I’d expected that. “Say, could you call him on the radio and see if he’ll let me come up. If he said it was okay, that’d be all right, wouldn’t it?”
Behind us, from somewhere up the hill, we heard the whine of a helicopter engine coming alive. As the engine noise increased, the slow whop-whop-whop of the blades grew as well.
“What do you think?” I asked.
The cop pulled his handi-talkie out of a leather holster on his belt. He held it to his mouth and pushed a button. “Henry Seven to Henry One.”
“Go ahead,” came the disembodied voice through the static.
“Lieutenant Spellman up there?”
“Yeah, hold on.”
The helicopter noise grew louder. I looked behind us just as the olive-drab military chopper rose quickly, then darted off away from the General Hospital complex and the morgue toward the downtown area. A wind blew in from across the river, up near the northern loop of I-65, bringing with it the faint fragrance of the rendering plant, mixed in with the usual car exhaust and the odor of burning garbage from the Thermal Plant. My nose curled involuntarily.
Spellman must have answered, because the young cop put the handi-talkie back to his face. “Lieutenant, I’ve got a man down here says he’s a friend of yours. Wants to cross the lines and come up there.”
“Who is he?” Spellman’s crackly voice answered.
“My name’s Denton,” I said. “Harry Denton.”
“Harry Denton,” the cop repeated.
Silence. I figured Spellman was trying to figure out exactly the right string of obscenities to put together to express just how pleased he was to hear from me.
More silence. The cop adjusted the gain on his radio, then held it closer to his ear.
“Tell him to wait right there.”
Ten minutes later a white sedan that had unmarked cop car written all over it rolled down the hill and pulled to a stop behind the line of squad cars. Spellman got out, alone, and motioned to me to join him over on the sidewalk.
I stepped between the squad cars, crossing the line between authorized and unauthorized personnel. Spellman was only glaring at me about half as irascibly as I expected, so maybe this wasn’t going to be too excruciating. It could have been fatigue, though. Spellman looked about as whipped as I’d ever seen a man who was still on two feet.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing here, Harry?”
“Howard, you look beat.” We were huddled under a streetlight, far enough away so that the uniform couldn’t hear us.
“I haven’t been home since Saturday morning,” he said, rubbing his face with both hands, the skin like putty beneath his fingers. “Thank God for electric razors that plug into cigarette lighters.”
“Jesus, man, how long they expect you to keep this up?”
“Until it’s over, I guess. C’mon, Harry, I don’t have time for this happy horseshit. What’s on your mind?”
How much could I tell him? I stood there for a moment, tongue-tied, clumsy.
“I’ve got a real good friend who’s in the morgue right now, and I’m worried about her, man. I want to know if there’s anything I can do to help, if there’s-”
“For starters, get the hell out of here. Doc Helms is doing fine. Everything’s under control.”
My head must have twitched at his mention of Marsha’s name. He grinned wearily at me, one of the few times I’d ever seen him smile.
“You know?” I asked, momentarily slack-jawed.
“Good God, Harry, what do you take me for? The whole damn department knows. It’s the biggest unkept secret in the city.”
I had to laugh myself. “Hell, Howard, we’ve been so careful, so discreet.”
“It’s Kay Delacorte. She suspected something was going on and confronted Doc about it a few weeks ago. Doc Helms swore her to secrecy.”
“Which meant Katie bar the door, right?” I said, then laughed at the whole damn situation.
“Right, if you want something to spread through the latrine-o-gram network like wildfire, make Kay Delacorte swear to keep her mouth shut.”
“Oh, hell,” I said. “I’m embarrassed. But now you understand why I’m so-”
“Of course. But there ain’t a thing you can do.”
I felt my jaw tighten and my back molars scrape together. “I know. That’s what’s driving me nuts. I hate this.”
“It’s no picnic for us. This is a weird one. Most hostage situations I’ve ever been involved in, you’ve got a disorganized, usually panicked psycho holding a gun to somebody’s head. This time, you’ve got a group of highly organized fanatics with enough firepower to make a real fight of it, but your hostages are basically safe-as long as they don’t starve.”
It was as if Howard was thinking out loud more than talking to me. “So what can you do?” I asked.
“The mayor says he does not, emphasize not, want another Waco, Texas, here. He doesn’t care what happens to anybody, as long as this city’s image isn’t damaged. It’s all politics, Harry. The new arena, the Second Avenue renovation … they’re thinking about expanding the Convention Center.”
“So whatever happens, just clean it up neatly, right?”
“You got it, cowboy.”
“I don’t envy you,” I said, suddenly weary myself.
“You don’t have to.”
I looked off to our left, up First Avenue. At the crest of the hill, there was a line of squad cars parked around a large box van, which served as the police command post.
“Howard,” I asked. “Can I go up there? I want to see it.”
Spellman stuck his hands in his pockets. “Damn it, Harry.”
“I’ve never asked you anything as a friend before. I’m asking now.”
He took a couple of steps toward the unmarked car. “What the hell, I’ll run you up there real quick. But you can only go to the second line, not the first.”
I followed him to the car. “Second line?”
The air-conditioning inside the car was set on MEAT LOCKER. Spellman dropped the car into gear and we sped up the hill.
“We’ve set up three lines. The first is across the parking lot from their line of Winnebagos. The second is farther back, at the hill where you can just look down on the morgue. The outside perimeter is the command post on Hermitage Avenue.”
“The newspapers said the vans broke through a chain-link fence,” I said as he braked to a stop behind the command post.
He jerked the driver’s side door open and hauled himself out. “As usual, they got it wrong.”
I followed him as we stepped over to the van. Uniformed officers in blue Kevlar vests and helmets with face shields milled around, casually toting their assault rifles. Large block white letters-M-U-S-T-covered the backs of the vests. We walked around them and entered the van. Inside the cramped space, three men manned a bank of radios, with a detailed map of the area spread out on a small desk jammed into one end of the van.
“Any word?” Howard asked.
One of the men looked up from a row of blue digital lights. “Nothing, Lieutenant. Been quiet for the last hour.”
“They actually came in through the General Hospital parking lot,” Spellman said, turning to me. “The back of the hospital lot joins the morgue’s parking lot right in front of a warehouse building. They drove the Winnebagos in a straight line down to the warehouse, then around the morgue right in front of it.”
Spellman pointed to the map. “Right here, see?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take you up there for a just a minute, with a couple of ground rules.”
“Shoot.”
He lowered his voice. “First, we haven’t even let the family members get this close. So you haven’t been here, right?”
“Right.”
“Second, we ain’t even let the news media up here. So if word leaks about the physical setup, I’ll know where it came from.”
“Wait, I can’t-”
“And that will make me very unhappy,” he interrupted.
I stared at him a second. “This is all off the record, Lieutenant. You have my word.”
“Let’s go.”
We stepped out of the van into what seemed like an almost eerie silence. I expected helicopters buzzing overhead, the diesel roar of armored assault vehicles revving engines, the racking of shotguns.