‘Who the fuck are you?’ Billy asked, relieved of his gag and unable to bear the silence. His arms were still behind him, but his legs were free, and he sat up on the deck of the salon.
Kelly sipped his coffee, allowing his tired arms to relax and ignoring the noise behind him.
‘I said, who the fuck are you!’ Billy called more loudly.
It was going to be a warm one. The sky was clear. There were plenty of stars visible, with not even a hint of gathering clouds. No ‘Red Sky at Morning’ to cause Kelly concern, but the outside temperature had dipped only to seventy-seven, and that boded ill for the coming day, with the hot August sun to beat down on things.
‘Look, asshole, I want to know who the fuck you are.’
Kelly shifted a little in the wide control chair, taking another sip of his coffee. His compass course was one-two-one, keeping to the southern edge of the shipping channel, as was his custom. A brightly lit tug was coming in, probably from Norfolk, towing a pair of barges, but it was too dark to see what sort of cargo they bore. Kelly checked the lights and saw that they were properly displayed. That would please the Coast Guard, which wasn’t always happy with the way the local tugs operated. Kelly wondered what sort of life it was, moving barges up and down the Bay. Had to be awfully dull doing the same thing, day in and day out, back and forth, north and south, at a steady six knots, seeing the same things all the time. It paid well, of course. A master and a mate, and an engineer, and a cook – they had to have a cook. Maybe a deckhand or two. Kelly wasn’t sure about that. All taking down union wages, which were pretty decent.
‘Hey, okay. I don’t know what the problem is, but we can talk about it, okay?’
The maneuvering in close was probably pretty tricky, though. Especially in any kind of wind, the barges had to be unhandy things to bring alongside. But not today. Today it wouldn’t be windy. Just hotter than hell. Kelly started his turn south as he passed Bodkin Point, and he could see the red lights blinking on the towers of the Bay Bridge at Annapolis. The first glow of dawn was decorating the eastern horizon. It was kind of sad, really. The last two hours before sunrise were the best time of the day, but something that few ever bothered to appreciate. Just one more case of people who never knew what was going on around them. Kelly thought he saw something, but the glass windsheld interfered with visibility, and so he left the control station and went topside. There he lifted his marine 7 x 50s, and then the microphone of his radio.
‘Motor Yacht Springer calling Coast Guard forty-one-boat, over.’
‘This is Coast Guard, Springer. Portagee here. What are you doing up so early, Kelly? Over.’
‘Carrying out my commerce on the sea, Oreza. What’s your excuse? Over.’
‘Looking out for feather merchants like you to rescue, getting some training done, what do you think? Over.’
‘Glad to hear that, Coast Guard. You push those lever-things towards the front of the boat – that’s the pointy part, usually – and she goes faster. And the pointy part goes the same way you turn the wheel – you know, left to go left, right to go right. Over.’
Kelly could hear the laughter over the FM circuit. ‘Roger, copy that, Springer, I will pass that along to my crew. Thank you, sir, for the advice. Over.’
The crew on the forty-one-foot boat was howling after a long eight hours of patrol, and doing very little. Oreza was letting a young seaman handle the wheel, leaning on the wheelhouse bulkhead and sipping his own coffee as he played with the radio mike.
‘You know, Springer, I don’t take that sort of guff off many guys. Over.’
‘A good sailor respects his betters, Coast Guard. Hey, is it true your boats have wheels on the bottom? Over.’
‘Ooooooo,’ observed a new apprentice.
‘Ah, that’s a negative, Springer. We take the training wheels off after the Navy pukes leave the shipyard. We don’t like it when you ladies get seasick just from looking at them. Over!’
Kelly chuckled and altered course to port to stay well clear of the small cutter. ‘Nice to know that our country’s waterways are in such capable hands, Coast Guard, ‘specially with a weekend coming up.’
‘Careful, Springer, or I’ll hit you for a safety inspection!’
‘My federal tax money at work?’
‘I hate to see it wasted.’
‘Well, Coast Guard, just wanted to make sure y’all were awake.’
‘Roger and thank you very much, sir. We were dozing a little. Nice to know we have real pros like you out here to keep us on our toes.’
‘Fair winds, Portagee.’
‘And to you, Kelly. Out.’ The radio frequency returned to the usual static.
And that took care of that, Kelly thought. It wouldn’t do to have him come alongside for a chat. Not just now. Kelly secured the radio and went below. The eastern horizon was pink-orange now, another ten minutes or so until the sun made its appearance.
‘What was that all about?’ Billy asked.
Kelly poured himself another cup of coffee and checked the autopilot. It was warm enough now that he removed his shirt. The scars on his back from the shotgun blast could hardly have been more clear, even in the dim light of a breaking dawn. There was a remarkable long silence, punctuated by a deep intake of breath.
‘You’re …’
This time Kelly turned, looking down at the naked man chained to the deck. ‘That’s right.’
‘I killed you,’ Billy objected. He’d never gotten the word. Henry hadn’t passed it along, deeming it to be irrelevant to his operation.
‘Think so?’ Kelly asked, looking forward again. One of the diesels was running a little warmer than the other, and he made a note to check the cooling system after his other business was done. Otherwise the boat was behaving as docilely as ever, rocking gently on the almost invisible swells, moving along at a steady twenty knots, the bow pitched up at about fifteen degrees on an efficient planing angle. On the step, as Kelly called it. He stretched again, flexing muscles, letting Billy see the scars and what lay under them.
‘So that’s what it’s about… she told us all about you before we snuffed her.’
Kelly scanned the instrument panel, then checked the chart as he approached the Bay Bridge. Soon he’d cross over to the eastern side of the channel. He was now checking the boat’s clock – he thought of it as a chronometer – at least once a minute.
‘Pam was a great little fuck. Right up to the end,’ Billy said, taunting his captor, filling the silence with his own malignant words, finding a sort of courage there. ‘Not real smart, though. Not real smart.’
Just past the Bay Bridge, Kelly disengaged the autopilot and turned the wheel ten degrees to port. There was no morning traffic to speak of, but he looked carefully anyway before initiating the maneuver. A pair of running lights just on the horizon announced the approach of a merchant ship, probably twelve thousand yards off. Kelly could have flipped on the radar to check, but in these weather conditions it just would have been a waste of electricity.
‘Did she tell you about the passion marks?’ Billy sneered. He didn’t see Kelly’s hands tighten on the wheel.
The marks about the breasts appear to have been made with an ordinary set of pliers, the pathology report had said. Kelly had it all memorized, every single word of the dry medical phraseology, as though engraved with a diamond stylus on a plate of steel. He wondered if the medics had felt the same way he did. Probably so. Their anger had probably manifested itself in the increased detachment of their dictated notes. Professionals were like that.
‘She talked, you know, she told us everything. How you picked her up, how you partied. We taught her that, mister. You owe us for that! Before she ran, I bet she didn’t tell you, she nicked us all, three, four times each. I guess she thought that was pretty smart, eh? I guess she never figured that we’d all get to fuck her some more.’
O+, O-, AB-, Kelly thought. Blood type O was by far the most common of all, and so that meant there could well have been more than three of them. And what blood type are you, Billy?
‘Just a whore. A pretty one, but just a fucking little whore. That’s how she died, did you know? She died while she was fucking a guy. We strangled her, and her cute little ass was pumping hard, right up till the time her face turned purple. Funny to watch,’ Billy assured him with a leer that Kelly didn’t have to see. ‘I had my fun with her – three times, man! I hurt her, I hurt her bad, you hear me?’