Way Past Dead

“Sit down,” he said.

“I don’t want to sit down. I’m tired. I want to go home.”

“Sit down anyway.” Something in his voice made me do it. “Listen, how long have we known each other?”

“A long time, I guess,” I said, caution in my voice. Where was this going?

“We’ve always been straight with each other, right?”

“Yes, we’ve always been straight with each other. Why do I get the feeling this is going to be a difficult conversation?”

He ignored my question. “I’ve been listening to you bitch and moan for the past week about missing your main squeeze. Truth is, buddy, it’s getting tiresome.”

Anger filled the inside of my chest to the point of bursting. I hammered it down, though, to keep from going off on him. “Maybe you just don’t understand,” I said through gritted teeth, “what it’s like to miss somebody that much.”

“Oh, I do understand, Harry. I do. More than you know. Twenty years ago, my first wife was missing for four days before they found her.”

“Found her?”

“Yeah. On the backside of a dump. Raped. Strangled. Buried in garbage. She was nineteen years old.” His voice remained steady, a numb monotone. I sat there for a few seconds, unable to speak.

“Well,” I said, staring down at the floor, “don’t I feel like a genuine asshole.…”

“I sat in my apartment for four days, surrounded by my in-laws and my family and my friends, all of us crying and frustrated and helpless. We all sat there, waiting for the police to take care of it for us. And the only thing the cops took care of was notifying us she was dead. I always felt bad that I just sat there.”

“Lonnie, there was nothing you could have done.”

He raised his head and looked me straight in the eye. “Yeah, but I’d have felt a fuck of a lot better if I’d tried.”

“So what are you saying?” I asked after a moment.

“Sit there,” he said. “Let me show you something.”

He disappeared into the back room and emerged seconds later with a stack of papers and a manila envelope. He sat down on the couch next to me, then scooted the glasses aside and laid the stack of papers down.

“Look.” He opened the manila envelope and took out a stack of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. “I’ve been doing a little surveillance of my own.”

He pulled the top shot off and set it in front of us.

“I stopped on the Silliman Evans Bridge over the Cumberland and took these.”

“You stopped in the middle of an interstate highway bridge over a river to take pictures?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Sure, why not? It was the only way I could get what I needed.”

He pointed to the middle of the photo. “Here’s the morgue, and if you look real closely, you can see-there, through the trees-the line of Winnebagos. The back of the morgue is actually open. There’s no one back there.”

“Yeah, there’s not enough room. That’s a bluff that goes straight down to the river. Nobody could get out that way. They’re trapped.”

“Ah.” He raised an index finger. “Wait, Kemo Sabe.”

He shuffled the photographs and came up with another one. “I had to blow this one up so much it’s grainy as all hell, but you can see well enough if you try.”

I squinted. “Looks like one of those spy-satellite photos.”

“Yeah, but look.” He pointed. “Here’s the back of the morgue. The back wall is actually fenced off by a high chain-link fence. That protects the air-conditioning units and the generator. There’s probably concertina around the top.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And here are the two tiny slit windows in the back of the building. Those are the only two windows back there.”

“Yeah, I remember that. There’s only a few windows in the whole building. They’re just slits and they’re bulletproof.”

“Now you see why, right? And here.” He pointed again. “Look closely.”

I picked up the picture and held it close to my face. “What is it?”

“What’s it look like?”

I turned to Lonnie. “A door?”

He grinned. “An access door to the fenced-in area. So maintenance men can get to the units from inside the building. That door’s probably in the basement.”

“Great,” I said. “So Marsha and everybody else could get out if they had to. But to their immediate right and left, they’re surrounded by the Looney Tunes Brigade.”

“Okay, fair enough. Now look at these.”

He pulled a few more photos out and spread them in front of me. “I crossed the river on the Woodland Street Bridge into East Nashville, then drove around all over hell and back following the river. The metal scrapyards are down there, along with a couple of manufacturing plants, warehouses, and the bridge company. Not exactly Belle Meade.”

“Okay, so you got to tour scenic East Nashville.”

“Yeah, and I talked the security guard at the Leggett and Platt warehouse into letting me past the gates. If you go to the back of their parking lot, you’re right on the riverbank, directly across the river from the morgue. On the East Nashville side, there aren’t any bluffs. You’re right on the water.”

I stared at the photos. Black-and-white shots of the river and the bank on the opposite side. The bluff coming out of the water was sheer mud for about twenty feet, then a tangle of undergrowth, trees sprouting at bizarre angles, and jungle that went straight up and appeared to be impenetrable.

“Great, you got shots of a bluff,” I said.

“The photos are misleading,” Lonnie said. “Actually, that’s a climb, but it’s not straight up. Our biggest problem will be cutting through the undergrowth, but we can use the vines and trees to pull ourselves up.”

My mouth fell open. No, I was too tired. I couldn’t have heard him right. “Ourselves? Pull ourselves what?”

“Up,” he said. “Pull ourselves up.”

“I thought this was some kind of academic exercise,” I said. “You actually want to go in there and get them?”

He set his jaw and gazed at me stone-faced. “You got it, big guy.…”

I jumped up, agitated. “You’re-you’re out of your fucking mind. For one thing, if that could be done, the police would have already done it.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” he said. “Their whole aim is to negotiate and avoid bloodshed. They’re not into clandestine, deep-cover ops.”

“Deep-cover ops? You’ve been reading way too many Tom Clancy novels,” I said. “We are not the freaking Green Berets.”

“Number one, I hate Tom Clancy. Bob Mayer’s a much better writer. And number two, stop being such a wuss. A couple pair of bolt cutters, a machete apiece, some dark clothing, rope, a couple grappling hooks. We’re in there, we’re out of there, twenty minutes tops.”

“You’re crazy,” I said, stupefied.

“Just call her on the cell phone and tell her to get everybody ready.”

“The cops are monitoring the cellular frequencies. I’m sure of it.”

“So what? It’s a risk we’ve got to take. Besides, how they gonna stop us? It’s no crime to take a midnight boat ride. It’s your call. In or out? You want your girlfriend back or what?”

“You’re crazy,” I said again.

He shrugged his shoulders. “How ’bout it?”