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.
'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.'
