Billy did what he was told. ??ll? pushed the girl back on the mattress and reached in his belt for the electrical wire. In a few seconds the hands were securely wrapped and knotted. The left hand still held a pair of pliers, which Kelly took and used to tighten the wire yet more, drawing a gasp from Billy.
Pliers?
Jesus.
The girl was staring at his face, eyes wide, breath heavy, but her movements were slow and her head was tilted. She was drugged to some extent. And she had seen his face, was looking at it now, memorizing it.
Why do you have to be here? This is out of the pattern. You’re a complication. I ought to … ought to …
If you do that, John, then what the fuck are you?
Oh, shit!
Kelly’s hands started shaking then. This was real danger, if he let her live, then someone would know who he was-a description, enough to start a proper manhunt, and that would – might – prevent him from accomplishing his goal. But the greater danger was to his soul. If he killed her, that was lost forever. Of that he was certain. Kelly closed his eyes and shook his head. Everything was supposed to have gone so smoothly.
Shit happens, Johnnie-boy.
‘Get dressed,’ he told her, tossing some stuff in her direction. ‘Do it now, be quiet, and stay there.’
‘Who are you?’ Billy asked, giving Kelly an outlet for his rage. The distributor felt something cold and round at the back of his head.
‘You even breathe loud, and your brains go on this floor, got it?’ The head nodded by way of an answer.
Now what the hell do I do? Kelly demanded of himself. He looked over at the girl, struggling to put panties on. The light caught her breasts and Kelly’s stomach revolted at the marks he saw there. ‘Hurry up,’ he told her.
Damn damn damn. Kelly checked the wire on Billy’s wrists and decided to do another loop at the elbows, hurting him badly, straining the shoulders, but ensuring that he wouldn’t be doing any resisting. To make things worse, he lifted Billy by the arms to a standing position, which evoked a scream.
‘Hurt a little, does it?’ Kelly asked. Then he applied a gag and turned him to the door. ‘Walk.’ To the girl: ‘You, too.’
Kelly conducted them down the steps. There was some broken glass, and Billy’s feet danced around it, sustaining cuts. What surprised Kelly was the girl’s reaction to the body at the bottom.
‘Rick!’ she gasped, then stooped down to touch the body.
It had a name, Kelly thought, lifting the girl. ‘Out the back.’
He stopped them at the kitchen, leaving them alone for an instant and looking out the back door. He could see his car, and there was no activity in his view. There was danger in what came next, but danger had again become his companion. Kelly led them out. The girl was looking at Billy, and he at her, motioning with his eyes. Kelly was dumbfounded to see that she was reacting to his silent entreaties. He took her arm and moved her aside.
‘Don’t worry about him, miss.’ He pointed her to the car, maneuvering Billy by the upper arm.
A distant voice told him that if she tried to help Billy, then he would have an excuse to –
No, goddamn it!
Kelly unlocked the car, forcing Billy in, then the girl into the front seat, before moving fast to the left-side door. Before starting the car he leaned over the seat and wired up Billy’s ankles and knees.
‘Who are you?’ the girl asked as the car started moving.
‘A friend,’ Kelly said calmly. ‘I am not going to hurt you. If I wanted to do that, I could have left you with Rick, okay?’
Her reply was slow and uneven, but for all that, still amazing to Kelly. ‘Why did you have to kill him? He was nice to me.’
What the hell? Kelly thought, looking over at her. Her face was scraped, her hair a mess. He turned his eyes back to the street. A police cruiser went past on a reciprocal heading, and despite a brief moment of panic on Kelly’s part, it just kept going, disappearing as he turned north.
Think fast. boy.
Kelly could have done many things, but only one alternative was realistic. Realistic? he asked himself. Oh, sure.
One does not expect to hear doorbells at a quarter to three in the morning. Sandy first thought she had dreamed it, but her eyes had opened, and in the way of the mind, the sound played back to her as though she had actually awakened a second earlier. Even so, she must have dreamed it, the nurse told herself, shaking her head. She’d just started to close her eyes again when it repeated. Sandy rose, slipped on a robe, and went downstairs, too disoriented to be frightened. There was a shape on the porch. She turned on the lights as she opened the door.
‘Turn that fucking light off!’ A rasping voice that was nonetheless familiar. The command it carried caused her to flip the switch without so much as a thought.
‘What are you doing here?’ There was a girl at his side, looking thoroughly horrible.
‘Call in sick. You’re not going to work today. You’re going to take care of her. Her name is Doris,’ Kelly said, speaking in the low commanding tone of a surgeon in the middle of a complex procedure.
‘Wait a minute!’ Sandy stood erect and her mind started racing. Kelly was wearing a woman’s wig – well, too dirty for that. He was unshaven, had on awful clothes, but his eyes were burning with something. Rage was part of it, a fury at something, and the man’s strong hands were shaking at his side.
‘Remember about Pam?’ he asked urgently.
‘Well, yes, but-‘
‘This girl’s in the same spot. I can’t help her. Not now. I have to do something else.’
‘What are you doing, John?’ Sandy asked, a different sort of urgency in her voice. And then, somehow, it was very clear. The TV news reports she’d been watching over dinner on the black-and-white set in the kitchen, the look she’d seen in his eyes in the hospital; the look she saw now, so close to the other, but different, the desperate compassion and the trust it demanded of her.
‘Somebody’s been beating the shit out of her, Sandy. She needs help.’
‘John,’ she whispered. ‘John… you’re putting your life in my hands …’
Kelly actually laughed, after a fashion, a bleak snort that went beyond irony. ‘Yeah, well, you did okay the first time, didn’t you?’ He pushed Doris in the door and walked away, off to a car, without looking back.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ the girl, Doris, said. Sandy hustled her to the first-floor bathroom and got her to the toilet in time. The young woman knelt there for a minute or two, emptying her belly into the white porcelain bowl. After another minute or so, she looked up. In the glare of incandescent lights off the white-tile walls, Sandra O’Toole saw the face of hell.
CHAPTER 20
Depressurization
It was after four when Kelly pulled into the marina. He backed the Scout to the transom of his boat and got out to open the cargo hatch after checking the darkness for spectators, of which, thankfully, there were none.
‘Hop,’ he told Billy, and that he did. Kelly pushed him aboard, then directed him into the main salon. Once there, Kelly got some shackles, regular marine handware, and fastened Billy’s wrists to a deck fitting. Ten minutes more and he had cast off, heading out to the Bay, and finally Kelly allowed himself to relax. With the boat on autopilot, he loosed the wires on Billy’s arms and legs.
Kelly was tired. Moving Billy from the back of the VW into the Scout had been harder than he’d expected, and at that he’d been lucky to miss the newspaper distributor, dumping his bundles on street corners for the paper boy to unwrap and deliver before six. He settled back into the control chair, drinking some coffee and stretching by way of reward to his body for its efforts.
Kelly had the lights turned way down so that he could navigate without being blinded by the internal glow of the salon. Off to port were a half-dozen cargo ships tied up at Dundalk Marine Terminal, but very little in his sight was moving. There was always something relaxing about the water at a time like this, the winds were calm, and the surface a gently undulating mirror that danced with lights on the shore. Red and green lights from buoys blinked on and off while telling ships to stay out of dangerous shallows. Springer passed by Fort Carroll, a low octagon of gray stone, built by First Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, US Army Corps of Engineers; it had held twelve-inch rifles as recently as sixty years before. The orange fires of the Bethlehem Steel Sparrow’s Point Works glowed to the north. Tugboats were starting to move out of their basins to help various ships out of their berths, or to help bring new ones alongside, and their diesels growled across the flat surface in a distant, friendly way. Somehow that noise only emphasized the pre-dawn peace. The quiet was overwhelmingly comforting, just as things should be in preparation for the start of a new day.