Without Remorse

“I need a cup of coffee.” The other man got up and walked inside, leaving his briefcase, which Piaggi took in his hand. He and Tucker walked off to his car, a blue Cadillac, without waiting for the other man to come back.

  “Not going to count it?” Tucker asked halfway across the parking lot.

  “If he stiffs us, he knows what happens. This is business, Henry.”

  “That’s right,” Tucker agreed.

  “Bill Murphy,” Kelly said. “I understand you have some vacant apartments.” He held up the Sunday paper.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A one-bedroom would be fine. I really just need a place to hang my clothes,” Kelly told the man. “I travel a lot.”

  “Salesman?” the manager asked.

  “That’s right. Machine tools. I’m new here—new territory, I mean.”

  It was an old garden-apartment complex, built soon after the Second World War for returning veterans, composed exclusively of three-story brick structures. The trees looked about right for that time period. They’d been planted then and grown well, tall enough now to support a good population of squirrels, wide enough to give shade to the parking areas. Kelly looked around approvingly as the manager took him to a first-floor furnished unit.

  “This is just fine,” Kelly announced. He looked around, testing the kitchen sink and other plumbing fixtures. The furniture was obviously used, but in decent shape. There were even air conditioners in the windows of every room.

  “I have other ones—”

  “This is just what I need. How much?”

  “One seventy-five a month, one month security deposit.”

  “Utilities?”

  “You can pay them yourself or we can bill it. Some of our renters prefer that. They’ll average about forty-five dollars a month.”

  “Easier to pay one bill than two or three. Let’s see. One seventy-five, plus forty-five ...”

  “Two-twenty,” the manager said helpfully.

  “Four-forty,” Kelly corrected. “Two months, right? I can pay you with a check, but it’s an out-of-town bank. I don’t have a local account yet. Is cash okay?”

  “Cash is always okay with me,” the manager assured him.

  “Fine.” Kelly took out his wallet, handing over the bills. He stopped. “No, six-sixty, we’ll make it three months, if that’s okay. And I need a receipt.” The helpful manager pulled a pad from his pocket and wrote one up on the spot. “How about a phone?” Kelly asked.

  “I can have that done by Tuesday if you want. There’s another deposit for that.”

  “Please take care of that, if you would.” Kelly handed over some more money. “My stuff won’t be here for a while. Where can I get sheets and stuff?”

  “Nothing much open today. Tomorrow, lots of ’em.”

  Kelly looked through the bedroom door at the bare mattress. He could see the lumps from this distance. He shrugged. “Well, I’ve slept on worse.”

  “Veteran?”

  “Marine,” Kelly said.

  “So was I once,” the manager replied, surprising Kelly. “You don’t do anything wild, do you?” He didn’t expect so, but the owner insisted that he ask, even ex-Marines. The answer was a sheepish, reassuring grin.

  “I snore pretty bad, they tell me.”

  Twenty minutes later Kelly was in a cab heading downtown. He got out at Penn Station and caught the next train to D.C., where another taxi delivered him to his boat. By nightfall, Springer was headed down the Potomac. It would have been so much easier, Kelly told himself, if there were just one person to help him. So much of his time was tied up with useless commuting. But was it really useless? Maybe not. He was getting a lot of thinking done, and that was as important as his physical preparations. Kelly arrived at his home just before midnight after six continuous hours of thinking and planning.

  Despite a weekend of almost nonstop motion, there was no time to dawdle. Kelly packed clothing, most of it purchased in the suburbs of Washington. Linens he would buy in Baltimore. Food the same. His .45 automatic, plus the .22-.45 conversion kit, was packed in with old clothing, along with two boxes of ammunition. He shouldn’t need more than that, Kelly thought, and ammo was heavy. While he fabricated one more silencer, this one for the Woodsman, he thought through his preparations. His physical condition was excellent, nearly as good as it had been in 3rd SOG, and he’d been shooting every day. His aim was probably better than it had ever been, he told himself, going through what were now almost mindless mechanical operations on the machine tools. By three in the morning the new suppressor was fitted to the Woodsman and tested. Thirty minutes after that he was back aboard Springer, headed north, looking forward to a few hours’ sleep once he got past Annapolis.

  It was a lonely night, with scattered clouds, and his mind drifted somewhat before he commanded himself to concentrate. He was not a lazy civilian anymore, but Kelly allowed himself his first beer in weeks while his mind churned over variables. What had he forgotten? The reassuring answer was that he could think of nothing. The less-than-satisfactory thought was that he still knew little. Billy with his red Plymouth muscle car. A black guy named Henry. He knew their area of operation. And that was all.

  But.

  But he’d fought armed and trained enemies with less knowledge than that, and though he would force himself to be just as careful now as he had been there, deep down he knew that he would accomplish this mission. Partly it was because he was more formidable than they, and far more highly motivated. The other part, Kelly realized with surprise, was because he didn’t care about the consequences, only the results. He remembered something from his Catholic prep school, a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid that had defined his mission almost two thousand years before: Una salus victus nullam sperare salutem. The one hope of the doomed is not to hope for safety. The very grimness of the thought made him smile as he sailed under the stars, light dispatched from distances so vast that it had begun its journey long before Kelly, or even Virgil, had been born.

  The pills helped shut out reality, but not all the way. Doris didn’t so much think the thought as listen to it, sense it, like recognizing something that she didn’t wish to face but refused to go away. She was too dependent on the barbiturates now. Sleep came hard to her, and in the emptiness of the room she was unable to avoid herself. She would have taken more pills if she could, but they didn’t allow her what she wanted, not that she wanted much. Just brief oblivion, a short-term liberation from her fear, that was all—and that was something they had no interest in granting her. She could see more than they knew or would have expected, she could peer into the future, but that was little consolation. Sooner or later she would be caught by the police. She’d been arrested before, but not for something of this magnitude, and she’d go away for a long time for this. The police would try to get her to talk, promise her protection. She knew better. Twice now she’d seen friends die. Friends? As close to that as was possible, someone to talk to, someone who shared her life, such as it was, and even in this captivity there were little jokes, small victories against the forces that ruled her existence, like distant lights in a gloomy sky. Someone to cry with. But two of them were dead, and she’d watched them die, sitting there, drugged but unable to sleep and blot it out, the horror so vast that it became numbing, watching their eyes, seeing and feeling the pain, knowing that she could do nothing, knowing even that they knew it as well. A nightmare was bad enough, but one of those couldn’t reach out and touch you. You could wake up and flee from one of those. Not this. She could watch herself from outside, as though she were a robot outside her own command but not that of others. Her body would not move unless others commanded it, and she even had to conceal her thoughts, was even afraid to voice them within her own mind lest they hear them or see them on her face, but now, try as she might, she could not force them away.

  Rick lay next to her, breathing slowly in the darkness. Part of her liked Rick. He was the gentlest of them, and sometimes she allowed herself
to think that he liked her, maybe a little, because he didn’t beat her badly. She had to stay in line, of course, because his anger was every bit as bad as Billy’s, and so around Rick she tried very hard to be good. Part of her knew that it was foolish, but her reality was defined by other people now. And she’d seen the results of real resistance. After one especially bad night Pam had held her, and whispered her desires to escape. Later, Doris had prayed that she had gotten away, that there might be hope after all, only to see her dragged in and to watch her die, sitting helplessly fifteen feet away while they did everything to her that they could imagine. Watching her life end, her body convulsing from lack of oxygen with the man’s face staring at her, laughing at her from an inch away. Her only act of resistance, thankfully unnoticed by the men, had been to brush out her friend’s hair, crying all the while, hoping somehow that Pam would know there was someone who cared, even in death. But the gesture had seemed empty even as she’d done it, making her tears all the more bitter.

  What had she done wrong? Doris wondered, how badly had she offended God that her life should be this way? How could anyone possibly deserve such a bleak and hopeless existence?

  “I’m impressed, John,” Rosen said, staring at his patient. Kelly sat on the examining table, his shirt off. “What have you been doing?”

  “Five-mile swim for the shoulders. Better than weights, but a little of that, too, in the evening. A little running. About what I used to do back in the old days.”

  “I wish I had your blood pressure,” the surgeon observed, removing the cuff. He’d done a major procedure that morning, but he made time for his friend.

  “Exercise, Sam,” Kelly advised.

  “I don’t have the time, John,” the surgeon said—rather weakly, both thought.

  “A doc should know better.”

  “True,” Rosen conceded. “How are you otherwise?”

  The reply was just a look, neither a smile nor a grimace, just a neutral expression that told Rosen all he needed to know. One more try: “There’s an old saying: Before setting out on revenge, dig two graves.”

  “Only two?” Kelly asked lightly.

  Rosen nodded. “I read the post report, too. I can’t talk you out of it?”

  “How’s Sarah?”

  Rosen accepted the deflection with good grace. “Deep into her project. She’s excited enough that she’s telling me about it. It’s pretty interesting stuff.”

  Just then Sandy O’Toole came in. Kelly startled both of them by lifting his T-shirt and covering his chest. “Please!”

  The nurse was so startled that she laughed, and so did Sam until he realized that Kelly was indeed ready for whatever he was planning. The conditioning, the looseness, the steady, serious eyes that changed to mirth when he wanted them to. Like a surgeon, Rosen thought, and what a strange thought that was, but the more he looked at this man, the more intelligence he saw.

  “You’re looking healthy for a guy who got shot a few weeks ago,” O’Toole said with a friendly look.

  “Clean living, ma’am. Only one beer in thirty-some days.”

  “Mrs. Lott is conscious now, Doctor Rosen,” the nurse reported. “Nothing unusual, she appears to be doing fine. Her husband’s been in to see her. I think he’ll be okay, too. I had my doubts.”

  “Thanks, Sandy.”

  “Well, John, you’re healthy, too. Put your shirt on before Sandy starts blushing,” Rosen added with a chuckle.

  “Where do you get lunch around here?” Kelly asked.

  “I’d show you myself, but I have a conference in about ten minutes. Sandy?”

  She checked her watch. “About time for mine. You want to risk hospital food or something outside?”

  “You’re the tour guide, ma’am.”

  She guided him to the cafeteria, where the food was hospital-bland, but you could add salt and other spices if you wanted. Kelly selected something that might be filling, even healthy, to compensate for the lack of taste.

  “Have you been keeping busy?” he asked after they selected a table.

  “Always,” Sandy assured him.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Off Loch Raven Boulevard, just in the County.” She hadn’t changed, Kelly saw. Sandy O’Toole was functioning, quite well in fact, but the emptiness in her life wasn’t qualitatively different from his. The real difference was that he could do something; she could not. She was reaching out, she had a capacity for good humor, but her grief overcame it at every turn. A powerful force, grief. There were advantages in having enemies you could seek out and eliminate. Fighting a shadow was far more difficult.

  “Row house, like they have around here?”

  “No, it’s an old bungalow, whatever you call it, big square two-story house. Half an acre. That reminds me,” she added. “I have to cut the grass this weekend.” Then she remembered that Tim had liked cutting grass, had decided to leave the Army after his second Vietnam tour and get his law degree and live a normal kind of life, all of that taken away from her by little people in a distant place.

  Kelly didn’t know what she was thinking, exactly, but he didn’t have to. The change in her expression, the way her voice trailed off, said it all. How to cheer her up? It was a strange question for him, considering his plans for the next few weeks.

  “You were very kind to me while I was upstairs. Thanks.”

  “We try to take care of our patients,” she said with a friendly and unaccustomed expression.

  “A face as pretty as yours should do that more,” Kelly told her.

  “Do what?”

  “Smile.”

  “It’s hard,” she said, serious again.

  “I know, ma’am. But I did have you laughing before,” Kelly told her.

  “You surprised me.”

  “It’s Tim, isn’t it?” he asked, jolting her. People weren’t supposed to talk about that, were they?

  She stared into Kelly’s eyes for perhaps five seconds. “I just don’t understand.”

  “In some ways it’s easy. In some ways it’s hard. The hard part,” Kelly said, thinking it through himself as he did so, “is understanding why people make it necessary, why people do things like that. What it comes down to is, there are bad people out there, and somebody has to deal with them, ‘cuz if you don’t, then someday they’ll deal with you. You can try ignoring them, but that doesn’t ever work, really. And sometimes you see things you just can’t ignore.” Kelly leaned back, searching for more words. “You see lots of bad things here, Sandy. I’ve seen worse. I’ve watched people doing things—”

  “Your nightmare?”

  Kelly nodded. “That’s right. I almost got myself killed that night.”

  “What was—”

  “You don’t want to know, honest. I mean, I don’t understand that part either, how people can do things like that. Maybe they believe in something so much that they stop remembering that it’s important to be human. Maybe they want something so much that they don’t care. Maybe there’s just something wrong with them, how they think, how they feel. I don’t know. But what they do is real. Somebody has to try and stop it.” Even when you know it’s not going to work, Kelly didn’t have the heart to add. How could he tell her that her husband had died for a failure?

  “My husband was a knight in shiny armor on a white horse? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “You’re the one wearing white, Sandy. You fight against one kind of enemy. There’s other kinds. Somebody has to fight against them, too.”

  “I’ll never understand why Tim had to die.”

  It really came down to that, Kelly thought. It wasn’t about great political or social issues. Everyone had a life, which was supposed to have a natural end after an amount of time determined by God or Fate or something men weren’t supposed to control. He’d seen young men die, and caused his share of deaths, each life something of value to its owner and others, and how did you explain to the others what it was all about? For that matter, how did y
ou explain it to yourself? But that was from the outside. From the inside it was something else. Maybe that was the answer.

  “You do some pretty hard work, right?”

  “Yes,” Sandy said, nodding a little.

  “Why not do something easier? I mean, work a department where it’s different, I don’t know—the nursery, maybe ? That’s a happy place, right?”

  “Pretty much,” the nurse admitted.

  “It’s still important, too, right? Taking care of little babies, it’s routine, yeah, but it still has to be done the right way, doesn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you don’t do that. You work Neuro. You do the hard stuff.”

  “Somebody has to—” Bingo! Kelly thought, cutting her off.

  “It’s hard—hard to do the work, hard on you—it hurts you some, right?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “But you do it anyway,” Kelly pointed out.

  “Yes,” Sandy said, not as an admission, but something stronger.

  “That’s why Tim did what he did.” He saw the understanding there, or perhaps the beginnings of it, just for a moment before her lingering grief pushed the argument aside.

  “It still doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe the thing doesn’t make sense, but the people do,” Kelly suggested. That was about as far as his mind stretched. “Sorry, I’m not a priest, just a broken-down Navy chief.”

  “Not too broken down,” O’Toole said, finishing her lunch.

  “And part of that is your doing, ma’am. Thank you.” That earned him another smile.

  “Not all our patients get better. We’re kind of proud of those who do.”

  “Maybe we’re all trying to save the world, Sandy, one little bit at a time,” Kelly said. He rose and insisted on walking her back to the unit. It took the whole five minutes to say what he wanted to say.

  “You know, I’d like to have dinner with you, maybe? Not now, but, well—”

  “I’ll think about it,” she allowed, half dismissing the idea, half wondering about it, knowing as Kelly did that it was too soon for both of them, though probably not as much for her. What sort of man was this? she asked herself. What were the dangers of knowing him?