Way Past Dead d-3

by Steven Womack

“Well, hold off for a while. I want to hear how the rest of this played out.”

  I sat up and took a long sip of the iced-down Coke. I had to admit it was probably better than a beer, given that a beer would have put me to sleep within five minutes.

  “Faye Morgan knew that Mac had beaten Rebecca Gibson to death, but she genuinely believed that Rebecca had pushed him over the edge. She told me she never thought he intended to kill Rebecca. It was only when she saw that he was going to kill me and Alvy Barnes that she knew how far gone he was. She had to stop him. The whole thing was eating away at Faye so badly, I think she ultimately would have talked him into confessing anyway. Especially if she saw that somebody else was about to do hard time for it.”

  “You think the district attorney’ll let him plead down?”

  I ran my hand around the condensation on the glass, the icy coldness of it soothing and pleasant.

  “If he’s willing to cop a plea, my guess is they will. Who knows, maybe they would have offered Slim a deal as well.…”

  “Speaking of Slim,” Lonnie said.

  I let loose with a weary, lazy yawn that bent my jaws to the limit. I set the glass down on the coffee table and stretched.

  “I phoned Ray from the police station, and he called Herman Reid, the attorney,” I said. “Reid contacted E. D. Fouch at the Homicide Squad and verified that Mac Ford was going to be charged with Rebecca Gibson’s murder. So they’ll start the process to get Slim released.”

  “Can they do that on a Saturday night?”

  “Yeah. The next step will be to go before the night-court magistrate and get a release order. It’ll probably take a few hours, but Slim should sleep in his own bed tonight.”

  Lonnie cradled his hands behind his head and stretched. “What about the tootsie?” he said, yawning himself.

  “Alvy Barnes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s no tootsie,” I said. “She’s a pretty damn smart lady. The only mistake she made was trying to blackmail Ford without sufficiently covering her ass.”

  “She’ll know better next time,” Lonnie said.

  “And you know what?” I added. “I don’t doubt there’ll be a next time. This day would’ve scared some ethics into a normal person, but I don’t think Alvy’s normal.”

  “She going to be charged with anything?”

  “I doubt it. As long as she cooperates with the DA and testifies for the state, she’ll probably walk.”

  “So it’s over,” he said.

  “Yeah, I just wish it was the last crisis in my life I had to deal with.”

  Lonnie grinned. “Oh, yeah. That.”

  “Oh yeah,” I mimicked. “That.”

  “You know something, Harry. You’re gettin’ awful damn touchy these days.”

  I stood up. “I’m tired, Lon-man. I’m going home, try once again to call Marsha, then I’m going to sleep for about twenty hours.”

  “Sit down,” he said.

  “I don’t want to sit down. I’m tired. I want to go home.”

  “Sit down anyway.” Something in his voice made me do it. “Listen, how long have we known each other?”

  “A long time, I guess,” I said, caution in my voice. Where was this going?

  “We’ve always been straight with each other, right?”

  “Yes, we’ve always been straight with each other. Why do I get the feeling this is going to be a difficult conversation?”

  He ignored my question. “I’ve been listening to you bitch and moan for the past week about missing your main squeeze. Truth is, buddy, it’s getting tiresome.”

  Anger filled the inside of my chest to the point of bursting. I hammered it down, though, to keep from going off on him. “Maybe you just don’t understand,” I said through gritted teeth, “what it’s like to miss somebody that much.”

  “Oh, I do understand, Harry. I do. More than you know. Twenty years ago, my first wife was missing for four days before they found her.”

  “Found her?”

  “Yeah. On the backside of a dump. Raped. Strangled. Buried in garbage. She was nineteen years old.” His voice remained steady, a numb monotone. I sat there for a few seconds, unable to speak.

  “Well,” I said, staring down at the floor, “don’t I feel like a genuine asshole.…”

  “I sat in my apartment for four days, surrounded by my in-laws and my family and my friends, all of us crying and frustrated and helpless. We all sat there, waiting for the police to take care of it for us. And the only thing the cops took care of was notifying us she was dead. I always felt bad that I just sat there.”

  “Lonnie, there was nothing you could have done.”

  He raised his head and looked me straight in the eye. “Yeah, but I’d have felt a fuck of a lot better if I’d tried.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked after a moment.

  “Sit there,” he said. “Let me show you something.”

  He disappeared into the back room and emerged seconds later with a stack of papers and a manila envelope. He sat down on the couch next to me, then scooted the glasses aside and laid the stack of papers down.

  “Look.” He opened the manila envelope and took out a stack of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. “I’ve been doing a little surveillance of my own.”

  He pulled the top shot off and set it in front of us.

  “I stopped on the Silliman Evans Bridge over the Cumberland and took these.”

  “You stopped in the middle of an interstate highway bridge over a river to take pictures?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Sure, why not? It was the only way I could get what I needed.”

  He pointed to the middle of the photo. “Here’s the morgue, and if you look real closely, you can see-there, through the trees-the line of Winnebagos. The back of the morgue is actually open. There’s no one back there.”

  “Yeah, there’s not enough room. That’s a bluff that goes straight down to the river. Nobody could get out that way. They’re trapped.”

  “Ah.” He raised an index finger. “Wait, Kemo Sabe.”

  He shuffled the photographs and came up with another one. “I had to blow this one up so much it’s grainy as all hell, but you can see well enough if you try.”

  I squinted. “Looks like one of those spy-satellite photos.”

  “Yeah, but look.” He pointed. “Here’s the back of the morgue. The back wall is actually fenced off by a high chain-link fence. That protects the air-conditioning units and the generator. There’s probably concertina around the top.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And here are the two tiny slit windows in the back of the building. Those are the only two windows back there.”

  “Yeah, I remember that. There’s only a few windows in the whole building. They’re just slits and they’re bulletproof.”

  “Now you see why, right? And here.” He pointed again. “Look closely.”

  I picked up the picture and held it close to my face. “What is it?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  I turned to Lonnie. “A door?”

  He grinned. “An access door to the fenced-in area. So maintenance men can get to the units from inside the building. That door’s probably in the basement.”

  “Great,” I said. “So Marsha and everybody else could get out if they had to. But to their immediate right and left, they’re surrounded by the Looney Tunes Brigade.”

  “Okay, fair enough. Now look at these.”

  He pulled a few more photos out and spread them in front of me. “I crossed the river on the Woodland Street Bridge into East Nashville, then drove around all over hell and back following the river. The metal scrapyards are down there, along with a couple of manufacturing plants, warehouses, and the bridge company. Not exactly Belle Meade.”

  “Okay, so you got to tour scenic East Nashville.”

  “Yeah, and I talked the security guard at the Leggett and Platt warehouse into letting me past the gates. If y
ou go to the back of their parking lot, you’re right on the riverbank, directly across the river from the morgue. On the East Nashville side, there aren’t any bluffs. You’re right on the water.”

  I stared at the photos. Black-and-white shots of the river and the bank on the opposite side. The bluff coming out of the water was sheer mud for about twenty feet, then a tangle of undergrowth, trees sprouting at bizarre angles, and jungle that went straight up and appeared to be impenetrable.

  “Great, you got shots of a bluff,” I said.

  “The photos are misleading,” Lonnie said. “Actually, that’s a climb, but it’s not straight up. Our biggest problem will be cutting through the undergrowth, but we can use the vines and trees to pull ourselves up.”

  My mouth fell open. No, I was too tired. I couldn’t have heard him right. “Ourselves? Pull ourselves what?”

  “Up,” he said. “Pull ourselves up.”

  “I thought this was some kind of academic exercise,” I said. “You actually want to go in there and get them?”

  He set his jaw and gazed at me stone-faced. “You got it, big guy.…”

  I jumped up, agitated. “You’re-you’re out of your fucking mind. For one thing, if that could be done, the police would have already done it.”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” he said. “Their whole aim is to negotiate and avoid bloodshed. They’re not into clandestine, deep-cover ops.”

  “Deep-cover ops? You’ve been reading way too many Tom Clancy novels,” I said. “We are not the freaking Green Berets.”

  “Number one, I hate Tom Clancy. Bob Mayer’s a much better writer. And number two, stop being such a wuss. A couple pair of bolt cutters, a machete apiece, some dark clothing, rope, a couple grappling hooks. We’re in there, we’re out of there, twenty minutes tops.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said, stupefied.

  “Just call her on the cell phone and tell her to get everybody ready.”

  “The cops are monitoring the cellular frequencies. I’m sure of it.”

  “So what? It’s a risk we’ve got to take. Besides, how they gonna stop us? It’s no crime to take a midnight boat ride. It’s your call. In or out? You want your girlfriend back or what?”

  “You’re crazy,” I said again.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “How ’bout it?”

  I let out a long breath of tired air. “One thing,” I said. “No guns.”

  His face screwed up. “No guns?”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “No shit here. I’m not going to get her or anybody else killed.”

  Lonnie pursed his lips. “Well, can I take some of my other toys?”

  It may not be a crime to take a midnight boat ride, but it’s sure as hell a crime to do it from the dock at Shelby Park. The park closes at eleven, and now here we were at one in the morning, coasting through the back of the park in a coal-black pickup truck with the lights turned off pulling a twenty-foot bass boat with a huge Mercury outboard mounted on the back.

  We rounded the hill coming off the golf course from the Riverside Drive side of the park. Down the hill, on the other side of the small lake in the middle of the park, the green-and-white cruiser of a Metro park ranger pulled slowly away.

  “Jesus, Lonnie!” I hissed.

  “Be cool,” he said. “He’s headed away from us.”

  “How can you see anything?”

  “I can’t. That’s why we’re going slow.”

  There’s a hairpin curve coming off the hill that doubles back on itself before splitting off in two directions near the ball fields. Lonnie managed to roll the truck through the turn without going off the side, then put the truck back in gear and cut to the left away from the lake and the park ranger. Above us, the spidery metal trusses of a railroad bridge over the river rose ghostlike and creepy. We drove through the parking lot under the bridge, then turned right.

  “You see anybody up there?”

  “There’s a couple of parked cars,” I said. “But I can’t tell whether they’re cops or not.”

  “Probably kids committing terminal pleasure,” he said. He drove past the steep ramp down to the river, then turned the parking lights on and put it in reverse.

  “I’ve got to be able to see what I’m doing,” he said, hanging his head out the window as we rolled backward.

  The concrete ramp was steep, maybe a thirty-degree angle down a hundred and fifty feet or so to the river’s edge. Lonnie backed most of the way down, then stopped.

  “Hop out and direct me.”

  I stepped out of the truck into the urban darkness of Shelby Park. There was an orange sodium light planted on a pole on the opposite bank, but beyond that, nothing. I could hear the swishing of the black water against the bank, and the smell of rot was everywhere; a dank, moldy smell that would have been unpleasant if I’d had time to think about it.

  I stood next to the truck and motioned him down, watching carefully to see that the boat trailer was staying on track.

  “When the wheels touch the water, let me know,” he said.

  Another twenty feet or so and I stopped him. He put the truck in park and locked the brakes, then got out with the motor still running.

  “Move, quick,” he said.

  We pulled cases and bags out of the back of the pickup and stowed them on the boat. Then Lonnie went around to the stern and made sure the drain plug was secure and the gas lines squared away. I looked through one of the cartons and came up holding a canister.

  “You sure we need smoke grenades?”

  Through the darkness, I could see his teeth in a grin. “Hey, c’mon. Let me play with my new toys.”

  I shook my head. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  I got into the boat, then Lonnie backed the trailer the rest of the way into the water. He turned off the motor, set the brake, got out, and locked the doors.

  “We just going to leave the truck here?” I said as he climbed in.

  “Why not? When we get back here, I want to be able to drive right up on that trailer and haul ass out of here.”

  “But what if we don’t come back?”

  Lonnie unhitched the towline on the trailer and pushed us out into the river. “Then somebody’ll find it in the morning, right?”

  The Cumberland River looks to be a slow-moving, lazy ribbon of brown mud, but when you’re out in the middle of it in a small boat, you realize there’s every kind of mean current imaginable out there. The boat whipped around in the wrong direction, with the flow carrying us away from downtown almost immediately. Lonnie sat down in the driver’s seat, or whatever the hell it’s called on a bass boat, and hit the switch. The Merc coughed and spit and shook for a couple of seconds, then roared to life.

  “Hold on,” Lonnie yelled. “We’re outta here!”

  I huddled in the bow as he put the engine in gear. The river fought us for a second, but then the boat came out of the water with a howl and we were skimming across the surface of the Cumberland at fifty knots.

  “Slow down!” I yelled. “There’s junk floating out here!”

  Lonnie cut the engine back to half-speed. “I just wanted to get us away from the park.”

  He turned on the running lights, and we settled into a steady cruise upriver toward downtown Nashville. A low-lying fog enveloped us, throwing everything out of focus. Ahead, the bright lights of the city burned into the hazy night. I could barely see the ribbon of light that was the interstate highway bridge over the river, headlights bouncing like fireflies in the distance.

  I fought off exhaustion. Up until now, adrenaline and fear had kept me alert, but now even that was wearing off. As we drew closer to downtown I wondered if I’d ever get enough sleep to make up for this past week. The bones in my neck were brittle; my skin seemed to crawl.

  We broke through a patch of fog and into clear air. The bridge loomed over us; we were almost there. Lonnie yelled above the engine noise. I turned. He motioned me back. I scooted back across the crowded boat, dodging boxes and packs. />
  “When we get there, you tie us up. But don’t get out of the boat yet.”

  I shook my head. As we passed under the bridge Lonnie pulled a spotlight out of its holder on the side and flicked the halogen beam on. It crackled as it lit, the narrow tube of blinding bright light scanning the bank. Then he stopped. Ahead of us, a mass of tangled driftwood and fallen trees looked to me to be the finest potential nesting place for water moccasins I’d ever seen.

  He throttled the engine down to idle as we approached. I crawled out onto the farthest point of the bow, a line in my hand. I just hoped that whatever happened, I didn’t screw up.

  I snagged a branch with my bare hand and felt skin being stripped out of my palm. Lonnie cut the engine and immediately the current began pulling us away. I tightened my grip and pulled as hard as I could, and gradually, the boat nestled into the snarl of decayed wood. I tied the line onto a thick branch of a fallen tree and managed to secure us.

  Lonnie came forward. “Good job. We’ll get squared away here, then walk that tree to the bank. Once there, we can pull the boat all the way in.”

  “Okay,” I said, panting.

  Lonnie handed me a pack, then passed me two fifty-foot coils of nylon rope, a Swiss army knife, a heavy-duty flashlight, a two-foot-long Khyber knife, four smoke grenades, and a pair of bolt cutters. We inventoried the packs a second time.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  I hit a button on my watch. “One forty-five,” I answered.

  “When did you tell them to open the door?”

  “Two. If we’re not there yet, they’ll check every couple of minutes. Marsha said she’d look for the key to the gate on the chain fence, so maybe we won’t have to cut through it.”

  “We’ll each carry cutters anyway.”

  I reached down and picked up a ten-inch-long black baton with a trigger and a safety ring on the side. “What’s this?”

  “Jeez, be careful,” he hissed, then yanked it out of my hand. “If we get in a jam and can’t get to the top, this is a spring-loaded grappling hook. Attach the nylon rope here, pull this pin, point it up, keep your head down, and stand back. It’ll shoot a grappling hook about a hundred feet straight up the bluff.”

  “Why don’t you carry that one?” I suggested.