‘The money?’ Piaggi asked.
‘I need a cup of coffee.’ The other man got up and walked inside, leaving his briefcase, which Piaggi took in his hand. He and Tucker walked off to his car, a blue Cadillac, without waiting for the other man to come back.
‘Not going to count it?’ Tucker asked halfway across the parking lot.
‘If he stiffs us, he knows what happens. This is business, Henry.’
“That’s right,’ Tucker agreed.
‘Bill Murphy,’ Kelly said. ‘I understand you have some vacant apartments.’ He held up the Sunday paper.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘A one-bedroom would be fine. I really just need a place to hang my clothes,’ Kelly told the man. ‘I travel a lot.’
‘Salesman?’ the manager asked.
‘That’s right. Machine tools. I’m new here – new territory, I mean.’
It was an old garden-apartment complex, built soon after the Second World War for returning veterans, composed exclusively of three-story brick structures. The trees looked about right for that time period. They’d been planted then and grown well, tall enough now to support a good population of squirrels, wide enough to give shade to the parking areas. Kelly looked around approvingly as the manager took him to a first-floor furnished unit.
‘This is just fine,’ Kelly announced. He looked around, testing the kitchen sink and other plumbing fixtures. The furniture was obviously used, but in decent shape. There were even air conditioners in the windows of every room.
‘I have other ones -‘
‘This is just what I need. How much?’
‘One seventy-five a month, one month security deposit.’
‘Utilities?’
‘You can pay them yourself or we can bill it. Some of our renters prefer that. They’ll average about forty-five dollars a month.’
‘Easier to pay one bill than two or three. Let’s see. One seventy-five, plus forty-five …’
‘Two-twenty,’ the manager assured him.
‘Fine.’ Kelly took out his wallet, handing over the bills. He stopped. ‘No, six-sixty, we’ll make it three months, if that’s okay. And I need a receipt.’ The helpful manager pulled a pad from his pocket and wrote one up on the spot. ‘How about a phone?’ Kelly asked.
‘I can have that done by Tuesday if you want. There’s another deposit for that.’
‘Please take care of that, if you would.’ Kelly handed over some more money. ‘My stuff won’t be here for a while. Where can I get sheets and stuff?’
‘Nothing much open today. Tomorrow, lots of’em.’
Kelly looked through the bedroom door at the bare mattress. He could see the lumps from this distance. He shrugged. ‘Well, I’ve slept on worse.’
‘Veteran?’
‘Marine,’ Kelly said.
‘So was I once,’ the manager replied, surprising Kelly. ‘You don’t do anything wild, do you?’ He didn’t expect so, but the owner insisted that he ask, even ex-Marines. The answer was a sheepish, reassuring grin.
‘I snore pretty bad, they tell me.’
Twenty minutes later Kelly was in a cab heading downtown. He got out at Penn Station and caught the next train to DC, where another taxi delivered him to his boat. By nightfall Springer was headed down the Potomac. It would have been so much easier, Kelly told himself, if there were just one person to help him. So much of his time was tied up with useless commuting. But was it really useless? Maybe not. He was getting a lot of thinking done, and that was as important as his physical preparations. Kelly arrived at his home just before midnight after si? continuous hours of thinking and planning.
Despite a weekend of almost nonstop motion, there was no time to dawdle. Kelly packed clothing, most of it purchased in the suburbs of Washington. Linens he would buy in Baltimore. Food the same. His .45 automatic, plus the .22-.45 conversion kit, was packed in with old clothing, along with two boxes of ammunition. He shouldn’t need more than that, Kelly thought, and ammo was heavy. While he fabricated one more silencer, this one for the Woodsman, he thought through his preparations. His physical condition was excellent, nearly as good as it had been in 3rd SOG, and he’d been shooting every day. His aim was probably better than it had ever been, he told himself, going through what were now almost mindless mechanical operations on the machine tools. By three in the morning the new suppressor was fitted to the Woodsman and tested. Thirty minutes after that he was back aboard Springer, headed north, looking forward to a few hours’ sleep once he got past Annapolis.
It was a lonely night, with scattered clouds, and his mind drifted somewhat before he commanded himself to concentrate. He was not a lazy civilian anymore, but Kelly allowed himself his first beer in weeks while his mind churned over variables. What had he forgotten? The reassuring answer was that he could think of nothing. The less-than-satisfactory thought was that he still knew little. Billy with his red Plymouth muscle car. A black guy named Henry. He knew their area of operation. And that was all.
But.
But he’d fought armed and trained enemies with less knowledge than that, and though he would force himself to be just as careful now as he had been there, deep down he knew that he would accomplish this mission. Partly it was because he was more formidable than they, and far more highly motivated. The other part, Kelly realized with surprise, was because he didn’t care about the consequences, only the results. He remembered something from his Catholic prep school, a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid that had defined his mission almost two thousand years before: Una salus victus nullam sperare salutem. The one hope of the doomed is not to hope for safety. The very grimness of the thought made him smile as he sailed under the stars, light dispatched from distances so vast that it had begun its journey long before Kelly, or even Virgil, had been born.
The pills helped shut out reality, but not all the way. Doris didn’t so much think the thought as listen to it, sense it, like recognizing something that she didn’t wish to face but refused to go away. She was too dependent on the barbiturates now. Sleep came hard to her, and in the emptiness of the room she was unable to avoid herself. She would have taken more pills if she could, but they didn’t allow her what she wanted, not that she wanted much. Just brief oblivion, a short-term liberation from her fear, that was all – and that was something they had no interest in granting her. She could see more than they knew or would have expected, she could peer into the future, but that was little consolation. Sooner or later she would be caught by the police. She’d been arrested before, but not for something of this magnitude, and she’d go away for a long time for this. The police would try to get her to talk, promise her protection. She knew better. Twice now she’d seen friends die. Friends? As close to that as was possible, someone to talk to, someone who shared her life, such as it was, and even in this captivity there were little jokes, small victories against the forces that ruled her existence, like distant lights in a gloomy sky. Someone to cry with. But two of them were dead, and she’d watched them die, sitting there, drugged but unable to sleep and blot it out, the horror so vast that it became numbing, watching their eyes, seeing and feeling the pain, knowing that she could do nothing, knowing even that they knew it as well. A nightmare was bad enough, but one of those couldn’t reach out and touch you. You could wake up and flee from one of those. Not this. She could watch herself from outside, as though she were a robot outside her own command but not that of others. Her body would not move unless others commanded it, and she even had to conceal her thoughts, was even afraid to voice them within her own mind lest they hear them or see them on her face, but now, try as she might, she could not force them away.
Rick lay next to her, breathing slowly in the darkness. Part of her liked Rick. He was the gentlest of them, and sometimes she allowed herself to think that he liked her, maybe a little, because he didn’t beat her badly. She had to stay in line, of course, because his anger was every bit as bad as Billy’s, and so around Rick she tried very hard to be good. Part of her knew that it was foolish, but her reality was defined by other people now. And she’d seen the results of real resistance. After one especially bad night Pam had held her, and whispered her desires to escape. Later, Doris had prayed that she had gotten away, that there might be hope after all, only to see her dragged in and to watch her die, sitting helplessly fifteen feet away while they did everything to her that they could imagine. Watching her life end, her body convulsing from lack of oxygen with the man’s face staring at her, laughing at her from an inch away. Her only act of resistance, thankfully unnoticed by the men, had been to brush out her friend’s hair, crying all the while, hoping somehow that Pam would know there was someone who cared, even in death. But the gesture had seemed empty even as she’d done it, making her tears all the more bitter.