Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (9 page)

“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 racking 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.”

I squinted and stared. “Yeah, I can see them.”

“Far as we can tell, they’re gun ports.”

“And it looks like they’ve sandbagged the tops of the RVs.”

“Right, and there’re people lying down behind those bags with automatic weapons. Every once in a while one of them sticks a head up, or climbs down in a shift change. They’ve got the advantage on us, that’s for sure. If we try a direct frontal assault, we’ll get mowed down.”

“So get a freaking tank up here.”

“That’s just what we’re trying to avoid, Harry. But I will tell you this. If it comes down to blowing them out of there, we’re prepared to do it.”

There was a military coldness and precision in his voice that I’d never heard before. What a hell of a lousy position to be in, though.

“Howard,” I said. “This sucks.”

“I’ve got to get you back down the hill. They said they were sending out a negotiator at three. We’re going to talk face-to-face for the first time. You mind walking down?”

“Of course not. So you’re meeting the Reverend Woodrow Tyberious Hogg?”

“Hogg?” Howard asked. “Hell, he ain’t up there.”

“I thought—”

“These are his people. They’re from his group, but he claims he hasn’t got any control over ’em, and he certainly ain’t up on the firing line himself. Hell, he’s
probably sitting in his mansion on Hillsboro Road in the Jacuzzi, watching all this on television just like everybody else.”

We walked back to the communications van and Howard radioed the officer at the roadblock that I’d be walking down alone. I didn’t know if that was to protect me, or to make sure I didn’t try to hang around.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” I called as I walked away. He turned in my direction.

“What’d you think about that country-music singer that got waxed last night?”

He waved his hand wearily. “I haven’t even had time to think about it. I gave that one to Fouch.”

So Reverend Woody had decided to skip the fireworks his own people had started. And Detective E. D. Fouch would be investigating the murder of Rebecca Gibson.

I had the sense life was going to get real interesting over the next few days.

I threw my jacket over my shoulder and loosened my tie, then started up Broadway, in shock from what I’d seen. The walk back to my office seemed much shorter, as if I were unaware of what was going on around me or of time passing.

God, how weird.

I stayed in the office just long enough to throw the bricklayer’s file, with an invoice and a copy of the videotape, into a briefcase and to verify that my answering machine was empty. Then it was back to the car and into the traffic.

There was a wreck on Broadway on the bridge over I-40 that was just being cleared away, so I missed the worst of the jam. Some poor sucker in an old Plymouth had turned left to get on the freeway, and what looked like a brand-new Toyota pickup—temporary tag still taped in the back window—had T-boned him on the passenger’s side. Somebody’s day was shot all to blazes.

Getting past that sucked up about ten minutes, so by the time I found a parking space on a side street off Demonbreun Street at the top of the hill next to Tourist Trap Row, my heart was beating pretty fast. I had less than an hour now before my appointment with Phil Anderson at the insurance company, the appointment that I hoped would bail me out financially.

So why was I running around working up a sweat on
something I couldn’t do anything about? I couldn’t come up with an answer, so I just kept plowing ahead.

Jericho’s was inside an old, renovated house that perched on the slight rise overlooking Broadway, next door to Gilley’s. The building was two stories high, painted gray, with tasteful maroon shutters on tall, double-hung windows. The name was emblazoned across the front in bright pink neon, with red crucifixes blazing steadily on either side of the crackling light. In two display windows on either side of the door, mannequins dressed in the custom-made clothes stood on mute display.

It struck me as odd that there weren’t a passel of news vans and cop cars outside here as well as down at the morgue. But then the Pentecostal Enochians had always been fairly discreet about owning the place. Unlike some other religious cults who’d opened up storefront retail operations in order to convert the infidels, the PEs had been content to make a fortune quietly.

I opened the door and stepped inside. The air was cool, dry, and scented with that stuffy textile odor I always associate with clothes stores or new carpet. An electronic bell chimed as I closed the door behind me.

The large front room was crowded with clothes racks, with shelves against the walls rising all the way to the top of what must have been at least a twelve-foot ceiling. Jackets, denim or leather mostly, hung on the clothes racks, while the shelves were piled with folded jeans.

And, God Almighty, clothes like I’d never seen before in my life. Pain quite literally came to my eyes and I found myself squinting to cut off some of the sensation. I pulled a stonewashed denim jacket off the rack and examined it.

Every seam had been studded with rhinestones, red and gold and blue and yellow and green. Light twinkled off chrome buttons. The damn thing had to weigh at
least ten pounds. And on the back, an airbrushed painting of Christ on a Harley-Davidson, and the words
BIKING FOR JESUS
! airbrushed with a flourish across the shoulder panels. Jesus was outlined in sequins, and the tires of the bike were gold leaf, either fake or real; I couldn’t tell which.