‘What’s that?’
‘I’m going to be too dirty to take you out to dinner. We have to eat here,’ he said, disappearing under the car, white shirt, worsted slacks and all. A minute later he was back out, his hands dirty. ‘Try it now.’
Sandy got back in and turned the key. The battery was down a little but the engine caught almost at once.
‘Leave it on to charge things up.’
‘What was it?’
‘Loose wire. All I did was tighten it up some.’ Kelly looked at his clothes and grimaced. So did Sandy. ‘You need to take it into the shop and have a lock washer put on the nut. Then it shouldn’t get loose again.’
‘You didn’t have to -‘
‘You have to get to work tomorrow, right?’ Kelly asked reasonably. ‘Where can I wash up?’
Sandy led him into the house and pointed him towards a bathroom. Kelly got the grime off his hands before rejoining her in the living room.
‘Where’d you learn to fix cars?’ she asked, handing him a glass of wine.
‘My dad was a shade-tree mechanic. He was a fireman, remember? He had to learn all that stuff, and he liked it. I learned from him. Thanks.’ Kelly toasted her with the glass. He wasn’t a wine drinker, but it wasn’t bad.
‘Was?’
‘He died while I was in Vietnam, heart attack on the job. Mom’s gone, too. Liver cancer, when I was in grade school,’ Kelly explained as evenly as he could. The pain was distant now. ‘That was tough. Dad and I were pretty close. He was a smoker, that’s probably what killed him. I was sick myself at the time, infection from a job I did. I couldn’t get home or anything. So I just stayed over there when I got better.’
‘I wondered why nobody came to visit you, but I didn’t ask,’ Sandy said, realizing how alone John Kelly was.
‘I have a couple uncles and some cousins, but we don’t see each other much.’
It was a little clearer now, Sandy thought. Losing his mother at a young age, and in a particularly cruel and lingering.way. He’d probably always been a big kid, tough and proud, but helpless to change things. Every woman in his life had been taken away by force of one kind or another: his mother, his wife, and his lover. How much rage he must feel, she told herself. It explained so much. When he’d seen Khofan threatening her, it was something he could protect her from. She still thought she could have handled it herself, but now she understood a little better. It defused her lingering anger, as did his manner. He didn’t get too close to her, didn’t undress her with his eyes – Sandy particularly hated that, though, strangely, she allowed patients to do it because she felt that it helped to perk them up. He acted like a friend, she realized, as one of Tim’s fellow officers might have done, mixing familiarity with respect for her identity, seeing her as a person first, a woman after that. Sandra Manning O’Toole found herself liking it. As big and tough as he was, there was nothing to fear from this man. It seemed an odd observation with which to begin a relationship, if that was the thing happening.
Another thunk announced the arrival of the evening paper. Kelly got it and scanned the front page before dropping it on the coffee table. A front-page story on this slow summer news day was the discovery of another dead drug pusher. She saw Kelly looking at it, scanning the first couple of paragraphs.
Henry’s increasing control of the local drug traffic virtually ensured that the newly dead dealer had been one of his distant minions. He’d known the dead man by his street name and only learned the real one, Lionel Hall, from the news article. They’d never actually met, but Bandanna had been mentioned to him as a clever chap, one worth keeping his eye on. Not clever enough, Tucker thought. The ladder to success in his business was steep, with slippery rungs, the selection process brutally Darwinian, and somehow Lionel Hall had not been equal to the demands of his new profession. A pity, but not a matter of great import. Henry rose from his chair and stretched. He’d slept late, having taken delivery two days earlier of fully fifteen kilograms of ‘material,’ as he was starting to call it. The boat trip to and from the packaging point had takes its toll – it was becoming a pain in the ass, Tucker thought, maintaining that elaborate cover. Those thoughts were dangerous, however, and he knew it. This time he’d merely watched his people do the work. And now two more knew more than they’d known before, but he was tired of doing such menial work himself. He had minions for that, little people who knew that they were little and knew they would prosper only so long as they followed orders exactly.
Women were better at that than men. Men had egos that they had to nurture within their own fertile minds, and the smaller the mind the greater the ego. Sooner or later one of his people would rebel, get a little too uppity. The hookers he used were so much more easily cowed, and then there was the fringe benefit of having them around. Tucker smiled.
Doris awoke about five, her head pounding with a barbiturate-induced hangover made worse still by the double shot of whiskey that someone had decided to give her. The pain told her that she would have to live another day, that the mixture of drugs and alcohol hadn’t done the job she’d dared to hope for when she’d looked at the glass, hesitated, then gunned it down before the party. What had followed the whiskey and the drugs was only half remembered, and it blended into so many other such nights that she had trouble separating the new from the old.
They were more careful now. Pam had taught them that. She sat up, looking at the handcuff on her ankle, its other end locked in a chain that was in turn fastened to a fitting screwed into the wall. Had she thought about it, she might have tried ripping it out, which a healthy young woman might have accomplished with a few hours of determined effort. But escape was death, a particularly hard and lengthy death, and as much as she desired the escape from a life grown horrid beyond any nightmare, pain still frightened her. She stood, causing the chain to rattle. After a moment or two Rick came in.
‘Hey, baby’ the young man said with a smile that conveyed amusement rather than affection. He bent down, unlocked the cuffs, and pointed to the bathroom. ‘Shower. You need it.’
‘Where did you learn to cook Chinese?’ Kelly asked.
‘A nurse I worked with last year. Nancy Wu. She’s teaching at the University of Virginia now. You like it?’
‘You kidding me?’ If the shortest distance to any man’s heart is his stomach, then one of the better compliments a man can give a woman is to ask for seconds. He held himself to one glass of wine, but attacked the food as quickly as decent table manners allowed.
‘It’s not that good,’ Sandy said, blatantly fishing for a compliment.
‘It’s much better than what I fix for myself, but if you’re thinking about writing a cookbook, you need somebody with better taste.’ He looked up. ‘I visited Taipei for a week, once, and this is almost that good.’
‘What did you do there?’
‘R and R, sort of a vacation from getting shot at.’ Kelly stopped it there. Not everything he and his friends had done was proper information to convey to a lady. Then he saw that he’d gone too far already.
‘That’s what Tim and – I already had it planned for us to meet in Hawaii, but -‘ Her voice stopped again.
Kelly wanted to reach out to her, take her hand across the table, just to comfort her, but he feared it might seem to be an advance.
‘I know, Sandy. So what else did you learn to cook?’
‘Quite a lot. Nancy stayed with me for a few months and made me do all the cooking. She’s a wonderful teacher.’
‘I believe it.’ Kelly cleaned his plate. ‘What’s your schedule like?’
‘I usually get up quarter after five, leave here just after six. I like to be on the unit half an hour before shift change so I can check the status of the patients and get ready for the new arrivals from the OR. It’s a busy unit. What about you?’
‘Well, it depends on the job. When I’m shooting -‘
‘Shooting?’ Sandy asked, surprised.
‘Explosives. It’s my specialty. You spend a lot of time planning it and setting it up. Usually there’s a few engineers around to fuss and worry and tell me what not to do. They keep forgetting that it’s a hell of a lot easier to blow something up than it is to build it. I do have one trademark, though.’