Without remorse - Tom Clancy [115]
'Both hands in the open,' Kelly said, the Colt automatic leveled twelve inches from the man's chest.
Lamarck's first response was a disbelieving bluster:
'My man, that is a very foolish -'
Kelly's voice was all business. 'Arguing with a gun is even more foolish, my man. Turn, walk down the alley, and you might even make it back to the bar for a nightcap.'
'You must need money real bad to try something this dumb,' the pimp said, trying an implied threat.
'Your roll worth dying for?' Kelly asked reasonably. Lamarck measured the odds and turned, moving into the shadows.
'Stop,' Kelly told him after fifty yards, still behind the blank wall of the bar, or perhaps another just like it. His left arm grabbed the man's neck and pushed him against the bricks. His eyes looked up and down the alley three times. His ears searched for sounds separate from traffic noise and distorted music. For the moment it was a safe and quiet place. 'Hand me your gun - real careful.'
'I don't -' The sound of a hammer being cocked sounded awfully loud, that close to his ear.
'Do I look stupid?'
'Okay, okay,' Lamarck said, his voice losing its smooth edge now. 'Let's be real cool. It's only money.'
'That's smart,' Kelly said approvingly. A small automatic appeared. Kelly put his right index finger into the trigger guard. There was no sense in putting fingerprints on the weapon. He was taking enough chances, and as careful as he'd been to this point, the dangers of his action were suddenly very real and very large. The pistol fit nicely into his coat pocket.
'Let's see the roll next.'
'Right here, man.' Lamarck was starting to lose it. That was both good and bad, Kelly thought. Good because it was pleasing to see. Bad because a panicked man might do something foolish. Instead of relaxing, Kelly actually became more tense.
'Thank you, Mr Lamarck,' Kelly said politely, to calm the man.
Just then he wavered, and his head turned a few inches or so, as his consciousness asserted itself through the six drinks he'd had this evening. 'Wait a minute - you said you knew Pam.'
'I did,' Kelly said.
'But why-' He turned farther to see a face that was bathed in darkness, only eyes showing with light glistening off their moisture, and the rest of the face a shadow white.
'You're one of the guys who ruined her life.'
Outrage: 'Hey, man she came to me!'
'And you got her on pills so she could party real good, right?' the disembodied voice asked. Lamarck could hardly remember what the man looked like now.
'That was business, so you met her, so she was a good fuck, right?'
'She certainly was.'
'I shoulda trained her better an' you coulda had her again insteada - was, you say?'
'She's dead,' Kelly told him, reaching in his pocket. 'Somebody killed her.'
'So? I didn't do it!' It seemed to Lamarck that he was facing a final exam, a test he didn't understand, based on rules he didn't know.
'Yes, I know that,' Kelly said, screwing the silencer onto the pistol. Lamarck saw that somehow, his eyes making the adjustment to the darkness. His voice became a shrill rasp.
'Then what are you doing this for?' the man said, too puzzled even to scream, too paralyzed by the incongruity of the past few minutes, by the passage of his life from the normality of his hangout bar to its end only forty feet away in front of a windowless brick wall, and he had to have an answer. Somehow it was more important than the escape, whose attempt he knew to be futile.
Kelly thought about that for a second or two. He could have said many things, but it was only fair, he decided, to tell the man the truth as the gun came up quickly and finally.
'Practice.'
CHAPTER 14
Lessons Learned
The early flight back from New Orleans to Washington National was too short for a movie, and Kelly had already eaten breakfast. He settled on a glass of juice