Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead Read online

  Praise for Steven Womack

  and his Harry James Denton

  mysteries!

  DEAD FOLKS’ BLUES

  “A deft, atmosphere-rich novel: smart, funny, and filled with a sense of wry heartbreak. Steven Womack’s Nashville stands out—it is a beautifully drawn backdrop.”

  —JAMES ELLROY

  TORCH TOWN BOOGIE

  “A sure winner … Many critics … have lauded Womack’s sense of setting. In Torch Town Boogie, his rendering of Nashville is almost palpable.”

  —Nashville Tennessean

  Also by Steven Womack:

  The Harry James Denton Books:

  DEAD FOLKS’ BLUES*

  TORCH TOWN BOOGIE*

  The Jack Lynch Trilogy:

  MURPHY’S FAULT

  SMASH CUT

  THE SOFTWARE BOMB

  *Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1995 by Steven Womack

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-96478

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77556-6

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  I’m grateful to all the people who have helped me with this novel, both with research and with endlessly patient readings of the book in manuscript. As always, my wife Cathryn was chief among the patient readers. Dr. James Veatch of Nashville State Technical Institute read the manuscript with an effective and sharp critical eye as well. Gratitude and affection go out to my friends and colleagues in the Nashville Writers Alliance who provided input and support: K. Cheatham, Martha Hickman, Nancy Hite, Amy Lynch, Madeena Nolan, Sallie Schloss, Michael Sims, Alana White, Jim Young, and Ronna Wineberg-Blazer.

  I also want to thank Scott Faragher, not only for his face-to-face insights into the nature of the country music business, but for his wonderful book, Music City Babylon.

  And to Nancy Yost and Joe Blades, my unending appreciation and affection.

  The night the fundamentalist redneck zealots assaulted the morgue, I was hauling butt down I-65 from Louisville back to Nashville after spending three days lying in the grass videotaping a disabled, wheelchair-bound bricklayer shooting hoops on his brother-in-law’s patio.

  It was my first big insurance-fraud case, and I was feeling pretty good. The object of my surveillance was a contract bricklayer who had taken my client for a bundle, claiming a hundred percent disability as a result of a fall off a scaffold. The fact that he drank a six-pack of tall boys at lunch didn’t seem to matter. I borrowed a van and a video camera from my friend Lonnie, threw some clothes and my old Nikon into a duffel bag, and followed the guy and his wife all the way to Louisville.

  For three days it rained like fury. I got soaked as I plopped down in a field overlooking the house and hid underneath a stand of peach trees maybe a hundred feet from the brother-in-law’s back door. I slept in the van, lived off cold burgers and french fries slathered in congealed grease, and shivered under a poncho. On the fourth day, Saturday, the sun broke through, the temperature went up about twenty degrees, and a gorgeous spring day erupted out of nowhere. Other than the chiggers, surveillance was a delight. Even the boredom seemed tolerable on such a beautiful day.

  It was too beautiful; the bricklayer couldn’t take it anymore. He drove his electric wheelchair through the open sliding-glass door onto the patio and watched his brother-in-law and a teenage boy—his nephew, I guessed—sinking baskets in the sun. He sat on the edge of the patio, whooping as he watched the two run around each other, bare-chested and sweaty, in a vicious one-on-one. I pulled the camera up and stared through the viewfinder. I was so close I had to back off the zoom.

  Suddenly the boy bounced the ball a few times and tossed it toward his uncle, who caught it in the wheelchair and cradled the ball longingly in his lap.

  My hand automatically hit the red button. I felt the gears inside the camera engage. There was the whirring of a motor in my ear to match the buzz of mosquitoes.

  I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I know body language when it jumps out at me. Even from this distance, I could see the boy and his father standing in front of the wheelchair making Aw, c’mons.…

  The camcorder whirred on.

  The bricklayer bounced the ball a few times on the concrete patio. The snap of the basketball next to the right wheel of his chair was staccato and sharp. The guy must have been good. Back when he could walk, I mean.

  Then I saw him look around nervously, palm the ball, and lay it back on his lap. He hand went to the toggle switch and he threw the wheelchair into reverse, skating smoothly off the concrete and onto the grass. He reached down in his lap, his back to me, and released the safety strap that kept his useless body from falling out of the chair. Then he shoved the ball toward the boy, put his hands on either side of the wheelchair, and leaped onto the patio.

  The brother-in-law applauded and cheered. The bricklayer ran to one end of the patio, whipped around, and took two long strides just as the boy bounced the ball in front of him. He became airborne right in front of the goal, did a three-sixty in midair, then slam-dunked the ball with a rim-shaking clatter.

  The camcorder whirred on.

  “Praise Jesus,” I whispered. “It’s a miracle.”

  So life was good and business was terrific that Saturday night on my way back to Nashville with a solid hour’s worth of sports highlights featuring the miraculously cured bricklayer. Monday morning, I’d head over to the insurance company, give them the tape and my invoice, then settle back to await that nice fat paycheck—with bonus—I needed so badly.

  Down around Bowling Green, I flicked on the radio in Lonnie’s van and started searching for the Nashville radio stations. Voices from home and all that. I tuned to the AM band and searched for the all-news station, the one that plays the audio feed off Cable Headline News twenty-four hours a day. The signal was scratchy, full of static, and a bit irritating over the noise of the van. What the hell, I figured, a little aggravation might keep me pumped up for the last hour and a half down I-65 to the city. I needed something to keep me awake after the week I’d had.

  “—in from Nashville,” the announcer said as I tuned the station in. I perked up, reached down, and cranked the volume even higher. “According to a police spokesman, an obscure, offshoot sect of a fundamentalist religious group has surrounded the local morgue, demanding the release of their founder’s wife’s body.”
/>   I stifled a laugh. Then it hit me. The morgue. Marsha. Holy cow. I lost it for a second; an orange tractor-trailer barreling down on me from the passing lane barely missed turning me into road paste. The semi’s horn blared in my ear as it roared past, with me swivel-hipping all over the right lane trying to keep it between the lines.

  “More from CNN’s Brian Larkin,” the radio anchor said. Then a change of voice: “Local police say this is one for the books. About five o’clock this afternoon, an unidentified man showed up at the T. E. Simpkins Forensic Science Center, which is the Nashville, Tennessee, morgue, and demanded that officials turn over to him the body of Evangeline Lee Hogg, who died under mysterious circumstances yesterday afternoon. Mrs. Hogg is the wife of Woodrow Tyberious Hogg, who has been identified as the leader and founder of an offshoot branch of the fundamentalist Assemblies of God. The group, which calls itself the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians, claims that on Judgment Day, only those whose bodies are buried whole will be resurrected. An autopsy, cult leaders claim, will deny Mrs. Hogg resurrection.”

  I didn’t know whether to giggle or scream.

  The reporter droned on. “When morgue officials refused to release the body, police said, at least a dozen Winnebagos crashed through a chain-link fence onto the grounds of the morgue and surrounded the building. Electricity and telephone wires have been cut, and cult members claim to be heavily armed. Trapped inside the morgue are an unidentified group of staff members who have been cut off from all contact with the outside. Police have set up barricades outside the morgue grounds and hostage negotiators are on the scene. We’ll have more to report as the story breaks.”

  I lowered the volume and tried to focus on the white lines in front of me.

  “Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians?” I said out loud. “Who in hell are the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians?”

  And why are they holding my girlfriend hostage?

  I always knew that sooner or later I’d discover the downside of being in love with somebody who cuts up dead bodies for a living. I’ve got to admit, though, I never expected it to be this.

  As for the question why?, the radio had pretty well answered that. Dr. Marsha Helms, Assistant Medical Examiner for Metropolitan Nashville/Davidson County, was going to slice open Evangeline Lee Hogg like a field-dressed deer on its way to the check-in station.

  “Yuck,” I said out loud. The thought was an unappealing one. But even more unappealing was the thought of Marsha—and all issues of possessiveness aside, I’d begun to think of her as my Marsha—being held hostage by a group of armed wackos who didn’t want anyone mucking around in Mrs. Hogg’s insides.

  I laid down hard on the accelerator pedal, feeling like I’d been thrown suddenly into the middle of a 1970s Burt Reynolds movie. All I needed was a CB radio and a Red Man Chewing Tobacco cap to complete the picture. I was still wearing the same filthy jeans and work shirt I’d had on in the peach orchard, and I hadn’t shaved in four days. I’d planned to go straight to Marsha’s apartment and settle into a hot bathtub, preferably not alone.

  So much for communal bathing. I’d been away not quite a week, and Marsha’s absence from my life was becoming more keenly noted by the minute. Our date last Saturday night had been canceled by the discovery of the body of a taxi driver who’d been executed by a couple of sixteen-year-olds he’d picked up at the Krystal Restaurant on Dickerson Pike after they’d robbed the place. A sack full of Belly Bombs, two large Cokes, and all your cash to go, please. Then they put one through the back of the driver’s head so he couldn’t identify them and took all of thirty-eight dollars off him. It never occurred to them, I guess, that all the people inside the Krystal would pick them out of a lineup the next day. You ask me, some of these demented kids are a couple of tacos short of a combination plate.

  But then, nobody asked me. So Dr. Marsha canceled our date and, instead, autopsied her third cabdriver of the month. I left town a couple of days later, fully expecting a passionate and heartfelt reunion on this very evening. An event that now, it seemed, was not going to take place.

  I once heard someone define conflict as the gap between expectation and result. At that moment I was conflicted out the ya-ya.

  I hit the Rivergate area in a panic just as the movie theatres were letting out. Rivergate Mall, an enormous, sprawling, congested shopping center in the northern part of the city, was a place I made every effort possible to avoid. Even though it was nearly eleven on Saturday night, the traffic was bumper-to-bumper on Two Mile Parkway in either direction as far as the eye could see. The spillover onto the freeway had slowed that traffic to a crawl as well, and all around us tractor-trailer drivers who’d just pulled fourteen-hour shifts at eighty miles an hour had to adjust to inner-city speeds. Brakes squealed, trailers went into graceful near jackknives, horns blared, bird fingers flew.…

  Welcome home.

  After hiding in the grass for almost four days, being half eaten alive by chiggers, living off fast food, sleeping in the back of Lonnie’s twelve-year-old Ford Econoline van, and then finding out my girlfriend was in the middle of a full-blown hostage situation, I only had one nerve left. And these people were getting on it.

  Maybe she wasn’t there. Maybe she’d taken a night off. Maybe she was okay.

  Hell, I knew better. Marsha was professional to the point of compulsive. As assistant medical examiner, rather than chief, she would have been the one called in on a Saturday night. I shot straight down I-65 all the way to Shelby Avenue, then whipped off the freeway, nearly wiping out a Chevy full of beer-drinking rednecks. I bounced across the Shelby Street Bridge, over the river into downtown. I ran two stop signs on my way over to First Avenue, then cut right and headed up the hill toward the morgue.

  I didn’t get very far.

  A line of Metro squad cards, their blue-and-white beacons cutting through the sulfurous streetlight glow like artillery bursts, had stopped traffic in front of the Thermal Plant. A single patrol officer in an orange safety vest swung a flashlight back and forth in a wide arc, detouring cars onto a side street away from the action. The car in front of me turned right off of First Avenue, as the officer instructed. I slid the van to a stop in front of him, slammed it into park, and jumped out.

  “C’mon, buddy,” the cop yelled. “Keep it moving.”

  “Wait,” I yelled, palms out in front of me. I realized that I looked like a crazy man who just came into town from up the holler a ways. “I’ve got to get to the morgue.”

  I stopped in front of the officer, who took two quick steps toward me. He was young, thin, blond crew-cut, determined.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he yelled over the noise of sirens and engines racing. “No one gets past this point.” Above us, the whopping of distant helicopter blades grew louder by the moment.

  “But I’ve got to!” The chaotic flashes of light bouncing off my face must have looked like a shot from a Fellini movie.

  “No, sir,” the officer boomed over the roar of a chopper as it appeared just above the rooftops behind us.

  The driver behind the van sat on his horn and stuck his head out the window. I turned; he yelled at me and spit flew out of his mouth. I couldn’t understand him, but I gathered his remarks weren’t polite.

  “But my girlfriend’s up there.…” I said, my voice plaintive. The cop probably couldn’t even hear me.

  “Move it, mister,” the cop instructed. His left hand moved ever so subtly to the baton that dangled from his utility belt.

  Message sent and received. Defeated, I opened the van door and climbed back in. I made the turn, not even knowing which side street I was on, and tried to figure out what to do next. Then it hit me.

  Lonnie.

  I cut back across the river and maneuvered my way to the Ellington Parkway, then headed toward my East Nashville neighborhood. Traffic on the EP had thinned out; the only motorists I’d encounter this time of night were the freelance carjackers and the usual crowd of tire-squealing rednecks.

&nbs
p; I kept the radio on, but there were no more updates on the hostage situation at the morgue. I ran up and down the FM stations as well, but all I got was music and commercials. I cut over to Gallatin Road off the EP and headed into Inglewood.

  It was after eleven by now, but I figured Lonnie’d still be up. He kept pretty strange hours. The only way I’d miss him was if he’d gone on a repo run—either that or out working his latest line of business: bounty hunting. Lonnie’d gotten bored with repossessing cars the last few months and decided to expand his area of operations into snagging bail jumpers. When things got bad, money-wise, I’d make repo runs with him to pick up extra cash. So far, though, I’d resisted the temptation to join him in this new venture. After all, a Mercedes won’t pull a .357 on you when you try to take it back.

  The side street off Gallatin Road that led to Lonnie’s place was crypt-black, cemetery-silent. What few streetlights there were had long since been shot out by the Death Rangers, the local East Nashville motorcycle gang. They sounded and looked ominous, but truth was they were largely just a bunch of aging, beer-drinking unemployables. Mostly harmless—as long as you didn’t mess with them—Jerry Garcia look-alikes … Their clubhouse was locked up tight, its windows cinder-blocked solid.

  I pulled to a stop in front of the chain-link fence gate that was right on the street and maybe fifty feet from a pale green mobile home with rust streaks down the side. I hit the horn once, then climbed out of the van and rattled the gate. There were lights on inside the trailer, but the rest of the landscape was illuminated only by ambient light. The wrecked automobile hulks that filled Lonnie’s junkyard jutted into the night sky at twisted, bizarre angles.

  I stood at the gate waiting for Shadow, Lonnie’s timber shepherd, who was absolute queen of everything inside that chain-link fence. I knew better than to go through the unlocked gate without getting her permission first.

  No Shadow, though. Where was she? I rattled the chain-link fence again and whistled, then backed away and looked up. I knew there were security cameras mounted on the utility poles, some with night-vision capability. Lonnie was a freak on security. Nobody got near him without him knowing it first. I shook the gate again, the metallic noise abrupt and jarring in the night.