Desperate Measures

6

The man’s eyes were open. So was his mouth. His head was propped against the far metal rim of the coffee table. His legs, bent at the knees, hung over the near rim.

Holding the lamp high, ready to throw it, Pittman stepped closer. The man’s chest wasn’t moving.

Dear God, he’s dead.

Time seemed to have accelerated. Simultaneously Pittman felt caught between heartbeats, as if time had been suspended. For seconds that might have been minutes, he continued to stare down at the man with the gun. Slowly he set the lamp back on its table. He knelt beside the man, his emotions in chaos.

How did…? I didn’t hit him hard enough to…

Christ, he must have broken his neck when he smashed through the glass. His head hid the metal side of the table.

Then Pittman noticed the blood pooling on the floor under the man-a lot of it.

Afraid that the man would spring into motion and aim the gun at him, Pittman touched the corpse’s arm and shifted the body. He swallowed bile when he saw that a long shard of glass had been rammed into the man’s back, between his shoulder blades.

Pittman’s face felt clammy.

He was thirty-eight years old. He had never been in the military. Apart from the previous night and the Saturday seven years earlier when the two men had broken his jaw, his only experience with violence had been through people he had interviewed who were acquainted with violence, either as victims, criminals, or police officers.

And now he had killed a man. Appalled by the blood on the telephone, he gingerly set it on its receptacle.

What am I going to…?

Abruptly he worried that somebody had heard the crash. He swung toward the wall behind which the neighbor’s television blared-people laughing, an announcer saying something about a trip to Jamaica, people applauding, a game show. He expected to hear urgent footsteps, the neighbor pounding on the door.

Instead, what he heard was the TV announcer giving out a prize on the game show. No matter the noise from the television, his apartment seemed eerily quiet.

What if I was wrong and he really is a policeman?

Breathing with effort, Pittman opened the man’s suit coat and took out the police identification that the man had shown him. A card next to the badge said that the detective’s name was William Mullen. The photograph on the ID matched the face of the dead man. But as Pittman examined it, he was unnerved to discover that the photograph had been pasted over another photograph, which didn’t look anything like the corpse. Pittman checked the man’s wallet, and in addition to almost four hundred dollars, he found a driver’s license in the name of Edward Halloway, residence in Alexandria, Virginia. Pittman had never heard of any New York City policeman who lived several states away. This definitely wasn’t a cop.

What the hell was he, then?