Without remorse - Tom Clancy [177]
'Fuck you, man! You're gonna kill me! And I ain't gonna tell you shit.'
Kelly twisted him around to stare in his eyes. 'I'm not going to kill you, Billy. You'll leave this island alive. I promise.'
The confusion on his face was sufficiently amusing that Kelly actually smiled for a second. Then he shook his head. He told himself that he was treading a very narrow and hazardous path between two equally dangerous slopes, and to both extremes lay madness, of two different types but equally destructive. He had to detach himself from the reality of the moment, yet hold on to it. Kelly helped him down from the boat and walked him towards the machinery bunker.
'Thirsty?'
'I need to take a piss, too.'
Kelly guided him onto some grass. 'Go right ahead.' Kelly waited. Billy didn't like being naked, not in front of another man, not in a subordinate position. Foolishly, he wasn't trying to talk to Kelly now, at least not in the right way. Coward that he was, he'd tried to build up his manhood earlier, trying to talk not so much to Kelly as himself as he'd recounted his part in ending Pam's life, creating for himself an illusion of power, when silence might - well, would probably not have saved him. It might have created doubts, though, especially if he'd been clever enough to spin a good yarn, but cowardice and stupidity were not strangers to each other, were they? Kelly let him stand untended while he dialed the combination lock. Turning on the interior lights, he pushed Billy inside.
It looked like - was in fact a steel cylinder, seventeen inches in diameter, sitting on its own legs with large caster-wheels at the bottom, just where he'd left it. The steel cover on the end was not in place, hanging down on its hinge.
'You're going to get in that,' Kelly told him.
'Fuck you, man!' Defiance again. Kelly used the butt end of the Ka-Bar to club him on the back of the neck. Billy fell to his knees.
'One way or another, you're getting in - bleeding or not bleeding, I really don't care.' Which was a lie, but an effective one. Kelly lifted him by the neck and forced his head and shoulders into the opening. 'Don't move.'
It was so much easier than he'd expected. Kelly pulled a key off its place on the wall and unbolted the shackles on Billy's hands. He could feel his prisoner tense, thinking that he might have a chance, but Kelly was fast on the wrench - he only had to remove one bolt to free both hands, and a prod from the knife in the right place encouraged Billy not to back up, which was the necessary precursor to any kind of effective resistance. Billy was just too cowardly to accept pain as the price for a chance at escape. He trembled but didn't resist at all, for all his lavish and desperate thoughts.
'Inside!' A push helped, and when his feet were inside the rim, Kelly lifted the hatch and bolted it into place. Then he walked out, flipping the lights off. He needed something to eat and a nap. Billy could wait. The waiting would just make things easier.
'Hello?' Her voice sounded very worried.
'Hi, Sandy, it's John.'
'John! What's going on?'
'How is she?'
'Doris, you mean? She's sleeping now,' Sandy told him. 'John, who - I mean, what's happened to her?'
Kelly squeezed the phone receiver in his hand. 'Sandy, I want you to listen to me very carefully, okay? This is really important.'
'Okay, go ahead.' Sandy was in her kitchen, looking at a pot of coffee. Outside she could see neighborhood children playing a game of ball on a vacant field whose comforting normality now seemed to be very distant indeed.
'Number one, don't tell anybody that she's there. Sure as hell you don't tell the police.'
'John, she's badly injured, she's hooked on pills, she probably has severe medical problems on top of that. I have to-'
'Sam and Sarah, then. Nobody else. Sandy, you got that? Nobody else. Sandy...' Kelly hesitated. It was too hard a thing to say, but he had to make it