The Deadline (20 page)

“Or for Malachi Pierce?”

Cassie shook her head.

“Fenwick and Pierce would definitely be strange bedfellows.  I just don’t see it.  Two completely different characters.”

“Was Fenwick any good?”

Cassie crossed her arms and leaned against the desk.  She chose her words carefully.

“As a lawyer?  Let’s just say the paperwork was always perfect.  He was precise about it.  Nothing out of place.  Nothing late.  Nothing missing.  He was downright anal about his case files.  A real pain in the gazoo.”

One of Cassie’s clerks brought a manila folder to her and whispered something Morgan couldn’t hear, then left.

“Sorry.  I have to deal with something right now, but it was sure good to see you after so long, Jeff,” she said.  “Maybe you and your wife could come over for a barbecue or something.  I’d love to meet her.”

“Sure, if you don’t mind being seen with the newspaper editor,” he said, only half joking.  “My wife’s a wonderful person, but I’m not the most popular guy in town right now.”

Cassie touched his arm again and winked.

“Some of us think you’re doing okay,” she said.  “If Old Bell thinks you’re man enough to take over his paper, then I have nothing but respect for you.  He’s a great judge of character, trust me.  Just hang in there.”

The rest of the morning rushed by.  Morgan laid out three pages and most of the opinion page, leaving a hole for his editorial.  His reporters had filed a dozen stories and three takes of short items, obits and weddings.

But advertising had continued to dwindle.  They’d sold less than four hundred inches, hardly enough to keep the doors open.  Morgan kept the paper at twelve pages, even though the advertising lineage didn’t justify it.  He didn’t want to surrender.

He worked through lunch, helping Cal Nussbaum typeset some classified ads and develop some photos from the weekend Little League games.  It had been years since he’d souped film, but he got the hang of it after a few late-night practice sessions in the dark.  He was spooling 35mm film on a processing reel in the pure blackness of the darkroom when somebody knocked.

“Don’t open it,” he warned.

It was Crystal.

“There’s a call for you,” she said.

“Can you take a message?”

“The lady says it’s urgent.”

“Is it Claire?”

“I don’t know.  She’s kind of freaking out.”

Morgan looped the film loosely around the reel and sealed it in the light-tight stainless steel developing canister.  To be safe, he stuck it in a cabinet before he turned on the overheard light and opened the darkroom door.

He picked up the phone on his desk.  It was the whiskey-voiced clerk at the Teepee Motor Lodge and she was hysterical.

“That old man told me to call you if there was an emergency.  Jeezus gawd, jeezus gawd.  The maid took up some food and found him layin’ there, all white and cold.  Jeezus gawd.  I coulda swore he was stone dead, but I wadn’t gonna touch no dead corpse.  No sir.  I just called the nine-one-one, then I called you.  You better come on over here.  Jeezus gawd.”

She let loose a bone-rattling cough and hung up.

Morgan sprinted out of the newspaper to his car, which would normally have been parked at the curb out front.  He’d walked to work that morning.

He heard a faint siren in the distance.  The ambulance was just leaving the hospital, a mile away, on the other end of town.  He checked his watch.  In less than three minutes, he could be home, if he ran.

He sprinted toward Rockwood Street, five long blocks away.  A prickling, nervous sweat trickled down his back as he raced past the downtown storefronts, and he felt curious eyes watching him.  The clinging midday heat sucked the breath from his lungs, suffocating him.

The old man can’t die
, Morgan thought. 
Not yet.

As he ran, he heard the siren coming closer, until it careened past him down Main Street.  He cut across the bank parking lot and up the alley behind the Post Office, where mail carriers sat on the dock and hooted as he passed.

Hang on, old man.

The alley emptied onto Rockwood just four houses away, he covered the last fifty yards at a dead run.  His lungs burned.

Morgan groped for the key he’d hidden under the driver’s seat.  He slammed it into the ignition and the Escort wheezed forlornly.  He turned it again and again, pumping the accelerator hard, finally pressing it all the way to the floor, but the car wouldn’t start.  He cursed and pounded the steering wheel.  He smelled gasoline and knew he’d flooded it.

He tried once more, and miraculously, the engine turned over.  It belched blue-rimmed black smoke from the exhaust, barely clinging to life. 

“C’mon, c’mon.  Don’t stop now,” he pleaded with his car.

Morgan jammed the accelerator, jolting the groggy engine awake.  It gasped twice, then growled back at him.  In a moment, he was hurtling through the only stoplight in town, toward the western edge of Winchester, where Neeley Gilmartin lay dying, maybe already dead, among the flies and trash in his foul trailer.

The ambulance was already there, no siren.  Its blue and red lights pulsed in a silent rhythm that always reminded Morgan of death.  As a little boy, he remembered what his father said once, when an ambulance passed them on the highway, its emergency lights on, but not its siren:  “Must be dead,” he said.  Morgan must have reminded himself of that day on a hundred murder scenes in Chicago, bathed in the surreal death beacons from silent ambulances, coroner vans and squad cars: 
Must be dead
.  They usually were.

Gilmartin’s trailer door was open.  A square-jawed deputy stood outside, sneaking peeks at several paramedics working inside.  The motel clerk who called him lurked unsteadily at the edge of the weeds, smoking a cigarette and clasping the front of her shag housecoat to keep from baring her rheumy chest to the world.  She looked drunk.

As soon as Morgan approached the trailer door, the deputy stopped him.  The name on the brass bar above his pocket was “Bocek.”

“You family?” the deputy asked him.

“No, he doesn’t have any family.  But I’m a friend.”

“Then why don’t you just wait over there so the medics can work, okay?”

“Is he alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you ask?  If he’s alive, they should know, he’s got lung cancer, probably metastasized, and he doesn’t want to go to a hospital.”

Deputy Bocek hitched up his holster and his tight brown pants, and glared at Morgan.

“This guy have a name?” Bocek asked.

“Gilmartin.  Neeley Gilmartin.  Now please ask if he’s alive,” Morgan implored him.  “It’s important.”

The deputy went inside the trailer.  Morgan inched close enough to hear their voices, but not what they were saying.

Don’t die, you son of a bitch.  Not now.  Hang on.

Deputy Bocek came to the door and motioned Morgan forward, but no farther than the front door, which swayed on its slack hinges.

“Your friend ain’t dead, but he’s bad off.  Just stand here at the door and tell these guys what you told me,” he said.

Morgan leaned inside.  The TV set was on, some afternoon game show.  The air conditioner must have finally given out, because the air inside was diseased and hot.  The place smelled worse than before, as if death had been there.

Gilmartin lay on the floor.  He was naked, his skin a pale, waxy yellow.  Three paramedics worked feverishly over him.  He was near death, but Morgan could see the skin of his bony chest being sucked in around his ribs and condensation in the oxygen mask.  He was struggling for air, but he was breathing.

“Let’s run an IV at a hundred an hour until we get the doc,” one of the paramedics said.  He was a clean-cut guy with wire-rimmed glasses and eagles tattooed on his thick, body-builder forearms, a little older than the other two, maybe in his thirties.  Clearly, he was calling the shots.  “Joey, check the pulse ox.”

Despite the cramped quarters, they worked quickly.  One of the younger paramedics unlooped a tube for the IV while the one called Joey clipped a small probe to Gilmartin’s index finger and turned some dials on a small machine in a small, nylon pack.  Red LED numbers flickered, sampling the oxygen in Gilmartin’s tissues.

Their boss, positioning the oxygen tank between Gilmartin’s legs, saw Morgan peering through the doorway.

“You know this guy?” he asked.  He was emotionless, cold.

“Yes.  His name is Neeley Gilmartin.  He’s seventy-three.  Is he alive?”

Joey interrupted.  “Bad news, Greg.  Pulse ox is seventy-six and dropping.”

Greg, the older paramedic who was in charge, turned his back to Morgan and muttered something Morgan couldn’t hear.  He adjusted a valve on the oxygen tank.

“You family?” Greg asked Morgan without looking at him.

“No.  He’s got no family.”

“You know his problem?”

“Lung cancer.  It might have spread.  I don’t know.”

“AIDS?”

“I don’t know,” Morgan said.  “I don’t think so.”

“He’s yellow.  Hepatitis?”

“I don’t know,” Morgan said.

Suddenly an alarm shrieked.  One of the digital read-outs was flashing red.  Morgan’s heart was pounding.

“We’re losing pulse ox.  Jesus, it’s going flat, seventy, sixty nine,” Joey said.  He’d squeezed past Gilmartin’s motionless body to reach for something in the crash box.

Greg scrambled to check Gilmartin’s vitals.  He checked for a pulse, then slumped.

Morgan couldn’t breathe.

“What’s happening, goddammit?” he said loudly.  “Is he okay?”

The older paramedic reached beneath the old man’s arm and held up a small clip.

“Dammit, Joey, you pulled off the fuckin’ probe,” he said angrily.  “Tape it on and watch where you put your damned feet in this shit hole.”

For the first time, Morgan felt a chill from the cold sweat that had been dribbling down his neck since he first heard the ambulance’s siren.

Wasting no time, the older paramedic resumed his inquiry, his voice still flat and hopeless.

“I see pill bottles all over hell.  You know this guy’s meds?”

“Just painkillers.”

Morgan breathed deeply and tried to visualize the pill bottles on Gilmartin’s dirty countertop.  “Uh, Tylox.  Demerol.  Mepergan.  He might have been taking morphine, too.”

“Nothing else?”

Morgan shook his head.

“He was terminal.”

Morgan quickly corrected himself.  “He
is
terminal.  He doesn’t want anything else.  He hasn’t got much time, maybe a couple weeks.”

Greg had a funny, disdainful look on his face, like he might laugh if the situation were any less grave.  But he didn’t seem the type to laugh much.

“Maybe hours, more like.  He’s in real bad shape.  His heart’s barely beating, breathing’s labored, BP is next to nothing.  He’s dehydrated and, judging by his color, he’s probably already in liver failure.  Right now, he’s unresponsive.  As soon as we get him stabilized for transport, we’re gonna take him to the ER.”

Morgan closed his eyes.  The trailer’s sticky, sour air clung to him.  He had to say it, even if he didn’t want to.

“But he doesn’t want to die in a hospital,” Morgan said.

Greg lost his fragile cool.

“Should we let him die right here?  You want to stand here and watch this old guy croak, goddammit?  Jesus fuckin’ Christ ...”

“Go easy, Greg,” Morgan heard one of the other paramedics say softly.  It was Joey, the younger one.

“Shut up, Joey,” Greg said.  Then he faced Morgan.

“Are you medically responsible for this guy?”

“What do you mean?” Morgan asked.

“Are you making his life and death decisions?  If you don’t, we do.  He’ll die right here if we don’t get him to the hospital.  Up there, at least he’s got a slim shot at a few more days.  If we get him working again and the doc says he can go home to die, that’s the doc’s call.  What’s it gonna be?  Are you gonna make the call?”

There was no one else, Morgan knew.  He certainly didn’t want to be the one who pulled the plug on Neeley Gilmartin by walking away.  And he knew Gilmartin couldn’t die.  Not yet.

“For now, I will,” he said reluctantly.

“Okay, just how far do you want us to go here?”

There was only one answer.

“Save him,” Morgan said.  “Keep him alive, please.”

He saw the young paramedic, Joey, smile.

“Good enough.  Is he packaged?” Greg asked his crew.  “Are we ready to roll?”

“Yeah, Oh-two and IV are going, and pulse ox is up to ninety-one,” Joey said.  “And we need to get on the road.  I didn’t have time to check the oxygen bottle this morning and we’re running low.  You want the monitor?  We left the damn thing outside.”

Greg shook his head.

“Let’s roll.  We’ll plug him in once we’re get him in the rig.”

Greg stripped off his rubber gloves and looked at Morgan with tired, empty eyes.

“You coming to the hospital?  You need to talk to the doc.  Like it or not, you’re this guy’s only angel.”

Morgan nodded.

They covered Gilmartin’s nakedness with a white sheet and loaded him onto a scoop stretcher, a two-piece contraption that was better than a conventional stretcher in close quarters.  In a few seconds, they were out the door.

Morgan ducked into the rancid bathroom and pulled Gilmartin’s wad of cash from behind the toilet.  He stuffed it in his pocket, where it would be safe.

While Greg and the other paramedic loaded Gilmartin onto a waiting gurney and rolled him across the weeds to the ambulance’s open doors, Joey hung back.  He reached in his pocket and held out his hand to Morgan.

“He’ll want you to take care of this for him,” he said.  “When I cut off his tee-shirt, it was around his neck on a chain.  We had to take it off, but I didn’t want it to get lost.”

Morgan opened his palm.  Joey gave him a thin silver chain and a medallion.

“I recognized it right off,” Joey said.  “I was in the Navy before all this.  He must have been somebody once.”

Morgan looked closely at the emblem in his trembling hand.

The Navy Cross
.

Before Morgan looked up, Joey was gone.  The ambulance rolled around the side of the decaying Teepee Motor Lodge toward the highway.

When it hit the asphalt, the siren wailed.  Morgan said a prayer, relieved to hear it scream.

It meant there was still life inside.