Sandy saw it all on his face. A changeling, perhaps, but not always guarded. You’re not a psychopath. You feel pain and they don’t—at least not from the death of a friend. What are you, then?
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. Why not leave them in and let some car thief go nuts? 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 taken 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.
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 brownstone, 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?
But that was something Kelly was working very hard to ignore as well. There were still real people trying to eke out their lives here. Whether on welfare or subsisting on menial employment, real people lived here, in constant danger, perhaps hoping to escape to someplace where a real life was possible. They ignored the traffickers as best they could, and in their petty righteousness they ignored the street bums like Kelly, but he could not find it in himself to dislike them for that. In such an environment they, like he, had to concentrate on personal survival. Social conscience was a luxury that most people here could scarcely afford. You needed some rudimentary personal security of your own before you could take from its surplus and apply it to those more needy than yourself—and besides, how many were more needy than they were?
There were times when it was just a pleasure to be a man, Henry thought in the bathroom. Doris had her charms. Maria, the spindly, dumb one from Florida. Xantha, the one most drug-dependent, a cause for minor concern, and Roberta, and Paula. None were much beyond twenty, two still in their teens. All the same and all different. He patted some after-shave onto his face. He ought to have a real main-lady of his own, someone glamorous for other men to see and envy. But that was dangerous. To do that invited notice. No, this was just fine. He walked out of the room, refreshed and relaxed. Doris was still there, semiconscious now from the experience and the two-pill reward, looking at him with a smile that he decided was respectful enough. She’d made the proper noises at the proper times, done the things that he’d wanted done without being asked. He could mix his own drinks, after all, and the silence of solitude was one thing, while the silence of a dumb bitch in the house was something else, something tedious. Just to be pleasant he bent down, offering a finger to her lips, which she duly kissed, her eyes unfocused.
“Let her sleep it off,” Henry told Billy on the way out.
“Right. I have a pickup tonight anyway,” Billy reminded him.
“Oh?” Tucker had forgotten in the heat of the moment. Even Tucker was human.
“Little Man was short a thousand last night. I let it slide. It’s the first time, and he said he just goofed on his count. The vig is an extra five yards. His idea.”
Tucker nodded. It was the first time ever that Little Man had made that kind of mistake, and he had always shown proper respect, running a nice trade on
his piece of sidewalk. “Make sure he knows that one mistake’s the house limit.”
“Yes, sir.” Billy bobbed his head, showing proper respect himself.
“Don’t let that word get out, either.”
That was the problem. Actually several problems, Tucker thought. First, the street dealers were such small-timers, stupidly greedy, unable to see that a regular approach to their business made for stability, and stability was in everyone’s interest. But street pushers were street pushers—criminals, after all—and he’d never change that. Every so often one would die from a rip or a turf fight. Some were even dumb enough to use their own stuff—Henry was as careful as he could be to avoid them, and had been mainly successful. Occasionally one would try to press the limits, claiming to be cash-short just to chisel a few hundred bucks when he had a street trade many times that. Such cases had a single remedy, and Henry had enforced that rule with sufficient frequency and brutality that it hadn’t been necessary to repeat it for a long time. Little Man had probably spoken the truth. His willingness to pay the large penalty made it likely, also evidence of the fact that he valued his steady supply, which had grown in recent months as his trade increased. Still, for months to come he would have to be watched carefully.
What most annoyed Tucker was that he had to trouble himself with such trivialities as Little Man’s accounting mistake. He knew it was just a case of growing pains, the natural transition process from small-time local supplier to major distributor. He’d have to learn to delegate his authority, letting Billy, for example, handle a higher level of responsibility. Was he ready? Good question, Henry told himself, leaving the building. He handed a ten to the youth who’d watched over his car, still considering the question. Billy had a good instinct for keeping the girls in line. A clever white boy from Kentucky’s coal country, no criminal record. Ambitious. Team player. Maybe he was ready for a step up.