Desperate Measures (4 page)

"Has he ... ?"

"Still in intensive care."

"Well, there isn't much. I'll have the obit finished before I go home."

"Don't tell me there isn't much," Burt said. "We both know better. I want this piece to be substantial. Seven years ago, you wouldn't have given up so easily. Dig. Back then, you kept complaining about how you couldn't find a way to see Millgate. Well, he's a captive interview this time. Not to mention, there'll be relatives or somebody waiting at the hospital to see how he's doing. Talk to them. For Christ sake, figure out how to get into his room and talk to him."

Pittman stood across from the hospital for quite a while. The building was soot gray. The mid-April day had been warm, but as the sun descended behind sky-scrapers, made Pittman cross his arms and hug himself.

This was the same hospital where Jeremy had died . Pittman had come to the corner across from the Emergency entrance, the same corner where he had often stood late at night after visiting Jeremy. From this corner, he had been able to see the window of Jeremy's room on the tenth floor. Gazing up through the darkness for several hours, he had prayed that Jeremy wouldn't be wakened by the need to vomit because of his chemotherapy.

Amid the din of traffic, Pittman now heard a siren. An ambulance veered from the busy street and rushed to a stop beneath the portal at the Emergency entrance. Attendants leapt out and urgently removed a patient on a gurney. Pedestrians glanced toward the commotion but kept walking swiftly onward.

Pittman swallowed, squinted up toward what he still thought of as Jeremy's window, and turned away. Jonathan Millgate was in that hospital, in the adult intensive-care ward that was just down the sixth-floor hallway from the children's intensive-care ward, where Jeremy had died. Pittman shook his head. He couldn't tolerate going into the hospital, couldn't make himself go up to that floor, couldn't bear exposing himself to the torment on the faces of people waiting to hear about their loved ones. It would be all he could do not to imagine that he was one of them, not to sit down with them and wait as if for news of Jeremy.

It would be far too much.

So he went home. Rather than take a taxi, he walked. He needed to fill the time. As dusk increasingly chilled him, he stopped for several drinks-to fill the time. The elevator to his third-floor apartment creaked and wheezed. He locked himself in his apartment, heard laughter 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 drizzle 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.