‘Where you goin’?’ she asked.
That surprised Kelly. He thought the first question -Need a ride? – was supposed to be his. He hesitated for a second or two, looking at her. Twenty-one, perhaps, but old for her years. Her face wasn’t dirty, but neither was it clean, perhaps from the wind and dust on the interstate. She wore a man’s cotton shirt that hadn’t been ironed in months, and her hair was knotted. But what surprised him most of all were her eyes. Fetchingly gray-green, they stared past Kelly into … what? He’d seen the look before often enough, but only on weary men. He’d had the look himself, Kelly remembered, but even then he’d never known what his eyes saw. It didn’t occur to him that he wore a look not so different now.
‘Back to my boat,’ he answered finally, not knowing what else to say. And that quickly, her eyes changed.
‘You have a boat?’ she asked. Her eyes lit up like a child’s, a smile started there and radiated down the remainder of her face, as though he’d just answered an important question. She had a cute gap between her front teeth, Kelly noticed.
‘Forty-footer – she’s a diesel cruiser.’ He waved to the back of the Scout, whose cargo area was completely filled with cartons of groceries. ‘You want to come along?’ he asked, also without thinking.
‘Sure!’ Without hesitation she yanked open the door and tossed her backpack on the floor in front of the passenger seat.
Pulling back into traffic was dangerous. Short of wheel-base and short of power, the Scout wasn’t built for interstate-highway driving, and Kelly had to concentrate. The car wasn’t fast enough to go in any other lane than the right, and with people coming on and off at every interchange, he had to pay attention because the Scout wasn’t nimble enough to avoid all the idiots who were heading out to the ocean or wherever the hell people went on a three-day weekend.
You want to come along? he’d asked, and she’d said Sure, his mind reported to him. What the h?ll? Kelly frowned in frustration at the traffic because he didn’t know the answer, but then there were a lot of questions to which he hadn’t known the answers in the last six months. He told his mind to be quiet and watched the traffic, even though it kept up its inquiries in a nagging sort of background noise. One’s mind, after all, rarely obeys its own commands.
Memorial Day weekend, he thought. The cars around him were filled with people rushing home from work, or those who’d already made that trip and picked up their families. The faces of children stared out of the rear-seat windows. One or two waved at him, but Kelly pretended not to notice. It was hard not having a soul, most especially when you could remember having had one.
Kelly ran a hand across his jaw, feeling the sandpaper texture. The hand itself was dirty. No wonder they’d acted that way at the grocery warehouse. Letting yourself go, Kelly.
Well, who the hell cares?
He turned to look at his guest and realized that he didn’t know her name. He was taking her to his boat, and he didn’t know her name. Amazing. She was staring forward, her face serene. It was a pretty face in profile. She was thin – perhaps willowy was the right word, her hair halfway between blonde and brown. Her jeans were worn and torn in a few places, and had begun life at one of those stores where they charged you extra to sell jeans that were pre-faded – or whatever they did with them. Kelly didn’t know and cared less. One more thing not to care about.
Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up? his mind demanded of him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation. Different segments of the organism called John Terrence Kelly knew different parts of the whole story, but somehow they’d never all come together, leaving the separate fragments of what had once been a tough, smart, decisive man to blunder about in confusion – and despair? There was a happy thought.
He remembered what he’d once been. He remembered all the things that he had survived, amazed that he had done so. And perhaps the worst torment of all was that he didn’t understand what had gone wrong. Sure, he knew what had happened, but those things had all been on the outside, and somehow his understanding had gotten lost, leaving him alive and confused and without purpose. He was on autopilot. He knew that, but not where fate was taking him.
She didn’t try to talk, whoever she was, and that was just as well, Kelly told himself, though he sensed that there was something he ought to know. The realization came as a surprise. It was instinctual, and he’d always trusted his instincts, the warning chill on his neck and forearms. He looked around at the traffic and Kelly saw no particular danger other than cars with too much engine under the hood and not enough brains behind the wheel. His eyes scanned carefully and found nothing. But the warning didn’t go away, and Kelly found himself checking the mirror for no good reason, while his left hand wandered down between his legs and found the checkered grips of the Colt automatic that hung hidden under the seat. His hand was stroking the weapon before he realized it.
Now what the hell did you do that for? Kelly pulled his hand back and shook his head with a grimace of frustration. But he did keep checking the mirror – just the normal watch on traffic, he lied to himself for the next twenty minutes.
The boatyard was a swarm of activity. The three-day weekend, of course. Cars were zipping about too fast for the small and badly paved parking lot, each driver trying to evade the Friday rush that each was, of course, helping to create. At least here the Scout came into its own. The high ground clearance and visibility gave Kelly an advantage as he maneuvered to Springer’s transom, and he looped around to back up to the slip he’d left six hours before. It was a relief, to crank up the windows and lock the car. His adventure on the highways was over, and the safety of the trackless water beckoned.
Springer was a diesel-powered motor yacht, forty-one feet long, custom built but similar in her lines and internal arrangements to a Pacemaker Coho. She was not especially pretty, but she had two sizable cabins, and the midships salon could be converted easily into a third. Her diesels were large but not supercharged, because Kelly preferred a large comfortable engine to a small straining one. He had a high-quality marine radar, every sort of communications gear that he could legally use, and navigation aids normally reserved for offshore fishermen. The fiberglass hull was immaculate, and there was not a speck of rust on the chromed rails, though he had defiberately done without the topside varnish that most yacht-owners cherished because it wasn’t worth the maintenance time. Springer was a workboat, or was supposed to be.
Kelly and his guest alighted from the car. He opened the cargo door and started carrying the cartons aboard. The young lady, he saw, had the good sense to stay out of the way.
‘Yo, Kelly!’ a voice called from the flying bridge.
‘Yeah, Ed, what was it?’
‘Bad gauge. The generator brushes were a little worn, and I replaced them, but I think it was the gauge. Replaced that, too.’ Ed Murdock, the yard’s chief mechanic, started down, and spotted the girl as he began to step off the ladder. Murdock tripped on the last step and nearly landed flat on his face in surprise. The mechanic’s face evaluated the girl quickly and approvingly.
‘Anything else?’ Kelly asked pointedly.
‘Topped off the tanks. The engines are warm,’ Murdock said, turning back to his customer. ‘It’s all on your bill.’
‘Okay, thanks, Ed.’
‘Oh, Chip told me to tell you, somebody else made an offer in case you ever want to sell -‘
Kelly cut him off. ‘No chance, Ed.’
‘She’s a jewel, Kelly,’ Murdock said as he gathered his tools and walked away smiling, pleased with himself for the double entendre.
It took several seconds for Kelly to catch that one. It evoked a belated grunt of semi-amusement as he loaded the last of the groceries into the salon.
‘What do I do?’ the girl asked. She’d just been standing there, and Kelly had the impression that she was trembling a little and trying to hide it.
‘Just take a seat topside,’ Kelly said, pointing to the flying bridge. ‘It’ll take me a few minutes to get things started.’
‘Okay.’ She beamed a smile at him guaranteed to melt ice, as though she knew exactly what one of his needs was.