Stephen White: Critical Conditions

My tele-car switched off almost immediately on a side track that angled right at forty-five degrees, and with disarming suddenness I was riding the rails upward again toward the top of one of the huge collection caverns like the one where Sam and I had begun our journey.

I looked everywhere and couldn’t find Merritt. Nor could I locate her pursuer.

After fifteen or twenty seconds, my tele-car slowed and stopped in a line behind four or five others. The gray trays were being automatically offloaded from their cradles by conveyors to await their elevator trips back to the curbside check-in area to pick up another pair of skis.

I jumped out of the tray and ducked behind an electrical equipment panel. Across the way, the tele-car transporting the man in the bomber jacket was just entering the same queue I had been in. As his tele-car bumped to a stop, he stepped out and scanned the huge space looking for Merritt. The room was so packed with lines of tracks that the task was like trying to find a specific fleck of basil in a bowl of spaghetti.

I saw the gun in his left hand.

Merritt?

He and I saw her at the exact same time. She had apparently crossed a maintenance bridge that traversed a few different tracks and was in the middle of the huge room crouching behind a stack of spare beige tele-car bins.

I was close enough to him to watch him smile.

To reach the middle of the room, he began to climb the steep steel ladder over the same maintenance bridge that Merritt had crossed. Newly loaded tele-cars zoomed past on the tracks below him. From the top of the bridge he scanned the space thoroughly, checking to see if anyone was closing in on him. From the look in his eyes, I could tell he didn’t see any cops. And he didn’t see me.

Merritt saw him approaching. Her eyes flattened. Death was coming to visit. This particular apparition had brown hair and a boxy automatic and a bomber jacket and a Lincoln Continental waiting at the curb.

The man released the clip from his weapon and checked his load. He was precise in his movements as he prepared. Satisfied, he clicked the magazine back into place and started down the other side of the bridge.

Merritt ran, jumped a track, and crouched low behind a series of track-mounted tele-cars with beige bins. The man fired. I couldn’t see Merritt, but I knew she was still moving. I could hear her feet pound against the metal grid floor.

She leapt another track. I lifted a fire extinguisher from a nearby rack and threw it as far as I could in the opposite direction. The man with the gun spun and fired at the bouncing canister before he recognized the diversion.

He looked right at the electrical panel that I was hiding behind. I couldn’t tell if he saw me. He then turned and refocused on Merritt.

She was gone. It was obvious he couldn’t locate her. Frantically, I scanned. I couldn’t locate her either.

The man in the bomber jacket jumped a track, almost getting himself clobbered by a tele-car. He checked behind him for a moment and was more careful as he crawled across the next track, to the place where he had last seen Merritt.

She wasn’t there. I started scanning the tele-cars that were scooting on the tracks around the room. He did, too. Neither of us found her.

Frustrated, he started back toward the bridge. Above me, I heard a muffled squeal and saw Merritt as she was thrown from a beige bin on a tele-car as a cam forced it to tilt down to be certain it was empty and ready for its next load. Instantly, she realized her sudden vulnerability and cowered in a tight ball. She looked like a pile of laundry on a stainless steel tray.

The man reached the top of the bridge, raised his arm, and aimed his weapon at Merritt.

I screamed, “Nooo!” as two quick gunshots exploded.

Merritt lay immobile.

The man stood immobile, too, and didn’t fire again. He seemed to lower his gun an inch or so.

Another shot rang out.

The man’s knees buckled and he pitched forward over the rail at the top of the bridge, falling head first into a tele-car that was loaded with a car seat in a plastic bag. The tele-car immediately sped up an incline and started to exit the loading area to begin its journey to the concourse.

Six inches to the left of Merritt’s buttocks I could see a bullet hole ripped in the stainless steel. I called out, “Merritt? Merritt?” and began to run toward her, dodging tele-cars and leaping tracks.

I watched as she unfolded herself and sat, hugging her knees to her chest. She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking high above me, behind the bridge. I turned, too, and saw her Uncle Sam standing on a catwalk with three uniformed Denver cops. He was holding a handgun as though it were a precious baby.

“Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam. Did you get him?”

Sam lowered his weapon and said, “Yes, babe. I got him. It’s over.”

Merritt and Lucy missed their flight.

But United Airlines officials scrambled to take advantage of the goodwill opportunity and offered to upgrade them to first-class on the next nonstop, which happened to be my flight. Unfortunately for me, only two spare seats were available in front of the curtain, and I was left with my aisle seat in the main cabin.

Merritt and Sam and I spent the time until takeoff talking to Denver cops.

Sam stayed so close to Merritt, it was if he were handcuffed to her. I knew that when the time for boarding came, he had every intention of walking her onto the plane and buckling her seat belt around her waist.

The airport security offices where we were being interviewed were on the sixth level of the main terminal building, not more than fifty feet above the location where Sam had shot Dr. Terence Gusman to death. For almost ten minutes after the siege ended, none of us knew that the man pursuing Merritt had been Dr. Gusman, or that he was dead. It took that long for the tele-car with his body and the car seat to make its way to Concourse B, Gate 28.

Gusman had been carrying an ID and a neatly written note assailing the media for twice destroying his family. He wasn’t naive about his plan; he had apparently anticipated the possibility of not surviving this last attempt at earning some vengeance on the media in general, and Brenda Strait in particular, by making one last assault on Brenda’s family. While Lucy accompanied Merritt to the bathroom, Sam was quiet and showed no signs of regret over shooting Gusman. I wanted to provoke some words from him, so I said, “At least your loose end is tied up now, Sam.”

He looked at me curiously. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been wondering why the harassment against Brenda stopped when it did. Well, Gusman chaired the medical board; he knew about Chaney’s illness through MedExcel. That’s why the harassment stopped before Chaney’s condition became public. He was sure he could keep the protocol from ever being approved for her and he was waiting patiently for her to die. Chaney’s death would be his retribution against Brenda. There was no need to continue the harassment anymore.”

He waved his arm in the direction of the baggage system. “This was what, desperation, then?”

“Don’t you think? He hears that his medical board’s decision to deny additional care for Chaney has been overruled and that Chaney is off to Seattle to get the protocol. He sees on the news that Merritt is going to follow her. Maybe he thought this would be his last chance to get even.”

I expected he would argue with me. Instead he lamented that he’d let Gusman slip. “You know, I should’ve had him picked up. I didn’t figure him for this. I played this too delicate. I should have plowed his head into the boards when I had him in the open. If I had done that, he would have been too timid for this kind of bullshit.”