Desperate Measures (31 page)

A shingle gave way beneath Jill, skittering off the roof, clattering onto cobblestones. She fell on her shoulder, beginning
to roll. Pittman grabbed her arm. She dropped her shoes, which hit the cobblestones next to the shingle.

Pittman charged ahead with Jill and halted unexpectedly.

The wall didn’t continue beyond the garage. The courtyard was framed only by buildings. Below them, a red Jaguar was parked
outside the garage.

Pittman jumped down onto the car, feeling the roof protest but hold. Jill didn’t need encouragement; she leapt down after
him, the metal so smoothly waxed that her bare feet nearly slid out from under her. Pittman clutched her, kept her from falling,
held her arms, lowered her toward the cobblestones, then jumped down next to her.

The Jaguar’s owner must have been planning to leave soon. The gate to the street was open. Racing along the driveway, they
reached a narrow, quiet, tree-lined, twilit street around the corner from Meecham’s address.

Their gray Duster was parked three spaces to their left.

“Drive.” Jill threw him the keys, then climbed into the backseat, ducking below the windows.

As Pittman sped away from the curb, he heard her rummaging in the back. “What are you doing?”

She was scrunched down out of sight, fumbling with something.

“Jill, what are you—?”

“Getting out of this damned skirt and into my jeans. This skirt is ripped up to my backside. If I’m going to be arrested,
there’s no way it’s going to be with my underwear showing.”

Pittman couldn’t help it. He was frightened, and he couldn’t catch his breath, but she sounded so embarrassed, he started
laughing.

“I’ve had it with skirts. And those useless pumps,” she said. “I don’t care who I have to make an impression on. All this
running. From now on, it’s sneakers, a sweater, and jeans. And how the hell did the police know we were at Meecham’s? Who
could have…?”

Pittman stared grimly ahead. “Yes. That’s really been bothering me.” He concentrated. “Who?”

“Wait a minute. I think I—There’s only one person who had that information. The man I phoned.”

“At the alumni association?”

“Yes. This evening, he must have called my father to suck up to him by bragging how he’d done me a favor.”

“That’s got to be it. Your father knows that the police are looking for you. As soon as he heard from the alumni association,
he phoned the police and sent them to the address the man gave you.”

“We’ve got to be more careful.”

Pittman steered onto Charles Street, trying to keep his speed down, not to be conspicuous. As other cars switched on their
headlights, so did he.

“Exactly,” Pittman said. “More careful. What were you doing back there?”

“I told you, putting on my jeans.”

“No. I mean back at the house. In the bedroom. You looked as if you weren’t going to leave with me.”

Jill didn’t respond.

“Don’t tell me that’s true,” Pittman said. “You actually thought about staying behind?”

“For a second…” Jill hesitated. “I told myself, I can’t keep running forever. The police don’t want
me
. It’s Millgate’s people who want to kill me. I thought I could end it right there. I could stay behind and give myself up,
explain to the police why I’ve been running, make them understand you’re innocent.”

“Yeah, sure. I bet that would have been good for a few laughs at the precinct.” Although Pittman could understand Jill’s motives,
the thought that she would have left him caused his stomach to harden. “So what made you keep going? Why didn’t you stay?”

“The story you told me about how you’d been arrested when you were trying to get an interview with Millgate seven years ago.”

“That’s right. Two prisoners, probably working for Millgate, beat me up while I was in a holding cell.”

“The police weren’t quick enough to help you,” Jill said.

“Or maybe the guards were bribed to take a long coffee break.” Pittman continued to feel bitter that she might have left him.
“There’s no way the authorities could guarantee your safety. So that’s why you came with me? Your common sense took over?
You listened to your survival instincts?”

“No,” Jill said.

“Self-preservation.”

“No. That’s not why I came with you. It had nothing to do with worrying whether the police could protect me.”

“Then…?”

“I was worried about you. I couldn’t imagine what you’d be like on your own.”

“Hey, I could have managed.”

“You don’t realize how vulnerable you are.”

“No kidding, every time somebody shoots at me, I get the idea.”

“
Emotionally
vulnerable. Last Wednesday,
you
were going to do the shooting.”

“I don’t need to be reminded. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble.”

Jill squirmed from the back into the passenger seat. “You just proved my point. I think the only reason you’ve managed to
get this far is you had somebody cheering for you. I’ve never met anybody more lonely. Why would you want to keep going if
you didn’t have anything to live for, anybody to care?”

Pittman felt as if ice had been placed on his chest. Unable to speak, he drove through the shadows of Boston Common, reaching
Columbus Avenue, using the reverse of the route Jill had taken.

“The reason I decided to stay with you,” Jill said, “is that I didn’t want to be apart from you.”

Pittman had trouble speaking. “You sure did a lot of thinking in a couple of seconds.”

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” Jill said. “I want to see how we get along when life gets normal.”

“If,” Pittman said. “If it ever does get normal. If we can ever get through this.”

“This is a new feeling for me,” Jill said. “It kind of snuck up on me. When you introduced me as your wife…”

“What?”

“I liked it.”

Pittman was so amazed that he couldn’t react for a moment. He reached over, touching her hand.

A car horn blared behind him as he steered from traffic and stopped at the curb. His throat feeling tighter, he studied Jill,
her beguiling oval face, her long corn-silk hair, her sapphire eyes glinting from the reflection of passing headlights.

He leaned close and gently kissed her, the softness of her lips making him tingle. When she put her arms around his neck,
he felt ripples of sensation. The kiss went on and on. She parted her lips. He tasted her.

He felt a swirling sensation and slowly leaned back, pleasantly out of breath, studying her more intensely. “I didn’t think
I’d ever feel this way again.”

“You’ve got a lot of good feelings to catch up on,” Jill said.

Pittman kissed her again, this time with a hunger that startled him.

Shaking, he had to stop. “My heart’s beating so fast….”

“I know,” Jill said. “I feel light-headed.”

Another car horn blared, passing them. Pittman turned to look out his side window. Where he’d stopped was in a no parking
zone. “The last thing we need is a traffic ticket.”

He pulled from the curb.

Immediately he noticed a police car at the corner of the next street. He tried to keep his speed constant, to peer straight
ahead. It seemed to take him forever to pass the cruiser. In his rearview mirror, he saw the police car move forward—not in
his direction, but along the continuation of the side street.

He loosened his tight grip on the steering wheel. His brow felt clammy. He was more afraid than usual.

“Where are we going?”

Pittman shook his head, squinting at the painful glare of headlights on the crowded Massachusetts Turnpike. For several minutes,
he’d been pensively quiet, trying to adjust—as he assumed Jill was—to the powerful change in their relationship. “We’re heading
out of Boston. But where we’re going, I have no idea. I don’t know what to do next. We’ve learned a lot. But we really haven’t
learned anything. I can’t believe that Millgate’s people would want to kill us because we’d found out what happened to him
in prep school.”

“Suppose he wasn’t molested.”

“The circumstantial evidence indicates—”

“No, what I mean is, suppose he’d been willing,” Jill said. “Maybe Millgate’s people believe that the old man’s reputation
would have been ruined if—”

“You think
that’s
what his people were afraid of?”

“Well, he confessed something to you about Grollier, and they killed him for it. Then
you
had to be stopped. And me because they have to believe you’ve told me what you know.”

“Killed him to protect his reputation? I just can’t… There’s something more,” Pittman said. “I don’t think we’ve learned the
whole truth yet. Maybe the other grand counselors are trying to protect
their
reputations. They don’t want anyone to know what happened to
them
at Grollier.”

“But what exactly? And how do we prove it?” Jill asked. She rubbed her forehead. “I can’t think anymore. If I don’t get something
to eat…”

Glancing ahead, she pointed to the right toward a truck stop off the turnpike, sodium arc lamps glaring in the darkness.

“My stomach’s rumbling, too.” Pittman followed an exit ramp into the bright, eerie yellow light of the gas station/restaurant,
where he parked several slots away from a row of eighteen-wheel rigs.

After they got out of the car and joined each other in front, Pittman hugged her.

“What are we going to do?” She pressed the side of her face against his shoulder. “Where do we go for answers?”

“We’re just tired.” Pittman stroked her hair, then kissed her. “Once we get something to eat and some rest…”

Hand in hand, they walked toward the brightly lit entrance to the restaurant. Other cars were pulling in. Wary, Pittman watched
a van stop ahead of them. The driver had his window down. The van’s radio was blaring, an announcer reading the news.

“I guess I’m needlessly jumpy. Everybody looks suspicious to me,” Pittman said. He made sure that he was between Jill and
the van when they came abreast of the driver’s door. The beefy man behind the steering wheel was talking loudly to someone
else, but the radio was even louder than his gruff tone.

Pittman turned toward the van. “My God.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The news. The radio in that van. Didn’t you hear it?”

“No.”

“Anthony Lloyd. One of the grand counselors.
He’s dead.”

Dismayed, Pittman ran with Jill back to the Duster. Inside, he turned on the radio and switched stations, cursing impatiently
at call-in shows and country-western programs. “There must be a news station
somewhere
.”

He turned on the car’s engine, afraid he would weaken the battery while he switched stations. Ten minutes later, an on-the-half-hour
news report came on.

“Anthony Lloyd, onetime ambassador to the United Nations, the former USSR, and Britain, past secretary of state as well as
past secretary of defense, died this evening at his home near Washington,” a solemn-voiced male reporter said. “One of a legendary
group of five diplomats whose careers spanned global events from the Second World War to the present, Lloyd was frequently
described—along with his associates—as a grand counselor. To quote the reaction of Harold Fisk, current secretary of state,
‘Anthony Lloyd had an immeasurable influence on American foreign policy for the past fifty years. His wisdom will be sorely
missed.’ While the cause of death has not yet been determined, it is rumored that Lloyd—aged eighty—died from a stroke, the
result of strain brought on by the recent apparent murder of his colleague, Jonathan Millgate, another of the grand counselors.
Authorities are still looking for Matthew Pittman, the former reporter allegedly responsible for Millgate’s death.”

The news report changed to other topics, and Pittman shut off the radio. In silence, he continued to stare at the dashboard.

“Died from a stroke?” Jill asked.

“Or was
he
murdered, too? It’s a wonder they didn’t blame
his
death on me, as well.”

“In a way, they did,” Jill said. “Their story is that the first death caused the second.”

“Died from strain.” Pittman bit his lip, thinking. He turned to Jill. “Or from guilt? From worry? Maybe something’s happening
to all of them. Maybe the grand counselors aren’t as strong as they thought.”

“What are you getting at?”

“We’ll have to eat on the road and take turns sleeping while the other drives. We’ve got a lot of miles to cover.”

Shortly before 7:00
A.M.
, in dim morning light, Pittman parked near the well-maintained apartment building in Park Slope in Brooklyn. Traffic increased.
People walked by, going to work. “I just hope she hasn’t left yet. If she has, we could end up sitting here all day, thinking
she’s still in the apartment.” Pittman used his electric razor to shave.

“You’re certain she works outside the home?”

“If you’d ever met Gladys, you’d know she’d definitely prefer to be away while her husband works at home and takes care of
the baby.” He sipped tepid coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

“Do we have any more of that Danish left?” Jill glanced around, peered at her Styrofoam cup of stale coffee on the dashboard,
and grimaced. “I can’t believe I’m doing this to myself. I hardly ever drink coffee, and now I’m guzzling it. Yesterday morning,
I was eating doughnuts. Last night, chili and French fries. Now it’s the gooiest Danish I ever… And I can’t get enough of
it. After years of eating right, I’m self-destructing.”

“There.” Pittman gestured. “That’s Gladys.”

A prim, sour-faced woman stepped out of the apartment building, tightened a scarf around her head, and walked determinedly
along the street.

“Looks like she runs a tight ship,” Jill said.

“Talking to her makes you think of mutiny.”

“But we
won’t
have to talk to her.”

“Right.” Pittman got out of the car.

They walked toward the apartment building. In the vestibule, Pittman faced a row of intercom buttons and pretended to study
the name below each button as if looking for one in particular, but what he really did was wait for the man and woman leaving
the building to get out of his sight in time for him to grab the door as it swung shut. Before it could lock itself, he reopened
it and walked through with Jill, heading toward the elevator.