Way Past Dead

“What about kidnapping?”

“Well, that would, of course, be up to a grand jury and the District Attorney’s Office. My feeling at this point in time is the charges that are ultimately leveled will be in direct relation to the cooperation we receive from the group, and to the outcome of this situation.”

I whistled. “Goddamn brilliant, Harold,” I said. If those people down there had any brains at all, they’d understand that Harold Gleaves had just given them an easy way out. Now if they’d only take it.

The conversation continued along those lines for another fifteen minutes or so, then Ted signed off with a teaser that tomorrow night’s 20/20 would feature Baba Wawa interviewing a woman who claimed to be yet another bimbo who’s claimed to have slept with Bill Clinton. Amazingly, he pulled it off with a straight face.

I punched in the cellular number and she answered on the second ring.

“Yes.”

“We have got to get you out of there,” I said.

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