Without Remorse

' "Ma'am." '

That one caught Farber short. 'Exactly! Very good. Why didn't he eliminate her? That's the only witness we know about. He was polite to her. He let her go... interesting... but not enough to go on, really.'

'Except to say that he's not killing for fun.'

'Correct.' Farber nodded. 'Everything he does will have a purpose, and he has a lot of specialized training that he can apply to this mission. It is a mission. You have one really dangerous cat prowling the street.'

'He's after drug people. That's pretty clear,' Ryan said. 'The one - maybe two - he kidnapped...'

'If one is a woman, she'll survive. The man will not. From the condition of his body we'll be able to tell if he was the target.'

'Rage?'

'That will be obvious. One other thing - if you have police looking for this guy, remember that he's better with weapons than almost anybody. He'll look harmless. He'll avoid a confrontation. He doesn't want to kill the wrong people, or he would have killed this Mrs Charles.'

'But if we corner him -'

'You don't want to do that.'

'All comfy?' Kelly asked.

The recompression chamber was one of several hundred produced for a Navy contract requirement by the Dykstra Foundry and Tool Company, Inc., of Houston, Texas, or so the name plate said. Made of high-quality steel, it was designed to reproduce the pressure that came along with scuba diving. At one end was a triple-paned four-inch-square Plexiglas window. There was even a small air lock so that items could be passed in, like food or drink, and inside the chamber was a twenty-watt reading light in a protected fixture. Under the chamber itself was a powerful, gasoline-powered air compressor, which could be controlled from a fold-down seat, adjacent to which were two pressure gauges. One was labeled in concentric circles of millimeters and inches of mercury, pounds-per-square-inch, kilograms-per-square-centimeter, and 'bar' or multiples of normal atmospheric pressure, which was 14.7 PSI. The other gauge showed equivalent water depth both in feet and meters. Each thirty-three feet of simulated depth raised the atmopsheric pressure by 14.7 PSI, or one bar.

'Look, whatever you want to know, okay...' Kelly heard over the intercom.

'I thought you'd see things my way.' He yanked the rope on the motor, starting the compressor. Kelly made sure that the simple spigot valve next to the pressure gauges was tightly shut. Then he opened the pressurization valve, venting air from the compressor to the chamber, and watched the needles rotate slowly clockwise.

'You know how to swim?' Kelly asked, watching his face.

Billy's head jerked with alarm. 'What - look, please, don't drown me, okay?'

'That's not going to happen. So, can you swim?'

'Yeah, sure.'

'Ever do any skin diving?' Kelly asked next.

'No, no, I haven't,' replied a very confused drug distributor.

'Okay, well, you're going to learn what it's like. You should yawn and work your ears, like, to get used to the pressure,' Kelly told him, watching the 'depth' gauge pass thirty feet.

'Look, why don't you just ask your fucking questions, okay?'

Kelly switched the intercom off. There was just too much fear in the voice. Kelly didn't really like hurting people all that much, and he was worried about developing sympathy for Billy. He steadied the gauge at one hundred feet, closing off the pressurization valve but leaving the motor running. While Billy adjusted to the pressure, Kelly found a hose which he attached to the motor's exhaust pipe. This he extended outside to dump the carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. It would be a time-consuming process, just waiting for things to happen. Kelly was going on memory, and that was worrisome. There was a useful but rather rough instruction table on the side of the chamber, the bottom line of which commanded reference to a certain diving manual which Kelly did not' have. He'd done very little deep diving of late, and the only one that had really concerned him had been a team effort, the oil rig down in the Gulf. Kelly spent an hour tidying things up around the machine shop, cultivating his memories and his rage before coming back to his fold-down seat.

'How are you feeling?'

'Look, okay, all right?' Rather a nervous voice, actually.

'Ready to answer some questions?'

'Anything, okay? Just let me outa here!'

'Okay, good.' Kelly lifted a clipboard. 'Have you ever been arrested, Billy?'

'No.' A littl? pride in that one, Kelly noted. Good.

'Been in the service?'

'No.' Such a stupid question.

'So you've never been in jail, never been fingerprinted, nothing like that?'

'Never.' The head shook inside the window.

'How do I know you're telling the truth?'

'I am, man! I am!'

'Yeah, you probably are, but I have to make sure, okay?' Kelly reached with his left hand and twisted the spigot valve. Air hissed loudly out of the chamber while he watched the pressure gauges.

Billy didn't know what to expect, and it all came as a disagreeable surprise. In the preceding hour, he had been surrounded by four times the normal amount of air for the space he was in. His body had adapted to that. The air taken in through his lungs, also pressurized, had found its way into his bloodstream, and now his entire body was at 58.8 pounds per square inch of ambient pressure. Various gas bubbles, mainly nitrogen, were dissolved into his bloodstream, and when Kelly bled the air out of the chamber, those bubbles started to expand. Tissues around the bubbles resisted the force, but not well, and almost at once cell walls started first to stretch, and then, in some cases, to rupture. The pain started in his extremities, first as a dull but widespread ache and rapidly evolving into the most intense and unpleasant sensation Billy had ever experienced. It came in waves, timed exactly with the now-rapid beating of his heart. Kelly listened to the moan that turned into a scream, and the air pressure was only that of sixty feet. He twisted the release valve shut and re-engaged the pressurization one. In another two minutes the pressure was back to that of four bar. The restored pressure eased the pain almost completely, leaving behind the sort of ache associated with strenuous exercise. That was not something to which Billy was accustomed, and for him the pain was not the welcome sort that athletes know. More to the point, the wide and terrified eyes told Kelly that his guest was thoroughly cowed. They didn't look like human eyes now, and that was good.

Kelly switched on the intercom. 'That's the penalty for a lie. I thought you should know. Now. Ever been arrested, Billy?'

'Jesus, man, no!'

'Never been in jail, fingerprinted -'

'No, man, like speeding tickets, I ain't never been busted.'

'In the service?'

'No, I told you that!'

'Good, thank you.' Kelly checked off the first group of questions. 'Now let's talk about Henry and his organization.' There was one other thing happening that Billy did not expect. Beginning at about three bar, the nitrogen gas that constituted the majority of what humans call air has a narcotic effect not unlike that of alcohol or barbiturates. As afraid as Billy was, there was also a whiplash feeling of euphoria, along with which came impaired judgment. It was just one more bonus effect from the interrogation technique that Kelly had selected mainly for the magnitude of the injury it could inflict.

'Left the money?' Tucker asked.

'More than fifty thousand. They were still counting when I left,' Mark Charon said. They were back in the theater, the only two people in the balcony. By this time Henry wasn't eating any popcorn, the detective saw. It wasn't often that he saw Tucker agitated.

'I need to know what's going on. Tell m? what you know.'

'We've had a few pushers whacked in the past week or ten days -'

'Ju- Ju, Bandanna, two others I don't know. Yeah, I know that. You think they're connected?'

'It's all we got, Henry. Was it Billy who disappeared?'

'Yeah. Rick's dead. Knife?'