Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (33 page)

She let loose a deep breath that had been locked inside her chest for too long. “So you saw it.”

“Are you kidding? Of course I saw it.”

“Well, I don’t know, Harry. I haven’t heard from you all day. I thought you’d forgotten about me.”

I got the distinct feeling I’d been snapped at, and thought for a moment she was being funny. There was no characteristic tag laugh at the end, though, and I suddenly realized she was serious.

“You know better than that.”

“Do I?” she demanded, her voice as sharp as a hammer rap. “I don’t know, Harry. I really don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything.”

“Marsha, what’s wrong?”

She laughed meanly. “Oh, listen to you! What do you think’s wrong? I’ve just been locked up in a loony bin for six days and nights! Other than that, I can’t imagine what could be wrong?”

“Marsha, listen to me. Something’s changed. What’s going on down there?”

There was a long pause, a strained and painful silence, punctuated by what sounded like a sob. Only I’d never heard her cry before; wasn’t sure, in fact, if she even knew how.

“Oh, God,” she whimpered. “I had to break up a fight today, Harry.”

I was stunned into momentary silence. “You did what?” I gasped.

“Larry and Charlie got in a fight over a stupid, freeze-dried meal. They were beating the hell out of each other.”

Larry and Charlie were two of the morgue attendants, young guys who’d managed to make their way onto the civil-service list. Larry was white, Charlie black; both were high-school dropouts and virtually unemployable in the private sector. The low-level jobs at the morgue paid about as much as a career in fast food, only the benefits were better and you didn’t have to work as hard. The thought of Marsha breaking up a real fight between these two gave me chest pains.

“So what happened?” I asked, horrified.

“I’ve got closure strips on Larry,” she sobbed again, then cleared her throat. Her voice became a little steadier, but still very soft. “But I think he’s going to take a couple of stitches if we ever get out of here. Charlie’s okay. But there were nasty racial slurs—and threats. I mean, Charlie’s the only black person in here with us. I think he’s starting to get sensitive.”

“I can understand that. Are you okay?”

“I got shoved around a little when I jumped in a bit too close. But I’m okay. It’s just we’re all bored and dirty and tense and scared to death by all this. It’s all too much to take, Harry. Kay’s terrified. She locks herself alone in the back storeroom to sleep. There’s this look in her eye all the time. She’s starting to remind me of that girl whose brother gets killed by the ghouls at the beginning of
Night of the Living Dead
. She keeps talking about Jesus and God, which is really tough to handle given the circumstances surrounding this whole mess.”

“Where’re you now?” I asked, trying to keep my own voice steady.

“In my office. Larry and Perry are in Dr. Henry’s office, and Charlie’s back in the cooler, sleeping on a gurney. I’ve got them separated for now. I think they’re all asleep.”

Perry Mascotti was the third, and senior, attendant. He was older than the other two and had worked at the morgue several years.

“Last night, I caught Larry going through the file drawers in Dr. Henry’s office,” she said. “I don’t know what he was looking for, but the night before, somebody snapped the lock on the locked cabinet in the autopsy room.”

“Looking for what? You got any drugs or anything there?”

“No, of course not. But I don’t think any of those three would necessarily know that. Kay’s the only one who’s certified to assist in autopsies and knows what’s in that room.”

“This is terrible,” I said before I could censor myself. Probably not the smartest comment.

Her voice broke again. “It’s going to get worse.”

I tried to put a little iron back in my voice, hoping maybe that would help her. “C’mon now, babe. You’re in charge there. You’re the authority. You’ve got to keep yourself together.”

“Stop the pep talk, Harry. I know what I have to do, and I’m going to do it. I just need somebody on the outside I can moan to right now.”

“I’m sorry. I never know what to do in situations like this.”

She almost broke a laugh. “Well, the next time I’m a hostage, you’ll know better.”

A long, deep sigh came out of me before I realized it. “You’re sounding more like you again.”

“I am me,” she answered. Then the damn phone popped again.

“I’ve got to go. I need to check in with Spellman before the phone dies, and then I’ve
got
to get some sleep.”

“Has he been out there the whole time?”

“Every minute,” she said. “He’s been a real trooper.”

“I owe him,” I said. “Big time. Do me a favor, will you?”

“Sure.”

“Lock your office door. You got anything to protect yourself with?”

“I’ve got my thirty-eight.”

“Sleep with it next to you, okay?”

“I have, every night. Up until now, it was in case the wackos charged us and tried to get in. Now I’m not so sure.”

“No matter. Just watch yourself.”

“I will. Listen, this is a hell of a time to say this, but I love you.”

Something caught in my throat and I swallowed hard. I’m not sure either of us had ever come out and just said it quite like that. “I love you, too. And one last question …”

“Yeah?”

“Is Charlie really back there sleeping with the stiffs?” She giggled, sort of. “It’s the only air-conditioned room in the building.”

“Well, tell him I said to tell Evangeline hi.”

The clock-radio alarm at seven sounded like an explosion. I jumped out of bed, instantly awake for that split second that it took me to turn the radio off, then back dead asleep as I sat on the edge of the bed. I felt myself falling over, until a voice on the edge of my consciousness told me that if I did, the whole day would be gone before I came to again.

I’d fallen asleep, finally, just as the sun began to shimmer greens and yellows off the tops of the trees outside my bedroom window. My eyes felt like somebody’d visited me in the middle of the night and stuffed a handful of BBs under each eyelid.

It had been days going on weeks since I’d felt anywhere near rested. It was hard for me to believe that barely a week ago, I was nestled in a field of tall grass, being eaten alive by chiggers, videotaping some buttwipe who’s supposed to be paralyzed slam-dunking a basketball. If I hadn’t been in Louisville, Marsha and I might have missed the call telling her to come in to work Saturday night, and now she might be out here with me wondering when the morgue siege was going to be over.

I headed toward the shower, remembering my encounter with the bricklayer. “Shoulda hit him with that stun gun again …”

I wasn’t used to the world at this time of the morning, especially after two hours’ sleep the night before. At least I think it was two; hell, it could have been five
minutes for all I knew. A warm front had moved in as I slept, and the cool spring weather had been swapped overnight for humidity and temperature in the high eighties. By the time I got to the office, it was past eight. I don’t know why I was so worried about all this. Phil said he’d get the check here. It was in his own best interest to do so, and I’ve always counted on people acting in their own best interest. Lately, though, I’d begun to wonder. Maybe I was just feeling like the smallest guy in the feeding chain.

Once inside the office, I scanned the floor for envelopes that might have been slipped under the door. Nothing. No blinking light on the answering machine either. No calls, no check.

I slammed the door behind me, pulled off my jacket, then slid into my chair. Maybe I’d just slip off and take a little catnap for a while, try to make up for lost time. I closed my eyes, let myself drift, tried to let go of everything.

Only problem was, everything wouldn’t let go of me. I kept thinking of Marsha and what might happen this weekend. Slim kept popping up in my mind as well. I imagined him sitting in jail, helpless, frustrated, with very few options left open to him.

Then there was Mac Ford’s Rolls-Royce. The more I sat there, the more that kept coming back. Why? Why would a guy like that be in the position of having a car repossessed? I knew from my experience working for Lonnie as a part-time skip-tracer and repo man that there are certain symptoms that crop up in a deteriorating financial life, and these symptoms are as predictable as the stages of a terminal disease.

It starts out with there never quite being enough cash to cover the expenses, so you start loading up the credit cards. First the gas, then the restaurant and bar bills. But then at the end of the month, you can’t pay off the credit cards, so you start paying the minimum balance due, but you keep charging those suckers up, anyway.
Then you’re getting cash advances to cover kited checks, or maybe you’re borrowing off one credit card to pay another. Meanwhile the cash situation gets tighter and tighter; the lifestyle’s out of control, like a cancer eating away at you. If you don’t stop soon, it’ll swamp you. But you can’t, so you miss a car payment or a loan payment. The house payment’s late and you drop your insurance. People start calling you around dinnertime, polite inquiries about late bills. You explain and mollify, placate and appease, for as long as you can. Then you dodge. You screen your calls, or you stop answering altogether.

Panic sets in and you feel like you’ll do anything. By then, it’s usually too late. Usually, the car goes first. The repo man comes in the middle of the night and rides off in your wheels. Then your house note’s a couple of months overdue, and the mortgage company’s sending you notices printed in red ink.

At that point, if you’re still thinking fast enough on your feet to have a strategy, you start looking for a good bankruptcy lawyer and hope you can come up with the cash to pay his retainer.

So about two steps back from collapse was where I figured Mac Ford must be. The amount of cash it takes to keep an office like that operating on a day-to-day basis must be horrendous, but at the same time he had to have a ton of cash coming in. Where did the balance get upset? What went wrong?

What the hell happened? And what did it mean?

I didn’t know if it meant anything. I’d been digging around for so long in the muck, I couldn’t see clearly anymore. But for now, I had nothing else to go on. You pull a thread loose and you start unraveling and you see how long it takes you to get to the core.

I sat there thinking for over an hour, my mind running in circles, then drifting, then spiraling down into focus again, then losing the focus and floating off lazily, like in and out of the rapids down the Ocoee River.

Somewhere in the fog, I started to doze off. Just as I was about to cross over into the drooling-on-myself stage, there was a loud knock at the door.

“Huh?” I mumbled, my feet dropping to the floor with a painful clatter. My knees hurt from being hyperextended for so long.

“Messenger,” a voice outside called. I looked down at my watch, which read 10:15. Not quite two hours late.

I opened the door and a young kid with a knapsack in his hands and a bicycle helmet strapped on his head handed me a sealed envelope. I signed for it, tipped the kid my last two singles, then locked the door as he left.

Inside was a certified check for five thousand dollars. The way it made me feel, the messenger could’ve been straight from the Kentucky Lottery, which was where a lot of Tennessee gambling money goes since we can’t have a lottery here.

I folded the check into my coat pocket, then reached for the phone. I tapped in seven numbers, then waited while an answering machine with no outgoing message clicked on. A few seconds later, a beep.

“Yo, Lonnie. Ed McMahon just dropped off my red Corvette outside. That was okay, wasn’t it? Red, I mean. I know it’s been done before, but I just didn’t think the teal was me. Anyway, this means you can cash that check I gave you. Better get it quick while the getting’s good.”

I started to hang up, then a thought struck me from somewhere in my still-asleep subconscious. “Oh, hey, I got a favor to ask. That Rolls you’ve got to repo, the one belonging to Mac Ford? How about running a credit report for me? Let’s see how much trouble the dude’s in, okay? Get back to me. Thanks.”

I hung up the phone. The credit report would be a start, but just a start. I needed someplace else to dig, some resource. I needed someone who could show me the secret handshake. Then it hit me.

Agon Dumbler.

I slapped the side of my head with an appropriate, self-directed critical epithet. Why the hell hadn’t I thought of him before?

I don’t like to cast aspersions on anyone’s character, and I don’t mean to get personal here, but Agon Dumbler was without a doubt the biggest asshole I’ve ever met in my entire life.

Agon’s about five-seven, and the last time I saw him, he was pushing three hundred and fifty pounds. He wears cream-colored suits, silk ties, and sports a white Dick Tracy hat. He drives a mid-Seventies restored Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which happens to be one of the few land yachts large enough to carry him in comfort. In appearance, he’s somewhere between Sydney Greenstreet and Rush Limbaugh, with a voice like Truman Capote on steroids. So it’s putting it diplomatically to say that Agon doesn’t exactly have a lot of dates. Luckily—because he’s overbearing, arrogant, insensitive, totally lacking in tact or consideration. And those are his good points. He’s the kind of fellow that when people speak his name, they usually follow it up with a good-sized hawker on the sidewalk.