Women were better at that than men. Men had egos that they had to nurture within their own fertile minds, and the smaller the mind the greater the ego. Sooner or later one of his people would rebel, get a little too uppity. The hookers he used were so much more easily cowed, and then there was the fringe benefit of having them around. Tucker smiled.
Doris awoke about five, her head pounding with a barbiturate-induced hangover made worse still by the double shot of whiskey that someone had decided to give her. The pain told her that she would have to live another day, that the mixture of drugs and alcohol hadn't done the job she'd dared to hope for when she'd looked at the glass, hesitated, then gunned it down before the party. What had followed the whiskey and the drugs was only half remembered, and it blended into so many other such nights that she had trouble separating the new from the old.
They were more careful now. Pam had taught them that. She sat up, looking at the handcuff on her ankle, its other end locked in a chain that was in turn fastened to a fitting screwed into the wall. Had she thought about it, she might have tried ripping it out, which a healthy young woman might have accomplished with a few hours of determined effort. But escape was death, a particularly hard and lengthy death, and as much as she desired the escape from a life grown horrid beyond any nightmare, pain still frightened her. She stood, causing the chain to rattle. After a moment or two Rick came in.
'Hey, baby' the young man said with a smile that conveyed amusement rather than affection. He bent down, unlocked the cuffs, and pointed to the bathroom. 'Shower. You need it.'
'Where did you learn to cook Chinese?' Kelly asked.
'A nurse I worked with last year. Nancy Wu. She's teaching at the University of Virginia now. You like it?'
'You kidding me?' If the shortest distance to any man's heart is his stomach, then one of the better compliments a man can give a woman is to ask for seconds. He held himself to one glass of wine, but attacked the food as quickly as decent table manners allowed.
'It's not that good,' Sandy said, blatantly fishing for a compliment.
'It's much better than what I fix for myself, but if you're thinking about writing a cookbook, you need somebody with better taste.' He looked up. 'I visited Taipei for a week, once, and this is almost that good.'
'What did you do there?'
'R and R, sort of a vacation from getting shot at.' Kelly stopped it there. Not everything he and his friends had done was proper information to convey to a lady. Then he saw that he'd gone too far already.
'That's what Tim and - I already had it planned for us to meet in Hawaii, but -' Her voice stopped again.
Kelly wanted to reach out to her, take her hand across the table, just to comfort her, but he feared it might seem to be an advance.
'I know, Sandy. So what else did you learn to cook?'
'Quite a lot. Nancy stayed with me for a few months and made me do all the cooking. She's a wonderful teacher.'
'I believe it.' Kelly cleaned his plate. 'What's your schedule like?'
'I usually get up quarter after five, leave here just after six. I like to be on the unit half an hour before shift change so I can check the status of the patients and get ready for the new arrivals from the OR. It's a busy unit. What about you?'
'Well, it depends on the job. When I'm shooting -'
'Shooting?' Sandy asked, surprised.
'Explosives. It's my specialty. You spend a lot of time planning it and setting it up. Usually there's a few engineers around to fuss and worry and tell me what not to do. They keep forgetting that it's a hell of a lot easier to blow something up than it is to build it. I do have one trademark, though.'
'What's that?'
'On my underwater work, I shoot some blasting caps a few minutes before I do the real shoot.' Kelly chuckled. 'To scare the fish away.'
She was puzzled for a second. 'Oh - so they won't get hurt?'
'Right. It's a personal quirk.'
It was just one more thing. He'd killed people in war, threatened a surgeon with permanent injury right in front of her and a security guard, but he went out of his way to protect fish?
'You're a strange one.'
He had the good grace to nod. 'I don't kill for the fun of it. I used to hunt, and I gave that up. I fish a little, but not with dynamite. Anyway, I set the caps a good ways from the real job - that's so it won't have any effect on the important part. The noise scares most of them away. Why waste a perfectly good game fish?' Kelly asked.
It was automatic. Doris was somewhat nearsighted, and the marks looked like dirt when her eyes were clouded by the falling water, but they weren't dirt and they didn't wash off. They never disappeared, merely migrating to different places at the vagaries of the men who inflicted them. She rubbed her hands over them, and the pain told her what they were, reminders of the more recent parties, and then the effort to wash herself became futile. She knew she'd never be clean again. The shower was only good for the smell, wasn't it? Even Rick had made that clear enough, and he was the nicest of them, Doris told herself, finding a fading brown mark that he had placed on her, not one so painful as the bruises that Billy seemed to like.
She stepped out to dry off. The shower was the only part of the room that was even vaguely tidy. Nobody ever bothered to clean the sink or toilet, and the mirror was cracked.
'Much better,' Rick said, watching. His hand extended to give her a pill.
'Thanks.' And so began another day, with a barbiturate to put distance between herself and reality, to make life, if not comfortable, not tolerable, then endurable. Barely. With a little help from her friends, who saw to it that she did endure the reality they made. Doris swallowed the pill with a handful of water, hoping that the effects would come fast. It made things easier, smoothing the sharp edges, putting a distance between herself and her self. It had once been a distance too great to see across, but no longer. She looked at Rick's smiling face as it swept over her.
'You know I love ya, baby,' he said, reaching to fondle her.
A wan smile as she felt his hands. 'Yes.'
'Special party tonight, Dor. Henry's coming over.'
Click. Kelly could almost hear the sound as he got out of the Volkswagen, four blocks from the corner brown-stone, as he switched trains of thought. Entering the 'treeline' was becoming routine. He'd established a comfort level that tonight's dinner had enhanced, his first with another human being in... five weeks, six? He returned to the matter at hand.
He settled into a spot on the other side of the cross street, again finding marble steps which generated a shadow, and waited for the Roadrunner to arrive. Every few minutes he'd lift the wine bottle - he had a new one now, with a red street wine instead of the white - for a simulated drink, while his eyes continuously swept left and right, even up and down to check second- and third-floor windows.
Some of the other cars were more familiar now. He spotted the black Karmann-Ghia which had played its part in Pam's death. The driver, he saw, was someone of his age, with a mustache, prowling the street looking for his connection. He wondered what the man's problem was that to assuage it he had to come from wherever his home might be to this place, risking his physical safety so that he might shorten his life with drugs. He was also leaving corruption and destruction in his wake with the money from the illicit traffic. Didn't he care about that? Didn't he see what drug money did to these neighborhoods?