Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

room at the newspaper where I used to work. I got some new guy who’d never heard of me—and who didn’t want to talk anyway. Then I called another reporter I’d worked with, but he didn’t know anything either. I phoned the police-department media liaison, but she wouldn’t talk to me. I called Lieutenant Howard Spellman, my old buddy who was in charge of the Homicide Squad, but was told simply that he was unavailable.
    I sat at my kitchen table, perplexed and frustrated. One more try for Marsha, one more busy signal. Then it hit me that I was ravenously hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the burger and fries the night before on the outskirts of Louisville.
    May as well get dressed and get out, I thought, giventhat there was nothing to eat in my apartment and the walls were closing in fast. Most of the time I enjoyed being a bachelor, especially when I remembered the last few months of my failed marriage. Occasionally, though, Sundays spent alone got to me. I had the feeling this was going to be one of them.
    I threw on a pair of jeans and a frayed oxford-cloth shirt, then walked down the rickety backstairs of my attic apartment to the driveway. Mrs. Hawkins stood at the window of her kitchen, washing a load of dishes and humming loudly off-key. She looked up as I crossed in front of her window, then cranked off the water and hurried to her back door.
    “Hello, Harry,” she called through the screen. I turned and smiled at her.
    “Hi, Mrs. Hawkins,” I said loudly. “How are you?”
    “Just fine. I put your mail on your kitchen table while you were gone.”
    “I got it. Thanks.”
    “Did everything go as expected in Louisville?” she asked.
    “Better than I expected.”
    “Then you nailed the SOB!”
    I smiled and raised a thumb at her.
    “Good,” she called. “It’s bad to defraud the insurance companies. It just makes it harder on the rest of us. The insurance companies are only trying to protect us.”
    Right, Mrs. Hawkins, I thought to myself. And Santa Claus wiggles his fat ass down your chimney every December the twenty-fifth, too.
    I’d replaced my eight-year-old Ford Escort—which had been incinerated along with Mrs. Hawkins’s garage in an unfortunate accident a few months earlier—with a sixteen-year-old Mazda Cosmo that Lonnie had repo’d. The finance company didn’t want the car. What are they going to do with a rotary-engine-powered rustbucket? So I got the car for five hundred. Lonnie tuned it up for me and now it ran like a top, despite the spreading bubblerust on its cream-colored skin and the quart of oil it burned with every tankful. It had electric windows that still worked and, more importantly with summer approaching, an air conditioner that pumped out cold air by the boxcar load. So what if nobody ever heard of a Mazda Cosmo? I considered it a future collectible.
    I pulled the choke out, fired up the Wankel engine, and headed over to Shelby Street. Rather than take the freeway, I crossed into town on the bridge and maneuvered my way back to First Avenue. Midmorning Sunday had brought a quieter crowd to the barricades, but people were still milling about so thickly you couldn’t get a car within half a block. Things looked quiet enough, though, and as long as I didn’t hear any gunfire or explosions, I allowed myself to feel relieved.
    A couple of minutes later I pulled off Demonbreun Street and into the parking lot of the Music Row Shoney’s. The Shoney’s breakfast bar is an institution in this city—one of those all-you-can-eat deals that runs until the middle of the afternoon on weekends. Eggs, bacon, sausage, grits swimming in butter, biscuits covered in gravy, coffee strong enough to make your nipples erect; my stomach growled and my arteries started clogging up with the anticipation alone.
    The parking lot was packed with the usual conglomeration of tourists, Music Row hustlers, songwriters, good ol’ boys, musicians, drifters, and cowboys, urban and otherwise. I took a