Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (11 page)

Then I tightened my gut and let fly with the next one. “How long do you think it’ll take your accounting department to cut the check.”

“Oh,” he drawled. “They’re pretty quick. Generally takes about forty-five days, maybe sixty if they get backed up.”

I swallowed hard; sixty days, assuming they’d pay the bill at all. In sixty days, they’d have to send the check to me in care of the homeless shelter. There was no way I could float that long.

I got this real bad taste in the back of my mouth.

“I’m sorry, Phil, but I’m afraid I’m not comfortable with that. I’m a small, one-man operation. Sixty days is going to cause me some real cash-flow problems. I was thinking more along the lines of ten days.”

Phil shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing I can do about it, buddy. Procedure … It takes as long as it takes.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the two suits grinning. You little bastards, I thought, you’d probably scream like scalded dogs if your paycheck was an hour late.

What could I do? Powerless little man confronts faceless corporate bureaucracy. Powerless little man goes down the dumper. I could be a real jerk and demand the tape back, but then I’d lose the account forever.

Next thing I know, I’m on the elevator, jammed in next to a crowd of exiting employees at five-thirty, fuming, frustrated, hacked off once again. So much for this being a glamorous business. Wonder how Doghouse Riley did it all those years?

I stepped out onto the sidewalk, amid the throng of people heading back to the parking lots to begin the long commute home. I wondered where the hell next month’s rent was coming from.

“Damn it,” I muttered. Then I saw it. A wire-mesh trash basket on the sidewalk about three feet high, one of those heavy-gauge metal city-owned types with a black-and-white sign on it that said
PLEASE DON’T LITTER
.

I reared back and kicked the shit out of it, yelped, then began the long limp back to my car.

I was lower than whale effluent. I couldn’t even bear to go back to the office. I cranked up the Mazda and made my by now ritual passage in front of the police barricades before heading over the river into East Nashville. Being preoccupied with money, among other things, I remembered that I was cashless. There was a drive-up ATM machine at a bank on the right, so I pulled in and withdrew a twenty; one of the last, few dwindling times I’d be able to, I feared.

Going home alone to my apartment was equally unappetizing as spending more time in my office. It was still early enough in the year for the sun to set early, but the darkness was no longer that oppressively heavy blanket that sends everyone to bed by ten. I needed to be around some people that I wasn’t in conflict with, so just past the Earl Scheib Body Shop, I turned in to the parking lot of Mrs. Lee’s.

Ever since I moved to East Nashville, following the precipitous drop in lifestyle that accompanied my getting fired from the newspaper and subsequently divorced, Mrs. Lee had become a kind of surrogate parent to me. My own parents retired to Hawaii a year or two before my divorce, and apart from occasional phone calls and the obligatory holiday visits, we don’t see each other that much anymore. Mrs. Lee’s Hunan Chinese restaurant had become my refuge, despite the fact that Mrs. Lee exhibited few nurturing instincts toward me. Hell, maybe it was just that she remembered my
name, which in this day and age is nothing short of remarkable.

Excuse me. I guess I am feeling sorry for myself. On top of that, my toe still hurts where I kicked the wire trash barrel.

I parked next to an enormous GMC pickup truck with a rack of emergency lights on the top, recognized it, and smiled.

“Well, look who’s here,” I said as the heavy glass doors of the restaurant hissed shut behind me. Lonnie looked up from his disposable plate—everything in Mrs. Lee’s was throwaway except the food—and shook his head.

“Look what the cat drug in.”

“Let me get a plate,” I said. “I’ll join you.”

I walked up to the counter just as Mrs. Lee was turning around from the window into the kitchen with a scowl on her face.

“Gweat,” she said, pointing to Lonnie. “Fust him, now you. You two give my prace a bad name. Too many car wepossess—” She stumbled. “Car we—”

“Now why would car repossessors give your place a bad name?”

“This neighborhood,” she barked. “People afraid to come heah. Think you pick they cars up.”

“Now, darling, that says more about the neighborhood than it does about us, doesn’t it?”

She half smiled at me. “Smaht-butt. What you want tonight? Let me guess. Szechuan chicken.”

“Unless you’re sold out.”

“Hah!” She turned to the window and yelled something to her husband in rapid-fire Chinese. At least I think that’s what it was; for all I knew, it could have been Venusian.

I laid my twenty on the counter and turned back to the tables. Lonnie had a folded afternoon newspaper held out in front of him as he ate absentmindedly. I
stood there a moment, waiting. It’d been a roller-coaster ride of a day, and I was glad it was nearly over.

“Heah you go, mistah investigatah,” Mrs. Lee said, sliding the white Styrofoam plate across the counter to me. She grabbed the twenty and returned sixteen bucks in change. One of the things I loved about Mrs. Lee’s was you got more food than anyone could possibly eat for four dollars.

“How’s Mary?” I asked, gathering up little packs of soy sauce and a plastic fork.

“You doan worry about Mary,” she instructed. “Mary not you problem.”

Mary was Mrs. Lee’s high-school-senior daughter; gorgeous, honor student, sweet, untouched. Hell, I’d keep her away from me, too. I’d tried over the last couple of years not to let my affection and admiration for her grow into anything more inappropriate than necessary.

“Tell her I said hi.”

I walked over to the table and slid down in front of Lonnie. He put down the newspaper and folded his arms across his chest. I raked up a forkful of rice, steaming vegetables, and chicken laced with red peppers and hot oil. As soon as it hit my mouth everything was right in the world, at least temporarily.

“So what’s happening, dude?”

“Well,” I snarfled, mouth full of food, “let’s see. My girlfriend’s a hostage, my bank account’s empty, my clients won’t pay me. On top of that, I don’t know where the rent’s coming from next month on either my apartment or my office. Otherwise, life’s just a regular hoot and a holler.”

“You know, Harry,” Lonnie drawled, “you’re getting to have a regular attitude problem.”

“I really am worried about her,” I said, real serious and low. “Kinda weird.”

“Talking about it all the time ain’t going to do any good.”

“You remind me of when I was a kid and I’d fall down and bust a knee open or something and my father would say, ‘Don’t cry.’ And I’d say, ‘But, Daddy, it hurts,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, just don’t feel it, son.’ Just don’t feel it.”

“Good advice, you ask me.”

A piece of a red chili pepper hit the back of my throat, a feeling I’d imagine was comparable only to accidentally swallowing a hot cigarette ash. I started choking and reached for the glass of ice water. Sweat broke out over my upper lip.

“Say,” I said when I’d recovered my composure, “you haven’t got a car or two I can pick up, have you? I could use the quick cash.”

“I lost the bank,” Lonnie said quietly.

I stared at him. “What do you mean, you lost the bank? Who loses a bank?”

“Asshole, I didn’t mean I
lost
it, lost it. I meant they’re not my clients anymore.”

I set my fork down in my plate. The Nashville Merchants Bank had been Lonnie’s main customer for years. He’d repossessed maybe three thousand cars for them.

“What happened?”

“They were bought by that bank in Virginia.”

“Oh yeah, I read about that.” Merchants was one of the last two locally owned banks in the city; the rest had been swallowed up in corporate takeovers. This just isn’t a small town anymore.

“So they brought in new management.”

“Well, they still got to repossess cars, don’t they?”

“Sure, they just aren’t going to have me do it for them. You know how it is when new bosses come in. They got to change everything just to mark their territory. Sort of like a dog pissing on a bush.”

“Sounds like a done deal,” I said.

“It is. Nothing I can do about it.”

I crammed in another mouthful. “You going to be
okay?” A trickle of hot oil leaked out the side of my mouth. One of the niceties about my relationship with Lonnie was that table manners played absolutely no part in anything. One of those male-bonding concepts, I guess.

“Yeah,” he said wearily. “Business had dried up over the past few months anyway. Times’re getting better; people are making their car payments.”

“Times are getting better?” I asked, my mouth open. “Damn, couldn’t tell it by me.”

Lonnie grinned. “Well, they are. Besides, I could use a little downtime. I got some money saved up. My other clients’ll feed me a couple of cars a week, just to keep my hand in. Won’t be nothing like the old days, though. Back when we were picking up two or three a night. Thought I was going to run my ass off back then.”

“Ah, the good old days of economic collapse.”

“Got that right. Besides, I’m working on a deal with a leasing company that may work out. Leased vehicles have to be repo’d, too, you know.” He unfolded the newspaper and held the front page toward me. “Seen the latest?”

CULT LEADER NOT IN CONTROL
the headline read.

“What the hell?” I reached over and took the newspaper out of his hand, then scanned the article. The Reverend Woodrow Tyberious Hogg was now claiming he was not in control of his followers, that in their zeal and religious fervor, they had surrounded the morgue on their own volition.

I looked up. “You buy this shit?”

“That Hogg’s not in control?”

“Yeah.”

Lonnie chuckled. “Right, and the Pope don’t wear a funny hat. The guy’s just trying to keep his legal problems to a minimum. It’s like if Koresh had been outside the compound in Waco going: ‘Hey, it’s not
my
problem those people have locked themselves in there with all those guns.’ ”

I read on. Hogg had held a press conference by phone from his walled estate just in time to make the afternoon paper deadline. His wife died of a stroke, he said, and this had been verified from the group’s own doctor. Rumors of drug and alcohol abuse, and especially the vile rumors about suicide or even murder, were despicable and the work of the devil’s own children seeking to stay the hand of God in the world.

“Guy’s a paranoid psychotic,” I said offhandedly.

“Rooney tunes,” Lonnie said.

“I went down there today,” I said, distracted as I scanned the rest of the article. A sidebar related the history of hostage situations over the past decade or so. It was not an upbeat tale.

Lonnie cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah,” I said. “Talked to Howard Spellman. He’s in charge of the hostage negotiations.”

“We’re screwed now,” Lonnie said. “Hang it up.”

I glared over the top of the paper. “That was uncalled for. Spellman’s not so bad, once one gets used to him,” I said, forcing a stiffness into my voice.

“A horsewhipping’s not so bad, once one gets used to it,” he answered, mimicking my formality and raising his paper cup in a mock toast.

I looked down at the paper, below the fold to the second lead story. “You see this?” I asked. “They’re looking for Slim Gibson in the Rebecca Gibson murder.”

“Yeah, I saw.”

“Police are searching,” I read aloud, “for Randall J. (Slim) Gibson, thirty-seven, for questioning in the bludgeoning death of country-music singer Rebecca Gibson. Gibson, thirty-five, was found beaten to death in the bedroom of her Bellevue home at approximately four-twenty Monday morning. A police spokesman said the star returned from playing a concert with her ex-husband and two other musicians at approximately two-thirty
A.M
.”

“Nasty business,” Lonnie said. “You ever seen anybody beaten to death?”

I shook my head.

“It’s not pretty,” he continued. “I hear it’s a helluva lot of work, too. It ain’t easy to beat a full-grown human being to death. They don’t take kindly to it.”

I folded the paper in front of me. “I sure as hell wouldn’t.” I scraped up the last of my Szechuan chicken into a scrambled puddle of goop and swallowed it whole.

“Slim’s partner, Ray, came over to my office today. Said Slim’s running kind of scared. I advised him to check in. The cops have to come after him, it’s going to look real bad.”

“If that article’s true, he’s in deep sewage now. You know as well as I do that when the police say they want you just for questioning, that means your ass is rolled, floured, and deep-fat-fried.”

“Ray wanted me to help him, but I’m damned if I know what to do,” I said.

“Ain’t nothing you can do,” Lonnie agreed.

“Besides that,” I added, “they can’t afford me anyway.”

“Jeez, and all this time I thought you were a cheap date.”

Mrs. Hawkins, my seventy-something, hard-of-hearing little old landlady, was already locked in her bottom half of the house by the time I got home. It was dark, but still refreshingly warm after the long winter. I parked in the back, beside the rickety black metal staircase that led up to my attic apartment, then trudged upstairs to settle in for the night.