by Neely Tucker
The man reached out and took the bottom of the flare, holding it in his left hand, the light dancing around the hallway. He rose and turned back. Sully could pick out jeans and a black T-shirt, no facial hair.
Just for a second—a fraction of it—Sully thought the man looked over toward the bathroom door, at the pen jutting out. But then he underhanded the flare back down the hallway from which he’d just come, a sparkler spinning backward, throwing shadows that somersaulted and pinwheeled. It flew past the door until it clack-clacked on the floor and slid, coming to a rest far down the hallway.
When Sully looked back, the man was gone.
There was nothing. No shadow, no footsteps, no clatter. The hissing of the flare, the pale light fluttering down the hall, the sound of his own breathing. That was all. He kept an eye on the slit in the door. It was possible the shooter had flattened himself against the wall and was waiting for Sully to open it and step out, but he doubted it. If the guy had wanted to bang in the door, he would have already.
Still, standing up required planning. He leaned forward, off his ass and onto the balls of his feet, bringing his weight over his heels. Pressing down on them, raising up—a knee joint popped loudly on the gimp leg, making him hobble forward and cringe—he was on his feet.
Now. The door.
Two careful, contorted steps, like he was playing Twister, then he was behind it. Slowly, he reached down with his right hand to hold the pen stuck in the door opening. His left hand found the door handle. He eased up and stood back, pulling the door with him, sliding in his socks, until it was wide open and his back was against the wall, the door pressing against his nose.
Nothing. He counted to twenty. Nothing. Where is the fucking cavalry?
He came from behind the door. The ghastly reddish-white flare hissed. Briefly, he waved a hand into the hallway to see if it would draw fire. None. He slid out into the hallway, moving backward toward the flare, his eyes fixed down the hall where the shooter had disappeared. There was nobody and nothing. Just the flickering light, his breathing, the floor cool beneath his feet.
Sliding, taking his right foot forward, then bringing his left to catch up with it. Again. Moving in this way, he came past the flare. He swung his eyes to see the body that the killer had left behind.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered.
A man in a suit. On his back. The mortal remains of Barry Edmonds. Smears of blood on the floor. Duct tape wrapped around his ankles, upper thighs. Arms bound at his sides. A strap of tape across his mouth. The crotch of his suit dark, wet.
He had been shot in the upper right leg, but that was hardly the problem. Sully blinked and looked again.
A stainless steel ice pick was driven through each eye. The shiny handles, catching the gleam, were flecked with blood and gore. They stood up out of his head like two antennae. Viscous fluid from each eye slid down his temples, puddling on the floor.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” Sully whispered.
He turned and looked back down the hall, to see if the killer had reappeared. There was just air and empty space and, at the end of it, a dark sense of foreboding that something was just beginning rather than coming to a bloody end.
* * *
He had no idea how long he crouched there, but another clattering sound brought him out of his reverie. He whipped around. There was only darkness punctuated by—
Fucking cavalry, now they . . .
—bouncing bits of light coming at him. Too late, he knew. He turned and flung himself backward, tripping over Edmonds’s corpse, clamping his teeth, trying to get his hands over his ears before the concussion grenades detonated. The floor came up too fast and he took the fall full on the chest, eyes squinched—
Whoomp whoomp whoomp
—flashes of light and Sully felt his eardrums dimple in against his brain and his temples explode and blood spurt out of his nose—
Floor vibrations running blistering ears forehead arms legs dragging feet feet feet floor sliding
—and it dawned somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, somewhere below articulate thought, that before he even opened his eyes, before they’d even finished dragging him down the hall, before he’d even asked anything, he knew that these SWAT motherfuckers or Navy Seals or Army Rangers or who the fuck ever had stormed past the shooter, that they had missed him, and that he was still free and loose and gone, baby, gone.
FIVE
“I, I DON’T know.”
“Hair color?”
“Don’t know. I told ’em an hour ago I don’t know.”
“Dark? Light?”
“Are you thick?”
“The ponytail. Long and wispy? Short and heavy?”
“Sort of wispy. Sort of long. Christ, my head.”
The sketch artist dropped his hand away from the paper. “They told me you were a reporter.”
Sully looked up. He’d been holding his forehead in the palms of both hands. The headache, the nosebleed from the concussion grenades making him dizzy and nauseous in a wobbling sort of way, like you were drunk and fell over but still thought you were standing upright. A crust of blood still held on to his upper lip; he could feel it, flaky and dry. He scratched at it, elbows still on his knees, and eyed the man up again.
Black hair perfectly combed, a neat little mustache, thin. Wearing a black Windbreaker with “FBI” emblazoned on it big enough to be seen from space. Through the arced light coming through the tent on the grounds east of the Capitol, set apart at a little table and easel a few feet from the milling crowd of uniformed cops, federal agents, witnesses, and Hill staffers, the man was looking at him dull-eyed. Didn’t give enough of a damn about him one way or another to give him shit. Sully was just a cog in the machine that had information that needed to be gleaned and he wasn’t—what—gleaning.
“Then we’re both fucked,” Sully rasped, keeping eye contact, “’cause they told me you were a sketch artist.”
“I can’t sketch without a description.”
“I can’t describe what I didn’t see.”
“You said you were within ten, fifteen feet.”
“Yeah, Pocahontas, I was. And then your friends cut the lights. All I saw was him lit by a flare. Maybe five foot ten, could be six feet, thin but obviously strong, jeans or dark pants, a dark pullover. Ponytail. Clean shaven.”
“We’re trying to get a sketch to broadcast.”
“Know that.”
“This guy is still out there. The sketch might help someone recognize him.”
“Know that too.”
“He was wearing a baseball cap when he came through the security screening, so the cameras didn’t pick up much of his face.”
“Okay.”
The man frowned. “The other people who saw him, mostly around the Speaker’s office, were very frightened. What they said, it’s more impressionistic, and somewhat contradictory. I was hoping you, given your background, might provide better detail.”
Arms folded across his chest, his breathing steady but his left eye developing a tic, Sully nodded. He sat up in his chair. His ass hurt. Everything hurt.
“I would have thought the commando team, whoever, would have gotten a good look at him on their way in. The man just walked out. He wasn’t in a hurry. He told the 911 operator his name and where to find him.”
“Apparently there was some confusion.”
“Not on my end.”
The man didn’t respond.
“Look at me like that all night,” Sully said, lowering his head back into the cradle of his palms, closing his eyes. “It ain’t changin’ nothin’.”
After a moment, the man with the black hair said: “He’s not in the building, we know that. He’s beyond the perimeter. He’s loose. And armed. Which is why the description is critical. Anything jog your memory? Anything at all?”
Th
e man waited. Sully heard the chair creak. The man was leaning forward, expectant. Sully recognized the drill without opening his eyes. He’d done it a million times to a million people himself. The patient interviewer looking for that last detail. Coaxing it forward with body language.
The noises of the night, the other conversations, the crowd of people in a small space, the light patter of rain tapping on the tent above, all these began to register on his conscious thought. But the image that danced on the back of his eyelids, the thing that he saw, like a still frame from a snuff film, was Edmonds’s face, his eyes, the gore-spattered ice picks sticking straight up out of them.
“Well?”
“I done told all I’n tell.”
The easel snapped back and there was the clatter of pencils on the table and the man walked away. The table and chair sat empty. Nobody else came.
The sound of the rain grew louder.
After a while, still bent over, still holding his forehead, he fished the phone out of his coat pocket. He pressed the green button and waited for it to come on. Once it did, he ignored the notice that he had six million missed calls and instead called the desk. Elliot, the news aide answering the call at this hour, immediately put R.J. on the line. Sully spoke for some time as the old man’s fingers flew over the keyboard, a loud clatter, keeping up with the narration.
Then R.J. stopped and said, “You are shitting me.”
“No.”
“Got to be.”
“It was pretty gotdamn original,” Sully said, talking with his eyes closed. Every now and then he leaned over to spit, trying to get the taste of the explosives out of his mouth. The jitters, now that the shit was all over, were starting. He could feel the tremors at his elbows radiating down to his palms. He shook his free hand to try to rid himself of the sensation and finally stood up, walking in a tight circle, over and over again. Sometimes, as they talked, he wandered outside the tent to feel the spattering rain. All the survivors or witnesses or what have you were quarantined out here in the shadows and humidity, standing around in clumps, waiting to be interviewed or reinterviewed or debriefed or whatever the feds were calling it.
Hours, this had been going on. Fucking hours. They’d let him use his phone once earlier, for five minutes, in which time he’d called the desk and given them the shooter’s name and a heads-up that a narrative was coming.
“Cooperators necklaced in South Africa,” Sully was saying. “Seen that. Serbians cut the cocks off the mujahideen. Seen that. Liberia. Fuck’s sake, man. All of Liberia. But this today, nah, I ain’t seen this. Ice picks through the eyes.”
“You’re positive?”
“Seriously, you ask me this?”
The hour was going on ten. Deadline, that merciless bitch, was moving in for the kill. It always got later faster than you thought. Sully would swear, actually give a sworn affidavit, that on some days the hours between seven and ten p.m. lasted twenty-three minutes.
“What about the name?” R.J. said. “Waters? The feds will neither confirm nor deny.”
“It’s what he told 911. It’s what I’m reporting.”
“We have to be one hundred percent,” R.J. said. “What you gave us, Terry Waters, from Oklahoma? We ran it. Got a hit out of central Oklahoma. An hour and change south-southwest of Tulsa. Indian Country. One ‘Terry Running Waters’ has been certifiable since high school at the local Native American reservation, which appears to be the Sac and Fox. He dropped out. In 1982. As a junior. In and out of wards and the local jailhouse for a year or two, then apparently kept at home. Something like two decades. He was a suspect in some animal mutilations. There are a couple of clips.”
“What you mean, ‘kept at home’?”
“I mean, like, kept at home,” R.J. said. “He’s the Boo fucking Radley of the res. Like nobody’s seen him in years. Except for, you know, the ‘shadow at the window,’ that sort of thing.”
“Come on.”
“We wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true.”
“Who’s reporting that?”
“Ellen, from the Chicago bureau. Quoting tribal officials by phone. Nobody else has the name, at least for now. Feds have a presser skedded at eleven; I’m guessing they’ll give it then. But nobody else has this for now. So you’re right, right?”
“As rain.”
Tulsa, Sully thought. Take out the “s” and you had his hometown in Louisiana. “Ellen’s solid,” he said. “And this guy, he told the 911 operator that was his name. Wanted credit. Couch it like that and we’re golden.”
“The feds aren’t releasing the 911.”
“I guess not. It sounded like the operator thought it was a prank.”
“Were you taking notes?”
“In the dark?”
“But, I mean, the name, the details of the call, sometimes it’s hard to remember—”
“Terry Waters and Oklahoma and ice picks. I can remember that much. What’s the town Terry’s from?”
“They’re calling it Stroud, which I personally have never heard of, but apparently he lived way out on or near the Sac and Fox Reservation, which is apparently in your greater metropolitan Stroud.”
“In other words, East Jesus.”
“Jim Thorpe grew up there. I learned that today.”
Sully, staying outside the tent now, took a seat on the curb, a blanket draped over his shoulders—what was with paramedics and blankets?—in a grove of trees in back of the Capitol, emergency lights throwing crazy shadows, ambulances and police cars, lights revolving. There was still a light rain falling, but it wasn’t bad under the trees that lined the drive. The Capitol was fully illuminated now—but depopulated of everyone save for the techs inside poring over blood spots and counting ejected shells.
Outside, a huge phalanx of police had herded the last staffers and tourists into this more-or-less pen, marked off with yellow crime-scene tape. It was a rough square among the trees, with officers a few feet apart, setting the perimeter. Everyone had been screened and screened again. Law enforcement had slowly come to the obvious conclusion that Terry Waters was, in fact, long gone.
On the streets framing the Capitol complex—Independence and Constitution running east and west, and First Street SE and NE running north to south—Sully could see dozens of squad cars, lights revolving. Armored trucks parked at intervals. Two choppers beating the air in the near distance.
The paramilitaries who’d pulled him from the building were more pissed off than inquisitive; the detectives and the feds who questioned him were demanding and impatient; and the medic, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, kept telling him, ‘Mister, you’re in shock,’ until Sully ran his fingers across the scars on his face, then raised his sweat-soaked shirt to show the railroad track of shrapnel scars from Bosnia and said, “It’s not my first dance at the prom.”
He had told the feds enough but not everything. Certainly he didn’t mention that he’d heard the man give his name—they would have that from the 911 call, anyway. He didn’t imagine they’d be thrilled to read it in the paper tomorrow, but that wasn’t his problem. Neither was it his problem that they’d missed Waters in the Capitol. It probably hadn’t been hard to do, people running out of offices all over the place, so many warrens and back stairways, the subway running to the House and Senate office buildings—had anybody sealed that off?
Now the manhunt story was galloping ahead, dominating television, radio, and the Web, with newspapers holding their final editions to the last minute. Sully could play no part in the manhunt—he was locked in the safest part of the city for the foreseeable future—but he had the first-person firecracker narrative of the shooter’s path.
“What’s our body count?” he asked R.J.
“Nine confirmed, four critical, five serious, thirteen admitted. One of the fatals is a heart attack. Two of the admitted were people tripping, tw
isting an ankle, like that, running out.”
“Who we got working it?”
“Everybody but Sports, and I’m including Jesus Christ in that. Keith is anchoring the lede-all with, I’m serious, something like forty, forty-five people sending feeds. It’s the whole damn paper. Your narrative is the 1-A centerpiece. The art is great, a shot of the eastern entrance to the Capitol, all these people sprinting out, looking like they just saw Charlie Manson.”
“Read me back the lede.”
“‘The killer came prepared,’” R.J. said, reading from the story they’d been editing.
“Go on,” Sully said.
“‘The gunman who killed U.S. Rep. Barry Edmonds and at least eight others in the U.S. Capitol yesterday afternoon first stormed into the building by shooting guards at the eastern entrance,’” R.J. continued. “‘He sprinted down a hallway, apparently shooting at random in the Crypt. Ascending the steps, he killed guards and civilians in the circular Rotunda, one of the most famous public spaces in the United States. Then, with a hard right, he zeroed in on one of the most powerful offices in the U.S. Capitol: that of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.’”
“It’s obvious but not awful.”
“We give his ID to the 911 operator, and a bit on his background, but most of that is in the lede-all, not your narrative. And down below, later, the killing of Edmonds reads like this: ‘He had come not only with semiautomatic guns, but with duct tape, flares, a cell phone, and ice picks. He shot Edmonds in the leg, bound him with the tape, hand and foot, then drove a steel ice pick through each of Edmonds’s eyes, killing him.’”
He paused. “Okay, wait. How do we know he shot him before the ice pick business?”
“Because the picks were mortal. The leg had bled a lot, the pants were soaked, all that. You shoot somebody post-mortem, they don’t bleed so much.”
“Hunh. But, I mean, he could have tied him up and then shot him, right? That could be the sequence?”
Sully closed his eyes. He was going to throw up soon, he could tell. The throbbing.
