'This fucker's alive,' one of them said.
'Oh, yeah?' The other walked over from the body of the eight-year-old, touched his muzzle to the NVA's forehead, and fired once.
'Fuck, Harry!'
'Knock that shit off!' the Lieutenant screamed.
'Look at what they done, sir!' Harry screamed back, falling to his knees to vomit.
'What's your problem?' the medical corpsman asked Kelly, who was. quite unable to reply. 'Oh, shit,' he observed further. 'Ell-Tee, this must be the guy who called in!'
One more face appeared, probably the Lieutenant commanding the Blue Team, and the oversized patch on his shoulder was that of the 1st Cavalry Division.
'Lieutenant, looks all clear, sweeping the perimeter again now!' an older voice called.
'All dead?'
'That's affirm, sir!'
'Who the hell are you?' the Lieutenant said, looking back down. 'Crazy fucking Marines!'
'Navy!' Kelly gasped, spraying a little blood on the medic.
'What?' Nurse O'Toole asked.
Kelly's eyes opened wide. His right arm moved rapidly across his chest as his head swiveled to survey the room. Sandy O'Toole was in the corner, reading a book under a single light.
'What are you doing here?'
'Listening to your nightmare,' she answered. 'Second time. You know, you really ought to -'
'Yeah, I know.'
CHAPTER 10
Pathology
'Your gun's in the back of the car,' Sergeant Douglas told him. 'Unloaded. Keep it that way from now on.'
'What about Pam?' Kelly asked from his wheelchair.
'We've got some leads,' Douglas replied, not troubling himself to conceal the lie.
And that said it all, Kelly thought. Someone had leaked it to the papers that Pam had an arrest record for prostitution, and with that revelation, the case had lost its immediacy.
Sam brought the Scout up to the Wolfe Street entrance himself. The bodywork was all fixed, and there was a new window on the driver's side. Kelly got out of the wheelchair and gave the Scout a long look. The door-frame and adjacent pillar had broken up the incoming shot column and saved his life. Bad aim on someone's part, really, after a careful and effective stalk - helped by the fact that he hadn't troubled himself to check his mirrors, Kelly told himself behind a blank expression. How had he managed to forget that? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Such a simple thing, something he'd stressed for every new arrival in 3rd SOG: always check your back, because there might be somebody hunting you. Simple thing to remember, wasn't it?
But that was history. And history could not be changed.
'Back to your island, John?' Rosen asked.
Kelly nodded. 'Yeah. I have work waiting, and I have to get myself back into shape.'
'I want to see you back here in, oh, two weeks, for a follow-up.'
'Yes, sir. I'll be back,' Kelly promised. He thanked Sandy O'Toole for her care, and was rewarded with a smile. She'd almost become a friend in the preceding eighteen days. Almost? Perhaps she already was, if only he would allow himself to think in such terms. Kelly got into his car and fixed the seat belt in place. Goodbyes had never been his strong suit. He nodded and smiled at them and drove off, turning right towards Mulberry Street, alone for the first time since his arrival at the hospital.
Finally. Next to him, on the passenger seat where he'd last seen Pam alive, was a manila envelope marked Patient Records/Bills in Sam Rosen's coarse handwriting.
'God,' Kelly breathed, heading west. He wasn't just watching traffic now. The cityscape was forever transformed for John Kelly. The streets were a curious mixture of activity and vacancy, and his eyes swept around in a habit he'd allowed himself to forget, zeroing in on people whose inactivity seemed to display a purpose. It would take time, he told himself, to distinguish the sheep from the goats. The city traffic was light, and in any case, people didn't linger on these streets. Kelly looked left and right to see that the other drivers' eyes were locked forward, shutting out what lay around them, just as he had once done, stopping uneasily for red lights they couldn't comfortably run and hitting the gas hard when the lights changed. Hoping that they could leave it all behind, that the problems here would stay here and never move outward to where the good people lived. In that sense it was a reversal of Vietnam, wasn't it? There the bad things were out in the boonies, and you wanted to keep them from moving in. Kelly realized that he'd come home to see the same kind of lunacy and the same kind of failure in a very different kind of place. And he'd been as guilty and as foolish as everyone else.
The Scout turned left, heading south past another hospital, a large white one. Business district, banks and offices, courthouse, city hall, a good part of town where good people came in daylight, leaving quickly at night, all together because there was safety in their hurried numbers. Well-policed, because without these people and their commerce, the city would surely die. Or something like that. Maybe it wasn't a question of life or death at all, but merely of speed.
Only a mile and a half, Kelly wondered. That much? He'd have to check a map. A dangerously short distance in any case between these people and what they feared. Stopped at an intersection, he could see a long way, because city streets, like firebreaks, offered long and narrow views. The light changed and he moved on.
Springer was in her accustomed place, twenty minutes later. Kelly assembled his things and went aboard. Ten minutes after that, the diesels were chugging away, the air conditioning was on, and he was back in his little white bubble of civilization, ready to cast off. Off of pain medications and feeling the need for a beer and some relaxation - just the symbolic return to normality - he nevertheless left the alcohol alone. His left shoulder was distressingly stiff despite his having been able to use it, after a fashion, for almost a week. He walked around the main salon, swinging his arms in wide circles, and wincing from the pain on the left side, before heading topside to cast off. Murdock came out to watch, but said nothing from the door into his office. Kelly's experience had made the papers, though not the involvement with??m, which somehow the reporters had failed to connect. The fuel tanks were topped off, and all the boat's systems appeared to be operating, but there was no bill for whatever the yard had done.
Kelly's line-handling was awkward as his left arm refused to do the things his mind commanded in the usual timely fashion. Finally, the lines were slipped, and Springer headed out. After clearing the yacht basin, Kelly settled into the salon control station, steering a straight course out to the Bay in the comfort of the air conditioning and the security of the enclosed cabin. Only after clearing the shipping channel an hour later did he look away from the water. A soft drink chased two Tylenol down his throat. That was the only drug he'd allowed himself for the last three days. He leaned back in the captain's chair and opened the envelope Sam had left him, while the autopilot drove the boat south.
Only the photos had been left out. He'd seen one of them, and that one had been enough. A handwritten cover note - every page in the envelope was a photocopy, not an original - showed that the professor of pathology had gotten the copies from his friend, the state medical examiner, and could Sam please be careful how he handled this. Kelly couldn't read the signature.
The 'wrongful death' and 'homicide' blocks on the cover sheet were both checked. The cause of death, the report said, was manual strangulation, with a deep, narrow set of ligature marks about the victim's neck. The severity and depth of the ligature marks suggested that brain death had occurred from oxygen deprivation even before the crushed larynx terminated airflow to the lungs. Striations on the skin suggested that the instrument used was probably a shoestring, and from bruises that appeared to come from the knuckles of a large-handed man about the throat, that the killer had faced the supine victim while performing the act. Beyond that, the report went on for five single-spaced pages, the victim had been subjected to violent and extensive traumatic insult prior to death, all of which was cataloged at length in dry medical prose. A separate form noted that she had been raped, further that the genital area showed definite signs of bruising and other abuse. An unusually large quantity of semen was still evident in her vagina upon her discovery and autopsy, indicating that the killer had not been alone in raping the victim. ('Blood types 0+, 0- and AB-, per attached serology report.') Extensive cuts and bruises about the hands and forearms were termed 'defensive-classical.' Pam had fought for her life. Her jaw had been broken, along with three other bones, one of them a compound fracture of the left ulna. Kelly had to set the report down, staring at the horizon before reading on. His hands didn't shake, and he didn't utter a word, but he needed to look away from the cold medical terminology.