David Morrell - Desperate Measures

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 wind-breaker.

“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 thin, 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-they 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 traffic light. “He’s being taken for emergency treatment to another hospital. Keep up with them.”

“What’s wrong with this hospital?”

“They don’t have a machine he needs. Hurry. Please .” Pittman gave the driver twenty dollars.

The taxi sped forward.

Pittman sat anxiously in the backseat, wiping rain from his forehead, catching his breath. What the hell was going on? he wondered. Although the oxygen mask had concealed the face of the patient on the gurney, Pittman had noticed the man’s wrinkled, liver-spotted hands, his slack-skinned neck, and his wispy white hair. Obviously old. That wasn’t much to go on, but Pittman had the eerie conviction that the man on the gurney was Jonathan Millgate.

“I thought you said they were taking your father to another hospital,” the taxi driver said.

“They are.”

“Not in New York City, they ain’t. In case you haven’t noticed, we just reached New Rochelle.”

Pittman listened to the rhythmic tap of the taxi’s windshield wipers. As tires hissed on wet pavement, he concentrated to provide an explanation. “The ambulance has a two-way radio. Maybe they called ahead and the hospital they were going to didn’t have the machine they needed.”

“Where I live over on Long Island, they’ve got plenty of good hospitals. I don’t know why they didn’t head there. What’s wrong with your father, anyhow?”

“Heart disease.”

“Yeah, my brother has a bad ticker. Thirty years of smoking. Poor bastard. Can hardly walk across the room. You better hope your father’s strong enough to hang on, because it doesn’t look like the ambulance is gonna stop here in New Rochelle. Christ, at this rate, we’ll soon be in Connecticut.”

Headlights gleamed in the rain.

“I’d better let my dispatcher know what’s going on,” the driver said. “Listen, I’m sorry about your father and all, but buddy, this long a trip needs special arrangements. If we end up in Stamford or some damned place like that, I won’t be able to get a fare to come back to the city. I’m gonna have to charge you both ways.”