“Gamier by the minute. But other than that, surviving.”
I sat down in my chair and mashed the phone into my ear, as if that would make her closer.
“Are you all right? Really? Have you got enough to eat?”
“Enough for now. And the plumbing still works, so we’ve got water and a place to wee-wee. Other than being bored and stressed-out, we’re all pretty much okay. The only place we’ve still got electricity is the cooler, so we ran an extension cord into the offices. At least we can run the microwave and keep the cellulars charged.”
“I tried to call you about a half hour ago.”
“We’ve only got one battery pack, and it’s old as Moses,” she said. “When it’s charging, we’re cut off. And it’ll only hold a charge a few minutes.”
“This is so frustrating,” I said after a moment. “I feel completely helpless.”
“Me, too,” she said. “But it’s okay, really. We’re all fine, and it’s just a matter of time until this gets settled. I’ll tell you one damn thing, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Metro’s going to owe me some comp time when this is over, and by God, I’m going to take it.”
I grinned. “Maybe we’ll get that vacation we’ve been talking about.”
“You’re on.”
“Listen, Marsha, I just—”
“Ruh, roh, you’re about to get mushy on me. Don’t, Harry. Like I said, this isn’t a private line. Besides, I’ve got to call Spellman before the cell phone dies again.”
“Spellman’s down there?” I asked. “Why homicide?”
“He’s also head of MUST.”
MUST is the Metro Unusual Situations Team, the local equivalent of SWAT.
“Listen, babe,” she continued. “I’ve got to go. I’ll try you later if I can. You be at home?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “Call me later. And please be careful.”
She hung up, leaving me once again with that hollow, damned electronic silence.
So my old buddy Lieutenant Howard Spellman was manning the barricades. Maybe there were some possibilities here, after all.
I thumbed through the Rolodex again until I came up with Howard Spellman’s office number. Howard and I went back a long way, back to the days when I had the police beat for the newspaper. Jeez, that was over ten years ago. I think I was still young then, although I can no longer remember that far back.
Our relationship hadn’t always been an easy one. Cops by nature are leery of and fascinated by reporters at the same time. Most will cuss out reporters given half the chance, but then scramble all over each other to get their names in the paper. Better yet, get an interview with one of the TV-station pretty boys who pass for journalists these days. That was a coup.
After leaving the newspaper business, I expected that, if anything, private investigators would be held in even less esteem than reporters. I soon learned, though, that if you earned a cop’s respect, he’d treat you accordingly. I’d tried over the past two years with Spellman, with mixed success.
Spellman’s phone rang about ten times before I gave up. You’d think that the Homicide Squad would keep their phones manned during business hours, but Spellman was the only one with a secretary. If she was out of the office and nobody else was around, then it just rang off the hook.
Glad I wasn’t trying to report a murder.
I had another two hours, maybe a little more, before I had to meet Phil Anderson over at the insurance company.
I figured a long walk might do me good. It’s quite a trek from my office down Broadway to the Riverfront, but there wouldn’t be anyplace to park down there, what with all the squad cars and news vans.
So I took a stroll, and within a few minutes found myself maneuvering past the Al Menah Shriners’ temple on my way down the long hill toward the Cumberland River. The day had really blossomed, with only a few thick gray-and-white clouds drifting lazily over the city. The lunch-hour pedestrian crowds hadn’t let up yet either; I could see how somebody would hate to get back to the office on a day like today.
It had been a long winter, one of dark days that ended early. Headlights on by four and all that. I was glad to see it over.
Down by Second Avenue, I had to cross Broadway to the south side of the street to avoid the construction traffic. Nashville’s been in a boom the last year or so, having itself come out of a long, dark economic wintertime. The company that owns Opryland had bought up a huge chunk of Second Avenue and was remaking it in its own image. At the foot of Second Avenue, right on Broadway, a Hard Rock Café had moved in last year.
Ah, I thought, we’ve arrived.
Only problem was that all the people who’d run restaurants and storefront operations that dated all the way back to the late nineteenth century were now being booted out. Some of the residents had to go as well. Too bad; progress in, people out. More tourists pumping their hard-earned dollars into the local economy. You know what they say: every Yankee tourist is worth a bale of cotton, and he’s a helluva lot easier to pick.
Down by the Acme Feed Store, which thankfully hadn’t been bought and gentrified, I rounded the corner and started toward General Hospital and the morgue. Up the sloping hill, a line of Metro squad cars, engines idling in the heat, blue strobes flashing, diverted traffic blocks before you could get anywhere near the action.
A few news vans, with their satellite towers cranked up, were parked half on the sidewalk. But the crowd of newspeople had thinned. Maybe the novelty was beginning to wear off.
It took less than five minutes to get up the line. A young uniformed officer, arms crossed, leaning against the front fender of his car, was the only one around. As cars approached he motioned them to turn right, away from the river, and head off in the other direction. There wasn’t much traffic, though. Word had gotten out.
“Hey, officer,” I called as I crossed the street and approached him. “How’s it going?”
He gave me that cool, professional dealing-with-civilians look, the one they teach you at the Academy.
“Quiet today,” he answered.
I came to within a couple of feet and leaned against the back quarter panel. I crossed my arms like he did and stared down the hill.
“Had a little free time after lunch,” I said. “Decided to take a walk in the sunshine, see what’s going on. This beats being cooped up in an office, don’t it?”
“Yessir.” He reached for his whistle as a car approached a little too quickly, blew it shrilly, and motioned firmly to the driver. The guy slowed, gave us both a dirty look, then turned onto the side street and sped away.
“How much longer you think this is going to go on?” I asked, trying to keep that casual, just-jawing tone in my voice.
“No idea, sir.”
I backed away from the blue-and-white Chevy and turned toward the cop. “Say, you don’t know if Howard Spellman’s up there right now, do you?”
The officer turned and squinted at me in his best Clint Eastwood style. All he needed was a pair of mirrored aviator shades to complete the picture.
“You a reporter?” he asked after a second or so.
“One of them sleazeballs?” I laughed. “Not me. I’m just a friend of his. Been kind of curious. Haven’t been able to get him in his office the past couple of days.”
“He’s been sort of busy.” The arms folded back across the uniformed and badged chest.
“Officer”—I squinted theatrically at his badge—“Roberts, I don’t suppose I could walk up the hill and say hi to him, could I?”
Officer Roberts shook his head. “No unauthorized personnel past this point.”
I’d expected that. “Say, could you call him on the radio and see if he’ll let me come up. If he said it was okay, that’d be all right, wouldn’t it?”
Behind us, from somewhere up the hill, we heard the whine of a helicopter engine coming alive. As the engine noise increased, the slow whop-whop-whop of the blades grew as well.
“
What do you think?” I asked.
The cop pulled his handi-talkie out of a leather holster on his belt. He held it to his mouth and pushed a button. “Henry Seven to Henry One.”
“Go ahead,” came the disembodied voice through the static.
“Lieutenant Spellman up there?”
“Yeah, hold on.”
The helicopter noise grew louder. I looked behind us just as the olive-drab military chopper rose quickly, then darted off away from the General Hospital complex and the morgue toward the downtown area. A wind blew in from across the river, up near the northern loop of I-65, bringing with it the faint fragrance of the rendering plant, mixed in with the usual car exhaust and the odor of burning garbage from the Thermal Plant. My nose curled involuntarily.
Spellman must have answered, because the young cop put the handi-talkie back to his face. “Lieutenant, I’ve got a man down here says he’s a friend of yours. Wants to cross the lines and come up there.”
“Who is he?” Spellman’s crackly voice answered.
“My name’s Denton,” I said. “Harry Denton.”
“Harry Denton,” the cop repeated.
Silence. I figured Spellman was trying to figure out exactly the right string of obscenities to put together to express just how pleased he was to hear from me.
More silence. The cop adjusted the gain on his radio, then held it closer to his ear.
“Tell him to wait right there.”
Ten minutes later a white sedan that had unmarked cop car written all over it rolled down the hill and pulled to a stop behind the line of squad cars. Spellman got out, alone, and motioned to me to join him over on the sidewalk.
I stepped between the squad cars, crossing the line between authorized and unauthorized personnel. Spellman was only glaring at me about half as irascibly as I expected, so maybe this wasn’t going to be too excruciating. It could have been fatigue, though. Spellman looked about as whipped as I’d ever seen a man who was still on two feet.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing here, Harry?”
“Howard, you look beat.” We were huddled under a streetlight, far enough away so that the uniform couldn’t hear us.
“I haven’t been home since Saturday morning,” he said, rubbing his face with both hands, the skin like putty beneath his fingers. “Thank God for electric razors that plug into cigarette lighters.”
“Jesus, man, how long they expect you to keep this up?”
“Until it’s over, I guess. C’mon, Harry, I don’t have time for this happy horseshit. What’s on your mind?”
How much could I tell him? I stood there for a moment, tongue-tied, clumsy.
“I’ve got a real good friend who’s in the morgue right now, and I’m worried about her, man. I want to know if there’s anything I can do to help, if there’s—”
“For starters, get the hell out of here. Doc Helms is doing fine. Everything’s under control.”
My head must have twitched at his mention of Marsha’s name. He grinned wearily at me, one of the few times I’d ever seen him smile.
“You know?” I asked, momentarily slack-jawed.
“Good God, Harry, what do you take me for? The whole damn department knows. It’s the biggest unkept secret in the city.”
I had to laugh myself. “Hell, Howard, we’ve been so careful, so discreet.”
“It’s Kay Delacorte. She suspected something was going on and confronted Doc about it a few weeks ago. Doc Helms swore her to secrecy.”
“Which meant Katie bar the door, right?” I said, then laughed at the whole damn situation.
“Right, if you want something to spread through the latrine-o-gram network like wildfire, make Kay Delacorte swear to keep her mouth shut.”
“Oh, hell,” I said. “I’m embarrassed. But now you understand why I’m so—”
“Of course. But there ain’t a thing you can do.”
I felt my jaw tighten and my back molars scrape together. “I know. That’s what’s driving me nuts. I hate this.”
“It’s no picnic for us. This is a weird one. Most hostage situations I’ve ever been involved in, you’ve got a disorganized, usually panicked psycho holding a gun to somebody’s head. This time, you’ve got a group of highly organized fanatics with enough firepower to make a real fight of it, but your hostages are basically safe—as long as they don’t starve.”
It was as if Howard was thinking out loud more than talking to me. “So what can you do?” I asked.
“The mayor says he does not, emphasize not, want another Waco, Texas, here. He doesn’t care what happens to anybody, as long as this city’s image isn’t damaged. It’s all politics, Harry. The new arena, the Second Avenue renovation … they’re thinking about expanding the Convention Center.”
“So whatever happens, just clean it up neatly, right?”
“You got it, cowboy.”
“I don’t envy you,” I said, suddenly weary myself.
“You don’t have to.”
I looked off to our left, up First Avenue. At the crest of the hill, there was a line of squad cars parked around a large box van, which served as the police command post.
“Howard,” I asked. “Can I go up there? I want to see it.”
Spellman stuck his hands in his pockets. “Damn it, Harry.”
“I’ve never asked you anything as a friend before. I’m asking now.”
He took a couple of steps toward the unmarked car. “What the hell, I’ll run you up there real quick. But you can only go to the second line, not the first.”
I followed him to the car. “Second line?”
The air-conditioning inside the car was set on MEAT LOCKER. Spellman dropped the car into gear and we sped up the hill.
“We’ve set up three lines. The first is across the parking lot from their line of Winnebagos. The second is farther back, at the hill where you can just look down on the morgue. The outside perimeter is the command post on Hermitage Avenue.”
“The newspapers said the vans broke through a chain-link fence,” I said as he braked to a stop behind the command post.
He jerked the driver’s side door open and hauled himself out. “As usual, they got it wrong.”
I followed him as we stepped over to the van. Uniformed officers in blue Kevlar vests and helmets with face shields milled around, casually toting their assault rifles. Large block white letters—M-U-S-T—covered the backs of the vests. We walked around them and entered the van. Inside the cramped space, three men manned a bank of radios, with a detailed map of the area spread out on a small desk jammed into one end of the van.
“Any word?” Howard asked.
One of the men looked up from a row of blue digital lights. “Nothing, Lieutenant. Been quiet for the last hour.”
“They actually came in through the General Hospital parking lot,” Spellman said, turning to me. “The back of the hospital lot joins the morgue’s parking lot right in front of a warehouse building. They drove the Winnebagos in a straight line down to the warehouse, then around the morgue right in front of it.”
Spellman pointed to the map. “Right here, see?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take you up there for a just a minute, with a couple of ground rules.”
“Shoot.”
He lowered his voice. “First, we haven’t even let the family members get this close. So you haven’t been here, right?”
“Right.”
“Second, we ain’t even let the news media up here. So if word leaks about the physical setup, I’ll know where it came from.”
“Wait, I can’t—”
“And that will make me very unhappy,” he interrupted.
I stared at him a second. “This is all off the record, Lieutenant. You have my word.”
“Let’s go.”
We stepped out of the van into what seemed like an almost eerie silence. I expected helicopters buzzing overhead, the diesel roar of armored assault vehicles revving engines, the rack
ing of shotguns.
But this was just plain quiet. No traffic, even. It gave me the creeps.
“Sergeant,” Howard said to one of the MUST members. “We’re going up the hill for a couple of minutes. We’ll be right back.”
“Right, sir.”
We stepped off the asphalt at a military pace, with me a step or two behind Spellman, through the stone pillars on either side of the road, then into the morgue parking lot. There were dozens of century-old trees in the area, their arching canopies shielding us from the sun and casting long, deep shadows over the area. From where we were, you couldn’t see much of anything. But then, as we approached the slight ridge in front of the morgue, where a line of Metro squad cars was parked, we could see the top of the building. Then a long row of RVs came into view. Howard motioned me to stop. I came up next to him. Ahead of us, maybe fifty officers lay hunkered down in flak jackets, helmets, assault rifles.
Fifty feet or so farther down, another line of squad cars faced off against the RVs not more than twenty yards distant.
“My God,” I said. “They’re right on top of each other.”
The line of Winnebagos was bumper-to-bumper in a half circle around the front of the morgue building from left to right, no more, I guessed, than twenty feet from the front door. The morgue sits on a bluff, with the Cumberland River acting as a barrier on the back. The Enochians, I realized, had taken up a virtually perfect and impregnable defensive line.
“It’s going to be tough to get them out of there. That’s why we keep talking.”
I looked at him. “How long can it go on?”
Howard shrugged. “Who the hell knows? They’re not going anywhere. We’re not going anywhere. It could last for months.”
“They’ll starve!”
He shook his head. “We’re negotiating now to get supplies into the building. The Enochians will need food and water, too, you know.”
“You’re not going to give it to them, are you?”
“If that’s what it takes to keep them talking, we will. Hell, we’ll have pizza delivered if it keeps the lines open.”
“I don’t see anybody,” I said.
“They’re all inside the RVs. Notice those little panels on the sides of the vehicles.”
Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead Page 6
