatever you call it, big square two-story house. Half an acre. That reminds me,' she added. 'I have to cut the grass this weekend.' Then she remembered that Tim had liked cutting grass, had decided to leave the Army after his second Vietnam tour and get his law degree and live a normal kind of life, all of that taken away from her by little people in a distant place.
Kelly didn't know what she was thinking, exactly, but he didn't have to. The change in her expression, the way her voice trailed off, said it all. How to cheer her up? It was a strange question for him, considering his plans for the next few weeks.
'You were very kind to me while I. was upstairs. Thanks.'
'We try to take care of our patients,' she said with a friendly and unaccustomed expression.
'A face as pretty as yours should do that more,' Kelly told her.
'Do what?'
'Smile.'
'It's hard,' she said, serious again.
'I know, ma'am. But I did have you laughing before,' Kelly told her.
'You surprised me.'
'It's Tim, isn't it?' he asked, jolting her. People weren't supposed to talk about that, were they?
She stared into Kelly's eyes for perhaps five seconds. 'I just don't understand.'
'In some ways it's easy. In some ways it's hard. The hard part,' Kelly said, thinking it through himself as he did so, 'is understanding why people make it necessary, why people do things like that. What it comes down to is, there are bad people out there, and somebody has to deal with them, 'cuz if you don't, then someday they'll deal with you. You can try ignoring them, but that doesn't ever work, really. And sometimes you see things you just can't ignore.' Kelly leaned back, searching for more words. 'You see lots of bad things here, Sandy. I've seen worse. I've watched people doing things -'
'Your nightmare?'
Kelly nodded. 'That's right. I almost got myself killed that night.'
'What was -'
'You don't want to know, honest. I mean, I don't understand that part either, how people can do things like that. Maybe they believe in something so much that they stop remembering that it's important to be human. Maybe they want something so much that they don't care. Maybe there's just something wrong with them, how they think, how they feel. I don't know. But what they do is real. Somebody has to try and stop it.' Even when you know it's not going to work, Kelly didn't have the heart to add. How could he tell her that her husband had died for a failure?
'My husband was a knight in shiny armor on a white horse? Is that what you're telling me?'
'You're the one wearing white, Sandy. You fight against one kind of enemy. There's other kinds. Somebody has to fight against them, too.'
'I'll never understand why Tim had to die.'
It really came down