Steven Womack - Way Past Dead

“You pay this invoice,” I said, “I just might do that. When can we get together?”

I heard a flipping of pages as Phil consulted his calendar.

“How about four this afternoon?”

“Works for me,” I said. “Your office at four.”

“You got it, boy. Later.”

I hung up the phone, wondering how old a Southern male had to be before people stopped calling him boy.

I set the phone down inside its cradle and stared at it a moment or two. Should I? I wanted to hear her voice. I had begun, in fact, to ache for it. But could I get through? Would Marsha be able to talk to me? Would she want to?

Oh, hell, this is crazy. I reached over and grabbed the phone and punched in the number to Marsha’s cellular phone, which I’d now committed to memory. Once again, that damn computer monotone told me where to get off.

I stared out the window five more minutes before giving up. There was no way I could sit still or concentrate on anything. So I trotted back down the stairs, outside into what was becoming a gorgeous spring day, and pumped thirty-five cents into a newspaper machine and pulled out the early edition of the afternoon paper. I wondered if Rebecca’s murder had made the paper yet.

SIEGE CONTINUES the headline read. And below that: HOSTAGE DRAMA IN DAY THREE.

It was nearly eleven and I was getting peckish, so I bought a hot dog and a large Coke off a vendor’s wagon on Church Street, then parked myself on a bench in the little pedestrian mall across from the Church Street Center. The government employees, who were about all that was left in a central downtown that everyone else had fled for the ’burbs, filed out of buildings and headed off for their own lunches in a flurry of suits and dresses.

I scarfed down the dog and flapped open the newspaper. It was hard to imagine that the words blared across the front page had their origin barely a mile from where I sat. First Avenue was still closed from the Thermal Plant on up to where the road curved around and changed names. As I sat there reading I could hear the dim buzzing of the helicopters circling the area. General Hospital, I read, had been evacuated of all but the most seriously ill patients; the rest were sent to Meharry Medical Center, Vanderbilt, and Baptist Hospital. The obligatory urgent call for blood donations had been made. The mayor announced that for the time being, he was not going to ask the governor to activate the National Guard.

On page two of the first section, a long profile of Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg occupied all the space above the fold. I felt like I’d seen his picture a thousand times: the earnest eyes with droopy eyelids above a thickening set of cheeks and jowls, the head atop a thickening neck in white shirt and polyester tie. It was the same face that had been on the hundreds of religious stations that the cable companies were now required to carry-the tacky, sleazy appeals for money in God’s name pouring forth from mouths that blended together and all started to look alike after you’d surfed around the channels long enough on a sleepless night.

And in a box on the front page, near the bottom, with a jump to the last page, were the details of Rebecca Gibson’s murder. Police reported that neighbors heard the sound of a fight around four A.M., glass breaking, screams, the thud of bodies slamming, or being slammed, against walls. Someone had phoned 911, and when police got there, Rebecca was already dead. She’d been beaten brutally, the kind of brutal that only a closed casket can hide.

Witnesses reported seeing a white, mid-Seventies Chevrolet four-door speeding away from the house.

I leaned back on the concrete-and-wood bench and let the sun beat down on my face. The noon whistle from the tobacco factory behind the State Capitol blared. Behind me, on Church Street, a bearded driver in a yellow taxi slammed on his brakes and laid on the horn to keep from hitting a street person who’d stepped off the sidewalk in a daze.

A white, four-door, fifteen-years-old-or-so Chevy, I thought. A white Chevy. I’d seen one before. Then it hit me.

Slim Gibson had a white Chevy.

I’d seen Slim Gibson’s white Chevy parked, double-parked, and triple-parked on Seventh Avenue in front of our offices so many times it was like a landmark. Once, I’d even given Slim a ride over to the Metro tow-in lot across the river to retrieve it after it’d been hooked. I never knew why Slim didn’t buy himself a slot in a parking lot somewhere.

One thing was for sure: the Chevy wasn’t parked out front today.

I entered the building this time without even bothering to check for Morris. I scooted up the stairs, turned left at the top of the landing, and fumbled for my key as I approached my office. The jangling of the keys must have been like an alarm. As soon as I closed the door behind me, I heard footsteps.

Just as I was bending over to check the answering machine, the pounding on the door started.

“Hold on,” I said loudly. “Just a sec.”

Truth was, I didn’t have to yell. My office is only one room, L-shaped, with just enough square footage in the small part of the L for the door to open without hitting my visitor’s chair.

I opened the door to find Ray standing there, without Slim, lines creased on his face deeper than I’d ever seen before. His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked like he hadn’t slept for a week.

“Ray, c’mon in, man.”

Ray stepped in behind me as I shut the door. “I guess you heard,” he said.

“Yeah, it was on TV this morning. And in the paper.”

I passed around him and slid into my seat, motioning for him to grab the other chair. Ray flopped into it, his butt barely on the edge of the chair, his elbows close into his sides, his hands pointing out toward me.

“Shit, I ain’t never seen nothing like this.”

“What’s going on? Where’s Slim? The newspaper said witnesses saw a car like his pulling away from Rebecca’s place last night.”

Ray brought his hands up and rubbed his forehead. “Harry, there’s a lot you don’t know about Slim. He looks real quiet and laid-back most of the time-”

“Yeah?”

“But sometimes, you push the wrong buttons, ol’ Slim’ll get kind of wild.”

I leaned back in the chair and thought for a second. Marsha trapped inside a morgue, surrounded by armed Winnebagos, me with a stack of bills to pay, and God knows how long the insurance company’s going to take to pay that invoice. Now this. So life’s never dull.

Please God, I thought, give me a little dull.

“Where is he, Ray?”

“That’s kind of hard to say.”

I crossed my feet and put them up on my desk, wrapped my hands around my head, and leaned back in my creaky office chair. Trying my best to look like a country lawyer, I guess. Maybe Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird .

“He didn’t decide to jackrabbit now, did he?”

Ray looked me in the eye and I saw his lips start to move.

“ ’Cause if he did, Ray, he’s mega-screwed. Can’t nobody help him now.”

Ray fidgeted a moment longer, then: “Well, he ain’t exactly run off. He’s just staying low to try to figure out the lay of the land. I got a friend over at the courthouse who called me about a half hour ago, said the police were looking for him as a material witness.”

“You know how to get in touch with him?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“I’m no lawyer, buddy, but I do know nothing good ever comes from running. If he’s rabbitted out of here, they’ll find him. If I was you, I’d get ahold of him, tell him to get a lawyer, and come on in. If he’s innocent, then sooner or later they’ll figure that out.”

I knew I was lying. Not about the police catching him, of course. If Slim’s run off, they’ll find him. I was lying about the if-he’s-innocent-he’ll-get-off stuff. Anybody who’s hung around courtrooms and jailhouses as much as I did in my years as a reporter knows that once you enter the judicial system and the system thinks you’re guilty, then nothing else matters. You can pretty well kiss your ass goodbye. But there’s no good in trying to acquaint people with the truth when they don’t have the basis upon which to accept it.