'You know that guy Farber over at Hopkins?'
'Yeah, Em, he worked the Gooding case with Frank Allen. I set the date up. He's real smart,' Douglas allowed. 'A little peculiar, but smart. I have to be in court this afternoon, remember?'
'Okay, I think I can handle it. I owe you a beer, Tom. You figured this one faster than I did.'
'Well, thanks, maybe I can be a lieutenant, too, some-day.'
Ryan laughed, fishing out a cigarette as he walked down the stairs.
'You going to resist?' Kelly asked with a smile. He'd just come back into the salon after tying up to the quay.
'Why should I help you with anything?'?ill? asked with what he thought to be defiance.
'Okay.' Kelly drew the Ka-Bar and held it next to a particularly sensitive place. 'We can start right now if you want.'
The whole body shriveled, but one part more than the others. 'Okay, okay!'
'Good. I want you to learn a little from this. I don't want you ever to hurt another girl again.' Kelly loosed the shackles from the deck fitting, but his arms were still together, bolted in tight, as he stood Billy up.
'Fuck you, man! You're gonna kill me! And I ain't gonna tell you shit.'
Kelly twisted him around to stare in his eyes. 'I'm not going to kill you, Billy. You'll leave this island alive. I promise.'
The confusion on his face was sufficiently amusing that Kelly actually smiled for a second. Then he shook his head. He told himself that he was treading a very narrow and hazardous path between two equally dangerous slopes, and to both extremes lay madness, of two different types but equally destructive. He had to detach himself from the reality of the moment, yet hold on to it. Kelly helped him down from the boat and walked him towards the machinery bunker.
'Thirsty?'
'I need to take a piss, too.'
Kelly guided him onto some grass. 'Go right ahead.' Kelly waited. Billy didn't like being naked, not in front of another man, not in a subordinate position. Foolishly, he wasn't trying to talk to Kelly now, at least not in the right way. Coward that he was, he'd tried to build up his manhood earlier, trying to talk not so much to Kelly as himself as he'd recounted his part in ending Pam's life, creating for himself an illusion of power, when silence might - well, would probably not have saved him. It might have created doubts, though, especially if he'd been clever enough to spin a good yarn, but cowardice and stupidity were not strangers to each other, were they? Kelly let him stand untended while he dialed the combination lock. Turning on the interior lights, he pushed Billy inside.
It looked like - was in fact a steel cylinder, seventeen inches in diameter, sitting on its own legs with large caster-wheels at the bottom, just where he'd left it. The steel cover on the end was not in place, hanging down on its hinge.
'You're going to get in that,' Kelly told him.
'Fuck you, man!' Defiance again. Kelly used the butt end of the Ka-Bar to club him on the back of the neck. Billy fell to his knees.
'One way or another, you're getting in - bleeding or not bleeding, I really don't care.' Which was a lie, but an effective one. Kelly lifted him by the neck and forced his head and shoulders into the opening. 'Don't move.'
It was so much easier than he'd expected. Kelly pulled a key off its place on the wall and unbolted the shackles on Billy's hands. He could feel his prisoner tense, thinking that he might have a chance, but Kelly was fast on the wrench - he only had to remove one bolt to free both hands, and a prod from the knife in the right place encouraged Billy not to back up, which was the necessary precursor to any kind of effective resistance. Billy was just too cowardly to accept pain as the price for a chance at escape. He trembled but didn't resist at all, for all his lavish and desperate thoughts.
'Inside!' A push helped, and when his feet were inside the rim, Kelly lifted the hatch and bolted it into place. Then he walked out, flipping the lights off. He needed something to eat and a nap. Billy could wait. The waiting would just make things easier.
'Hello?' Her voice sounded very worried.
'Hi, Sandy, it's John.'
'John! What's going on?'
'How is she?'
'Doris, you mean? She's sleeping now,' Sandy told him. 'John, who - I mean, what's happened to her?'
Kelly squeezed the phone receiver in his hand. 'Sandy, I want you to listen to me very carefully, okay? This is really important.'
'Okay, go ahead.' Sandy was in her kitchen, looking at a pot of coffee. Outside she could see neighborhood children playing a game of ball on a vacant field whose comforting normality now seemed to be very distant indeed.
'Number one, don't tell anybody that she's there. Sure as hell you don't tell the police.'
'John, she's badly injured, she's hooked on pills, she probably has severe medical problems on top of that. I have to-'
'Sam and Sarah, then. Nobody else. Sandy, you got that? Nobody else. Sandy...' Kelly hesitated. It was too hard a thing to say, but he had to make it clear. 'Sandy, I have placed you in danger. The people who worked Doris over are the same ones -'
'I know, John. I kinda figured that one out.' The nurse's expression was neutral, but she too had seen the photo of Pamela Starr Madden's body. 'John, she told me that you - killed somebody.'
'Yes, Sandy, I did.'
Sandra O'Toole wasn't surprised. She'd made the right guesses a few hours before, but hearing it from him - it was the way he'd just said it. Calm, matter-of-fact. Yes. Sandy, I did. Did you take the garbage out? Yes, Sandy, I did.
'Sandy, these are some very dangerous people. I could have left Doris behind - but I couldn't, could I? Jesus, Sandy, did you see what they -'
'Yes.' It had been a long time since she'd worked the ER, and she'd almost forgotten the dreadful things that people did to one another.
'Sandy, I'm sorry that I -'
'John, it's done. I'll handle it, okay?' Kelly stopped talking for a moment, taking strength from her voice. Perhaps that was the difference between them. His instinct was to lash out, to identify the people who did the evil things and to deal with them. Seek out and destroy. Her instinct was to protect in a different way, and it struck the former SEAL that her strength might well be the greater.
'I'll have to get her proper medical attention.' Sandy thought about the young woman upstairs in the back bedroom. She'd helped her get cleaned off and been horrified at the marks on her body, the vicious physical abuse. But worst of all were her eyes, dead, absent of the defiant spark that she saw in patients even as they lost their fight for life. Despite years of work in the care of critically ill patients, she'd never realized that a person could be destroyed on purpose, through deliberate, sadistic malice. Now she might come to the attention of such people herself, Sandy knew, but greater than her fear for them was her loathing.
For Kelly those feelings were precisely inverted. 'Okay, Sandy, but please be careful. Promise me.'
'I will. I'm going to call Doctor Rosen.' She paused for a moment. 'John?'
'Yes, Sandy?'
'What you're doing... it's wrong, John.' She hated herself for saying that.
'I know,' Kelly told her.
Sandy closed her eyes, still seeing the kids chasing a baseball outside, then seeing John, wherever he was, knowing the expression that had to be on his face. She knew she had to say the next part, too, and she took a deep breath: 'But I don't care about that, not anymore. I understand, John.'
'Thank you,' Kelly whispered. 'Are you okay?'
'I'll do fine.'
'I'll be back as soon as I can. I don't know what we can do with her - '