Lethal Measures

by Leonard Goldberg

  “Where to?”

  “A small park a few blocks from here. I think it’s used mostly by people from the hospital. I saw a lot of doctors and nurses there. And a bunch of kids were playing on the grass. It’s kind of like a family park.”

  “Was Joanna Blalock alone?”

  “No. The cop was right behind her.”

  Rudy was so loyal, Eva was thinking. It was a shame he was so stupid.

  “I meant, did she meet anyone there?”

  Rudy thought back, concentrating.

  “Well, a little kid ran up to her and called her Aunt Joanna.” “Was the kid with anyone?”

  “His mother. He called her Ma-ma, or something like that.”

  Eva’s eyes narrowed behind her dark glasses. So Joanna Blalock had a sister and a nephew. Interesting.

  “Did they stay in the park?”

  “Just for a little while,” Rudy told her.

  “Then they went to a small ice cream place behind the park.”

  “Did the cop remain close to them?”

  “He was ten or fifteen feet away.”

  “And what about the cop car?”

  “He cruised the ice cream parlor and parked at the curb across the street,” Rudy said.

  “I’m telling you, they’ve got her covered like glue.”

  Eva pulled down the sun visor and reached for a stick of gum. Carefully she digested all the information about Joanna Blalock and her sister and nephew and the cops watching them. Then she began searching for a weak spot. She found two immediately, both risky. Too risky.

  “Maybe we should just forget about her,” Rudy said, breaking into her thoughts.

  Eva shook her head, trying to ignore Rudy and focus on the problem she faced.

  Somehow the cops guarding Joanna Blalock would have to be separated, their views of each other blocked. But how?

  “I don’t see why—” “It’s not your job to see why,” Eva snapped, her concentration gone.

  “But I’ll give you the reasons anyhow, so listen up.” She ticked off the points on her fingers.

  “First, Blalock saw me well enough to give the cops a description. The police artist was able to come up with a sketch of my face.”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “That means she can pick me out of a lineup or recognize me in some picture the FBI may have.”

  “Oh, shit!” Rudy said again.

  “And she’s leading the investigation,” Eva went on.

  “Without her those cops would be stumbling over one another like a bunch of clowns. She keeps pointing them in the right direction.”

  “Yeah, but there’s only four days left.”

  “Which is enough time for someone as smart as Joanna Blalock,” Eva said.

  “And remember, every aspect of this case revolves around Memorial

  Hospital, one way or another. So the cops and the FBI and the aTF. will pass all of their information through Joanna Blalock.

  They need her expertise.”

  Rudy nodded slowly, finally understanding.

  “She’s like the cog in the wheel.”

  “She is the wheel. And anything the cops and feds know, she’ll know.” And Blalock would also know whether the Medals of Freedom would be presented on the steps or inside, Eva thought. That information was critical to their plans.

  “Boy! Wouldn’t you like to crawl inside Blalock’s head and find out exactly how close the cops are?”

  “Yes, I would,” Eva said, thinking that on occasion Rudy wasn’t so dumb. Her mind went back to Joanna Blalock and her family and the park and the nearby ice cream parlor.

  “Did her relatives go back to the hospital with Joanna Blalock?”

  “No,” Rudy said.

  “She hugged them and said she’d see them tomorrow.”

  “And that would be today, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did they say where they were going to meet?”

  “At the park, I guess.”

  Eva smiled.

  “We’re going to need a baby carriage. I want one with a big bonnet.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now.”

  “For what?”

  “You’ll see.”

  12=25 p.m.

  Jean-Claude ran across the grass with his arms spread wide apart, waving to Joanna.

  Joanna knelt down and gave the little boy a tight hug.

  “Do you know how handsome you are?”

  Jean-Claude nodded, smiling happily.

  “Did you have a nice day?”

  Jean-Claude nodded again and lifted his pants leg, showing off his new cowboy boots.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  Jean-Claude kissed Joanna’s cheek.

  “We go ice cream.” “Of course, but later. You go play now.”

  Joanna watched her nephew gallop away on his horse, riding into a make-believe world that only children knew. He waved to his mother, who was sitting on a park bench, then rode on, making the sound of a cowboy moving cattle.

  Joanna walked over and sat next to Kate.

  “Does he ever rest?”

  “Only when the herd is safely in.”

  “How did he become so infatuated with cowboys?”

  “Lord knows.” Kate lit a cigarette with a disposable lighter and inhaled deeply.

  “I think he even dreams about them.”

  “When did you start smoking again?”

  “When I heard there were people trying to kill you.”

  Joanna reached for the cigarette and took a drag before handing it back.

  “Well, in a few days it’ll all be over. The terrorists won’t give a damn about me one way or the other.”

  “What makes you so sure of that?”

  “Because on the nineteenth, they’ll—” Joanna stopped in midentence as she realized the threats against her might never end. Even after the big explosion, they might still want her dead. She again wondered what she knew that was so important to them. Joanna glanced over at the uniformed policeman standing ten feet away.

  “Chances are the terrorists will scatter once they’ve done their deed.”

  “And with any luck disappear forever.” Kate crushed out her cigarette on the ground, then leaned back and studied Joanna’s face.

  “You look beat.”

  “The nights are long.”

  “Even with Jake close by?”

  Joanna shrugged.

  “I hear noises. I have dreams.”

  “Are you still thinking about Paul a lot?”

  “Not so much,” Joanna lied. The night before she had dreamt that she and Paul du Maurier were still together. She had awakened feeling so good. Then she’d realized it had been only a dream and the tears had come again.

  Jean-Claude zoomed by, stopping briefly to give his mother a quick kiss. He waited for a woman pushing a baby carriage to pass, then galloped off again.

  Joanna glanced at the baby carriage and the young woman behind it. The woman had long red hair and was wearing a baseball cap with its bill pulled far down to protect her face against the sun. In profile she

  seemed so young—no more than twenty-five. And her abdomen was beginning to bulge with another pregnancy. Joanna tried to see the baby, but the bonnet on the carriage blocked her view. She looked away, then down at her own flat stomach.

  Joanna sighed deeply. She was now approaching middle age, the years slipping by too fast. There would be no pregnancies for her, no children, no family.

  On the street in front of the park, a motorcycle roared past and stopped at the traffic light. The rider had a shaved head and beard. His arms were heavily tattooed. The policeman next to Joanna quickly moved in front of her, obstructing any view from the street. His hand went to his holster, unsnapping the strap. His eyes stayed on the skinhead. The cop in the black-and-white was out of his car, keeping the door open to serve as a shield. Seconds ticked by.

  The light changed. The motorcyclist gunned his engine an
d rode away.

  Kate breathed a sigh of relief.

  “I don’t know how you can stand this.”

  “I don’t have any choice.”

  “Sure you do,” Kate said at once.

  “Get on a damn plane and fly to a place ten thousand miles away.”

  Joanna shook her head.

  “If they want you, they can find you.”

  “But you said they’d leave you alone after they’ve committed their act of terror.”

  “I said chances are they would,” Joanna corrected her.

  “They may still come after me. There are no guarantees.”

  “Jesus.” Kate groaned softly.

  “This place is as good as any.”

  Kate reached for her cigarettes but couldn’t find her lighter. It had slipped through a small hole in her pocket into the inner lining of her jacket. With effort she worked the lighter back up into her pocket and lit her cigarette.

  “How can you work with all this going on around you?”

  “It’s not easy.”

  “Can you still concentrate?”

  Joanna smiled faintly.

  “I keep thinking they’re going to kill me. Believe it or not, that thought concentrates the mind wonderfully.”

  Kate smiled back at her sister.

  “You really are a package, aren’t you?”

  “I guess.”

  “Are you getting any closer to identifying these bastards?”

  “We know who they are,” Joanna said.

  “We’ve got names and faces now.” “Great!”

  “It sounds great on paper,” Joanna said tonelessly.

  “But knowing who they are is one thing. Catching them before they detonate their bomb is another.”

  Joanna told Kate about her phone conversation with Jake earlier that morning.

  She described in detail Eva and Walter George Reineke and Rudy Payte and the terrorist group they belonged to and how it was founded.

  “They call themselves the Ten Righteous.”

  Kate’s eyes suddenly widened.

  “Did you say the Ten Righteous?”

  “Yes,” Joanna responded, seeing the startled look on her sister’s face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Something terrible is going to happen,” Kate said darkly.

  “It’ll be like an Armageddon.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because of their name,” Kate explained.

  “It’s a prediction of things to come.”

  Joanna moved in closer, ears pricked.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It comes from the Book of Genesis,” Kate said.

  “When God decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham tried to convince him not to. Abraham argued that if God destroyed the cities, he would be killing innocent people along with the evil ones. God reconsidered and said he would spare the cities if Abraham could find ten righteous men living in Sodom. Just ten. Abraham couldn’t, and what followed was one of the Bible’s great catastrophes—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  Joanna shivered.

  “God! What do they have in store for us?”

  “A disaster of some sort. That’s for sure.”

  Religious zealots, Joanna thought disgustedly, all believing they were doing God’s work. Even when they were blowing up babies or strangling an innocent patient. To them, it was God’s will. Joanna looked over at her sister, now thinking about the biblical derivation of the group’s name. She wondered if it might contain hidden clues about the terrorists.

  “How do you know so much about Sodom and Gomorrah?”

  “I don’t,” Kate said.

  “A few years back my husband was on an archaeological dig, and they uncovered what they believed to be the remnants of Sodom. The evidence was fairly compelling, and he presented the findings at a conference in Paris.

  What I told you is what he told me.” She ran a hand through her hair

  and patted it back into place. “We used to laugh about what would happen if God demanded that ten righteous people be produced from the city of Paris. It doesn’t seem so funny now.”

  Jean-Claude zoomed past, chasing imaginary outlaws. He circled the policeman nearby, then rode off again.

  Kate asked, “Do these creeps have any unusual features? Anything that makes them stand out?”

  “Not in physical appearance,” Joanna said.

  “But Walter George Reineke has severe asthma.”

  “So?”

  “So he was last seen in San Diego and is believed to be on his way to Los Angeles,” Joanna went on, her voice now clinical.

  “The air here is putrid, filled with smog and other pollutants. It could trigger a severe asthmatic attack that wouldn’t respond to the drugs he usually takes. He would have to go to an emergency room.”

  “And you’ve got his picture plastered on the walls of every ERin Los Angeles, right?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “And his name is in the computer file of every drugstore, just in case he tries to have his Idaho prescriptions filled down here.”

  Kate looked at Joanna admiringly.

  “Sis, I’d hate to have you tracking me down.”

  “Apparently the terrorists feel the same way,” Joanna said as she thought about the futility of trying to track down the leader of the group through his medical problems. The ERin Los Angeles were so busy on weekends that the personnel barely had time to glance at people’s faces. All Walter George Reineke would need was thick glasses and a false mustache, and nobody would recognize him.

  “It’s a real long shot,” she muttered, more to herself than to Kate.

  “But that’s better than no shot.”

  “I guess.” Joanna stood and straightened her skirt.

  “Do you feel like some ice cream?”

  “Not really,” Kate said, waving Jean-Claude over.

  “But I know someone who does.”

  1=02 p.m.

  Rudy Payte lay on the floor in the rear of the Chevy van, sweating in the heat.

  All the windows were rolled up and the noontime sun was blazing down,

  raising the temperature inside to over a hundred degrees. Rudy cursed at his discomfort, hating the heat and humidity and the pools of perspiration forming beneath him. But most of all he hated the dangerous position Eva had placed him in. The van was parked in a loading zone in front of the ice cream parlor. Directly across the street was the black-and-white squad car that was watching Joanna Blalock. Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! The cop is going to know something is wrong and come over and check the van. And I’ll have to kill him. What the hell could Eva be thinking about?

  There was a cop right across from him, and there was another cop inside the ice cream shop with the Blalock family. And the street was busy. There would be no quick getaway, even if they did manage to survive. Stupid plan! Stupid! Whatever the plan was.

  Eva hadn’t given him the details. All she had told him was to lie flat in the van and not look out the window. When he heard two raps on the side door he was to open it, then get behind the wheel and drive off. Right! While the cops just stood there and waved to him. Shit! She’s going to get us killed. Rudy took deep breaths, trying to calm himself. Four more days, he thought, and I’ll be laying on a beach in Mexico. With a half million in the bank.

  There was a soft rubbing sound on the windshield.

  Rudy reached for his semiautomatic weapon, all his senses instantly on alert.

  It’s got to be the cop, he told himself. He lay perfectly still, his heart pounding in his chest. He wondered if the cop was going to try the doors. They were all locked, except for the side door nearest Rudy. If the cop opened that door, Rudy would kill him and drive off. He’d have no choice. Eva would have to fend for herself.

  Rudy heard the sound against the windshield again. Carefully he inched his body forward so he could peer through the opening between the front seats. It was a fat meter
maid placing a parking ticket between the windshield and the wiper blade. Fuck you and your ticket! The guy I stole the van from can pay it.

  Rudy worked his way back to his original position. The hear made it hard to breathe. The temperature seemed to be rising by the minute. Rudy reached for a small bottle of distilled water and gulped it down. He wondered how much longer it would be and how much longer he could tolerate the heat. Another fifteen minutes and his brain would be fried. He again reached for the small bottle and tilted it up, trying

  to suck out the last few drops of water. Outside he heard traffic passing by, then the laughter of a small child. He wanted to take a quick look, but Eva had instructed him to stay out of sight. He heard the sound of laughter once more, this time much closer. Rudy couldn’t resist the urge to look. Slowly he raised up and peeked out of the lower corner of the window. The Blalocks were entering the ice cream parlor, a cop right behind them. Coming up the street he saw Eva pushing a baby carriage.

  Rudy dropped to the floor and tightened the silencer on his weapon. Then he waited.

  “Chocolate,” Jean-Claude announced to the man behind the ice cream counter.

  “One scoop or two?” the man asked.

  Jean-Claude looked up at his mother for guidance. She held up a finger.

  Jean-Claude nodded and held up one finger.

  “He likes those tiny marshmallows too,” Kate told the server.

  The man prepared the ice cream cone and handed it to Jean Claude

  “Here you go, little fellow.”

  “Merci beaucoup,” Jean-Claude said, smiling at the server. The man was wearing a red apron and had a protuberant abdomen and a fluffy white beard. Jean-Claude thought he looked like Santa Claus. Carefully Jean-Claude picked off the miniature marshmallows and ate them one by one.

  “More, Mama.”

  “Coming right up.” The man came from behind the counter and added a fresh layer of marshmallows.

  Kate said, “You’re going to spoil him.”

  The owner of the ice cream parlor nodded happily.

  “That’s my job.”

  The small shop was crowded with lunchtime customers. All the tables and stools were occupied. There wasn’t even room to stand against the wall.

  “We should start back,” Joanna said.

  The policeman guarding them led the way out into bright sunlight. Traffic was heavy with cars and big trucks. He waited for the vehicles to pass before giving a hand signal to the black-and-white squad car across the street.