Without remorse - Tom Clancy [164]
'Worse, probably. We'll look at it, but I'll bet you the whole structure is destroyed. You don't repair an injury like this, not all the way. His pitching career was over even before the knife.'
White, forty, or older, long black hair, short, dirty. Ryan looked at his notes. 'Go home, ma'am,' he'd told Virginia Charles.
Ma'am.
'Our victim was still alive when she walked away.' Douglas came over to his lieutenant. 'Then he must have taken his knife away and gave it back. Em, in the past week we've seen four very expert murders and six very dead victims.'
'Four different MOs. Two guys tied up, robbed, and executed, .22 revolver, no sign of a struggle. One guy with a shotgun in the guts, also robbed, no chance to defend himself. Two last night just shot, probably a .22 again, but not robbed, not tied up, and they were alerted before they were shot. Those were all pushers. But this guy's just a street hood. Not good enough, Tom.' But the Lieutenant had started thinking about it. 'Have we ID'd this one yet?'
The uniformed sergeant answered. 'Junkie. He's got a rap sheet, six arrests for robbery, God knows what else.'
'It doesn't fit,' Ryan said. 'It doesn't fit anything, and if you're talking about a really clever guy, why let somebody see him, why let her leave, why talk to her - hell, why take this guy out at all? What pattern does that fit?' There was no pattern. Sure, the two pairs of drug dealers had been taken down with a .22, but the small-bore was the most commonly used weapon on the street, and while one pair had been robbed, the other had not; nor had the second pair been shot with the same deadly precision, though each did have two head wounds. The other murdered and robbed dealer had been done by a shotgun. 'Look, we have the murder weapon, and we have the wine bottle, and from one or both we'll get prints. Whoever this guy was, he sure as hell wasn't real careful.'
'A wino with a sense of justice, Em?' Douglas prodded. 'Whoever took this punk down -'
'Yeah, yeah, I know. He wasn't Wally Cox.' But who and what the hell was he?
Thank God for gloves, Kelly thought, looking at the bruises on his right hand. He'd let his anger get the better of him, and that wasn't smart! Looking back, reliving the incident, he realized that he'd been faced with a difficult situation. If he'd let the woman get killed or seriously injured, and just gotten into his car and driven off, first, he'd never really have been able to forgive himself, and second, if anyone had seen the car, he'd be a murder suspect. That extended thought evoked a snort of disgust. He was a murder suspect now. Well, somebody would be. On coming home, he'd looked in the mirror, wig and all. Whatever that woman had seen, it had not been John Kelly, not with a face shadowed by his heavy beard, smeared with dirt, under a long and filthy wig. His bunched-over posture made him appear several inches shorter than he was. And the light on the street had not been good. And she'd been even more interested in getting away than anything else. Even so. He'd somehow left his wine bottle behind. He remembered dropping it to parry the knife thrust, and then in the heat of the moment he'd not recovered it. Dumb! Kelly raged at himself.
What would the police know? The physical description would not be a good one. He'd worn a pair of surgical gloves, and though they allowed him to bruise his hands, they hadn't torn and he hadn't bled. Most important of all, he had never touched the wine bottle with ungloved hands. Of that he was certain because he'd decided from the beginning to be careful about it. The police would know a street bum had killed that punk, but there were lots of street bums, and he only needed one more night. It meant that he'd have to alter his operational pattern even so, and that tonight's mission was more dangerous than if ought to be, but his information on Billy was too good to pass up on, and the little bastard might be smart enough