by Tom Clancy
“I do not abase myself before women!” the doctor hissed. A little more pressure on the hand caused his face to change. Only a little additional force, he knew, and things would begin to separate.
“You have very bad manners, sir. You only have a little time to learn better ones.” Kelly smiled. “Now,” he commanded. “Please.”
“I’m sorry, Nurse O’Toole,” the man said, without really meaning it, but the humiliation was still a bleeding gash on his character. Kelly released the hand. Then he lifted the doctor’s name tag, and read it before staring again into his eyes.
“Doesn’t that feel better, Doctor Khofan? Now, you won’t ever yell at her again, at least not when she’s right and you’re wrong, will you? And you won’t ever threaten her with bodily harm, will you?” Kelly didn’t have to explain why that was a bad idea. The doctor was flexing his fingers to work off the pain. “We don’t like that here, okay?”
“Yes, okay,” the man said, wanting to run away.
Kelly took his hand again, shaking it with a smile, just enough pressure for a reminder. “I’m glad you understand, sir. I think you can go now.”
And Dr. Khofan left, walking past the security guard without so much as a look. The guard did give one to Kelly, but let it go at that.
“Did you have to do that?” Sandy asked.
“What do you mean?” Kelly replied, turning his head around.
“I was handling it,” she said, now moving to the door.
“Yes, you were. What’s the story, anyway?” Kelly asked in a reasonable voice.
“He prescribed the wrong medication, elderly man with a neck problem, he’s allergic to the med, and it’s on the chart,” she said, the words spilling out rapidly as Sandy’s stress started bleeding off. “It could have really hurt Mr. Johnston. Not the first time with him, either. Doctor Rosen might get rid of him this time, and he wants to stay here. He likes pushing nurses around, too. We don’t like that. But I was handling it!”
“Next time I’ll let him break your nose, then.” Kelly waved to the door. There wouldn’t be a next time; he’d seen that in the little bastard’s eyes.
“And then what?” Sandy asked.
“Then he’ll stop being a surgeon for a while. Sandy, I don’t like seeing people do things like that, okay? I don’t like bullies, and I really don’t like seeing them push women around.”
“You really hurt people like that?”
Kelly opened the door for her. “No, not very often. Mainly they listen to my warnings. Look at it this way, if he hits you, you get hurt and he gets hurt. This way nobody gets hurt except for a few bent feelings, maybe, and nobody ever died from that.”
Sandy didn’t press the issue. Partly she was annoyed, feeling that she’d stood up well to the doctor, who wasn’t all that good a surgeon and was far too careless on his post-op technique. He only did charity patients, and only those with simple problems, but that, she knew, was beside the point. Charity patients were people, and people merited the best care the profession could provide. He had frightened her. Sandy had been glad of the protection, but somehow felt cheated that she hadn’t faced Khofan down herself. Her incident report would probably sink him once and for all, and the nurses on the unit would trade chuckles about it. Nurses in hospitals, like NCOs in any military unit, really ran things, after all, and it was a foolish doctor who crossed them.
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 pain won’t ever go away, 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 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.
