Without remorse - Tom Clancy [155]
Doris awoke about five, her head pounding with a barbiturate-induced hangover made worse still by the double shot of whiskey that someone had decided to give her. The pain told her that she would have to live another day, that the mixture of drugs and alcohol hadn't done the job she'd dared to hope for when she'd looked at the glass, hesitated, then gunned it down before the party. What had followed the whiskey and the drugs was only half remembered, and it blended into so many other such nights that she had trouble separating the new from the old.
They were more careful now. Pam had taught them that. She sat up, looking at the handcuff on her ankle, its other end locked in a chain that was in turn fastened to a fitting screwed into the wall. Had she thought about it, she might have tried ripping it out, which a healthy young woman might have accomplished with a few hours of determined effort. But escape was death, a particularly hard and lengthy death, and as much as she desired the escape from a life grown horrid beyond any nightmare, pain still frightened her. She stood, causing the chain to rattle. After a moment or two Rick came in.
'Hey, baby' the young man said with a smile that conveyed amusement rather than affection. He bent down, unlocked the cuffs, and pointed to the bathroom. 'Shower. You need it.'
'Where did you learn to cook Chinese?' Kelly asked.
'A nurse I worked with last year. Nancy Wu. She's teaching at the University of Virginia now. You like it?'
'You kidding me?' If the shortest distance to any man's heart is his stomach, then one of the better compliments a man can give a woman is to ask for seconds. He held himself to one glass of wine, but attacked the food as quickly as decent table manners allowed.
'It's not that good,' Sandy said, blatantly fishing for a compliment.
'It's much better than what I fix for myself, but if you're thinking about writing a cookbook, you need somebody with better taste.' He looked up. 'I visited Taipei for a week, once, and this is almost that good.'
'What did you do there?'
'R and R, sort of a vacation from getting shot at.' Kelly stopped it there. Not everything he and his friends had done was proper information to convey to a lady. Then he saw that he'd gone too far already.
'That's what Tim and - I already had it planned for us to meet in Hawaii, but -' Her voice stopped again.
Kelly wanted to reach out to her, take her hand across the table, just to comfort her, but he feared it might seem to be an advance.
'I know, Sandy. So what else did you learn to cook?'
'Quite a lot. Nancy stayed with me for a few months and made me do all the cooking. She's a wonderful teacher.'
'I believe it.' Kelly cleaned his plate. 'What's your schedule like?'
'I usually get up quarter after five, leave here just after six. I like to be on the unit half an hour before shift change so I can check the status of the patients and get ready for the new arrivals from the OR. It's a busy unit. What about you?'
'Well, it depends on the job. When I'm shooting -'
'Shooting?' Sandy asked, surprised.
'Explosives. It's my specialty. You spend a lot of time planning it and setting it up. Usually there's a few engineers around to fuss and worry and tell me what not to do. They keep forgetting that it's a hell of a lot easier to blow something up than it is to build it. I do have one trademark, though.'
'What's that?'
'On my underwater work, I shoot some blasting caps a few minutes before I do the real shoot.' Kelly chuckled. 'To scare the fish away.'
She was puzzled for a second. 'Oh - so they won't get hurt?'
'Right. It's a personal quirk.'
It was just one more thing. He'd killed people in war, threatened a surgeon with permanent injury right in front of her and a security guard, but he went out of his way to protect fish?
'You're a strange one.'
He had the good grace to nod. 'I don't kill for the fun of it. I used