But she'd learned something about Kelly this day. The look she'd seen and been unable to forget had not been an illusion. Holding Khofan's right hand, the look on John's face had been - well, no expression at all, not even amusement at his humiliation of the little worm, and that was vaguely frightening to her.
'So what's wrong with your car?' Kelly asked, pulling onto Broadway and heading north.
'If I knew that, it wouldn't be broke.'
'Yeah, I guess that makes sense,' Kelly allowed with a smile.
He's a changeling, Sandy told herself. He turns things on and off. With Khofan he was like a gangster or something. First he tried to calm things down with a reasonable word, but then he acted like he was going to inflict a permanent injury. Just like that. No emotion at all. Like squashing a bug. But if that's true, what is he? Was it temper? No, she told herself, probably not. He's too in control for that. A psychopath? That was a scary thought - but no, that wasn't possible either. Sam and Sarah wouldn't have a friend like that, and they're two very smart people.
What, then?
'Well, I brought my toolbox. I'm pretty good on diesels. Aside from our little friend, how was work?'
'A good day,' Sandy said, glad again for the distraction. 'We discharged one we were really worried about. Little black girl, three, fell out of her crib. Doctor Rosen did a wonderful job on her. In a month or two you'll never know she was hurt at all'
'Sam's a good troop,' Kelly observed. 'Not just a good doc - he's got class, too.'
'So's Sarah.' Good troop, that's what Tim would have said.
'Great lady.' Kelly nodded, turning left onto North Avenue. 'She did a lot for Pam,' he said, this time reporting facts without the time for reflection. Then Sandy saw his face change again, freezing in place as though he'd heard the words from another's voice.
The painwon't ever goaway, will it? Kelly asked himself. Again he saw her in his mind, and for a brief, cruel second, he told himself - lied, knowing it even as it happened - that she was beside him, sitting there on the right seat. But it wasn't Pam, never would be again. His hands tightened on the plastic of the steering wheel, the knuckles suddenly white as he commanded himself to set it aside. Such thoughts were like minefields. You wandered into them, innocent, expecting nothing, then found out too late that there was danger. It would be better not to remember, Kelly thought. I'd really be better off that way. But if without memories, good and bad, what was life, and if you forgot those who mattered to you, then what did you become? And if you didn't act on those memories, what value did life have?
Sandy saw it all on his face. A changeling, perhaps, but not always guarded. You're nota psychopath. You feel pain and they don't - at least not from the death of a friend. What are you, then?
CHAPTER 18
Interference
'Do it again,' he told her.
Thunk.
'Okay, I know what it is,' Kelly said. He leaned over her Plymouth Satellite, jacket and tie off, sleeves rolled up. His hands were already dirty from half an hour's probing.
'Just like that?' Sandy got out of her car, taking the keys with her, which seemed odd, on reflection, since the damned car wouldn't start. Whynotleave them in and let some car thief go mast she wondered.
'I got it down to one thing. It's the solenoid switch.'
'What's that?' she asked, standing next to Kelly and looking at the oily-blue mystery that was an automobile engine.
'The little switch you put the key in isn't big enough for all the juice you need to turn the starter, so that switch controls a bigger one here.' Kelly pointed with a wrench. 'It activates an electromagnet that closes a bigger switch, and that one lets the electricity go to the starter motor. Follow me so far?'
'I think so.' Which was almost true. 'They told me I needed a new battery.'
'I suppose somebody told you that mechanics love to -'
'Jerk women around 'cuz we're so dumb with cars?' Sandy noted with a grimace.
'Something like that. You're going to have to pay me something, though,' Kelly told her, rummaging in his toolbox.
'What's that?'
'I'm going to be too dirty to take you out to dinner. We have to eat here,' he said, disappearing under the car, white shirt, worsted slacks and all. A minute later he was back out, his hands dirty. 'Try it now.'
Sandy got back in and turned the key. The battery was down a little but the engine caught almost at once.
'Leave it on to charge things up.'
'What was it?'
'Loose wire. All I did was tighten it up some.' Kelly looked at his clothes and grimaced. So did Sandy. 'You need to take it into the shop and have a lock washer put on the nut. Then it shouldn't get loose again.'
'You didn't have to -'
'You have to get to work tomorrow, right?' Kelly asked reasonably. 'Where can I wash up?'
Sandy led him into the house and pointed him towards a bathroom. Kelly got the grime off his hands before rejoining her in the living room.
'Where'd you learn to fix cars?' she asked, handing him a glass of wine.
'My dad was a shade-tree mechanic. He was a fireman, remember? He had to learn all that stuff, and he liked it. I learned from him. Thanks.' Kelly toasted her with the glass. He wasn't a wine drinker, but it wasn't bad.
'Was?'
'He died while I was in Vietnam, heart attack on the job. Mom's gone, too. Liver cancer, when I was in grade school,' Kelly explained as evenly as he could. The pain was distant now. 'That was tough. Dad and I were pretty close. He was a smoker, that's probably what killed him. I was sick myself at the time, infection from a job I did. I couldn't get home or anything. So I just stayed over there when I got better.'
'I wondered why nobody came to visit you, but I didn't ask,' Sandy said, realizing how alone John Kelly was.
'I have a couple uncles and some cousins, but we don't see each other much.'
It was a little clearer now, Sandy thought. Losing his mother at a young age, and in a particularly cruel and lingering.way. He'd probably always been a big kid, tough and proud, but helpless to change things. Every woman in his life had been taken away by force of one kind or another: his mother, his wife, and his lover. How much rage he must feel, she told herself. It explained so much. When he'd seen Khofan threatening her, it was something he could protect her from. She still thought she could have handled it herself, but now she understood a little better. It defused her lingering anger, as did his manner. He didn't get too close to her, didn't undress her with his eyes - Sandy particularly hated that, though, strangely, she allowed patients to do it because she felt that it helped to perk them up. He acted like a friend, she realized, as one of Tim's fellow officers might have done, mixing familiarity with respect for her identity, seeing her as a person first, a woman after that. Sandra Manning O'Toole found herself liking it. As big and tough as he was, there was nothing to fear from this man. It seemed an odd observation with which to begin a relationship, if that was the thing happening.
Another thunk announced the arrival of the evening paper. Kelly got it and scanned the front page before dropping it on the coffee table. A front-page story on this slow summer news day was the discovery of another dead drug pusher. She saw Kelly looking at it, scanning the first couple of paragraphs.
Henry's increasing control of the local drug traffic virtually ensured that the newly dead dealer had been one of his distant minions. He'd known the dead man by his street name and only learned the real one, Lionel Hall, from the news article. They'd never actually met, but Bandanna had been mentioned to him as a clever chap, one worth keeping his eye on. Not clever enough, Tucker thought. The ladder to success in his business was steep, with slippery rungs, the selection process brutally Darwinian, and somehow Lionel Hall had not been equal to the demands of his new profession. A pity, but not a matter of great import. Henry rose from his chair and stretched. He'd slept late, having taken delivery two days earlier of fully fifteen kilograms of 'material,' as he was starting to call it. The boat trip to and from the packaging point had takes its toll - it was becoming a pain in the ass, Tucker thought, maintaining that elaborate cover. Those thoughts were dangerous, however, and he knew it. This time he'd merely watched his people do the work. And now two more knew more than they'd known before, but he was tired of doing such menial work himself. He had minions for that, little people who knew that they were little and knew they would prosper only so long as they followed orders exactly.