Without remorse - Tom Clancy [172]
What the hell? Kelly thought, looking over at her. Her face was scraped, her hair a mess. He turned his eyes back to the street. A police cruiser went past on a reciprocal heading, and despite a brief moment of panic on Kelly's part, it just kept going, disappearing as he turned north.
Think fast. boy.
Kelly could have done many things, but only one alternative was realistic. Realistic? he asked himself. Oh, sure.
One does not expect to hear doorbells at a quarter to three in the morning. Sandy first thought she had dreamed it, but her eyes had opened, and in the way of the mind, the sound played back to her as though she had actually awakened a second earlier. Even so, she must have dreamed it, the nurse told herself, shaking her head. She'd just started to close her eyes again when it repeated. Sandy rose, slipped on a robe, and went downstairs, too disoriented to be frightened. There was a shape on the porch. She turned on the lights as she opened the door.
'Turn that fucking light off!' A rasping voice that was nonetheless familiar. The command it carried caused her to flip the switch without so much as a thought.
'What are you doing here?' There was a girl at his side, looking thoroughly horrible.
'Call in sick. You're not going to work today. You're going to take care of her. Her name is Doris,' Kelly said, speaking in the low commanding tone of a surgeon in the middle of a complex procedure.
'Wait a minute!' Sandy stood erect and her mind started racing. Kelly was wearing a woman's wig - well, too dirty for that. He was unshaven, had on awful clothes, but his eyes were burning with something. Rage was part of it, a fury at something, and the man's strong hands were shaking at his side.
'Remember about Pam?' he asked urgently.
'Well, yes, but-'
'This girl's in the same spot. I can't help her. Not now. I have to do something else.'
'What are you doing, John?' Sandy asked, a different sort of urgency in her voice. And then, somehow, it was very clear. The TV news reports she'd been watching over dinner on the black-and-white set in the kitchen, the look she'd seen in his eyes in the hospital; the look she saw now, so close to the other, but different, the desperate compassion and the trust it demanded of her.
'Somebody's been beating the shit out of her, Sandy. She needs help.'
'John,' she whispered. 'John... you're putting your life in my hands ...'
Kelly actually laughed, after a fashion, a bleak snort that went beyond irony. 'Yeah, well, you did okay the first time, didn't you?' He pushed Doris in the door and walked away, off to a car, without looking back.
'I'm going to be sick,' the girl, Doris, said. Sandy hustled her to the first-floor bathroom and got her to the toilet in time. The young woman knelt there for a minute or two, emptying her belly into the white porcelain bowl. After another minute or so, she looked up. In the glare of incandescent lights off the white-tile walls, Sandra O'Toole saw the face of hell.
CHAPTER 20
Depressurization
It was after four when Kelly pulled into the marina. He backed the Scout to the transom of his boat and got out to open the cargo hatch after checking the darkness for spectators, of which, thankfully, there were none.
'Hop,' he told Billy, and that he did. Kelly pushed him aboard, then directed him into the main salon. Once there, Kelly got some shackles, regular marine handware, and fastened Billy's wrists to a deck fitting. Ten minutes more and he had cast off, heading out to the Bay, and finally Kelly allowed himself to relax. With the boat on autopilot, he loosed the wires on Billy's arms and legs.
Kelly was tired. Moving Billy from the back of the VW into the Scout had been harder than he'd expected, and at that he'd been lucky to miss the newspaper distributor, dumping his bundles on street corners for the paper boy to unwrap and deliver before six. He settled back into the control chair, drinking some coffee and stretching by way of reward to his body for its efforts.
Kelly had the lights