“Maybe. Won’t know till Monday.”
“Damn, man. I’m sorry,” I said, punching in the numbers.
He turned the beer up, his Adam’s apple bobbing in time to his swallowing. Then he uncocked his arm and stared at me a moment. “Yeah, I know. Me, too.”
“C’mon, babe,” I whispered into the phone. “Answer. Be home. Tell me you took a night off for once.” The phone rang four times, then the answering machine picked up.
“Aw, hell,” I muttered. When the message played through and the beep came, I said: “Marsha? You there? C’mon, lady. Pick up if you’re there.”
Nothing. I punched the hang-up button.
“How’d it go in Louisville?” Lonnie asked.
“Great,” I said. “Probably win a freaking Oscar or something. Got film of the guy slam-dunking a basketball about thirty times in an hour.”
“Jesus. What a moron. Hey, dude.” Lonnie sniffed. “You’re getting kind of gamy, you know that?”
“Why don’t you install a shower in that damn van of yours?”
“Well, pardon me, Sam Spade.…”
“I didn’t expect to find you here, anyway,” I said. “I figured you’d either be on a run or back at the apartment.”
“Just got in about an hour ago,” he answered. He raised the can to his lips and drained about half of it. “Pulled down a new Lincoln Town Car. Guy followed me in his pickup truck. Getting smart with me, I guess. I decided to stick around in case he tried to get it back.”
I popped the top on the beer can and downed a healthy third of it, then set it down next to a filthy, oil- covered gear of some kind that occupied a corner of Lonnie’s scarred coffee table. I don’t know why I even noticed it; the trailer was littered with loose auto parts, electronic components, tools. Lonnie saw me staring at the gear.
“CV joint off an ’85 Accord,” he said. “Ellis’s wife blew one out the other day.” Ellis was one of Lonnie’s freelance repo men: big guy, tobacco chewer, half a dozen teeth left if he’s lucky. Laughs a lot, gets on my nerves.
“What in the hell is going on down at the morgue?”
I asked, aware of how irritable I must have sounded.
“Has this whole damn city gone crazy?”
“What do you mean
“Look,” I said, “they’ve preempted
“Must be some real shit going down,” Lonnie commented, his voice a monotone.
The picture was mostly flashing lights: blues and reds and yellows and whites like I’d seen at the foot of the First Avenue hill. I recognized the curve in front of General Hospital where First Avenue becomes Hermitage Avenue. Police barricades were everywhere. Fire engines sat hunkered down on the sidewalk, their engines racing. The orange-and-white paramedic vans lined up one after the other all the way down the hill.
“As you can see,” an announcer’s voice narrated off-screen, “police have cordoned off the area and no one is getting through. We’re waiting for a police briefing, which is scheduled to begin momentarily.”
I sat down on the couch, then shifted around trying to get comfortable. I pulled my right hip up off the torn vinyl. My wallet, packed to the flaps with cards, licenses, and scraps of paper, was giving me a cramp in my butt. I pulled it out, then it hit me like the memory of a forgotten appointment. Tucked in a corner, scribbled on a cocktail napkin, was a telephone number that only a couple of people possessed.
I grabbed the phone off the coffee table and punched the numbers in, not knowing what to expect. I’d never used the number before. Never had to.
Marsha picked up on the first ring. “Yeah.”
“You okay?”
She let out a sigh that was as deep as it was long. “Yeah, I’m okay. Where are you?”
“Lonnie’s,” I said, trying to keep the alarm in my voice to a minimum. “I just got back in town tonight. What the hell’s going on down there.”
“You tell me,” she said. “All I know is one minute I’m checking in a fat dead lady, the next Kay’s in here screaming about a bunch of people with guns yelling about Jesus and Judgment Day and all kinds of crap.”
Kay Delacorte was the head administrator at the morgue, a real take-charge cowgirl. If Kay went into the cooler and yelled, “Jump,” you’d half expect the stiffs to say: “How high?”
“Are you okay? Is anybody hurt?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “They’ll never get in here. Plus we’ve got a generator that’ll give us limited backup power, as well as this cellular phone. But the cops won’t tell us much besides lay low and stay away from the windows.”
“I don’t know what they’re worried about,” I said. “The windows are all bulletproof.” The Nashville morgue had thick Plexiglas windows and doors like a bunker. Whoever designed the facility had a feeling that someday, somebody might want a body back bad enough to kill for it.
“Yeah, but nobody knows whether these guys are bluffing or not. They claim to have LAW 80s.”
“What’n the hell’s a LAW 80?” I asked.
“Light antitank weapon,” Marsha answered. “Sort of a mini-bazooka.”
“Oh, that’s not all. They say they’ve got H and K MP5s, whatever they are. And M16s-I know what they are- and something called a …”
Her voice faded away, and I heard her in the background. “What was it, Kay?”
Another mumbled voice, then Marsha was back. “-ARMSEL Strikers. Whatever they are.”
I looked at Lonnie. “What’s an ARMSEL Striker?”
He pointed the clicker at me. “Something you don’t want to fuck with …”
“Aw, c’mon, man. What is it?”
“Riot control. Looks like a big damn Thompson submachine gun, only it fires shotgun shells instead of bullets. Empties a twelve-round magazine in about three seconds. South African police call it a Streetsweeper.”
I held the phone back to my ear. “What is it?” she asked.
“Something you don’t want to fuck with …”
“That bad, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess that explains why the Metros haven’t just blasted their way in here and hauled ’em all off to jail.”
“They’re outgunned, aren’t they?” I commented. It was a question that didn’t require an answer.
“Welcome to America in the Nineties,” she said. “Have you paid your NRA dues yet?”
“This is crazy. Freaking Looney Tunes.”
“You ought to see it from my end,” Marsha said wearily. “Another cabdriver got popped yesterday. Fourth one this month. Guy had a two-month-old baby. His first.”
“Jesus, I’m tearing up my hack license.”
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“I got it a few months ago, just in case times ever got real bad.”
“Hey, baby,” she said. “Things ever get that bad, you move in with me. I’ll feed you before I let you drive one of those puppies.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said. I felt my mouth go dry and my throat tighten. “I tried to get down there. Couldn’t talk my way past the barricades.”
“No point in trying, babe. But don’t worry, we’re-”
Pop. Static. Crackle.
“Marsha!” I yelled.
