Extreme Measures (29 page)

“There it is, pal. Beautiful Cleveland, Ohio.”

Eddie Garcia swigged down the last of a thermos of coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was glad to be nearing the end of the run but was anxious about his passenger. Soon, he would have to drop Bob off, point him in the direction of the bus terminal, and go about unloading his rig. The man was no more prepared or equipped to strike out on his own than a kindergartener.

For a time during their journey, Eddie had tried to help him remember something, anything. But beyond recurring references to East Boston, a woman named Gideon, and her horse, he got nowhere. He pressed questions about Bob’s limp and about his
hand; he asked about his family, his service record. Nothing. Not even a glimmer. It was as if a razor had sliced cleanly through all connections to his past. For a while, Eddie even gave thought to driving him to Boston. But with a perfect turnaround run awaiting him in Cincinnati, that possibility was out of the question.

He guided the semi off the interstate and began working his way through darkened, successively narrowing streets toward Buckeye Packing. It was three in the morning, an hour before he was due in. He didn’t know his way around the city at all, but there was a bit of time to look for a diner. If they found one, he would spring for one last meal, give Bob thirty or forty bucks, find out directions to the bus terminal, and send him on his way. That was more than most anyone else would be doing in a similar spot.

Bob himself, after sleeping through most of Indiana and Ohio, had awakened just outside of Lorain, and was once more staring out the window. If there were any thoughts going on in his mind, he showed no sign of them. But Eddie could still sense the aura of sadness and bewilderment enveloping him.

“You feelin’ okay?” Eddie asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Good, because you’ve got some travelin’ ahead of you. Boston is still a hell of a ways.”

Scott squinted at the passing lights and strained to put together the images swirling through his mind. Nothing connected. Nothing at all.

They turned onto a side street barely wide enough for the rig, and rolled into a broad, deserted flat lined with warehouses and factories.

“Buckeye Packing’s just up this road,” Eddie said.

“That’s good,” Scott said with no emotion.

“I thought we might cruise around and see if we can find us some breakfast.”

Eddie had slowed to less than ten miles per hour when he saw a man standing in the road ahead,
waving a stop sign at them. He was dressed in work clothes and a plaid hunting overshirt. Garcia brought the semi to a stop and rolled down the window.

“Mornin’,” he said. “What’s up?”

The man, husky, with close-cropped hair, walked to the window, pulled a revolver from his waistband, and held it two feet from Eddie’s face.

“Open the door,” he growled. “No sudden moves.”

A second man, brandishing a shotgun, appeared by the passenger door, and a third stepped just in front of them.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Eddie said. “I’m just hauling beef. There’s nothing of any—”

“We know what you have,” the man said. “Now just get out or you’re dead.”

Eddie turned to his passenger.

“Bob,” he said evenly, “we’re being hijacked. Just open your door and do what these fuckers say. Without this rig and this load, I’m busted, but I don’t know what the fuck else we can do, goddam it.”

Slowly, the two of them opened their doors and dropped to the pavement. The man who had stopped them, clearly the leader of the three, motioned them together and then pointed to an alley between buildings.

“In there,” he ordered. “Do as I say and neither of you gets hurt.”

“Hey, look,” one of the others said. “This guy’s a gimp. What are you, some kind of war hero?”

Scott merely looked at him.

“Do what the man says, Bob,” Eddie whispered. “Hey guys, please. This rig’s all I have.”

“In the alley,” the man barked.

For Eddie Garcia, the half-minute or so that followed was little more than a blur. It began with Bob bending over, ostensibly to tie his shoe. Suddenly, and with vicious force, he swung his arm backhand, catching one of the hijackers across the throat, and dropping him like a stone. In virtually the same motion,
he whipped his good leg around, sweeping the second man to the ground and stunning him with a glancing right, palm up under his chin. The shotgun clattered to the pavement, but the man, not immobilized, lashed out with his feet, knocking Bob over.

The leader of the group, a beat slow to react, was raising his revolver when Eddie kicked him in the groin. The man doubled over as Eddie kicked him again, catching him on the upper arm and sending him sprawling.

To Garcia’s left, the first man hit was stumbling to his feet while the second had grabbed Bob by the throat and was beginning to pummel him. In that instant, Eddie saw the look on his passenger’s face. It was an expression he would never forget as long as he lived—not one of panic or rage or fear, and certainly not the blank stare he had grown so used to over the miles. Rather, Bob appeared almost serene, removed from what was happening to him, oblivious to the pain. He seemed to be completely ignoring the man on top of him in order to focus in on something else. Before Eddie realized what was happening, Bob had reached out with his good leg and swept the shotgun several feet in his direction.

Eddie dived for it, rolling over and over again as he fumbled to cock it.

One hijacker had already started to run.

The second, realizing what had happened, shoved Bob aside, kicked him hard in the ribs, and was racing toward the alley as Garcia fired. The shot seemed to hit him, but after staggering a step, he barreled on. Moments later, he disappeared into the alley. By the time Eddie brought the shotgun around, the man he had kicked was up and sprinting away. He leveled and fired, but the hijacker was already well out of range. In seconds, the street was quiet again.

Shaken and gasping for breath, Eddie stumbled to his feet. Bob was on his knees, holding his left side.

“You okay, Bob?” Garcia asked.

Scott coughed and felt the searing clinch of broken bone in his chest. He had had fractured ribs before, he knew. But when? And how?

“I’m okay,” he managed.

Garcia helped him to his feet.

“You sure?” he asked. “You want to go to a hospital?”

The word brought a barrage of images to Scott’s mind, none of them pleasant.

“No,” he said hoarsely. “No hospital.”

Eddie Garcia stepped back a pace and looked at him.

“I’ve never seen anyone move like that,” he said. “Who are you?”

Scott looked at him sadly and shook his head.

“I don’t know, Eddie. I don’t know anything. I didn’t even plan on attacking those guys. It just happened.”

He coughed again, and had to splint the pain to keep from passing out.

“I’m takin’ you to a fuckin’ hospital,” Garcia insisted.

Scott shook his head. “I’ve got to get to East Boston,” he said. “It’s important.”

“For what?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Mrs. Gideon’s horse?”

“Something. I don’t know what.”

Garcia opened his wallet and pulled out a hundred dollars—all the money he had but ten.

“Here,” he said. “The Buckeye people owe me big bucks for this run. Thanks to you I’m gonna collect. Can you make it back into the cab?”

“I can make it,” Scott said, wincing with each step.

“We’ll find the bus terminal then.” Garcia kept shaking his head in amazement as he started up the rig. “I don’t believe what I just saw you do. With your hand and your leg like that. I just don’t believe it.”

Fifteen minutes later they stood outside the darkened Greyhound terminal.

“You sure you don’t want to just stay with me for a while?” Garcia asked. “We can do my Cinci-Phoenix run together, and then maybe get you to a doctor—find out why you can’t remember nothin’.”

“I’ll be okay,” Scott said.

“Well, here. This is a number you can call in Utah. It’s my mother. She always knows where to find me. If you ever need anything, anything at all, just call.”

“Thanks.”

“I owe you, Bob. I owe you big-time.”

“No, you don’t.”

Behind them, the lights of the terminal flicked on. Moments later the doors were opened. Eddie Garcia wondered if there was something else—anything else—he could do. Finally, he simply shrugged, held the man’s hand for a time, and then walked away. When he reached his rig, he turned back. Bob was still standing there, rail-thin and rumpled, and badly needing both a shave and a bath. Looking at the shape he was in, Garcia simply could not fathom what he had seen him do.

“You sure you know what’s what in there, Bob?” he called out.

“Boston bus. I know.”

“Well, I hope you find yourself, my friend, and that woman’s horse, too. I really do.”

The man, in obvious pain, managed something of a smile.

“I hope so, too, Eddie,” he said, with no animation whatever. “I hope so too.”

Garcia hauled himself up behind the wheel. When he glanced back, his passenger was gone.

T
he pathology unit at White Memorial was a fluorescently lit, windowless place filling the basement and much of the subbasement of the main building. It had been newly decorated with a mix of Marimekko cloth wall hangings and artificial plants which Eric found not the least appealing.

Although it was not yet eight-thirty in the morning, the day shifts in chemistry, hematology, blood bank, cytology, and histology were in full swing. Wearing scrubs and his clinic coat, Eric passed by each section on his way to the cubicle that housed the hospital’s toxicologist. It amazed him that even after five years, there were still so many White Memorial employees whose work he depended on day after day, case after case, yet whom he didn’t know.

Although he was operating on precious little sleep, he felt charged and invigorated—excited not only for the discoveries he hoped the day ahead would hold, but by the magic of the night just past.
He and Laura had, at last, become lovers in every physical sense. They made love on her bed and in the shower, on the easy chair by her television, even on the carpet. They loved each other in the frantic, groping way of teenagers, and in the prolonged, imaginative, gently touching way of old friends.

And finally, toward dawn, they slept, wrapped in each other’s arms, both sensing their lives beginning to join.

The White Memorial toxicologist, a man named Ivor Blunt, could not have been more aptly named. A crusty veteran of nearly thirty years at his craft, Blunt had earned a reputation as much for his eccentricities as for his brilliance. His primary area of research involved the chemical dissection and adaptation of snake venom, and rumor had it that he kept more than one hundred different species of poisonous reptiles in a single huge solarium in his house.

Blunt was still smarting at having “not been invited to get involved” in the Loretta Leone case, as he phrased it to Eric. The toxicologist had been reluctant even to see him about the case. Eric persisted, though, and was finally granted a fifteen-minute appointment. It was his plan to break from his E.R. shift long enough to see Blunt and later Haven Darden, and then to leave for the Countway Library as early as possible.

Meanwhile, Laura would file a complaint against Donald Devine and the Gates of Heaven, and also report on the threatening phone call she had received. Whether she told the police about the shooting in East Boston would depend on how much credence they seemed to be giving her story.

Blunt’s office was set at the far end of the corridor from the autopsy suite. The door, with
IVOR T. L. BLUNT, PH.D
. painted in black on opaque glass, was ajar just a crack. As Eric was about to knock, he heard the toxicologist’s raspy voice from within.

“Come on, you pig-headed rascal,” Blunt was exclaiming. “It’s under the chair. Under the chair!”

Uncertain, Eric held back from knocking for a few seconds, and then gently tapped on the wooden margin of the door. The door creaked open an inch.

“No!” Blunt shouted.

Eric could hear him race for the door at the moment a brown mouse darted out, over Eric’s shoes, and down the corridor.

“Damn,” Blunt said.

There was a scuffling behind the door. Finally, it was opened. Blunt, looking every bit the mad professor with a frayed tweed sportcoat, disheveled gray hair, and Coke-bottle glasses, stood in the doorway with five or six feet of python draped over his shoulders.

“That was breakfast for Dr. Livingston here,” he said, without the faintest trace of humor.

“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean—”

From somewhere down the hall came a shriek, then another.

“I know, I know,” Blunt growled. “Save your apologies for those women out there. As if I didn’t have enough problems around here.”

He lowered the snake into a large wire-mesh cage and motioned Eric to a seat. The office had the cluttered, active disarray of an academician’s retreat. A huge periodic table of the elements covered one wall, and excellent African safari photos another. The rest of the space was crammed with books and journals. Above Blunt’s desk was a sign that read:
IF IT LOOKS LIKE A DUCK, AND WALKS LIKE A DUCK, AND QUACKS LIKE A DUCK, COOK IT
.