by Neely Tucker
“I guess so, R.J. Edit as you wish. I’m not hung up on that.”
“Okay, okay, just a second . . .” and R.J. drifted away, the keyboard clattering, the old man breathing softly into the receiver. Sully wondered if he had a concussion. Blown up in Bosnia, beaten up at a motorcycle race track in the spring, now this. The paycheck wasn’t matching the effort. He was pretty sure of that.
“Now then,” the voice, bright and hard, back with him. “Let’s pick it up at: ‘Waters was in no hurry. He lit a common roadside flare—he had apparently brought it with him—to illuminate the pitch-black darkness. By the light of the flare, he appeared as a man of average height, perhaps five foot eleven, with a ponytail of dark hair, dressed in jeans and a dark shirt. When he was leaving, he tossed the flare back toward Edmonds, but did not speak. His path after that is unknown.’”
“True, fair, and accurate,” Sully said. He leaned forward and spit.
“Did he say anything?” R.J. asked. “Did you hear him say anything to or about Edmonds, about why he had to kill him, and in that manner?”
“No. But they’re saying out here that Edmonds was on the House Committee for Indian fuckovery or whatever.”
“He’s the ranking member on the House Committee on the Indian, Insular and Native Alaskan Affairs,” R.J. said.
“Which is, what, the new name for the Bureau of Indian Affairs?”
“Bringing you Wounded Knee and other atrocities since 1824.”
“Well. Any evidence of a more direct connection?”
“You mean like Edmonds was fucking his girlfriend?”
“That would put a bow on it. Tells you something, the way a man kills another. This thing, they had personal history, that’s my guess.”
“None apparent,” R.J. said. “We got Susan and Audra up in research, and the entire congressional desk, going over Edmonds’s voting history, like that, see if there’s some legislation that our shooter might not have liked.”
“Nothing on the manhunt?”
“Sweet fuck all. The city is locked down. Metro is shut down. So is Amtrak, the MARC Train, National, Dulles, and BWI. Traffic checkpoints everywhere. You should see the aerials. The Beltway, 66, 495, 295, the BW Parkway, the George Washington. Every on- and off-ramp. World’s biggest parking lot.”
“Jesus,” Sully said, the last of the adrenaline oozing out of him, a physical sensation, like blood had been drained from his arm. He closed his eyes against the dizziness. The ice picks buried in Edmonds’s face materialized in the blackness. He popped his eyes back open.
“How much time we got?” he said.
“We’re five minutes over.”
“Punch the button. We’re sewed up tight.”
R.J. paused, silence on the line. “Sullivan,” he said quietly.
“Da, sahib.”
“You’re sure about this? All of it?”
Sully looked down at his socks, worn through at the heels now, his shoes lost and long gone, at his right hand, which had dried blood on it. He guessed it was from the kid in the Rotunda or the woman in the Crypt. The night had a bright electric feel to it, something metallic on the tip of the tongue, a penny in a socket.
“One more time, R.J. I swear to Christ and sonny Jesus, you ask me one more time—”
“Okay, alright already. We cannot be wrong. We have tons of exposure. Nobody else was up there. This thing is gonna be huge and you’re out there all alone. Eddie, Eddie Winters—you remember the executive editor of this establishment? He’s behind you on this but nervous. The feds are going to want to pick you apart, you were up there before them. It’s not going to be—”
“I don’t see it that way,” Sully said.
“—pretty, wait, what? Enlighten me.”
“I’m not the one with the exposure. I didn’t let the fucker get in the Capitol. I didn’t let him get out. I got within ten feet of him without a gun, pistol, or badge, and had the drop on him, besides. The police and the feds, they can’t say that. They don’t correct us on this. We correct them.”
SIX
THE POLICE WERE taking witnesses and survivors over to Union Station, or to hotels at the foot of the Hill. By the time Sully was finished talking to R.J., the crowd was almost all gone, nothing left but stragglers. So when he was herded with the rest to the east entrance, right across from the Supreme Court, he figured he’d walk home. It was just six blocks up East Cap and two north on Sixth Street.
But when he walked past the waiting bus and got a dozen steps up the street, every cop on the block started screaming at him, shouting, uniforms running, boots on the wet asphalt. Two of the tacticals on the corner, beneath floodlights, had M-16s trained on him.
This set off a five-minute pissing match about who could go where and orders and states of emergency and what defined a public street. The bus pulled away and left. The cop said that he’d throw his ass in D.C. Jail. Sully, the cavity behind his eyes feeling like it was about to explode, pulled out his phone and called the cell of John Parker, head of D.C. Homicide, who didn’t pick up. Sully, still holding up a wait-a-minute finger at the cop in front of him, called right back. Parker picked up this time and said, “If this caller ID is right, it better not be.”
Sully gave Parker the ten-second summary and said he’d count it as a personal favor and handed the phone to the cop. The cop listened and didn’t say anything and handed it back to Sully. The cop waved his hand and said, “Let the fucker get shot then.” He waved his arms back and forth to get the attention of the cops a block up, at the end of the Supreme Court building. Then he told Sully to walk his bony ass down the middle of East Cap all the way home and that if he got shot, all they’d do is stand there and watch him bleed out.
Sully limped to the first checkpoint, the cops there eye-fucking him, then moved from the brightly lit part of the city immediately into the neighborhood of narrow row houses and brick sidewalks and overhanging trees, the hush descending.
The cell in his hand buzzed.
It never failed to astonish him how vast the seat of power on the Hill was, a center of clout, senators and representatives who could change the lives of the entire nation, if not the world . . . and, one lousy block east, you crossed a two-lane and you were in a Washington neighborhood of row houses and corner markets and alleyways, where streetlights didn’t work, air-conditioning units hung out of most of the windows, you could buy dope in the parks, and nobody gave a rat’s ass about who you knew.
The tremors—he felt them start at his fingertips.
The cell buzzed again.
Still in the middle of the street, he was approaching the checkpoint at Third Street, the police cruiser blinding him with its spotlight. He clicked to accept the call without looking at it, expecting Parker or R.J.
“This is Carter.”
Lucinda’s high-pitched voice burst out of the phone.
“How could you not even call,” she said. “I trust you with my son and this is what—”
He came up even with the cruiser and shielded his eyes to click off the call, his sister still at full volume. The cops cut the searchlight and stared at him.
“Family,” he smiled, twiddling the phone back and forth. “We good, gentlemen?”
* * *
Ten steps past the checkpoint, the cell buzzed. Arizona area code. He clicked it back on. “Lucinda, I got to tell you,” he said, before she could speak, “you scream in my ear like that one more gotdamn time, we won’t talk again.”
She was quiet now but seething. He could feel it coming through the line.
“Sullivan. Sullivan. Sullivan. Let me breathe. I send my only child to you. Only child. And you go gallivanting after some crazy man with a gun. Leaving him alone. He called at least five times tonight, scared to death. And now this lunatic is loose? Blocks from my son? What, I ask you, what are you doing to keep him saf
e?”
There were times he wished he smoked, to give him something to do when he felt the world pinwheeling beyond his grasp, that out-of-control feeling that had taken over so much of his life since Bosnia.
Bourbon floated across his mind, just like that, and he unconsciously turned to look at the pub on the corner, but the red and blue neon OPEN sign was off, of course, the entire block shuttered. Even the houses were dark, people huddled inside, thinking that somehow Terry Waters was lurking by the Japanese maple in the front yard.
“Sullivan,” her voice rising. “Did you hear me?”
He pictured Lucinda in the kitchen of her house in Phoenix, sitting at the breakfast nook—that’s what she called it, honest to Christ—looking outside at the dry hills in the distance, still light there this time of year, the house quiet, Jerry off at the grocery store, overseeing all of them in the city or region or whatever.
He also made a mental note to pop Josh upside the head, soon as he got home.
“I would call it doing my job,” he said, finally. “Josh was at home in the basement watching television,” he said. “Boy was fine. Eating pizza. Is fine.”
“You hung up on me just now,” she said, sounding like she was reading from an indictment.
“You called me three hundred times already,” he said, now nearly shouting himself. “Any one of those coulda gotten me killed, you know that? You coulda given this psycho a homing beacon to blow my head off. You knew Josh was gotdamn good-and-well safe but you could not wait, could not wait, to fuck with me about it. Calling me at work to start some shit about your kid at my house.”
She took a breath down the line and he roared into it.
“You with me here? I call and ask you to babysit all summer? Nope. You called me and I got your boy in the flipping Corcoran, a summer session with Bill Christenberry, for God’s sake.”
“You keep saying that like I’m supposed to know who it is.”
“You should.”
“Don’t lecture.”
“How long’d it been since we talked, then you call me up asking if Josh could come?”
“Don’t start.”
“That’s not a date on a calendar.”
“A long time, Sully.”
“A long time, you’re fuckin’ A. You didn’t come to see me when I was in Walter Reed, after Bosnia, right? What, I was out cold and missed you?”
Silence, then: “No, Sully, you did not.”
Long, slow, resigned, the same sibling waltz they’d been dancing since the family had collapsed and they’d been farmed out to different relatives. Lucinda to Phoenix, Sully to New Orleans.
Lucinda had found religion. Sully had found bourbon. Their bonds, stretched paper-thin, drifted apart like a spiderweb in the wind. The answer to the question he’d posed was five years, maybe six, and then seven or eight before that. Twice in fifteen years, call it that. Both at Christmas. They were, by any measure, strangers, but maybe even worse than that—people who had once shared a bond and lost it. Now any meeting, any conversation, was filled with the shadows and silences of the intervening years and the weight of what had happened to their parents.
“You, you, you call, tell me the kid’s a prodigy,” he said, “asking me if there’s a summer art program in D.C., something to boost his college application.”
Silence.
“And I did you a solid. William fucking Christenberry, a summer class, ten kids, you got to be kidding me. And then, on a day when I damn near get killed, on a day I watch a lady spit a blood bubble out of her mouth before she dies, on a day I see a man with ice picks through his fucking face, on this day you call me, and your concern is not for your only brother, who was less than thirty feet from a mass shooter, but for your kid, who was half a mile away, in what amounts to a basement bunker. It’s touching, sis. Touching.”
“Sully, hey?” she said. “You chose to spend your life in a sewer of war and violence. Josh didn’t. The rest of the world isn’t like you. I turn on my television out here, the cable channels are screaming about mass murder on Capitol Hill. How do I know, from this side of the country, what the situation is unless I talk to you? And when I called? You wouldn’t answer. So, really, what did you expect?”
* * *
The late-summer drizzle, coming down through the massive oaks, into the open spaces, pattering onto the asphalt, the brick cobblestone sidewalk, dripping off leaves and onto the patrol cars parked on the streets, it all seemed blurry, like it had been painted by Van Gogh. Head. His head.
Heading north on Sixth now. One of the warped bricks in the sidewalk caught his stockinged foot, causing him to stumble, cursing. Crossing A Street. No sound but a chopper in the distance. His house was one hundred and ten years old, at the edge of what his neighbors called “the box”—a rectangle on the east side of the Capitol building that roughly approximated the National Mall on the west.
The way the real estate market was exploding—a neighbor had her house on the market for three hours and sold it for $320,000, after buying it for less than half that eight years earlier—Sully sometimes thought, when he was in a good mood, that he was turning the corner in life.
This night, he was a long goddamn way from a good mood.
He shoved open the low wrought-iron gate, ascending the few brick steps to the front door. He dropped the keys once and then couldn’t get the key in the lock until he stopped and took a long, deep breath. Once inside, he made straight for the kitchen, a glass, the bottle, and he was pouring. He made himself wait to add the ice to the Basil’s but then he drained it in a long gulp, rattling the ice against his lips. Closed his eyes. Yes, Lord, yes. The burn in his chest, the blossoming percussion in his brain. He opened his eyes and poured another deep one, coughed, then went downstairs.
Josh was sitting on the sofa, television blaring, pizza carton on the beat-up coffee table, popcorn, a bottle of beer, half raising a hand in greeting but not turning.
Sully came off the last step, bourbon sloshing, “Hey, slick, you want to tell me that was about, your mother busting my eardrum just now?”
Josh turned, hand still half raised. “What, what?”
Sully grabbed the remote with a free hand, hit mute, threw it back on the couch. “Your momma. My sister. Screeching you were wetting your diapers.”
“Oh, um, that. Mom. I switched off a movie? And it was all over every station, some shooting up there at the Capitol? So I thought I should call and let her know, you know, that I was okay and everything.”
“She says you called like five times, blabbering.”
“Blabbering? Two.”
“Blabbering two what?”
“Twice. I called twice. And I wasn’t crying, I can’t believe she said that. That’s just random.”
“So, what I’m wondering is, why call her anyhow? You know how she gets—Christ, you live with her—and you set her off—”
“No, no. See, no. I, I wanted to let her know I was paying attention, calm her down, let her know I was okay. I thought it was interesting conversationally, the shooting. She asked if I was okay, and, you know, she likes to think I’m still seven years old, so I said, well, I’d feel safer if Sully were here, you know, or I was back home with her and Dad, ’cause I thought she’d like to hear that. Me being responsible.”
“Responsible.”
“Right.”
“Move over. God. What is responsible about torquing your hysterical mother up another notch.”
It wasn’t a question and Josh knew it if Sully didn’t. The couch was soft but, holy shit, his joints. His bones. He got a whiff of himself: musty, sweaty, stale. The kid was looking at him like he was out of a zoo.
“She’s already at eleven,” Sully said.
There was something on the television, a guy in an insane asylum, crosses all over his face and the room, the guy drawing like mad. Jo
sh found the remote and turned the sound up enough that there were mumbles emanating from the screen. Sully closed his eyes and let out a long breath.
“Where are your shoes?” Josh’s voice.
“What?”
“Your shoes? Your feet are soaked. The socks, they got all these holes.”
“I don’t even want to talk about it. Fetch me a bourbon, will you? Three cubes.” He held out his glass with three fingers splayed. He did not open his eyes.
“You told me not to go get you bourbon when you asked for it.”
“Never mind that now.”
“You said it would help you slow down.”
“‘Never mind that now’ seems to be a phrase that most fifteen-year-olds who don’t want their uber-evangelical parents to know they’re drinking beer and binging on horror movies and certain pay-per-view titles I’m not going to mention would understand.”
The weight lightened on the couch. Sully felt the glass taken from his hand. He let it fall back down in his lap. Breathing. He focused on breathing until it started to come even and slow. He’d forgotten to ask the kid for Advil.
When he felt the cool, heavy round circle of the glass back on his knee, he opened his eyes again. Three cubes. Another long pull and he felt his head ease, like somebody had loosened a too-tight belt. Still, the vileness in his gut from the explosives, that seasick feeling.
“Is the shooting thing all through?”
Sully looked at him, the slight frame, the my-mom-cuts-my-hair vibe, the shorts and the bare feet. “Yeah,” Sully said. “Ain’t you been watching the television? After you called Lucinda?”
“For a few minutes. But then it got boring. I put in a movie, one of those we got from the Blockbuster on Eighth. The Evil Dead. Your office called and this guy, he said you would be home late and to get dinner myself. He said I could order pizza or Chinese.”
“‘This guy.’”
“He said that somebody shot somebody in the Capitol and you were there.”
“That about covers it.”
“Is your story finished?”
“I made it on the bevel.”
