Way Past Dead Read online

  C’mon, damn it, Lonnie, where the hell are you?

  The door to the mobile home opened. A lanky form in jeans and a white T-shirt stood in the doorway, shrouded by the blue, flickering light of a television. An arm raised, motioning me in.

  I slid the gate aside, then hopped back in the van and pulled it inside. I shut the gate back and stepped through the door just in time to catch a bright silver can of beer that came sailing through the air toward me. I grabbed it quickly, smoothly.

  Lonnie pushed the Frigidaire door shut and grinned. “You’re getting better.”

  “Hell, I’ve had to. One of these days, you’re going to take my head off.” I looked around. “I need your phone, man. Quick …”

  He tossed me a portable telephone. I pulled out the antenna and switched it on. “Where’s Shadow?” I said absentmindedly.

  He didn’t answer. I looked up. Lonnie’s face darkened. “Vet’s.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Bad?”

  “Maybe. Won’t know till Monday.”

  “Damn, man. I’m sorry,” I said, punching in the numbers.

  He turned the beer up, his Adam’s apple bobbing in time to his swallowing. Then he uncocked his arm and stared at me a moment. “Yeah, I know. Me, too.”

  “C’mon, babe,” I whispered into the phone. “Answer. Be home. Tell me you took a night off for once.” The phone rang four times, then the answering machine picked up.

  “Aw, hell,” I muttered. When the message played through and the beep came, I said: “Marsha? You there? C’mon, lady. Pick up if you’re there.”

  Nothing. I punched the hang-up button.

  “How’d it go in Louisville?” Lonnie asked.

  “Great,” I said. “Probably win a freaking Oscar or something. Got film of the guy slam-dunking a basketball about thirty times in an hour.”

  “Jesus. What a moron. Hey, dude.” Lonnie sniffed. “You’re getting kind of gamy, you know that?”

  “Why don’t you install a shower in that damn van of yours?”

  “Well, pardon me, Sam Spade.…”

  “I didn’t expect to find you here, anyway,” I said. “I figured you’d either be on a run or back at the apartment.”

  “Just got in about an hour ago,” he answered. He raised the can to his lips and drained about half of it. “Pulled down a new Lincoln Town Car. Guy followed me in his pickup truck. Getting smart with me, I guess. I decided to stick around in case he tried to get it back.”

  I popped the top on the beer can and downed a healthy third of it, then set it down next to a filthy, oil-covered gear of some kind that occupied a corner of Lonnie’s scarred coffee table. I don’t know why I even noticed it; the trailer was littered with loose auto parts, electronic components, tools. Lonnie saw me staring at the gear.

  “CV joint off an ’85 Accord,” he said. “Ellis’s wife blew one out the other day.” Ellis was one of Lonnie’s freelance repo men: big guy, tobacco chewer, half a dozen teeth left if he’s lucky. Laughs a lot, gets on my nerves.

  “What in the hell is going on down at the morgue?”

  I asked, aware of how irritable I must have sounded.

  “Has this whole damn city gone crazy?”

  “What do you mean gone?” he asked. “Try already there.” Lonnie reached for the television clicker and started rotating through the channels. He stopped on the local NBC outlet.

  “Look,” I said, “they’ve preempted Saturday Night Live.”

  “Must be some real shit going down,” Lonnie commented, his voice a monotone.

  The picture was mostly flashing lights: blues and reds and yellows and whites like I’d seen at the foot of the First Avenue hill. I recognized the curve in front of General Hospital where First Avenue becomes Hermitage Avenue. Police barricades were everywhere. Fire engines sat hunkered down on the sidewalk, their engines racing. The orange-and-white paramedic vans lined up one after the other all the way down the hill.

  “As you can see,” an announcer’s voice narrated off-screen, “police have cordoned off the area and no one is getting through. We’re waiting for a police briefing, which is scheduled to begin momentarily.”

  I sat down on the couch, then shifted around trying to get comfortable. I pulled my right hip up off the torn vinyl. My wallet, packed to the flaps with cards, licenses, and scraps of paper, was giving me a cramp in my butt. I pulled it out, then it hit me like the memory of a forgotten appointment. Tucked in a corner, scribbled on a cocktail napkin, was a telephone number that only a couple of people possessed.

  I grabbed the phone off the coffee table and punched the numbers in, not knowing what to expect. I’d never used the number before. Never had to.

  Marsha picked up on the first ring. “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  She let out a sigh that was as deep as it was long. “Yeah, I’m okay. Where are you?”

  “Lonnie’s,” I said, trying to keep the alarm in my voice to a minimum. “I just got back in town tonight. What the hell’s going on down there.”

  “You tell me,” she said. “All I know is one minute I’m checking in a fat dead lady, the next Kay’s in here screaming about a bunch of people with guns yelling about Jesus and Judgment Day and all kinds of crap.”

  Kay Delacorte was the head administrator at the morgue, a real take-charge cowgirl. If Kay went into the cooler and yelled, “Jump,” you’d half expect the stiffs to say: “How high?”

  “Are you okay? Is anybody hurt?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “They’ll never get in here. Plus we’ve got a generator that’ll give us limited backup power, as well as this cellular phone. But the cops won’t tell us much besides lay low and stay away from the windows.”

  “I don’t know what they’re worried about,” I said. “The windows are all bulletproof.” The Nashville morgue had thick Plexiglas windows and doors like a bunker. Whoever designed the facility had a feeling that someday, somebody might want a body back bad enough to kill for it.

  “Yeah, but nobody knows whether these guys are bluffing or not. They claim to have LAW 80s.”

  “What’n the hell’s a LAW 80?” I asked.

  “Light antitank weapon,” Marsha answered. “Sort of a mini-bazooka.”

  “Mini-bazookas?” I said, aghast. “These people are supposed to be religious, for Chrissakes.”

  “Oh, that’s not all. They say they’ve got H and K MP5s, whatever they are. And M16s—I know what they are—and something called a …”

  Her voice faded away, and I heard her in the background. “What was it, Kay?”

  Another mumbled voice, then Marsha was back. “—ARMSEL Strikers. Whatever they are.”

  I looked at Lonnie. “What’s an ARMSEL Striker?”

  He pointed the clicker at me. “Something you don’t want to fuck with …”

  “Aw, c’mon, man. What is it?”

  “Riot control. Looks like a big damn Thompson submachine gun, only it fires shotgun shells instead of bullets. Empties a twelve-round magazine in about three seconds. South African police call it a Streetsweeper.”

  I held the phone back to my ear. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Something you don’t want to fuck with …”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess that explains why the Metros haven’t just blasted their way in here and hauled ’em all off to jail.”

  “They’re outgunned, aren’t they?” I commented. It was a question that didn’t require an answer.

  “Welcome to America in the Nineties,” she said. “Have you paid your NRA dues yet?”

  “This is crazy. Freaking Looney Tunes.”

  “You ought to see it from my end,” Marsha said wearily. “Another cabdriver got popped yesterday. Fourth one this month. Guy had a two-month-old baby. His first.”

  “Jesus, I’m tearing up my hack license.”

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “I got it a few months ago, just
in case times ever got real bad.”

  “Hey, baby,” she said. “Things ever get that bad, you move in with me. I’ll feed you before I let you drive one of those puppies.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said. I felt my mouth go dry and my throat tighten. “I tried to get down there. Couldn’t talk my way past the barricades.”

  “No point in trying, babe. But don’t worry, we’re—”

  Pop. Static. Crackle. Damn cell phone.

  “Marsha!” I yelled.

  “—sorry, the phone’s fritzing out on me. Listen, I gotta go. I don’t know how long the batteries are going to last.”

  “Have you got a recharger?”

  “Yeah,” she said through the ever-rising hiss. “Only we’re not sure if it works.”

  “Marsh,” I said, almost desperately. Damn, I didn’t want her to go. “I’ll call you tomorrow morning. You got food, water, the essentials?”

  She laughed. “Enough for a couple of days. We get real hungry, we’ll pop Evangeline in the microwave.”

  “Well,” I said, “at least you’ve retained your sense of humor.”

  “Who’s laughing?”

  “Listen, babe. Keep your head down.”

  “In your dreams, smart guy. And that’s Doctor Babe to you.”

  “Okay, Dr. Babe. Listen, I—I—” I got stuck, couldn’t get the words out.

  “Harry,” she said, “don’t get mushy on me. This isn’t a private line.”

  “Yeah. So take care, will ya?”

  “Yeah. See you soon.” She hung up.

  I laid the phone down next to the CV joint, wondering for the first time if I’d ever see her again.

  Lonnie pointed the remote control at the television and we got sound again. The station had cut away from the morgue to a conference room at the main police station downtown. I stared dumbly at the screen, exhausted, drained. As cameras flashed and reporters jostled for position, Chief of Police Harold Gleaves walked into the room and marched stiffly to a podium set up on a folding table.

  “I’ve got a prepared statement for you,” he announced. Lonnie and I leaned forward in our chairs as he described for everyone what we’d all just seen and heard. After the short statement, hands flew up.

  “Has the FBI been brought in?” one reporter yelled.

  “No,” Chief Gleaves said firmly. “At this point in time, we’re considering this a local matter. The local FBI office has been notified, but for the time being, we have our own hostage negotiators on scene.”

  “That won’t last long,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Lonnie agreed. “The Fumbling Bunch of Idiots isn’t going to let this party go by without crashing it.”

  I smiled. “Maybe they’ll bring in thuh Bew-row of Al-key-hol, Tabacky, and Far-arms.…”

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “Bring in the BatFucks. That’ll do it. Then we can all kiss our asses goodbye.”

  “God, you’re tacky,” I said.

  “What about federal weapons charges?” a voice yelled. “And kidnapping charges?”

  “As I said,” Chief Gleaves shot back, “as of this point in time—”

  “Why do politicians always talk in clichés?” Lonnie interrupted. “As of this point in time …”

  “Ssshh,” I hissed.

  “—we have no proof other than the claims of the people involved that there are any illegal weapons on scene.”

  “But they admitted it!” another reporter yelled back.

  “If you’ll let me finish,” Gleaves instructed. I had to hand it to him; Chief Gleaves was cool. He was the first Nashville police chief to come to the job with academic credentials and a little professionalism, rather than just a hundred years on the beat and a lot of good ol’ boys on the council as pals.

  “There have been no charges filed against these people yet. The last thing we are going to do is go in there and provoke a confrontation. I’m not going to have another Waco here.”

  “That’s a switch,” Lonnie said. “Old Baltimore Sims would’ve welcomed the chance go in there shooting.”

  Baltimore Sims was a North Nashville boy who’d come up out of the old city sheriff’s department in the days before city consolidation. He had only a tenth-grade education, but he’d served as Nashville police chief for over a decade before being forced to retire for having his picture taken with guys in black suits at Churchill Downs one too many times.

  I leaned back in the chair, exhausted. We listened to the press conference rattle on for another minute or so, and when everybody started repeating themselves, Lonnie hit the mute button.

  “Want another one?” Lonnie held up his empty beer can.

  “No. Too tired. I’ve still got to drive home. Guess I ought to stop at Marsha’s first and make sure her place is okay.”

  Lonnie got up and walked over to the refrigerator and swung the door open. The inside light chiseled ridges on his face while the blue flickering from the television danced on his back.

  “You ever get the feeling the world’s going to hell?” I asked. My eyes burned and my mind became a muddled blur. I thought of Marsha, murdered cabdrivers, slaughtered convenience-store clerks. All innocent people just trying to eke out a living.

  “It’s like a disease. Random chaos, violence. Where’d it come from?”

  Lonnie smiled and shook his head, like boy, are you dense.… He walked over past me and picked up the television remote control, then pressed a couple of buttons and the picture changed to an old black-and-white film of GIs spraying napalm out of a flamethrower into a cave. A second or so later, some poor soul comes sprinting out, a ball of flame doing the hundred-yard dash to death, then collapses in a burning heap.

  “Channel Twenty-six,” Lonnie said. “The War Channel, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. All you can stand.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “There has to be a point here somewhere.”

  Lonnie dropped the remote control on the top of the television, then flopped down in his chair. “You think we win wars because we’re good, man? You think we whip ass everywhere because freaking God’s on our side, and not on the other guy’s? That somehow we’re righteous …”

  He threw a leg over the side of the chair and took a long swallow of the beer. “Hell, no. We won the war because we are the single most meanest motherthumpers in the world. We even beat the snot out of the Japanese and the Germans, who up until they pissed us off were themselves the meanest motherthumpers in the world. I mean, these people gave us the Rape of Nan-king and the Holocaust, for God’s sake, and we pummeled them into slop. You think we did that ’cause we’re the nice guys?”

  “That’s different, man. It’s not the same.”

  “Isn’t it?” He leaned back, the can of beer cradled in his hands. “Violence is America, man. Just ask the Indians. See what they think of us. It’s genetic, encoded in the DNA. It’s where we’re from. It’s who we are.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. “That’s lunacy.”

  “So who’s arguing? Of course it’s lunacy. It’s also reality.…” His voice trailed off.

  I stood up, suddenly very tired of Lonnie. I didn’t know whether it was his preaching, or the message he was delivering. Either way, I needed some air. “It’s late. I’ve got to go.”

  “Yeah,” he said, staring ahead at the television.

  “Thanks for the loan of the van.”

  “No charge.”

  “I filled up the tank.”

  “Thanks.”

  I stood there a second, then stepped over and opened the door. “Lonnie,” I said, turning back to him, “I’m really worried about her.”

  “I know you are, man. Just hang in there. She’ll be okay. She’s a tough lady.”

  “Thanks, buddy. Get some sleep. See you.”

  “Yeah, you, too,” Lonnie said without getting up. “Watch yourself.”

  As I stepped out into the darkness Lonnie turned the sound up on the television. I walked across the parki
ng lot to my car, accompanied by the whistle of bombs dropping fifty years ago.

  So who needs sleep, right? I took a long shower, slid under the covers, and tried to fade out. Every time I thought I was going to drop off, road rushed at me again, as if the vision of white-lined asphalt rolling by had been tattooed on my retinas.

  This day had started out so well. The badly needed cash the videotape would score took second place to my perseverance. I’d hung in there and beaten the guy! He’d rolled that damn wheelchair around for weeks with me watching him. He figured nobody’d be crazy enough to follow him all the way to Louisville, Kentucky.

  Well, damn it, he figured wrong. I was that crazy.

  But it was all meaningless. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. On the way home from Lonnie’s the night before, I’d driven once again past the barricades. The traffic was so bad it took nearly an hour to get in and out. Blue lights sabered the night, and off in the distance sirens meowed faintly and helicopter blades chopped. But, thank God, no gunshots. Spectators, drunks, street people, concerned family members, and rowdy teenagers all mixed into a potpourri of chaos; that uniquely American method of dealing with tragedy by transforming it into street theatre. I tried to figure out some way to get past the police lines and up the hill, but there was no way.

  I finally drifted off. Around four in the morning, I woke up with a jolt and couldn’t fall back off. I channel-surfed for a while, unsuccessfully searching for news bulletins, then popped the videotape of the bricklayer in the VCR. My landlady, Mrs. Hawkins, was asleep downstairs, but I wasn’t worried about waking her up. She’s as deaf as a rock wall, can barely hear with both hearing aids turned up to max. So I cranked up the sound and listened to the laughing and the bouncing of the basketball on concrete, the birds chirping and shrieking in trees, the roar of a truck going by somewhere behind the house.

  I made a cup of hot chocolate and watched the tape again. I was preoccupied, drifting in and out. The tape took on a surreal quality, as if the TV screen were a window into another world, a world of much brighter colors and more acute lines than the fuzzy set of gray scales and soft lines that made up my world in the middle of the night.