‘That makes me feel warm all over.’ Douglas snorted.
* * *
Kelly arose at ten-thirty, feeling clean for the first time in several days. He’d showered immediately on returning to his apartment, wondering if in doing so he’d left rings on the sewers. Now he could shave, even, and that compensated for the lack of sleep. Before breakfast – brunch – Kelly drove half a mile to a local park and ran for thirty minutes, then drove back home for another thoroughly wonderful shower and some food. Then there was work to do. All the clothing from the previous evening was in a brown paper grocery bag – slacks, shirt, underwear, socks, and shoes. It seemed a shame to part with the bush jacket, whose size and pockets had proven to be so useful. He’d have to get another, probably several. He felt certain that he hadn’t been splattered with blood this time, but the dark colors made it difficult to be sure, and they probably did carry powder residue, and this was not the time to take any chances at all. Leftover food and coffee grounds went on top of the clothing, and found their way into the apartment complex’s Dumpster. Kelly had considered taking them to a distant dumpsite, but that might cause more trouble than it solved. Someone might see him, and take note of what he did, and wonder why. Disposing of the four empty .22 cases was easy. He’d dumped them down a sewer while jogging. The noon news broadcast announced the discovery of two bodies, but no details. Maybe the newspaper would say more. There was one other thing.
‘Hi, Sam.’
‘Hey, John. You in town?’ Rosen asked from his office.
‘Yeah. Do you mind if I come down for a few minutes? Say around two?’
‘What can I do for you?’ Rosen asked from behind his desk.
‘Gloves,’ Kelly said, holding his hand up. ‘The kind you use, thin rubber. Do they cost much?’
Rosen almost asked what the gloves were for, but decided he didn’t need to know. ‘Hell, they come in boxes of a hundred pair.’
‘I don’t need that many.’
The surgeon pulled open a drawer in his credenza and tossed over ten of the paper-and-plastic bags. ‘You look awfully respectable.’ And so Kelly did, dressed in a button-down white shirt and his blue CIA suit, as he’d taken to calling it. It was the first time Rosen had seen him in a tie.
‘Don’t knock it, doc.’ Kelly smiled. ‘Sometimes I have to be. I even have a new job, sort of.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Sort of consulting.’ Kelly gestured. ‘I can’t say about what, but it requires me to dress properly.’
‘Feeling okay?’
‘Yes, sir, just fine. Jogging and everything. How are things with you?’
‘The usual. More paperwork than surgery, but I have a whole department to supervise.’ Sam touched the pile of folders on his desk. The small talk was making him uneasy. It seemed that his friend was wearing a disguise, and though he knew Kelly was up to something, in not knowing exactly what it was, he managed to keep his conscience under control. ‘Can you do me a favor?’
‘Sure, doc.’
‘Sandy’s car broke down. I was going to run her home, but I’ve got a meeting that’ll run till four. She gets off shift at three.’
‘You’re letting her work regular hours now?’ Kelly asked with a smile.
‘Sometimes, when she’s not teaching.’
‘If it’s okay with her, it’s okay with me.’
It was only a twenty-minute wait that Kelly disposed of by going to the cafeteria for a light snack. Sandy O’Toole found him there, just after the three-o’clock change of shift.
‘Like the food better now?’ she asked him.
‘Even hospitals can’t hurt a salad very much.’ He hadn’t figured out the institutional fascination with Jell-0, however. ‘I hear your car’s broke.’
She nodded, and Kelly saw why Rosen had her working a more regular schedule. Sandy looked very tired, her fair skin sallow, with puffy dark patches under both eyes. ‘Something with the starter – wiring. It’s in the shop.’
Kelly stood. ‘Well, my lady’s carriage awaits.’ His remark elicited a smile, but it was one of politeness rather than amusement.
‘I’ve never seen you so dressed up,’ she said on the way to the parking garage.
‘Well, don’t get too worked up about it. I can still roll in the mud with the best of ’em.’ And his jesting failed again.
‘I didn’t mean -‘
‘Relax, ma’am. You’ve had a long day at the office, and your driver has a crummy sense of humor.’
Nurse O’Toole stopped and turned. ‘It’s not your fault. Bad week. We had a child, auto accident. Doctor Rosen tried, but the damage was too great, and she faded out on my shift, day before yesterday. Sometimes I hate this work,’ Sandy concluded.
‘I understand,’ Kelly said, holding the door open for her. ‘Look, you want the short version? It’s never the right person. It’s never the right time. It never makes any sense.’
‘That’s a nice way of looking at things. Weren’t you trying to cheer me up?’ And that, perversely, made her smile, but it wasn’t the kind of smile that Kelly wanted to see.
‘We all try to fix the broken parts as best we can, Sandy. You fight your dragons. I fight mine,’ Kelly said without thinking.
‘And how many dragons have you slain?’
‘One or two,’ Kelly said distantly, trying to control his words. It surprised him how difficult that had become. Sandy was too easy to talk with.
‘And what did it make better, John?’
‘My father was a fireman. He died while I was over there. House fire, he went inside and found two kids, they were down from smoke. Dad got them out okay, but then he had a heart attack on the spot. They say he was dead before he hit the ground. That counted for something,’ Kelly said, remembering what Admiral Maxwell had said, in the sick bay of USS Kitty Hawk, that death should mean something, that his father’s death had.
‘You’ve killed people, haven’t you?’ Sandy asked.
‘That’s what happens in a war,’ Kelly agreed.
‘What did that mean? What did it do?’
‘If you want the big answer, I don’t have it. But the ones I took out didn’t ever hurt anybody else.’ PLASTIC FLOWER sure as hell didn’t, he told himself. No more village chiefs and their families. Maybe someone else had taken the work over, but maybe not, too.
Sandy watched the traffic as he headed north on Broadway. ‘And the ones who killed Tim, did they think the same thing?’
‘Maybe they did, but there’s a difference.’ Kelly almost said that he’d never seen one of his people murder anyone, but he couldn’t say that anymore, could he?
‘But if everybody believes that, then where are we? It’s not like diseases. You fight against things that hurt everybody. No politics and lying. We’re not killing people. That’s why I do this work, John.’
‘Sandy, thirty years ago there was a guy named Hitler who got his rocks off lulling people like Sam and Sarah just because of what their goddamned names were. He had to be killed, and he was, too damned late, but he was.’ Wasn’t that a simple enough lesson?
‘We have problems enough right here,’ she pointed out. That was obvious from the sidewalks they passed, for Johns Hopkins was not in a comfortable neighborhood.
‘I know that, remember?’
That statement deflated her. ‘I’m sorry, John.’
‘So am I.’ Kelly paused, searching for words. ‘There is a difference, Sandy. There are good people. I suppose most people are decent. But there are bad people, too. You can’t wish them away, and you can’t wish them to be good, because most won’t change, and somebody has to protect the one bunch from the other. That’s what I did.’
‘But how do you keep from turning into one of them?’
Kelly took his time considering that, regretting the fact that she was here at all. He didn’t need to hear this, didn’t want to have to examine his own conscience. Everything had been so clear the past couple of days. Once you decided that there was an enemy, then acting on that information was simply a matter of applying your training and experience. It wasn’t something you had to think about. Looking at your conscience was hard, wasn’t it?
‘I’ve never had that problem,’ he said, finally, evading the issue. That was when he saw the difference. Sandy and her community fought against a thing, and fought bravely, risking their sanity in resisting the actions of forces whose root causes they could not directly address. Kelly and his fought against people, leaving the actions of their enemies to others, but able to seek them out and fight directly against their foe, even eliminating them if they were lucky. One side had absolute purity of purpose but lacked satisfaction. The other could attain the satisfaction of destroying the enemy, but only at the cost of becoming too much like what they struggled against. Warrior and healer, parallel wars, similarity of purpose, but so different in their actions. Diseases of the body, and diseases of humanity itself. Wasn’t that an interesting way to look at it?