“You got it, cowboy.”
“I don’t envy you,” I said, suddenly weary myself.
“You don’t have to.”
I looked off to our left, up First Avenue. At the crest of the hill, there was a line of squad cars parked around a large box van, which served as the police command post.
“Howard,” I asked. “Can I go up there? I want to see it.”
Spellman stuck his hands in his pockets. “Damn it, Harry.”
“I’ve never asked you anything as a friend before. I’m asking now.”
He took a couple of steps toward the unmarked car. “What the hell, I’ll run you up there real quick. But you can only go to the second line, not the first.”
I followed him to the car. “Second line?”
The air-conditioning inside the car was set on MEAT LOCKER. Spellman dropped the car into gear and we sped up the hill.
“We’ve set up three lines. The first is across the parking lot from their line of Winnebagos. The second is farther back, at the hill where you can just look down on the morgue. The outside perimeter is the command post on Hermitage Avenue.”
“The newspapers said the vans broke through a chain-link fence,” I said as he braked to a stop behind the command post.
He jerked the driver’s side door open and hauled himself out. “As usual, they got it wrong.”
I followed him as we stepped over to the van. Uniformed officers in blue Kevlar vests and helmets with face shields milled around, casually toting their assault rifles. Large block white letters-M-U-S-T-covered the backs of the vests. We walked around them and entered the van. Inside the cramped space, three men manned a bank of radios, with a detailed map of the area spread out on a small desk jammed into one end of the van.
“Any word?” Howard asked.
One of the men looked up from a row of blue digital lights. “Nothing, Lieutenant. Been quiet for the last hour.”
“They actually came in through the General Hospital parking lot,” Spellman said, turning to me. “The back of the hospital lot joins the morgue’s parking lot right in front of a warehouse building. They drove the Winnebagos in a straight line down to the warehouse, then around the morgue right in front of it.”
Spellman pointed to the map. “Right here, see?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take you up there for a just a minute, with a couple of ground rules.”
“Shoot.”
He lowered his voice. “First, we haven’t even let the family members get this close. So you haven’t been here, right?”
“Right.”
“Second, we ain’t even let the news media up here. So if word leaks about the physical setup, I’ll know where it came from.”
“Wait, I can’t-”
“And that will make me very unhappy,” he interrupted.
I stared at him a second. “This is all off the record, Lieutenant. You have my word.”
“Let’s go.”
We stepped out of the van into what seemed like an almost eerie silence. I expected helicopters buzzing overhead, the diesel roar of armored assault vehicles revving engines, the racking of shotguns.
But this was just plain quiet. No traffic, even. It gave me the creeps.
“Sergeant,” Howard said to one of the MUST members. “We’re going up the hill for a couple of minutes. We’ll be right back.”
“Right, sir.”
We stepped off the asphalt at a military pace, with me a step or two behind Spellman, through the stone pillars on either side of the road, then into the morgue parking lot. There were dozens of century-old trees in the area, their arching canopies shielding us from the sun and casting long, deep shadows over the area. From where we were, you couldn’t see much of anything. But then, as we approached the slight ridge in front of the morgue, where a line of Metro squad cars was parked, we could see the top of the building. Then a long row of RVs came into view. Howard motioned me to stop. I came up next to him. Ahead of us, maybe fifty officers lay hunkered down in flak jackets, helmets, assault rifles.
Fifty feet or so farther down, another line of squad cars faced off against the RVs not more than twenty yards distant.
“My God,” I said. “They’re right on top of each other.”
The line of Winnebagos was bumper-to-bumper in a half circle around the front of the morgue building from left to right, no more, I guessed, than twenty feet from the front door. The morgue sits on a bluff, with the Cumberland River acting as a barrier on the back. The Enochians, I realized, had taken up a virtually perfect and impregnable defensive line.
“It’s going to be tough to get them out of there. That’s why we keep talking.”
I looked at him. “How long can it go on?”
Howard shrugged. “Who the hell knows? They’re not going anywhere. We’re not going anywhere. It could last for months.”
“They’ll starve!”
He shook his head. “We’re negotiating now to get supplies into the building. The Enochians will need food and water, too, you know.”
“You’re not going to give it to them, are you?”
“If that’s what it takes to keep them talking, we will. Hell, we’ll have pizza delivered if it keeps the lines open.”
“I don’t see anybody,” I said.
“They’re all inside the RVs. Notice those little panels on the sides of the vehicles.”
I squinted and stared. “Yeah, I can see them.”
“Far as we can tell, they’re gun ports.”
“And it looks like they’ve sandbagged the tops of the RVs.”
“Right, and there’re people lying down behind those bags with automatic weapons. Every once in a while one of them sticks a head up, or climbs down in a shift change. They’ve got the advantage on us, that’s for sure. If we try a direct frontal assault, we’ll get mowed down.”