David Morrell - Desperate Measures Read online

  from a television show vibrate through thin walls from the apartment

  next to him, and had another drink. To fill the time.

  He sat in darkness. He imagined what it would have been like if Jeremy

  had lived. With basketball playoffs approaching, he would have spent

  the coming Saturday afternoon playing one-on-one with Jeremy. Afterward

  they'd have gone for pizza and a movie, or maybe to Tower Records

  whatever they wanted to do. The future would have been theirs.

  Pitt ' man wept.

  He turned on the kitchen light, opened the drawer where he'd put the

  .45, and took out the pistol.

  Vaguely conscious that the time was 8:00 P.m., because the sitcom next

  door had ended and another was starting, he continued to stare at the

  .45. His eyes became like the lenses of a microscope, focusing

  intensely on the gleaming blue metal, magnifying the trigger, the

  hammer, the opening in the barrel from which the bullet would ...

  The next thing he was aware of, a new sound disturbed him, the smooth

  deep voice of a man who spoke in formal cadences. The voice came from

  the apartment next door. The voice was ... A television news

  announcer? Frowning, Pittman turned his gaze from the .45 and fixed it

  on the stove's mechanical clock. Its numbers whirred 10:03 becoming

  10:04. Pittman frowned harder. He had so absorbed himself in the gun

  that he hadn't been conscious of so much time passing. Hand trembling,

  he set down the .45. The news announcer on the television next door had

  said something about Jonathan Millgate.

  "Haven't seen you in a while, Matt." The heavy man, an Italian, had

  gray hair protruding from the bottom of his Yankees baseball cap. He

  wore a Yankees baseball jersey as well, and he held a ladle with which

  he'd been stirring a large steaming pot of what smelled like

  chicken-noodle soup as Pittman came into the diner.

  The place was narrow, with Formica-topped tables along one side, a

  counter along the other. The Overhead fluorescent lights made Pittman

  blink after the darkness of the street. It was almost 11:00 P.M. As

  Pittman sat at the counter, he nodded to the only other customer, a

  black man drinking a CUP Of coffee at one of the tables. a "You been

  sick?" the cook asked. "Is that why you haven't been in?"

  "Everybody keeps saying ... Do I look sick?"

  "Or Permanently hungover. Look at how loose your clothes are. How much

  weight have you lost? Ten, fifteen pounds? And judging from them bags

  under your eyes, I'd say you haven't been sleeping much, either."

  Pittman didn't answer. "What'll it be for tonight?"

  "To start with, a favor."

  The cook appeared not to have heard as he stirred the soup. "I wonder

  if you could store this for me."

  "What?" The cook glanced at the counter in front of Pittman and sounded

  relieved. "That box?"

  Pittman nodded. The box had once held computer paper. Now it concealed

  the .45 and its container of ammunition. He had stuffed the box with

  shredded newspaper so that the gun wouldn't shift and make a thunking

  noise when the box was tilted. He had sealed the box many times with

  tape. ' "Just a place to store this," Pittman said. "I'll even pay you

  for ...

  "No need," the cook said. "What's in it? How come you can't keep it at

  your place? There's nothing funny about this, is there?"

  "Nah. It's just a gun."

  "A gun?"

  Pittman smiled at his apparent joke. "I've been working on a book. This

  is a copy of the printout and the computer discs. I'm paranoid about

  fires. I'd ask my girlfriend to help, but she and I just had a fight. I

  want to keep a duplicate of this material someplace besides my

  apartment."

  "Yeah? A book? What's it about?"

  "Suicide. Let me have some of that soup, will you?"

  Pittman prepared to eat his first meal in thirty-six hours.

  He'd packed the gun and left it with the cook at the diner because his

  experience of losing time while he stared at the weapon had taught him

  there was every chance he might shoot himself before he made good on his

  promise to work for Burt Forsyth until Chronicle died. The effort of

  getting through this particular day, the bitterness and emptiness he had

  felt, had been so intense that he couldn't be certain of his resolve to

  keep himself alive for eight more days. This way, in the event of

  overwhelming despair, he would have a chance of regaining control by the

  time he reached the diner, got the box, and went to his apartment.

  Pittman felt compelled to keep the promise he had made. For eight more

  days.

  Despite his reluctance, he went back to the hospital. This time, he

  took a taxi. Not because he was in a hurry. After all, he still had a

  great deal of time to fill and would have preferred to walk. ]But to

  get to the hospital, he would have had to Pass through several

  neighborhoods that became dangerous at this hour. He found it bitterly

  ironic that in doing his best to postpone his death for eight more days,

  he had to be extra careful about not dying in the meanwhile.

  He returned to the hospital because of the television announcer's

  reference to Millgate. Through the thin walls , he had listened to the

  news report. Pittman's expectation was that Millgate had died and a

  brief description of his public-service career was being provided. Burt

  Forsyth would be annoyed about that-Millgate dying before Pittman

  finished the obituary in time for tomorrow morning's edition of the

  newspaper. But the TV news story had not been Millgate's death. To the

  contrary, Millgate was still in intensive care, as the announcer had

  pointed out.

  Instead, the story had been about another possible scrape in Millgate's

  background. To the government's dismay, copy of a Justice Department

  special prosecutor's report had been leaked to the press this evening.

  The report, a final draft never intended for publication, implicated

  Millgate a negotiator in a possible covert attempt-unsanctioned

  Congress-to buy nuclear weapons from the chaos of governments in what

  used to be the Soviet Union.

  An unsubstantiated charge against him. Solely an assessment of where

  the Justice Department's investigation might eventually lead. But the

  gravity of the news announcer's voice had made the grave allegation

  sound as established fact. Guilty until proven innocent. This was

  second time in seven years that Jonathan Millgate had implicated as a

  go-between in a major arms scandal, Pittman knew that if he failed to

  investigate this time, if he didn't at least make an attempt to get a

  statement from him- gate's people, Burt Forsyth would accuse him of

  renigging on his bargain to do his best for the Chronicle during brief

  time remaining to it. For Burt and what Burt had done for Jeremy,

  Pittman forced himself to try.

  Pittman stood on the corner across from the hospital's Emergency

  entrance. It was after midnight. A drizzle intensified the April

  night's chill. He buttoned his wed London Fog topcoat and felt dampness

  even through the soles of his shoes. The drizzl
e created misty halos

  around gleaming streetlights and the brighter floodlights at the

  Emergency entrance. By contrast, the lights in some of the hospital

  rooms were weak, making Pittman feel lonely. He stared up toward what

  had been Jeremy's window on the tenth floor, and that window was dark.

  Feeling even more lonely, he crossed the street toward the hospital.

  At this hour, traffic was slight. The Emergency area was almost

  deserted. He heard a far-off siren. The drizzle strengthened, wetting

  the back of his neck. When Jeremy had been sick, Pittman had learned

  about the hospital in considerable detail-the locations of the various

  departments, the lounges that were most quiet in the middle of the

  night, the areas that had coffee machines, the places to get a sandwich

  when the main cafeteria was closed. Bringing Jeremy to the hospital for

  chemotherapy, he had felt uncomfortable at the main entrance and in the

  lobby. The cancer had made Jeremy so delicate that Pittman had a fear

  of someone in a crowd bumping against him. Given Jeremy's low

  blood-cell counts, a bruise would have taken a considerable time to

  heal. In addition, Pittman had felt outraged by the stares of people in

  the lobby, who seemed shocked to see a skinny, bald fifteen-year-old,

  his face gaunt, his hairless scalp tinted blue from blood vessels close

  to the surface. Terribly sensitive about his son's feelings, Pittman

  had chosen an alternate route, in the back, a small entrance around the

  corner to the left of the Emergency area. The door was used primarily

  by interns and nurses, and as Pittman discovered, the elevators in this

  section were faster, perhaps because fewer people used them.

  Retracing this route created such vivid memories that he sensed Jeremy

  next to him as he passed a private ambulance parked outside this exit.

  It was gray. It had no hospital markings. But through a gap in

  curtains drawn across the back windows, Pittman saw a light, an oxygen

  unit, various medical monitors. A man wearing an attendant's white coat

  was checking some equipment.

  Then Pittman was beyond the ambulance, whose engine was running,

  although its headlights were off. He noticed a stocky man in a dark

  suit drop the butt of a cigarette into a puddle and come to attention,

  seeing Pittman. You must really have needed a cigarette, Pittman

  thought, to stand out here in the rain.

  Nodding to the man, who didn't nod back, Pittman reached for the

  doorknob and noticed that the light was out above the entrance. He

  stepped inside, went up four steps to an echoey concrete landing, and

  noticed another stocky man in a dark suit, this one leaning against the

  wall next to where the stairs turned upward. The man's face had a hard

  expression with squinted, calculating eyes.

  Pittman didn't need the stairs; instead, he went forward, across the

  landing, through a door to a brightly lit hospital corridor. The

  pungent, acrid, too-familiar odors of food, antiseptic, and medicine

  assaulted him. When Pittman used to come here daily to visit Jeremy,

  the odors had been constantly present, on every floor, day or night. The

  odors had stuck to Pittman's clothes. For several weeks after Jeremy's

  death, he had smelled them on his jackets, his shirts, his pants.

  The vividness of the painful memories caused by the odors distracted

  Pittman, making him falter in confusion. Did he really want to put

  himself through this? This was the first time he'd been back inside the

  hospital. Would the torture be worth it just to please Burt?

  The elevator doors were directly across from the door through which he

  had entered the corridor. If he went ahead, he suspected that his

  impulse would be to go up to the tenth floor and what had been Jeremy's

  room rather than to go to the sixth floor, where Millgate was and where

  Jeremy had died in intensive care.

  Abruptly a movement on Pittman's right disturbed him. A large-chested

  man stepped away from the wall next to the door Pittman had used. His

  position had prevented Pittman from noticing him when he came toward the

  elevators. The man wore an oversized windbreaker. "Can I help?" The

  man sounded as if he'd swallowed broken glass. "You lost? You need

  directions?"

  "Not lost. Confused." The man's aggressive tone made Pittman's body

  tighten. His instincts warned him not to tell the truth . "I've got a

  sick boy on the tenth floor. The nurses let me see him at night. But

  sometimes I can barely force myself to go up there."

  "Sick, huh? Bad?"

  "Cancer. "

  "Yeah, that's bad."

  But the man obviously didn't care, and he'd made Pittman feel so

  apprehensive, his stomach so fluttery, that Pittman had answered with

  the most innocent, believable story he could think of. He certainly

  wasn't going to explain his real reason for coming to the hospital to a

  man whose oversized windbreaker concealed something that made a

  distinct, ominous bulge on the left side of his waist.

  Footsteps made Pittman turn. He faced yet another solemn, stocky man,

  this one wearing an overcoat. The man had been standing against the

  wall on the opposite side of the door from where the man in the

  windbreaker had been standing. Neither man had rain spots on his coat.

  The rain had started fifteen minutes previously, so they must have been

  waiting in this corridor at least that long, Pittman thought. Why?'

  Recalling the man who'd been smoking outside and the man in the

  stairwell, he inwardly frowned.

  "Then you'd better get up and see your boy," the second man said.

  "Right. " More uneasy, Pittman reached to press the elevator's up

  button when he heard a ding and the doors suddenly opened. Loud voices

  assaulted him.

  "I won't be responsible for this!"

  "No one's asking you to be responsible. He's my patient now."

  The elevator compartment was crammed. A man on a gurney with an oxygen

  mask over his face and an intravenous tube leading into his left arm was

  being quickly wheeled out by two white-coated attendants. A nurse

  swiftly followed, holding an intravenous bottle above the patient. A ,

  intense young man was arguing with an older red-faced man who had a

  stethoscope around his neck and a clipboard with what looked like a

  medical file in his hand.

  "But the risk of-"

  "I said he's my responsibility."

  The young man surged from the elevator just as Pittman felt hands behind

  him grab his arms and pull him back out of the way. The gurney, the two

  attendants, the nurse, and the young man hurried past him toward the

  door to the stairwell. As the man with the stethoscope charged out,

  trying to stop them, two dark-suited, solemn, well-built men also had'

  been in the elevator-veered ahead of him and formed a blockade.

  "Damn it, if you don't get out of my way-"

  "Relax, doctor. Everything's going to be fine."

  Pittman squirmed, pained by the force of the hands that gripped him from

  behind. Through the window in the stairwell door, he saw the man who'd

  been waiting on the landing dart forward to open the
door. The

  attendants pushed the gurney through, then lifted it, hurrying with it

  down the stairs to the exit from the hospital. Although restrained,

  Pittman was able to turn his head enough to see the man who'd been

  smoking in - the rain yank the outside door open. The attendants rushed

  with the gurney, disappearing into the night along with the nurse and

  the thin, intense man. The somber, stocky men retreated, letting go of

  Pittman, moving swiftly into the stairwell, down the stairs, through the

  outside door.

  The man with the stethoscope trembled. "By God, I'll phone the police.

  They can't-"

  Pittman didn't stay to hear the rest of his sentence. What he heard

  instead were repeated thunks as doors to the private ambulance outside

  were opened and closed. He ran down the stairs. Peering out toward the

  drizzle-misted darkness, he saw the private ambulance pull away, a dark

  Oldsmobile following.

  Immediately he lunged into the chilling rain. Seeing frost come out of

  his mouth, he raced through puddles toward the street corner opposite

  the Emergency entrance. From having come to the hospital so often with

  Jeremy, he knew the easiest places to hail a taxi late at night, and the

  corner across from Emergency was one of the best.

  An empty taxi veered around a curve, almost striking Pittman as he ran

  across toward the corner.

  "Watch it, buddy!" Pittman scrambled in. "My father's in that Private

  ambulance." He pointed toward where, a block ahead, the ambulance and

  the dark Oldsmobile were stopped at a light. , 'He's being taken for

  emergency treatment to another hospital. Keep up with them."