“Jeez, be careful,” he hissed, then yanked it out of my hand. “If we get in a jam and can’t get to the top, this is a spring-loaded grappling hook. Attach the nylon rope here, pull this pin, point it up, keep your head down, and stand back. It’ll shoot a grappling hook about a hundred feet straight up the bluff.”
“Why don’t you carry that one?” I suggested.
“Good move. It’s a mean mother.”
Lonnie stood up, pulled on his pack, attached the baton to a hook on his belt, and looked down at me.
“You ready?”
“No,” I said, standing up and throwing the pack on. “But let’s go anyway.”
I had on the hiking boots that Marsha’d talked me into buying, along with a pair of jeans and a checked black-and-white flannel shirt. I figured that was about as much commando as I could stand.
Lonnie, on the other hand, looked like something out of
A wall of undergrowth, trees, vines, snakes, critters, and only God knew what else lay ahead of us. Lonnie pulled out his sealed beam and flicked it on as we made our way across the fallen tree and retied the boat. To random boat traffic, we’d look like a couple of night fishermen. And we were tucked in the bluff far enough forward to be unseen by anyone who might be wandering around above.
I still wasn’t sure this was really happening, but then I gritted my teeth, pulled out the Khyber knife, and started climbing.
Halfway up the slope, I thought my lungs would finally, and mercifully, give out.
I stopped for a moment, panting. “If we even make it to the top, how the hell are we going to get them down?”
Lonnie was a half a body length ahead of me, his boots kicking mud and clumps of rotting gunk down on me. He turned, his face shiny, sweaty black in the dim light.
“This is the worst of it. It levels off near the top.”
“I’m not worried about Marsha,” I said, “but Kay Delacorte’s a middle-aged bureaucrat.”
“She’s a middle-aged bureaucrat who wants to go home very badly.”
I dug my toes into the soft earth, grabbed another hunk of vines, and pulled myself up. Thornbushes had whipped scratches across my face that would be scarlet and on fire by morning. Maybe fifty yards lay behind us, and the boat was only a tiny speck bobbing in the water, hidden from view by the twisted debris of dead vegetation.
There was a rustle to our right; we’d disturbed something that I hoped would head away, rather than toward us. We climbed on, yanking and gashing our way through the undergrowth. Lonnie was right, though, and the last few yards were actually a gentle slope upward to a line of trees, the bases of which were buried in thick vines.
Lonnie stopped. “We’ll have a time hacking through that,” he said. “But I don’t see a way around it.”
Off to our right, a TVA high-tension tower jutted into the black sky. “Are we even in the right place?” I asked.
“I think so,” he whispered. “There’s the brick smokestack at General Hospital. It looks to be in the right place.”
Once we stepped into the bed of vines, we sank in up to our waists. I wasn’t meant for this sort of thing. Lonnie was loving it, though. He hacked away, ripping vines and working his way upward. I followed him as best I could, driven to stay close by fear as much as anything else.
We got to a little rise on the slope, just below the trees that marked the back of the morgue property. He dropped down, flicked off his flashlight, and motioned me to follow him. I turned my light off, and we crept forward.
“Damn,” he stage-whispered.
“What is it?” I came up behind him. His fingers were wrapped in the wire spiderweb of a chain-link fence.
“Okay,” I said, “we cut through it.”
“Did you see the good news?”
I shook my head. He grabbed a fistful of vines and pulled them back. Beyond the fence, the brown brick of the Nashville morgue stared back at us, not twenty feet away. For the first time, I let loose with a grin.
“Nice shooting, cowboy,” I whispered.
I pulled the bolt cutters out of his knapsack, and he got mine.
“Be careful not to make any noise,” he said.
He started on the left; I took the right. We cut slowly, carefully, quietly upward, then curved toward each other and met in the middle. It took about five minutes, and when we finished, we pulled back a piece of fence in the shape of a four-foot mouse hole.
“What time is it?”
I checked my watch. “Two-thirty.”
“Damn, we’re really behind schedule. I hope they haven’t given up on us.”
“They haven’t,” I said. “What’s next?”
We were huddled just below the tree line. If we stepped forward two feet, we’d be potentially exposed. I stuck my head up slowly and looked; the front end of a tan Winnebago was visible around the corner of the building. A lone man stood in front of it, cradling a weapon. I couldn’t see the other direction, but assumed they were still there as well.
“What if they’ve got foot patrols?”
“We’ll have to take them out,” he said.
I glared at him. “I’ve never taken anybody out before!” I whispered. “They’ve got guns!” I wished I hadn’t made him leave the guns at home.
His white teeth shown in the darkness. “Nothing to it. Listen, dude, I’m going to crawl up to the tree line and cover the area. You’re going to play hero.”
“I’m going to
“You’re going to crawl on your belly up to that gate and rattle it just a bit and hope somebody comes out.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “You up for it?”
“Oh, shit,” I said again, then gulped. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”
He moved forward and poked his head out of the underbrush. He leaned as far as he could to the left, then back to the right. Then he motioned with his arm.
I crawled up next to him. “I think I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Stop joking.”
“Who’s joking?”
He turned to me. “You going or not?”
I moved up past him. He touched my arm. I looked back. “I see anybody coming, I’ll rustle the bushes, okay? Then you haul ass out of there.”
I nodded, then slid the pack off my back. I gently pulled a clump of vines out of the way and crawled forward. Every time a stick cracked, my heart stopped. Sweat ran down my sides. I crawled forward a few more steps, then past the tree.
I was out in the open, on a lawn that needed mowing and was wet with dew.
Thank God for high grass, I thought as I hugged the ground and moved slowly toward the chain-link fence. I figured there had to be a gate somewhere; it was just a matter of finding it. It was too dark to see, so I crawled along feeling a few feet at a time. For once in my life, I took the right direction the first time. I got to the gate and reached forward to rattle it, then looked up. The padlock was hanging there. Open.
God, what a woman.
I looked to my right, then left. The only person I could see was the lone sentry at the head of the last Winnebago in the circle. He had his back to me. I stood up slowly, lifted the padlock out of its hole, lifted the latch,
