by Neely Tucker
ALSO BY NEELY TUCKER
Murder, D.C.
The Ways of the Dead
Love in the Driest Season
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2016 by Neely Tucker
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
ISBN: 9780525429425 (hardcover)
ISBN: 9780698198081 (ebook)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
CONTENTS
Also by Neely Tucker
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
for my parents
who did not throw me off the fire tower on hwy 12
though
god knows
i gave them reason
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create . . .
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
ONE
HE COULDN’T COUNT the shots for the screaming. It was coming from everywhere. Jesus, the noise. Bouncing down the marble steps, over the stone floors, around the columns, echoing down the long corridors. Women. It was mostly women screaming, but there were men yelling, too, all bass and fury, bellowing that they’d been hit.
The woman across from him in the Crypt of the Capitol building was bleeding out. Shot through the chest. She had been screaming but now she was just whimpering. The blood oozing over the stone floor beneath her was darker now, a maroon tidal pool, moving steadily outward.
The shots had been pop pop popping, an automatic at work. But now they were sporadic and far away and seemed more to be echoes than original sound and he had no idea how many gunmen were in the building or where they were.
Sully Carter, tucked between two of the double columns that formed the outer ring of the Crypt’s sandstone beams, looked toward the center of the circular room, then to the outer walls. Ten, maybe a dozen others, cowering between columns or under display cases. Some wounded, some taking cover. Nobody said anything. They were all breathing heavily. Looking, the lot of them, like passengers on a plane with no pilot.
Well, fuck this.
He blew out his breath and scrambled on all fours until he got to the shot woman. She was flat on her back. He took her hand and knelt beside her, breathing hard with the effort, the adrenaline. She had two hits, the upper chest and the abdomen. The blood pumping out of her was a river. She opened her eyes when he squeezed her hand, but the light in them was faint.
“Can you hear me?” he whispered. “Hey? Squeeze if yes. We’ll get out the door.” He jerked his head to the right, toward the exit. Which, when he looked at it now, with the prospect of carrying her, looked a mile and a half away.
She had curly brown hair, green eyes, little blue stud earrings, and too much makeup. Her mascara was running. Early thirties. A lanyard around her neck with a badge. She was wearing a navy skirt and a white blouse, untucked and gone mostly red, with a smart navy jacket over it. One of her shoes, black pumps, had come off. Heavyset. If he got one arm under her knees and another behind her back . . . no. Never. She’d be limp as a dishrag, and forty pounds too heavy. He’d have to heave her over a shoulder.
“You squeeze me? Like this?” He gave her a series of rapid-fire squeezes. She blinked and her mouth parted. A gossamer-thin bubble of saliva, tinged red, came up from her lips, ballooned, and—as Sully watched, transfixed—burst.
She did not squeeze.
“Goddammit,” he said.
The blood pumping through her blouse settled into a desultory flow. She stared at him, and there was the stillness, the letting go, the hand coming off the trapeze bar, and she was floating, floating, the ground a forgotten thing, just floating into the void. He felt dizzy for a second. He did not want to let go.
There was scrambling behind him. The rest of the survivors were coming out of hiding, abandoning their safe spots, running like hell for the exit or back down the hallway to the Senate side, away from the gunfire.
Somewhere, someone pulled the fire alarm.
Sully looked at his watch. A little after five. He had been in the building maybe an hour, filling in for Clarice. It was August in Washington, the worst time of year, the absolute worst. Everybody who was anybody was on vacation. Sully, who was not quite anybody, was working, like the stragglers in the Capitol building: stuck in the city, the heat a hammer that hit you in the face.
He’d been assigned a bullshit story about environmental regulations governing oil drilling in the Gulf. The desk handed it to him because the Gulf was back home and they thought he’d know something about it. And because he was a warm body dumb enough not to be in the Outer Banks or the Caribbean this time of year. Then, in the sagging hours of this afternoon errand, there had come the burst of automatic weapons fire, the bleeding and screaming, everything going out of focus and off kilter, the modern American nightmare. The national anxiety during the Cold War had been a Russian nuclear strike, millions of god-fearing Americans vaporized in an instant. By the turn of the century, the national anxiety had devolved into a crazy man with a gun, god-fearing Americans picked off half a dozen at a time. Slow motion suicide instead of instant annihilation.
The woman on the floor beside him had, no kidding, stopped breathing.
The hand in his was still warm but it wouldn’t be for long. He gave it a final squeeze and then pushed himself up, shaking a little now. Looked down the hallway to the exit. Sunshine and safety. Part of him, at this point in his life, longed for it. But he was at work, and you did your job because nobody ever made anything better by running from i
t.
Sitting up, he slid his hard-soled shoes from his feet and left them beside the dead woman. The last thing he needed, going to find the man with the gun, was his shoes telling the bastard where to shoot.
Quickstepping in his socks, he gimp-legged it into the heart of the building, finding a circular marble staircase. He brought his eyes up, brought his eyes up hard, and his feet followed, hewing close to the rail, back hunched over to lower his profile, hitching his bad leg along as best he could, up the steps, now six, now eight, the screaming getting closer—Sully Carter alone in the core of the building that symbolized America’s allegedly invincible power, and his isolation telling him with every step that something had gone terribly wrong.
TWO
CRISSCROSSING HIS STEPS, watching the shooting angles, he made his way up the marble staircase, lowering his hips, bending his knees. Two more pop pops stopped him. The acoustics of the building, the stone and marble, the arched ceilings, turned it into an echo chamber. You couldn’t tell what was coming from where.
He felt some nameless thing creeping up his spine and spreading out through his nervous system, little Day-Glo electrical dots flying down the bundles of the nerve fibers buried under his flesh, conducting not a knuckle-whitening sense of fight or flight, but of . . . calm.
That was it. The sensation flowing through his body, right down to the tips of his fingers and the far reaches of his toes, was that of antifreeze in a running engine, a coolant, like what bourbon so often had done for his kicked-around and possibly damaged brain. His heart rate slowed and his breathing deepened. Day-to-day stress drove him up the wall.
Chaos suited him.
He came out of the crouch at the top of the steps and, gaining the edge of the Rotunda, his eyes scanned the upper reaches of the atrium. Sounds, colors, stillness. Also: a bloodied mess. Five, six, seven bodies lay in the open, tiled expanse. Two were in uniform. The grand statues looked on, mute. Light streamed in from above.
One body, that of a man in a brown suit, lay in almost the center of the floor. Another, in seersucker, was across the way, the blast to the face taking out the back half of the man’s skull, the body facedown. Wet speckles and clumps of gore, gray and red and brown, were everywhere, like grotesque confetti that had showered and settled. The two officers lay on their backs a few feet apart. They were both just inside the House entrance to the room, not forty feet in front of him, slightly to his left. They had come running from the Senate corridor, Sully thought, shot from the front. It indicated the shooter or shooters were in the House wing, to his right.
The screaming burst out again. It had sounded like a woman when he was coming up the steps but now that he was here, he could see that it was a young man. Slumped against the far wall, half hidden behind a tall marble statue, the kid kept his left hand on his right shoulder, trying to slow the spewing. Blood came up through his fingers and over his suit. He had to be a page, an intern. His wing-tip-clad feet were clawing at the floor, trying to push himself farther into the wall.
The shriek lasted until he ran out of breath. Then, chest heaving, still looking at the bloody pulp of his shoulder, he started up again. A long, high-pitched wail, seeming to start at the base of his lungs and, shuddering once in the open air, to bounce off the walls, until he coughed, and coughed again. Vomit bubbled out of his mouth, onto his suit. He spat. Then he started another wail, half an octave higher than the one before.
Sully got his eyes up again, scouting for an arm, a rifle, a gun held over one of the balconies above. Nothing. Then he came out of his crouch at a full clip, running, sidestepping one body, ignoring the others, his eyes fixed on the bleeding kid by the Grant statue until he was right up on him, dropping into a half slide, like he was coming into second base, slamming into the wall with a grunt.
The kid’s lips were slightly apart, dried out. The tongue was pulled back in the mouth. Sweat drenched his forehead, dampened his hair, dropped from his chin. He had pissed himself, given the aroma, but Sully accorded him the dignity of not looking.
“Hey, hey now,” Sully whispered, forcing his voice to be heard over the alarm. “You good? You hear me okay?”
This was greeted with a blink and the bobbing of the kid’s Adam’s apple.
“Where,” he said, a little louder, “where did they go?”
The kid looked at him, his blink-blink brown eyes looking like a puppy’s on the front porch. Sully put his age at twenty or twenty-one. The kid licked his sweating upper lip and looked at Sully like he was an escaped zoo exhibit. At least he had stopped screaming.
“You hear? The words coming out of my mouth, you hear that?”
The kid blinked and licked his lips again and nodded.
“Okay. Kinda crazy weird, hey, you know?” Sully smiled and ran a hand through his hair, letting the kid know it was a long day, okay to be tired, okay to be a little freaked. The kid was so deeply in shock that if Sully bounced a basketball off his head, all he would do is nod.
“Can you tell me your name? Try it out.”
The kid shook his head, no. Now he was staring at the scars on Sully’s face.
“That’s cool. That’s cool. For real. But hey, you’re going home now, you know that? You’ll be home before dark. Okay? Okay? Home before dark. We’re going to get you on your feet and outside.”
The kid was nodding, exhaling a little, his body still clenched tight. Enough flashed through Sully’s mind. Soldiers were younger than this. Guys with guns who would shoot you at a hundred and fifty meters and then come over and pop another in your brain, they were younger than this.
“But, seriously, how many, man? I got to know, you see that? How many men with guns we talking about today?”
The kid held up one finger.
“One. What he look like, this guy?”
“He had a gun.” The voice, tremulous, halting, but it was there.
“Right. Tall, short, white, black, wearing what?”
“The gun.”
“Okay. Okay. That’s good. We can deal with one gun, right? Now. What I want you to do, you’re going to head down this hall right behind us, okay? You’ll see some stairs? You go down them, you see a long hallway, you get outside. Tell the police that the first floor is, like, clear, and what we’re probably talking about is the second floor, House wing.”
The kid nodded and did not move.
“Guy, gun, House, wing,” Sully said.
The boy had on a purple tie. It was still knotted. He was hit high on the right shoulder. It probably burned like hell but the rest of everything around it should be going numb. It wasn’t serious. Still, without a foot up his ass, the kid might sit there until the next term was over, still saying “gun.”
Sully leaned over and took off the kid’s shoes, one by one, slip-ons with little tassels—the fuck was that even about. The kid looked at him and Sully said, “So you don’t make any noise running, okay?”
Then Sully stood in front of him and bent into a crouch and lifted him from under the armpits until he, too, was standing.
“Time to go home,” he said. “Go for the stairways. Back there. Quick like a bunny rabbit. Now.” Sully pushed him, gently, and then harder. The kid stood there, immobile.
“Run, goddammit,” he said, finally, shoving, and the kid staggered away, stiff-legged and straight upright, knees barely bending, one palm clapped on the bullet wound. But he was moving, out of the Rotunda and down the steps, silent as a cat on the kitchen counter, leaving Sully behind.
THREE
IT WOULD HAVE been better if he knew a goddamn thing about the building layout. He cursed himself for his ignorance but he had always avoided Congress like it was an infectious disease, a parliament of prostitutes, the building ostentatious beyond belief. He’d been in red velvet French Quarter whorehouses that had more restraint. Jesus, you’d get a wart on your dick, hanging out in places lik
e this.
That last pop pop, two, three, minutes ago, that had come from somewhere near Statuary Hall. But the alcove just before you got to it led to a hallway that led to the Capitol office of the Speaker of the House, third in line to the presidency. He knew that much, but Christ, you couldn’t miss it. A wooden sign above the hallway designated it as such. The problem was that it was a corridor, a shooting gallery. You went down that, the guy was waiting? You were fully ventilated and done.
Now the hitch in his throat, the tingle of urine at the tip of his cock. Fear.
He blinked and all the paintings on the walls shifted from heroic scenes of the Revolution and Freedom to grotesqueries by Greco or Bosch or the murderous masterpieces by Caravaggio—the blood running, the perspectives shifted, the world tilting off its axis, nightmares painted on the walls in colors that ran and bled and spread over the luminous tile floors in front of him, the sunlight streaming from the arched windows above going from sunshine yellow to a sclerotic orange.
“Goddammit,” he said, rubbing his forehead with the palms of his hands, pain building behind the temples. Cupping his hands in front of his mouth, a deep breath. Another.
On the exhalation, he pushed off and came out from behind the Grant statue, sticking to the wall, humping it around the statues, keeping an eye on the upper reaches of the Rotunda. By the time he reached the corridor to the Speaker’s office, he’d made up his mind. Full tilt and no excuses, all the cards on the table. Halfway down, suddenly, there was a door on his right. He lowered a shoulder and reached for the handle, timing it just right, barreling into a meeting room with a long wooden conference table and chairs in front of him, a chandelier, the walls painted Republican red.
Empty, thank the Jesus. He got under the conference table and let the door close behind him. Where was the phone, his phone. . . . Here. The inside pocket of the sport coat. One bar. Fuck. But he punched the buttons and it went through, the Metro desk answering on the second ring. He asked for R.J., his editor, and the man himself was on the line in milliseconds.
