Desperate Measures

9

As the phone started ringing again, Pittman grabbed his spare overcoat, opened his apartment door, peered out, saw no one, went into the dimly lit corridor, and locked the door behind him.

In his apartment, the phone kept ringing.

He hurried toward the elevator. But the moment he reached it, extending his right hand to press the down button, not yet touching it, he heard a buzz.

Creaking, the elevator began to rise from the ground floor.

Pittman felt pressure behind his ears.

He headed down the stairs but froze as he heard footsteps scraping far below him, coming up the concrete steps, echoing louder as they ascended from the ground floor.

Invisible arms seemed to pin his chest, squeezing him. One man in the elevator, another on the stairs. That would make sense. No one could come down without their knowing.

Pittman backed up, straining to be silent. Again in the corridor, he analyzed his options and crept up the stairs toward the next floor.

Out of sight, he heard the elevator stop and footsteps come out. They hesitated in the corridor. Other footsteps, those in the stairwell, came up to the third floor and joined whoever had gotten out of the elevator.

No one spoke as both sets of footsteps proceeded along the corridor. They stopped about where Pittman judged his apartment would be. He heard a knock, then another. He heard the scrape of metal that he recognized as the sound of lock-pick tools. A different kind of metallic sound might have been the click of a gun being cocked. He heard a door being opened.

“Shit,” a man exclaimed, as if he’d seen the corpse in Pittman’s apartment.

Immediately the footsteps went swiftly into a room. The door was closed.

I can’t stay here, Pittman thought. They might search the building.

He swung toward the elevator door on the fourth floor and pressed the down button. His hands shook as the elevator wheezed and groaned to his level.

Part of him was desperate to flee down the stairs. But what if the men came out and saw him? This way, he’d be out of sight in the elevator-unless the men came out in the meantime and decided to use the elevator, stopping it as it descended, in which case he’d be trapped in the cage with them.

But he had to take the risk. Suppose the men had left someone in the lobby. Pittman needed a way to get past, and the elevator was it. His face was slick with sweat as he got in the car and pressed the button for the basement. As the car sank toward the third floor, he imagined that he would hear a buzz, that the car would stop, that two men would get in.

He trembled, watching the needle above the inside of the door point to 3.

Then the needle began to point toward 2.

He exhaled. Sweat trickled down his chest under his shirt.

The needle pointed toward 1, then B.

The car stopped. The doors grated open. He faced the musty shadows of the basement.

The moment he stepped out, the elevator doors closed. As he shifted past a furnace, the elevator surprised him, rising. Turning, he watched the needle above the door: 1, 2, 3.

The elevator stopped.

Simultaneously, via the stairwell, he heard noises from the lobby: footsteps, voices.

“See anybody?”

“No. Our guys just went up.”

“Nobody came down?”

“Not that I saw. I’ve been here only five minutes. Somebody took the elevator to the basement.”

“Basement? What would anybody want down there?”

“A storage unit maybe.”

“Check it out.”

Pittman hurried beyond the furnace. In shadows, he passed locked storage compartments. He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him. He came to the service door from the basement. Sweating more profusely, he gently twisted the knob on the dead-bolt lock, desperate not to make noise. The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs.

Pittman opened the door, tensed from the squeak it made, slipped out into the night, shut the door, and broke into a run. The narrow alley, only five feet wide, led each way, to Twelfth Street or past another apartment building to Eleventh Street. Reasoning that the men who were chasing him would have a car waiting in front of his building on Twelfth Street, he darted past garbage cans toward Eleventh Street.

At the end, a stout wooden door blocked his way. Clumsy with fright, he twisted the knob on another dead bolt and tugged at the door, flinching when he heard a noise far along the alley behind him. He surged out onto Eleventh Street, straining to adjust his eyes to the glare of headlights and streetlights. Breathing hard in panic, he turned left and hurried past startled pedestrians. His goal was farther west, the din of traffic, the safety of the congestion on Seventh Avenue.

And this time, he did find an empty taxi.