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

to buy all those exotic weapons,” I said.
    “Yeah, I hear they got some strange shit down there,” Ray said. “Hear the Metros are afraid to take ’em on.”
    “They ain’t careful,” Slim, the master of understatement, said, “somebody down there’s gonna get hurt.”
    The waitress stepped over, pad in hand. I ordered coffee and motioned for the breakfast bar.
    “You guys going to stick around?” I asked.
    “Sure,” Ray said. “We ain’t going nowhere.”
    “Seems that way sometimes, don’t it?” I cracked. “Let me go load up.”
    A couple of minutes later I was back at the booth with enough fat grams and serum cholesterol to send Richard Simmons into apoplexy.
    “What’re you guys up to these days?” I asked. “That deal with Randy Travis ever work out?” The last time I talked to Ray, he was whooping that Randy Travis was going to run one of their songs on his next A-side.
    Slim shook his head slowly side to side. Ray looked down at his coffee cup. “No,” he said. “We ain’t got much going on in that area these days. That’s all kind of fizzled out.”
    “We’re writing a few songs,” Slim added. “But not much is happening.”
    “Times are kind of hard everywhere, aren’t they?” I said, with a mouth full of pancake.
    “Hey, why don’t you come out tonight and hear us at the Bluebird?” Ray asked. “We’re roundtabling with two other singers.”
    The last thing in the world I felt like doing was fighting for a seat at the Bluebird Café on a Sunday night. With Marsha in trouble, I wasn’t going to enjoy much anyway. But sitting around pulling my hair out wasn’t going to accomplish anything either.
    “What the hell …” I said. “Maybe. Let me see what else is happening. What time you playing?”
    “We start at nine,” Ray said. “Oughta last a couple of hours.”
    “Can the Bluebird pull a crowd like that so late on a Sunday?”
    Ray laughed. “When’s the last time you went there?” I settled back, swallowed a mouthful of wonderfully greasy bacon. “Hell, Ray, I haven’t been to the Bluebirdsince I moved out of Green Hills. That part of town’s not my usual haunt anymore. Guess it’s been a couple of years.”
    Slim spoke over the rim of his coffee cup. “Get there early if you want a parking space.”
    Right, I thought, my girlfriend’s hunkered down in a concrete blockhouse with bulletproof windows surrounded by religious wackos with bazookas in Winnebagos.… And I’m going to go listen to country music.
    You ask me, the world has become completely deranged.

“Oh, great,” Marsha spewed, her voice coming through the cellular ether crackling and strained. “I’m locked up here eating canned ham and crackers, drinking
Nashville
water, for God’s sake, and you’re going off to the Bluebird with your songwriting buddies.”
    “I didn’t say I was going.”
    Through the static, her laugh sounded like a titter. “I’m just kidding, Harry. Go ahead. Go to the Bluebird. There’s no reason not to.”
    “You’re not taking this very seriously.”
    “Oh, I’m not?” she said. “I’m the one who got to sleep on the couch in my office last night and has had the same underwear on for two days. How seriously do you want me to take it?”
    I leaned back in my office chair and put my feet up on the desk. The effort stretched the tangled cord, dragging the phone across my desk. “Would you feel better if I kept the same underwear on until this was over?”
    “Oh, gross. Besides, that doesn’t bother men.”
    “Now wait a minute,” I protested. “That’s the kind of sexual stereotyping you’d bust my chops fo—”
    “Don’t get torqued on me,” she interrupted with a laugh. “I was only kidding.”
    “Not funny. You’ve got a shower in the building, right?”
    “If you like cold water. Which is not bad, given how hot it is in here. There’s no ventilation and the air conditioner’s off.”
    “I thought there was a