So much for communal bathing. I’d been away not quite a week, and Marsha’s absence from my life was becoming more keenly noted by the minute. Our date last Saturday night had been canceled by the discovery of the body of a taxi driver who’d been executed by a couple of sixteen-year-olds he’d picked up at the Krystal Restaurant on Dickerson Pike after they’d robbed the place. A sack full of Belly Bombs, two large Cokes, and all your cash to go, please. Then they put one through the back of the driver’s head so he couldn’t identify them and took all of thirty-eight dollars off him. It never occurred to them, I guess, that all the people inside the Krystal would pick them out of a lineup the next day. You ask me, some of these demented kids are a couple of tacos short of a combination plate.
But then, nobody asked me. So Dr. Marsha canceled our date and, instead, autopsied her third cabdriver of the month. I left town a couple of days later, fully expecting a passionate and heartfelt reunion on this very evening. An event that now, it seemed, was not going to take place.
I once heard someone define conflict as the gap between expectation and result. At that moment I was conflicted out the ya-ya.
I hit the Rivergate area in a panic just as the movie theatres were letting out. Rivergate Mall, an enormous, sprawling, congested shopping center in the northern part of the city, was a place I made every effort possible to avoid. Even though it was nearly eleven on Saturday night, the traffic was bumper-to-bumper on Two Mile Parkway in either direction as far as the eye could see. The spillover onto the freeway had slowed that traffic to a crawl as well, and all around us tractor-trailer drivers who’d just pulled fourteen-hour shifts at eighty miles an hour had to adjust to inner-city speeds. Brakes squealed, trailers went into graceful near jackknives, horns blared, bird fingers flew.…
Welcome home.
After hiding in the grass for almost four days, being half eaten alive by chiggers, living off fast food, sleeping in the back of Lonnie’s twelve-year-old Ford Econoline van, and then finding out my girlfriend was in the middle of a full-blown hostage situation, I only had one nerve left. And these people were getting on it.
Maybe she wasn’t there. Maybe she’d taken a night off. Maybe she was okay.
Hell, I knew better. Marsha was professional to the point of compulsive. As assistant medical examiner, rather than chief, she would have been the one called in on a Saturday night. I shot straight down I-65 all the way to Shelby Avenue, then whipped off the freeway, nearly wiping out a Chevy full of beer-drinking rednecks. I bounced across the Shelby Street Bridge, over the river into downtown. I ran two stop signs on my way over to First Avenue, then cut right and headed up the hill toward the morgue.
I didn’t get very far.
A line of Metro squad cards, their blue-and-white beacons cutting through the sulfurous streetlight glow like artillery bursts, had stopped traffic in front of the Thermal Plant. A single patrol officer in an orange safety vest swung a flashlight back and forth in a wide arc, detouring cars onto a side street away from the action. The car in front of me turned right off of First Avenue, as the officer instructed. I slid the van to a stop in front of him, slammed it into park, and jumped out.
“C’mon, buddy,” the cop yelled. “Keep it moving.”
“Wait,” I yelled, palms out in front of me. I realized that I looked like a crazy man who just came into town from up the holler a ways. “I’ve got to get to the morgue.”
I stopped in front of the officer, who took two quick steps toward me. He was young, thin, blond crew-cut, determined.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he yelled over the noise of sirens and engines racing. “No one gets past this point.” Above us, the whopping of distant helicopter blades grew louder by the moment.
“But I’ve got to!” The chaotic flashes of light bouncing off my face must have looked like a shot from a Fellini movie.
“No, sir,” the officer boomed over the roar of a chopper as it appeared just above the rooftops behind us.
The driver behind the van sat on his horn and stuck his head out the window. I turned; he yelled at me and spit flew out of his mouth. I couldn’t understand him, but I gathered his remarks weren’t polite.
“But my girlfriend’s up there.…” I said, my voice plaintive. The cop probably couldn’t even hear me.
“Move it, mister,” the cop instructed. His left hand moved ever so subtly to the baton that dangled from his utility belt.
Message sent and received. Defeated, I opened the van door and climbed back in. I made the turn, not even knowing which side street I was on, and tried to figure out what to do next. Then it hit me.
Lonnie.
I cut back across the river and maneuvered my way to the Ellington Parkway, then headed toward my East Nashville neighborhood. Traffic on the EP had thinned out; the only motorists I’d encounter this time of night were the freelance carjackers and the usual crowd of tire-squealing rednecks.
I kept the radio on, but there were no more updates on the hostage situation at the morgue. I ran up and down the FM stations as well, but all I got was music and commercials. I cut over to Gallatin Road off the EP and headed into Inglewood.
It was after eleven by now, but I figured Lonnie’d still be up. He kept pretty strange hours. The only way I’d miss him was if he’d gone on a repo run-either that or out working his latest line of business: bounty hunting. Lonnie’d gotten bored with repossessing cars the last few months and decided to expand his area of operations into snagging bail jumpers. When things got bad, money-wise, I’d make repo runs with him to pick up extra cash. So far, though, I’d resisted the temptation to join him in this new venture. After all, a Mercedes won’t pull a .357 on you when you try to take it back.
The side street off Gallatin Road that led to Lonnie’s place was crypt-black, cemetery-silent. What few streetlights there were had long since been shot out by the Death Rangers, the local East Nashville motorcycle gang. They sounded and looked ominous, but truth was they were largely just a bunch of aging, beer-drinking unemployables. Mostly harmless-as long as you didn’t mess with them-Jerry Garcia look-alikes … Their clubhouse was locked up tight, its windows cinder-blocked solid.
I pulled to a stop in front of the chain-link fence gate that was right on the street and maybe fifty feet from a pale green mobile home with rust streaks down the side. I hit the horn once, then climbed out of the van and rattled the gate. There were lights on inside the trailer, but the rest of the landscape was illuminated only by ambient light. The wrecked automobile hulks that filled Lonnie’s junkyard jutted into the night sky at twisted, bizarre angles.
I stood at the gate waiting for Shadow, Lonnie’s timber shepherd, who was absolute queen of everything inside that chain-link fence. I knew better than to go through the unlocked gate without getting her permission first.
No Shadow, though. Where was she? I rattled the chain-link fence again and whistled, then backed away and looked up. I knew there were security cameras mounted on the utility poles, some with night-vision capability. Lonnie was a freak on security. Nobody got near him without him knowing it first. I shook the gate again, the metallic noise abrupt and jarring in the night.
C’mon, damn it, Lonnie, where the hell are you?
The door to the mobile home opened. A lanky form in jeans and a white T-shirt stood in the doorway, shrouded by the blue, flickering light of a television. An arm raised, motioning me in.
I slid the gate aside, then hopped back in the van and pulled it inside. I shut the gate back and stepped through the door just in time to catch a bright silver can of beer that came sailing through the air toward me. I grabbed it quickly, smoothly.
Lonnie pushed the Frigidaire door shut and grinned. “You’re getting better.”