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

wheelchair around for weeks with me watching him. He figured nobody’d be crazy enough to follow him all the way to Louisville, Kentucky.
    Well, damn it, he figured wrong. I was that crazy.
    But it was all meaningless. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. On the way home from Lonnie’s the night before, I’d driven once again past the barricades. The traffic was so bad it took nearly an hour to get in and out. Blue lights sabered the night, and off in the distance sirens meowed faintly and helicopter blades chopped. But, thank God, no gunshots. Spectators, drunks, street people, concerned family members, and rowdy teenagers all mixed into a potpourri of chaos; that uniquely American method of dealing with tragedy by transforming it into street theatre. I tried to figure out some way to get past the police lines and up the hill, but there was no way.
    I finally drifted off. Around four in the morning, I woke up with a jolt and couldn’t fall back off. Ichannel-surfed for a while, unsuccessfully searching for news bulletins, then popped the videotape of the bricklayer in the VCR. My landlady, Mrs. Hawkins, was asleep downstairs, but I wasn’t worried about waking her up. She’s as deaf as a rock wall, can barely hear with both hearing aids turned up to max. So I cranked up the sound and listened to the laughing and the bouncing of the basketball on concrete, the birds chirping and shrieking in trees, the roar of a truck going by somewhere behind the house.
    I made a cup of hot chocolate and watched the tape again. I was preoccupied, drifting in and out. The tape took on a surreal quality, as if the TV screen were a window into another world, a world of much brighter colors and more acute lines than the fuzzy set of gray scales and soft lines that made up my world in the middle of the night.
    I finally went under again, then woke up about daybreak with the bright silver flashing of the television dancing off the dirty cup in my lap. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was. Then it came back to me. I grabbed the clicker and ran frantically through the local stations, then CNN.
    Nothing.
    I fought the urge to call her, not wanting to wake her if she’d had as bad a night as I had. I showered again, this time to wake up, and made a cup of coffee. The carton of milk in my refrigerator had gone solid on me; I choked the coffee down black. The day outside was dreary, with the threat of spring thunderstorms in the air. I threw on a robe and walked down the driveway to retrieve my Sunday-morning paper.
    STATE OF SIEGE the newspaper headline blared in seventy-two-point bold block type. I laughed when I saw the headline, but then remembered how I used to feel when something like this went down in my old newspaper days.
    I’d have handled the story the same way. Thenewspeople had to milk the story for all it was worth. If this kept up, half the city would be talking to Ted Koppel by Monday night. I unfolded the paper and spread it out on the kitchen table. Most of the front page was taken up by the story. And there, down in the far right-hand corner, was Marsha’s picture. Below the picture, a caption read:
Dr. Marsha Helms, Assistant Medical Examiner
and another line below that:
Now held captive by cult members
.
    Held captive
. I read the words over and over. I’d never known anyone who was held captive, at least not outside the normal channels of incarceration.
    Held captive
.
    I rubbed my forehead and poured another cup of coffee, trying without much luck to shake off the cobwebs. I lay back down, somehow managed to drift off again, then woke up an hour later. I called Marsha on the cellular phone, but got busy signals for nearly a half hour. It occurred to me that with the regular telephone lines cut, the cellular would be her only connection to the police outside.
    I spent the rest of the morning trying to find out anything I could. Events were occurring so fast that everybody was playing catch-up. I called the city