Free Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead by Steven Womack

“Decided to take a walk in the sunshine, see what’s going on. This beats being cooped up in an office, don’t it?”
    “Yessir.” He reached for his whistle as a car approached a little too quickly, blew it shrilly, and motioned firmly to the driver. The guy slowed, gave us both a dirty look, then turned onto the side street and sped away.
    “How much longer you think this is going to go on?” I asked, trying to keep that casual, just-jawing tone in my voice.
    “No idea, sir.”
    I backed away from the blue-and-white Chevy and turned toward the cop. “Say, you don’t know if Howard Spellman’s up there right now, do you?”
    The officer turned and squinted at me in his best Clint Eastwood style. All he needed was a pair of mirrored aviator shades to complete the picture.
    “You a reporter?” he asked after a second or so.
    “One of them sleazeballs?” I laughed. “Not me. I’mjust a friend of his. Been kind of curious. Haven’t been able to get him in his office the past couple of days.”
    “He’s been sort of busy.” The arms folded back across the uniformed and badged chest.
    “Officer”—I squinted theatrically at his badge—“Roberts, I don’t suppose I could walk up the hill and say hi to him, could I?”
    Officer Roberts shook his head. “No unauthorized personnel past this point.”
    I’d expected that. “Say, could you call him on the radio and see if he’ll let me come up. If he said it was okay, that’d be all right, wouldn’t it?”
    Behind us, from somewhere up the hill, we heard the whine of a helicopter engine coming alive. As the engine noise increased, the slow whop-whop-whop of the blades grew as well.
    “What do you think?” I asked.
    The cop pulled his handi-talkie out of a leather holster on his belt. He held it to his mouth and pushed a button. “Henry Seven to Henry One.”
    “Go ahead,” came the disembodied voice through the static.
    “Lieutenant Spellman up there?”
    “Yeah, hold on.”
    The helicopter noise grew louder. I looked behind us just as the olive-drab military chopper rose quickly, then darted off away from the General Hospital complex and the morgue toward the downtown area. A wind blew in from across the river, up near the northern loop of I-65, bringing with it the faint fragrance of the rendering plant, mixed in with the usual car exhaust and the odor of burning garbage from the Thermal Plant. My nose curled involuntarily.
    Spellman must have answered, because the young cop put the handi-talkie back to his face. “Lieutenant, I’ve got a man down here says he’s a friend of yours. Wants to cross the lines and come up there.”
    “Who is he?” Spellman’s crackly voice answered.
    “My name’s Denton,” I said. “Harry Denton.”
    “Harry Denton,” the cop repeated.
    Silence. I figured Spellman was trying to figure out exactly the right string of obscenities to put together to express just how pleased he was to hear from me.
    More silence. The cop adjusted the gain on his radio, then held it closer to his ear.
    “Tell him to wait right there.”
    Ten minutes later a white sedan that had unmarked cop car written all over it rolled down the hill and pulled to a stop behind the line of squad cars. Spellman got out, alone, and motioned to me to join him over on the sidewalk.
    I stepped between the squad cars, crossing the line between authorized and unauthorized personnel. Spellman was only glaring at me about half as irascibly as I expected, so maybe this wasn’t going to be too excruciating. It could have been fatigue, though. Spellman looked about as whipped as I’d ever seen a man who was still on two feet.
    “You want to tell me what you’re doing here, Harry?”
    “Howard, you look beat.” We were huddled under a streetlight, far enough away so that the uniform couldn’t hear us.
    “I haven’t been home since Saturday morning,” he said, rubbing his face with both hands, the skin like putty beneath his fingers. “Thank