“Up,” he said. “Pull ourselves up.”
“I thought this was some kind of academic exercise,” I said. “You actually want to go in there and get them?”
He set his jaw and gazed at me stone-faced. “You got it, big guy.…”
I jumped up, agitated. “You’re-you’re out of your fucking mind. For one thing, if that could be done, the police would have already done it.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” he said. “Their whole aim is to negotiate and avoid bloodshed. They’re not into clandestine, deep-cover ops.”
“Deep-cover ops? You’ve been reading way too many Tom Clancy novels,” I said. “We are not the freaking Green Berets.”
“Number one, I hate Tom Clancy. Bob Mayer’s a much better writer. And number two, stop being such a wuss. A couple pair of bolt cutters, a machete apiece, some dark clothing, rope, a couple grappling hooks. We’re in there, we’re out of there, twenty minutes tops.”
“You’re crazy,” I said, stupefied.
“Just call her on the cell phone and tell her to get everybody ready.”
“The cops are monitoring the cellular frequencies. I’m sure of it.”
“So what? It’s a risk we’ve got to take. Besides, how they gonna stop us? It’s no crime to take a midnight boat ride. It’s your call. In or out? You want your girlfriend back or what?”
“You’re crazy,” I said again.
He shrugged his shoulders. “How ’bout it?”
I let out a long breath of tired air. “One thing,” I said. “No guns.”
His face screwed up. “No guns?”
“I’m serious,” I said. “No shit here. I’m not going to get her or anybody else killed.”
Lonnie pursed his lips. “Well, can I take some of my other toys?”
It may not be a crime to take a midnight boat ride, but it’s sure as hell a crime to do it from the dock at Shelby Park. The park closes at eleven, and now here we were at one in the morning, coasting through the back of the park in a coal-black pickup truck with the lights turned off pulling a twenty-foot bass boat with a huge Mercury outboard mounted on the back.
We rounded the hill coming off the golf course from the Riverside Drive side of the park. Down the hill, on the other side of the small lake in the middle of the park, the green-and-white cruiser of a Metro park ranger pulled slowly away.
“Jesus, Lonnie!” I hissed.
“Be cool,” he said. “He’s headed away from us.”
“How can you see anything?”
“I can’t. That’s why we’re going slow.”
There’s a hairpin curve coming off the hill that doubles back on itself before splitting off in two directions near the ball fields. Lonnie managed to roll the truck through the turn without going off the side, then put the truck back in gear and cut to the left away from the lake and the park ranger. Above us, the spidery metal trusses of a railroad bridge over the river rose ghostlike and creepy. We drove through the parking lot under the bridge, then turned right.
“You see anybody up there?”
“There’s a couple of parked cars,” I said. “But I can’t tell whether they’re cops or not.”
“Probably kids committing terminal pleasure,” he said. He drove past the steep ramp down to the river, then turned the parking lights on and put it in reverse.
“I’ve got to be able to see what I’m doing,” he said, hanging his head out the window as we rolled backward.
The concrete ramp was steep, maybe a thirty-degree angle down a hundred and fifty feet or so to the river’s edge. Lonnie backed most of the way down, then stopped.
“Hop out and direct me.”
I stepped out of the truck into the urban darkness of Shelby Park. There was an orange sodium light planted on a pole on the opposite bank, but beyond that, nothing. I could hear the swishing of the black water against the bank, and the smell of rot was everywhere; a dank, moldy smell that would have been unpleasant if I’d had time to think about it.
I stood next to the truck and motioned him down, watching carefully to see that the boat trailer was staying on track.
“When the wheels touch the water, let me know,” he said.
Another twenty feet or so and I stopped him. He put the truck in park and locked the brakes, then got out with the motor still running.
“Move, quick,” he said.
We pulled cases and bags out of the back of the pickup and stowed them on the boat. Then Lonnie went around to the stern and made sure the drain plug was secure and the gas lines squared away. I looked through one of the cartons and came up holding a canister.
“You sure we need smoke grenades?”
Through the darkness, I could see his teeth in a grin. “Hey, c’mon. Let me play with my new toys.”
I shook my head. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
I got into the boat, then Lonnie backed the trailer the rest of the way into the water. He turned off the motor, set the brake, got out, and locked the doors.
“We just going to leave the truck here?” I said as he climbed in.
“Why not? When we get back here, I want to be able to drive right up on that trailer and haul ass out of here.”
“But what if we don’t come back?”
Lonnie unhitched the towline on the trailer and pushed us out into the river. “Then somebody’ll find it in the morning, right?”
The Cumberland River looks to be a slow-moving, lazy ribbon of brown mud, but when you’re out in the middle of it in a small boat, you realize there’s every kind of mean current imaginable out there. The boat whipped around in the wrong direction, with the flow carrying us away from downtown almost immediately. Lonnie sat down in the driver’s seat, or whatever the hell it’s called on a bass boat, and hit the switch. The Merc coughed and spit and shook for a couple of seconds, then roared to life.
“Hold on,” Lonnie yelled. “We’re outta here!”
I huddled in the bow as he put the engine in gear. The river fought us for a second, but then the boat came out of the water with a howl and we were skimming across the surface of the Cumberland at fifty knots.
“Slow down!” I yelled. “There’s junk floating out here!”
Lonnie cut the engine back to half-speed. “I just wanted to get us away from the park.”