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an attendant's white coat was checking some equipment.
    Then Pittman was beyond the ambulance, whose engine was running, although its headlights were off. He noticed a stocky man in a dark suit drop the butt of a cigarette into a puddle and come to attention, seeing Pittman. You must really have needed a cigarette, Pittman thought, to stand out here in the rain.
    Nodding to the man, who didn't nod back, Pittman reached for the doorknob and noticed that the light was out above the entrance. He stepped inside, went up four steps to an echoey concrete landing, and noticed another stocky man in a dark suit, this one leaning against the wall next to where the stairs turned upward. The man's face had a hard expression with squinted, calculating eyes.
    Pittman didn't need the stairs; instead, he went forward, across the landing, through a door to a brightly lit hospital corridor. The pungent, acrid, too-familiar odors of food, antiseptic, and medicine assaulted him. When Pittman used to come here daily to visit Jeremy, the odors had been constantly present, on every floor, day or night. The odors had stuck to Pittman's clothes. For several weeks after Jeremy's death, he had smelled them on his jackets, his shirts, his pants.
    The vividness of the painful memories caused by the odors distracted Pittman, making him falter in confusion. Did he really want to put himself through this? This was the first time he'd been back inside the hospital. Would the torture be worth it just to please Burt?
    The elevator doors were directly across from the door through which he had entered the corridor. If he went ahead, he suspected that his impulse would be to go up to the tenth floor and what had been Jeremy's room rather than to go to the sixth floor, where Millgate was and where Jeremy had died in intensive care.
    Abruptly a movement on Pittman's right disturbed him. A large-chested man stepped away from the wall next to the door Pittman had used. His position had prevented Pittman from noticing him when he came toward the elevators. The man wore an oversized windbreaker. "Can I help?" The man sounded as if he'd swallowed broken glass. "You lost? You need directions?"
    "Not lost. Confused." The man's aggressive tone made Pittman's body tighten. His instincts warned him not to tell the truth . "I've got a sick boy on the tenth floor. The nurses let me see him at night. But sometimes I can barely force myself to go up there."
    "Sick, huh? Bad?" "Cancer. "
    "Yeah, that's bad."
    But the man obviously didn't care, and he'd made Pittman feel so apprehensive, his stomach so fluttery, that Pittman had answered with the most innocent, believable story he could think of. He certainly wasn't going to explain his real reason for coming to the hospital to a man whose oversized windbreaker concealed something that made a distinct, ominous bulge on the left side of his waist.
    Footsteps made Pittman turn. He faced yet another solemn, stocky man, this one wearing an overcoat. The man had been standing against the wall on the opposite side of the door from where the man in the windbreaker had been standing. Neither man had rain spots on his coat. The rain had started fifteen minutes previously, so they must have been waiting in this corridor at least that long, Pittman thought. Why?' Recalling the man who'd been smoking outside and the man in the stairwell, he inwardly frowned.
    "Then you'd better get up and see your boy," the second man said.
    "Right. " More uneasy, Pittman reached to press the elevator's up button when he heard a ding and the doors suddenly opened. Loud voices assaulted him.
    "I won't be responsible for this!"
    "No one's asking you to be responsible. He's my patient now."
    The elevator compartment was crammed. A man on a gurney with an oxygen mask over his face and an intravenous tube leading into his left arm was being quickly wheeled out by two white-coated attendants. A nurse swiftly followed, holding an intravenous bottle above the patient.