David Morrell - Desperate Measures
Page 42
to contact someone else he had once interviewed before he came to the
mansion to confront Gable.
The person he'd gone to see was a security expert. The sweater was a
bullet-resistant vest whose state-of-the-art design made it look like
ordinary clothing.
I'm the sum of all the people I ever interviewed, Pittman thought
morosely as he stared again out the shattered window toward Denning's
corpse.
He turned away. The effort of breathing made him wince. The security
expert had explained that the woven fibers of the bullet-resistmt vest
could stop most projectiles but that it offered no protection against
the force of their impact. Bruises and injured ribs were sometimes
unavoidable.
I believe it, Pittman thought, holding himself. I feel like I've been
kicked by a horse.
The sirens, joined by others, sped nearer and louder.
Pittman staggered across the living room, passing Gable's corpse, then
Sloane's, then Webley's. The stench of cordite and death was cloying.
He had to get outside. He had to breathe fresh air. He stumbled along
the stone-floored hallway, his legs weak from the effects of fear. As
he reached for the main door, he heard tires squealing on the paved
drivewayoutside. He'opened the door and lurched onto the terrace,
breathing sweet, cool air. Policemen scrambled trom cruisers. Weapons
drawn, they didn't bother slamming their car doors. They were too busy
racing toward Pittman. He lifted his arms, not wanting them to think he
was a threat. But then he saw Jill among them, racing even harder to
reach him, shouting his name, and he knew that for now at least he
didn't have to be afraid. He held her, clinging to her, oblivious to
the pressure against his injured chest. She was sobbing, and he held
her tighter, never wanting to let her go.
"I love you. I was so afraid that I'd lose you," she said.
"Not today." Pittman kissed her. "Thank God, not today.
EPILOGUE
Love is an act of faith, Pittman thought. People get sick and die, or
they die in accidents, or they eat food that hasn't been properly cooked
and they get salmonella and they die, or they fall from a ladder and
break their necks, or they get tired of you and they don't want to see
you anymore and they don't answer your phone calls, or they divorce you.
There were so many ways to be to by love. Indeed, eventually all love,
even the truest and most faithful, doomed the lover to agonizing
loss-because of death. Love required so much optimism, so much trust in
the future. A practical person might say that the possible'immediate
benefits did not compensate for the ultimate painful result. A cautious
person might deny his or her feelings, closet the temptation to love,
smother it, and go through life in a safe, emotionless vacuum. But not
me, Pittman thought. If love requires faith, I'm a believer. These
thoughts occurred to him as he held Jill's hand and walked between rows
of tombstones toward his beloved son's grave. It was Thursday again, a
week after the events that had taken place at Eustace Gable's mansion
and two weeks after Pittman had tried to save Jonathan Millgate's life
at the Scarsdale estate. Following the arrival of the police and the
discovery of the corpses in Gable's blood-spattered living room, Pittman
and Jill had been held in custody. But as
Pittman had hoped, the damning conversation that had been broadcast to
the police was his salvation. After he and Jill had been questioned at
length, after Mn. Page corroborated those portions of their story about
which she had personal experience, after the police in Boston and New
York verified other details (with help from the Vermont State Police,
who went to Grollier Academy), Pittman and Jill were eventually
released.
Now in New York, they stopped before Jeremy's grave, and the warm
sunshine-filled spring afternoon made Pittman's heart ache worse from
love for his absent son. It was terrible that Jeremy would never again
see and experience weather so beautiful.
Pittman put his arm around Jill, drawing comfort from her, while he
studied the amazingly green grass that covered
Jeremy's grave. As his tear ducts stung his eyes, he was reminded of
something that Walt Whitman had written, that grass was the hair of
graves. Jeremy's hair. The only hair he has now. Except that isn't
true, Pittman thought. A hundred years ago maybe, when coffins were
made of wood and weren't surrounded by a concrete sleeve and lid. In
the old days, the coffin and the body would decompose, become one with
the earth, and generate new life. Now the way bodies are hygienically
sealed within the earth, death is truly lifeless, Pittman thought. If
his ex-wife had agreed with Pittman's wishes, their son's body would
have been cremated, his ashes lovingly scattered in a meadow where
wildflowers could bloom from him. But Pittman's ex-wife had insisted so
strongly and Pittman had been so emotionally disabled, Jer emy's body
had been disposed of in a traditional manner, and the sterility of it
made Pittman want to cry.
The thought of death, which for the past year had preoccupied him, now
weighed heavier on his mind. Since his escape from the Scarsdale
estate, he had seen his best friend killed, and Father Dandridge, and
that didn't include several men whom he himself had killed, and it
certainly didn't include the slaughter at Gable's mansion. The more
Pittman brooded about it, the more he wondered if the other grand
counselors-Anthony Lloyd dead from a stroke, Victor Standish dead from
suicide-should also be included. And of course, Jonathan Millgate. I
set out to do an obituary on a man who wasn't dead, Pittman thought. In
the process, I inadvertently ended up causing the death of that man and
of all his associates.
The grand counselors were evil. Of that, Pittman had no doubt. But
they would have died soon anyway, he told himself, and maybe that would
have been better than exposing their obscene secret and causing so many
other deaths along the way. Would any of this have happened, Pittman
wondered, if he hadn't believed that the public truly had a right to
know about the abuses of power? If he'd been less determined, he would
never have gone after Jonathan MiHgate seven years previously. Burt
would never have chosen him to go after Millgate again two weeks ago. Do
I bear some responsibility for what happened?
Pittman couldn't believe that. No, I was right to go after them, he
told himself with force. 'Mose bastards did think they were above
everyone. They didn't care who suffered and died as long as their
careers prospered. They deserved to be punished-not killed, too easy
for them, but exposed, condemned, ridiculed. In the old days, they
would have been put in a cage in the town square and people would have
spat upon them. And maybe other diplomats would have been discouraged
from abusing power.
This "what if' type of thinking, this "if only" second guessing had been
typical of Pittman's
mind-set after Jeremy's death. He had kept
imagining an alternate reality in which if only this or that had
happened, everything would have turned out for the best. But the "if
only" hadn't happened. "If only" wasn't the case. Reality was the
case. And reality was painful.
As a consequence, he had not been prepared for the love that he had
found in Jill. He held her close to him. He treasured her. Yes, love
was doomed to end in pain, he thought, but in the meantime it was an
anodyne against other kinds of pain, the tragic imperfections of life.
He still could not adjust to the realization of how close he had come to
killing himself two weeks earlier. He had been in such black despair
because of grief, the pain had been intolerable. Now grief still
weighed upon him, unrelieved by the tears that streamed down his cheeks
as he blinked through them at Jeremy's sunbathed grave, but he had been
shocked into dealing with the present rather than dwelling on the past,
and with Jill beside him to share the weight of his grief, he knew that
he could now persist, just as he would gladly share the weight of
whatever despair would eventually seize her.
And to be sure, a few good things had happened. The day after the
massacre at Gable's mansion, the newspaper for which Pittman had worked
and which had been scheduled to go out of business had found a financial
white knight willing to keep it in business. The dying paper had been
reborn, and the publicity that Pittman's story had received had prompted
the paper's new owner to rehire Pittman as a lead reporterin exchange
for an exclusive series about what had happened to him and what he had
discovered about the grand counselors, although his prestigious new
position didn't matter to him as much as the chance to continue telling
the truth about the abuses of power.
If only Jeremy was alive to cheer me on, Pittman thought
If only.
But II if only" was to look backward, and at the moment, watching
Jeremy's grave, tightening his arm around Jill, he knew that he had an
obligation to himself and Jill to look to the future. An act of faith,
Pittman thoughtHe turned to Jill, who wiped his eyes and kissed him.
"I'm sorry you're hurting," she told him.
"Hey, I,m alive. you're here with me." His voice broke.
"Tears don't always mean a person's sad."