As I stepped out into the darkness Lonnie turned the sound up on the television. I walked across the parking lot to my car, accompanied by the whistle of bombs dropping fifty years ago.
So who needs sleep, right? I took a long shower, slid under the covers, and tried to fade out. Every time I thought I was going to drop off, road rushed at me again, as if the vision of white-lined asphalt rolling by had been tattooed on my retinas.
This day had started out so well. The badly needed cash the videotape would score took second place to my perseverance. I’d hung in there and beaten the guy! He’d rolled that damn wheelchair around for weeks with me watching him. He figured nobody’d be crazy enough to follow him all the way to Louisville, Kentucky.
Well, damn it, he figured wrong. I was that crazy.
But it was all meaningless. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. On the way home from Lonnie’s the night before, I’d driven once again past the barricades. The traffic was so bad it took nearly an hour to get in and out. Blue lights sabered the night, and off in the distance sirens meowed faintly and helicopter blades chopped. But, thank God, no gunshots. Spectators, drunks, street people, concerned family members, and rowdy teenagers all mixed into a potpourri of chaos; that uniquely American method of dealing with tragedy by transforming it into street theatre. I tried to figure out some way to get past the police lines and up the hill, but there was no way.
I finally drifted off. Around four in the morning, I woke up with a jolt and couldn’t fall back off. I channel- surfed for a while, unsuccessfully searching for news bulletins, then popped the videotape of the bricklayer in the VCR. My landlady, Mrs. Hawkins, was asleep downstairs, but I wasn’t worried about waking her up. She’s as deaf as a rock wall, can barely hear with both hearing aids turned up to max. So I cranked up the sound and listened to the laughing and the bouncing of the basketball on concrete, the birds chirping and shrieking in trees, the roar of a truck going by somewhere behind the house.
I made a cup of hot chocolate and watched the tape again. I was preoccupied, drifting in and out. The tape took on a surreal quality, as if the TV screen were a window into another world, a world of much brighter colors and more acute lines than the fuzzy set of gray scales and soft lines that made up my world in the middle of the night.
I finally went under again, then woke up about daybreak with the bright silver flashing of the television dancing off the dirty cup in my lap. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was. Then it came back to me. I grabbed the clicker and ran frantically through the local stations, then CNN.
Nothing.
I fought the urge to call her, not wanting to wake her if she’d had as bad a night as I had. I showered again, this time to wake up, and made a cup of coffee. The carton of milk in my refrigerator had gone solid on me; I choked the coffee down black. The day outside was dreary, with the threat of spring thunderstorms in the air. I threw on a robe and walked down the driveway to retrieve my Sunday-morning paper.
STATE OF SIEGE the newspaper headline blared in seventy-two-point bold block type. I laughed when I saw the headline, but then remembered how I used to feel when something like this went down in my old newspaper days.
I’d have handled the story the same way. The newspeople had to milk the story for all it was worth. If this kept up, half the city would be talking to Ted Koppel by Monday night. I unfolded the paper and spread it out on the kitchen table. Most of the front page was taken up by the story. And there, down in the far right-hand corner, was Marsha’s picture. Below the picture, a caption read:
I rubbed my forehead and poured another cup of coffee, trying without much luck to shake off the cobwebs. I lay back down, somehow managed to drift off again, then woke up an hour later. I called Marsha on the cellular phone, but got busy signals for nearly a half hour. It occurred to me that with the regular telephone lines cut, the cellular would be her only connection to the police outside.
I spent the rest of the morning trying to find out anything I could. Events were occurring so fast that everybody was playing catch-up. I called the city room at the newspaper where I used to work. I got some new guy who’d never heard of me-and who didn’t want to talk anyway. Then I called another reporter I’d worked with, but he didn’t know anything either. I phoned the police-department media liaison, but she wouldn’t talk to me. I called Lieutenant Howard Spellman, my old buddy who was in charge of the Homicide Squad, but was told simply that he was unavailable.
I sat at my kitchen table, perplexed and frustrated. One more try for Marsha, one more busy signal. Then it hit me that I was ravenously hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the burger and fries the night before on the outskirts of Louisville.
May as well get dressed and get out, I thought, given that there was nothing to eat in my apartment and the walls were closing in fast. Most of the time I enjoyed being a bachelor, especially when I remembered the last few months of my failed marriage. Occasionally, though, Sundays spent alone got to me. I had the feeling this was going to be one of them.
I threw on a pair of jeans and a frayed oxford-cloth shirt, then walked down the rickety backstairs of my attic apartment to the driveway. Mrs. Hawkins stood at the window of her kitchen, washing a load of dishes and humming loudly off-key. She looked up as I crossed in front of her window, then cranked off the water and hurried to her back door.
“Hello, Harry,” she called through the screen. I turned and smiled at her.
“Hi, Mrs. Hawkins,” I said loudly. “How are you?”
“Just fine. I put your mail on your kitchen table while you were gone.”
“I got it. Thanks.”
“Did everything go as expected in Louisville?” she asked.
“Better than I expected.”
“Then you nailed the SOB!”
I smiled and raised a thumb at her.
“Good,” she called. “It’s bad to defraud the insurance companies. It just makes it harder on the rest of us. The insurance companies are only trying to protect us.”
Right, Mrs. Hawkins, I thought to myself. And Santa Claus wiggles his fat ass down your chimney every December the twenty-fifth, too.
I’d replaced my eight-year-old Ford Escort-which had been incinerated along with Mrs. Hawkins’s garage in an unfortunate accident a few months earlier-with a sixteen-year-old Mazda Cosmo that Lonnie had repo’d. The finance company didn’t want the car. What are they going to do with a rotary-engine-powered rustbucket? So I got the car for five hundred. Lonnie tuned it up for me and now it ran like a top, despite the spreading bubble rust on its cream-colored skin and the quart of oil it burned with every tankful. It had electric windows that still worked and, more importantly with summer approaching, an air conditioner that pumped out cold air by the boxcar load. So what if nobody ever heard of a Mazda Cosmo? I considered it a future collectible.
I pulled the choke out, fired up the Wankel engine, and headed over to Shelby Street. Rather than take the freeway, I crossed into town on the bridge and maneuvered my way back to First Avenue. Midmorning Sunday had brought a quieter crowd to the barricades, but people were still milling about so thickly you couldn’t get a car within half a block. Things looked quiet enough, though, and as long as I didn’t hear any gunfire or explosions, I allowed myself to feel relieved.
A couple of minutes later I pulled off Demonbreun Street and into the parking lot of the Music Row Shoney’s. The Shoney’s breakfast bar is an institution in this city-one of those all-you-can-eat deals that runs until the middle of the afternoon on weekends. Eggs, bacon, sausage, grits swimming in butter, biscuits covered in gravy, coffee strong enough to make your nipples erect; my stomach growled and my arteries started clogging up with the anticipation alone.
The parking lot was packed with the usual conglomeration of tourists, Music Row hustlers, songwriters,
