Death Watch (20 page)

S
ydney sat at a polished wooden table in front of a large window overlooking O’Hare International Airport, her head in her hands. She moaned. Hunz had charged a suite at the Hilton to the station. He said he needed a quiet place to prepare for the upcoming broadcast, the one that would air his death scene live. With time running out, Sydney couldn’t help but think he wanted the suite so he didn’t have to die in a studio or on the street.

She glanced at a clock radio on the end table beside the sofa.

5:05 a.m.

Her heart lurched. It couldn’t be . what happened to the time?

She checked her watch.

3:05 a.m.

It took a moment for her tired mind to sort it out. There was two hours’ difference between Los Angeles and Chicago.

Well, that little scare got the ol’ heart pumping.

She considered changing her watch to local time, then decided against it. If she changed her watch, she’d also have to remember to adjust Hunz’s deadline—a word that had taken on a whole new meaning since Death Watch—from 8:47 a.m. to 10:47 a.m. Best to keep things simple.

8:47 a.m. The number to remember.

She urged her tired gray cells to do the math.

Hunz had five hours and forty-two minutes left to live.

Sydney let out a sigh. It was quiet, and she was drowsy. Not many flights landing or taking off at the airport.

Did Billy Peppers have control tower clearance when he took off on angels’ wings?

Aahhhh! Where had that come from?

A tired mind, that’s where. What do you expect? You’re half dead, dead on your feet, dead tired, dead asleep, dead to the world ..

“Stop it,” she growled to herself and stood to wake up. She rubbed tired eyes with the palms of her hands. Maybe she was going loony tunes. When she opened her eyes, would she find herself standing outside on the sidewalk? Had checking into the hotel been a dream?

Tentatively, she lowered her hands. To her relief she found herself standing beside a table on the eighth floor of the Hilton Hotel overlooking the airport runway. She was alone. None of Mel Blanc’s loony friends were in the room with her.

With a sigh, she risked sitting down.

Hunz had gone to get coffee. None of that foil-packet hotel brew for him. He wanted the real stuff. He’d seen a coffee shop in the lobby, an all-nighter for true addicts, and went to check it out. He asked her if she wanted anything—a scone, cookie, brownie. What she wanted was forty winks, but she was pretty sure they didn’t sell winks by the cup.

Sydney tried calling the hospital to get an update on Cheryl. The only information the hospital would confirm to someone who wasn’t a relative was that Cheryl had checked in and that she didn’t have a phone in her room. Sydney tried Josh’s cell phone and got the standard automated voice message informing her that the phone was either out of range or turned off.

She slumped back in her chair and stared at the Chicago skyline on the horizon. She hated it when life was reduced to being alone and waiting. It wasn’t good to give an active and frightened mind that much freedom.

Billy Peppers’s shoe box lay on the table in front of her. The white Nike wing dominated a side that was slightly caved in. All four corners of the top were worn and cardboard gray. The box had obviously seen some mileage.

Sydney lifted the lid. Looking up at her was a ceramic angel on his back. Or was it a her? In all the stories she’d heard in Sunday school, angels acted and sounded male. Yet she seemed to remember hearing something about angels having no gender. This angel wore a pale blue unisex robe and he looked perturbed, if not angry. Maybe he was angry because half of his right foot was gone.

The face of the ceramic angel looked nothing like Billy’s angels. Billy’s angels appeared to be having fun, swooping out of nowhere.

“Expressions!” Sydney shouted. “I remember their expressions! If they weren’t real, how come I remember their expressions so vividly?”

It wasn’t profound, but it was something.

There was a bump at the door. Not a knock. It was too much of a thud to be a knock.

Sydney rose and peered through the security peephole. A distorted Hunz stood on the other side holding a cup of coffee in each hand and clenching a white bag with his teeth.

She opened the door.

“Faannx,” Hunz said.

Crossing the room, he set the coffee cups on the table, double jumbo size from the looks of them, and took the bag from his mouth.

“Got myself a cinnamon roll,” he said. “Figure, why not? It’s not like I have to watch my waistline anymore.”

Death-row humor. Sydney smiled halfheartedly.

Hunz fell into the chair opposite her seat and leaned his head back. His eyes closed, but not for long. Pulling himself forward, he checked his watch, then pried the lid off one coffee. Two days ago, glancing at one’s watch was a casual act; now, it was no different than a demolitions expert checking the clock of a ticking time bomb.

“If you want,” Hunz said, “you can lie down for a while in the bedroom. You look like you’re asleep on your feet.”
dead tired, dead asleep, dead to the world

“No, I’m all right,” Sydney said.

She sat down. He shoved her coffee closer to her. On the side of the container there was a checkmark in the box next to the word
latte.
Sydney lifted the lid and was greeted by the warm odor of milky coffee.

“Don’t know why you’d want to ruin a perfectly good cup of coffee by dumping all that froth in it,” Hunz said.

He drank his black.

Sydney pulled the cup closer. She didn’t drink any. The coffee stores always made it too hot. She was used to waiting for it to cool. She stared at the creamy brown swirls and wondered how to begin telling Hunz Vonner what she needed to tell him.

“You’re not going to make it as a reporter,” Hunz said.

She looked up. He was staring at her.

“That’s a cruel thing to say,” she said. “Something I’d expect to hear from Cori Zinn.”

“Wasn’t meant to be unkind, just stating a fact.”

“You haven’t even seen me in front of a camera. You haven’t read any of my copy, or seen any of my video clips. All you’ve seen me do these last two days is drive you all over Los Angeles, and from that you pass judgment .on my professional skills?”

“I’ve seen enough.” Hunz sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. His cinnamon roll lay atop the white bag on the table, largely uneaten.

Sydney wondered how many condemned men when served their last meal clean their plates.

“All right,” Sydney said, returning to the topic. “Tell me. Upon what exactly are you basing your opinion?”

“You’re angry,” Hunz said.
“I
didn’t mean to make you angry. Let’s just forget I said anything.”

“Oh, no! You said it, now defend it. What makes you think I don’t have what it takes to be a reporter?”

Hunz took another sip. “Let’s get to work. Tell me what Billy Peppers said to you on the roof.”

“No. You’re going to tell me why you think I won’t make a good reporter.”

Hunz stared at her, exasperated.

Fine. Let him be exasperated. They weren’t moving on to the next topic until he gave her an answer. She had more time to kill than he did.

Sydney cringed inwardly. She couldn’t believe she’d just thought that. Yes, she was tired, but that was just cruel.

“Fine, I’ll tell you,” Hunz said. “You’re too kind.”

Now she cringed visibly.

“Don’t pretend you’re not,” Hunz insisted. “Naturally, no reporter wants to hear that they’re kind, but you are. You can’t help it. It’s part of who you are.”

“Hunz. ”

“Step back and look at yourself objectively. Look at what you did for Lyle Vandeveer, what you’re doing for Cheryl. With both of them, there came a point when they were no longer a story to report. There came a point when you were more concerned for them as persons than you were about doing your job as a reporter.

“And again, with Billy Peppers. A good reporter couldn’t have gotten down from that roof fast enough to get the story on the air. A good reporter would have been secretly—some outwardly—thrilled that he jumped, because it makes a better story.

“And now, here. Look at us. Sitting, drinking, chatting. If you were a good reporter, you’d be pumping me with questions: What was I thinking about just hours from death? If I could say something to the terrorists behind Death Watch, what would I say to them? How does it feel to come to America only to be handed a death sentence? Why did you choose a cinnamon roll for your last meal? But you haven’t asked any of those questions. Why? Because you’re more concerned about me than you are about getting the story.”

An uneasy silence settled between them.

“I have a question for you,” Sydney said. “Reporter to condemned man.”

“Too late. If I hadn’t goaded you into it, you wouldn’t be asking questions.”

“Not true. I was thinking about this question before you started evaluating my performance.”

Hunz was skeptical, but he said, “Go ahead. Ask your question.”

“Are you going to finish that cinnamon roll?”

It was probably the combination of being tired and being a few hours from death, but the question struck them both as hilarious. They laughed until tears came.

3
:36 a.m. (PST)

Hunz Vonner had five hours, eleven minutes left to live.

“Billy wrote everything down in the front of his Bible.” Sydney pulled the black leather-bound book from beneath the angel in the shoe box. She laid it open between them.

“He wrote it down?” Hunz said. “He could have saved us all a lot of time by faxing the information to you.”

Sydney took a deep breath. There was no turning back now. Billy’s supernatural explanation to Death Watch would soon be on the table.

She anticipated a negative reaction. The stuff of fairy tales. A story worthy of the brothers Grimm. And as persuasive as Billy Peppers had been on the roof, a few hours ago, she might have agreed with him. But that was before Billy’s plunge.

How could she tell Hunz what she saw?

“The way Billy described it to me on the roof,” she began, “the human race is on the cusp of a new spiritual age, where matters of the spirit will soon take center stage.”

“Matters of the spirit what does he mean by that? Ghosts and demons?”

“Here, let me show you.”

Reaching for the Bible, she read the Job passage to him, where Satan makes an appearance in God’s court. Then, though it took her awhile to find this one, she read to him the passage in Genesis where Jacob stumbled upon the encampment of angels.

“Peppers was definitely fixated on angels.” Hunz studied the surviving ceramic angel. “Look at the way he covered himself with pictures of them.”

Sydney closed the Bible. Hunz picked it up, turning to Billy’s notes.

“Doesn’t it strike you as simplistic to blame Satan, the original bad guy, for all this?” he said flatly. “People have been blaming him for every evil event since the dawn of history.”

Sydney gave no reply; Hunz appeared to have his mind made up.

“The question is why,” he said. “Why would Satan do this? Just because he’s evil, or does he have something to gain from the slaughter of a massive number of innocent people?”

“That part’s fuzzy for me,” Sydney said. “Something about proving that God’s plan for humankind had gone south, that God had overestimated the goodness of man, that if a man knew his neighbor was dying, he wouldn’t do anything to help him. That’s why the confirmation notices to two acquaintances. Two Christians.”

Hunz listened as he read. “So, according to Billy Peppers, two Christians have been notified that I’ve received the Death Watch?”

“Yeah. But so far, you’ve not heard from anyone, have you?”

“Proving the Devil’s point, so it would seem.”

“That’s not fair,” Sydney said. “You’ve been out of the country. Who’s to say they haven’t tried to contact you?”

Hunz gave her an amused smile before returning to Billy’s notes.

“How do we break the Death Watch, did he say, or is this all gloom and doom? How does one battle the Devil? Make a donation to a rescue mission? Enlist a priest to do an exorcism? My head’s not going to spin around, is it?”

Now Sydney knew he wasn’t taking this seriously.

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” she said. “And I doubt Billy Peppers came all the way to Chicago just to take an offering.”

Sydney reached into her pocket. She tossed the crumpled salvation tract onto the table.

“You have to get right with God,” she said.

Hunz picked up the tract and examined it. The name and address of the mission was stamped on the back.

“You mean, I have to find Jesus. Get saved. Hallelujah, glory to God, and all that stuff.”

“Pretty much.”

He tossed the tract back at her.

“I don’t buy it.”

“Why?”

“Because that would mean the crazy evangelicals were right all along, and that’s unacceptable to me.”

C
heryl McCormick watched from her hospital bed as Dr. Lewis Boscacci wrote on her chart.

“Your blood pressure is elevated, not to the point of concern, and certainly not unusual considering the circumstances. Your blood work came back negative and the baby’s heartbeat is strong.”

Dr. Boscacci had been Cheryl’s OB/GYN doctor for a little more than six months. He came with the insurance package. With black hair and a substantial nose befitting his ancestry, Boscacci was one of those doctors who was pretty much all business. Prenatal checkups had been brief. He spoke to her through the clipboard. In, out, on to the next patient.

Cheryl lay beneath the covers in a hospital gown, her bed cranked up to a sitting position. Her clothes hung in a plastic bag on the handle of the closet door along with her purse.

Josh sat in a chair against the wall. Next to him, on a makeshift bed of pillows and blankets on the floor, Stacy slept.

The clock on the wall read 5:38 a.m.

The room was bright, as was the hallway. It was still dark outside the window. At the moment, all was quiet at Prentice Women’s Hospital, though ten minutes ago a wailing woman had passed by the open door, wheeled into delivery with nurses, doctors, and a man in street clothes—presumably the father—running beside her, all of them talking at once.

“Everything looks good,” Dr. Boscacci said to the chart.

“When will you induce labor?” Cheryl asked.

Boscacci didn’t answer immediately. He continued writing. Then, clipping the pen in his pocket, he hugged the chart.

Talking to the foot of the bed, he said, “We’re not.”

“Cesarean?” Cheryl asked. “Why? Is something .”

“I anticipate a normal delivery in about a month.”

Josh sat up.

“Dr. Boscacci,” Cheryl said, “I thought I made myself clear—”

“There is no medical reason to take the baby now,” the doctor said. “It would be irresponsible to do so.”

“Doctor, I have one day left to live. I don’t want my baby extracted from my dead body. The risk is too great. Surely you realize that.”

“Mrs. McCormick,” the doctor said with forced patience, “you’re not dying.” He looked at the chart again, lifting several pages. “I have examined your records. You’re a healthy woman.”

“Josh. In my purse. There’s an envelope with my name on it. Would you get it for me, please?”

Josh jumped up and dug into Cheryl’s purse. It was odd to watch a man she’d known for only a few hours rummage through her purse.

He handed the envelope to Cheryl, who gave it to the doctor.

Boscacci read the death watch notice. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t worry about this, if I were you.”

Cheryl stared in disbelief, with color rising in her neck and cheeks. “Not worry about it?” she said, a little too loudly. A scowling nurse appeared at the door and closed it.

“You are a healthy woman,” Boscacci repeated.

“Are you aware of what that is?” Josh said, coming to Cheryl’s aid. “Or have you had your head stuck in the sand for the last two days?”

“I’ve seen the news reports,” Boscacci said. “Mass hysteria, that’s all it is. I assure you, Mrs. McCormick, you will not die.”

“Well, I’m going to need more than your assurances,” Cheryl shouted. “I want this baby out of me.”

The doctor placed the death watch letter on the bed. “I will not authorize it,” he said. “But, if you insist, I will admit you for twenty-four hours. Should anything happen, you will be surrounded by medical personnel who are trained to handle every emergency. But I’m only doing this because of your near-hysterical state.” He wrote on the chart. “I will also insist you have a psych consult.”

“I want another doctor,” Cheryl said.

Boscacci’s eyes hardened. One more time he wrote on the chart. “Very well. I will ask Dr. Isaacs to look in on you in the morning for a second opinion.”

The door swung closed behind him as the last syllable of his last word sounded.

Josh stood beside the bed helplessly. “I can’t believe that guy.”

“Thanks for being here,” Cheryl said.

She held out her hand. Josh seemed eager to take it. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, then let go. But she didn’t let go of him. His hand was warm. Comforting. It surprised her how much she needed the touch of another human being right now.

“I can’t believe how kind you’ve been,” she said. “We haven’t known each other for a day and yet you flew halfway across the country with me, and now you’re here in the hospital with me.”

Josh shrugged. “If we’re going to lick this thing, we’ve got to stick together.”

He looked at her with understanding, as only another person living in death’s shadow could do.

“Stay with me?” Cheryl said. “I’m scared.”

“Shaquille O’Neal couldn’t muscle me out of here,” he said.