Without Remorse

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 homible.

  “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.

  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 hardware, 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, U.S. 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 windshield 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 fucked 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?”

  Kelly opened his mouth wide, breathing slowly and regularly, not allowing his muscles to tense up now. The morning wind had picked up some, letting the boat rock perhaps five degrees left and right of the vertical, and he allowed his body to ride with the rolls, commanding himself to accept the soothing motion of the sea.

  “I don’t know what the big deal is,
I mean, she’s just a dead whore. We should be able to cut a deal, like. You know how dumb you are? There was seventy grand back in the house, you dumb son of a bitch. Seventy grand!” Billy stopped, seeing it wasn’t working. Still, an angry man made mistakes, and he’d rattled the guy before. He was sure of that, and so he continued.

  “You know, the real shame, I guess, is she needed drugs. You know, if she just knew another place to score, we never woulda seen y’all. Then you fucked up, too, remember.”

  Yes, I remember.

  “I mean, you really were dumb. Didn’t you know about phones? Jesus, man. After our car got stuck, we called Burt and got his car, and just went cruisin’, like, and there you were, easy as hell to spot in that jeep. You must’ve really been under her spell, man.”

  Phones? It was something that simple that had killed Pam? Kelly thought. His muscles went taut. You fucking idiot, Kelly. Then his shoulders went slack, just for a second, with the realization of how thoroughly he had failed her, and part of him recognized the emptiness of his efforts at revenge. But empty or not, it was something he would have. He sat up straighter in the control chair.

  “I mean, shit, car easy to spot like that, how fuckin’ dumb can a guy be?” Billy asked, having just seen real feedback from his taunts. Now perhaps he could start real negotiations. “I’m kinda surprised you’re alive—hey, I mean, it wasn’t anything personal. Maybe you didn’t know the work she did for us. We couldn’t let her loose with what she knew, right? I can make it up to you. Let’s make a deal, okay?”

  Kelly checked the autopilot and the surface. Springer was moving on a safe and steady course, and nothing in sight was on a converging path. He rose from his chair and moved to another, a few feet from Billy.

  “She told you that we were in town to score some drugs? She told you that?” Kelly asked, his eyes level with Billy’s.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Billy was relaxing. He was puzzled when Kelly started weeping in front of him. Perhaps here was a chance to get out of his predicament. “Geez, I’m sorry, man,” Billy said in the wrong sort of voice. “I mean, it’s just bad luck for you.”