Only the Hunted Run

by Neely Tucker

  “So, Special Agent Gill,” Sully said, “you been asking all the questions. I got two.”

  She did not look at Chin Man before she said, “If I can,” which confirmed his earlier impression of who was in charge, and thus allowed him to ask a better first one.

  “You know of any place Waters has been since he left the res?”

  “No. But it’s early.”

  “You think he’s going to call me again?”

  “Absolutely. That’s why we’re putting a trace on your home, cell, office. It’s why you’re going to sit by one of them until he calls.”

  “Why would he?”

  “That’s three.”

  “Indulge me.”

  She flicked him a half smile, the first she’d allowed herself the entire interview, and stood up, looping her bag over a shoulder.

  “Because a Spelman grad can see you’re his loose end, Louisiana,” she said, “not to mention a loose cannon.”

  NINE

  THE WHOLE WAY down in the elevator, walking back to the newsroom, R.J. was either pissing about the big-footing feds coming in the place with that attitude or riding him about popping off at them.

  “You figure out she’s smarter than you yet,” R.J. said, looking over at him, “or you need me to tell you?”

  “They on our turf,” Sully said, ignoring the question. “You got to pee on your trees.”

  Yeah, R.J. was saying, but you can’t just go peeing on every tree in the yard, and then he was bitching about southerners and their obsession with dogs. Sully, as they made their way through the cavernous newsroom, slowly tuned him out, the place was going a million miles an hour. Everybody had been called in from home or called back from vacation, nobody fucking around. Phones rang and reporters caught it before the echo of the first ring and talked low and fast, popping open a file, phone crooked between ear and shoulder.

  At home, their spouses or girlfriends or boyfriends or children gave up hope of seeing them again for days. Across the city, the manhunt and the waves of heat and humidity rolled down deserted streets. People sat in front of their televisions and stared at the nonstop coverage and listened to what the killer had done to the congressman and decided that no, no, there’d be no taking the kids out for ice cream or to the movies or anything at all until this nutjob was dead or in jail.

  In the newsroom, the televisions suspended from the ceiling broadcast images of retired cops and federal investigators, the sound muted, but all of them talking about facts they didn’t have. The pundits yakked about what it all meant for the 2002 midterms. Some guy on the market floor was talking about how stocks were sliding. There was a real and actual police scanner blipping somewhere; Sully could swear he heard it.

  “The daily budget, what, for today?” R.J. said, coming out of his rant, steering them to the main conference room. “It looks like a cross between D-day and a high-speed train wreck.”

  And then he was off on a new rant, about how this would involve, what, how many, between seventy-five and one hundred reporters, editors, photographers, graphic designers, copy editors, layout artists, and lawyers. Reporters were moving by foot, car, taxi, and airplane. They would, he went on, correspond by email, burn up phone lines, send faxes, file FOIAs, burrow into court clerks’ offices, consult online databases, attend press conferences, consult experts, and—in a massive, strange, and somehow primitive act of coordination—all turn in stories, files, reports, and dispatches within minutes of one another, from all over the nation if not the globe, like they were a murmuration of starlings, like they were shoaling fish. They had to separate, align, and maintain cohesion while running at flat-out full speed, and then come together for a final presentation at almost the same time.

  “The fuck-me part of it is,” R.J. said, coming into the conference room, plopping down in a swivel chair, “is that it’ll work. Does every time. Challenger blew up, Reagan shot, pick.”

  Sully, who had neither grown up in newspapers nor ever really cared to work in one before getting hired by the Times-Pic in New Orleans, said it was some sort of professional voodoo.

  “When voodoo works,” R.J. shrugged, “you leave the juju be.” He flapped his printout of “Love Song” on the table. It was annotated in red, lines and arrows here and there. “The library has the rest of Eliot. Susan, Audra, everyone else, are going over it.”

  “Has Eddie decided when he wants me to write up something for the Web about the call?”

  R.J. looked up, over his glasses. “I would score that one an ‘if,’ sport. Your new best friend at the FBI wants a sit-down with Eddie as to if we’re going to use that. National security, encouraging a killer, etc.”

  “So why didn’t we all do that just now?”

  “The director wants in on it.”

  “Director?”

  “Of the Feeb.”

  Sully stopped looking out the window to throw a look at R.J.

  “You’re serious.”

  “As cancer. Sullivan, the man just infiltrated the Capitol of the United States and executed a member of Congress.”

  “‘Infiltrating the Capitol of the United States’ consisted of blowing past one magnetometer with two guards. Then he ran down a hall and shot his local representative.”

  “The ice picks.”

  “I’m trying to block the visual, thanks.”

  His stomach rolled over. Initially, he thought it was nausea. Then he remembered he had not eaten since yesterday, lunch. This morning, after the call from Waters, he had run upstairs, grabbed the small, heavy felt package holding the Tokarev from its hiding place in the closet, stuffed it in his cycle jacket, grabbed his helmet, told Josh to stay inside all day, and flew into the office on the Ducati. Now he was walking around the conference room, realizing he was in need of a shower and a burger in equal urgency. He wasn’t going to get either for a while, he thought, looking at the big-ass whiteboard where all this was being mapped out.

  It was a lunatic’s scribbling of names and story assignments and headings and numbers, a lot of it in different colored markers.

  There were stories assigned on Edmonds, his House career, his voting records, his youth back in Oklahoma, funeral plans, memories from colleagues, searches for ties to Waters. Did they meet at a shopping center campaign rally? Had Edmonds angered the tribe? Did Native Americans like or loathe Edmonds? Did a member of Waters’s family work for one of his businesses? Rent an apartment from a property he owned? Did Edmonds fuck his sister? Did Waters even have a sister?

  There was a link, there was a tie, and somebody somewhere was going to find it. They had to be first. Had to. This story. In this town. Getting beat on this would be professional humiliation.

  The board also mapped out short memorial stories on each of the victims, longer ones on the Capitol police officers killed in the line of duty. Another quadrant was devoted to Capitol security, with “own police force” and “WTF” written in huge letters, with four exclamation marks.

  Then, Jesus, there was another Old Testament assigned to Waters: his mysterious youth in Oklahoma, his alleged mental state, his juvenile arrests or misdemeanors or complaints or whatever about the animal mutilations. Did he or his family have any ties to protests or Native American causes? Had nobody really seen him for a decade? What was the state of mental health care out there? Could a doctor or nurse or aid worker be persuaded to comment? His old high school? Teachers, friends, classmates? There was at least one story on Sac and Fox, if not Native American, mysticism and the importance of eyes in folklore. What did the act of stabbing a man in the eyes mean? Did he stab the animals he mutilated in the eyes, too?

  Washington being a company town, you also had the entire D.C. slice of the pie—stories about representatives and senators and staffers talking about their fears and safety, the outrage for once not partisan. There was a sidebar on a history of political assassina
tions and attacks in Washington (Lincoln, Garfield, Reagan), and assaults at the Capitol building (Jackson). There was a roundup of international reaction from other capitals, with feeds about attacks on other national parliaments and how security was handled in London, Paris, Moscow, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Mexico, Canada, South Africa, basically wherever the paper had a correspondent.

  Investigative and Metro and the political desk were combining on a ticktock of the attack—tracking Waters’s access to the building, Edmonds’s movements that day until the two collided, the resulting chaos, and how Waters could have escaped.

  Theories held that he’d used the subway that ran underneath the building, then popped out of one of the House or Senate office buildings. Others held that he’d taken a staffer’s ID badge and just walked right past police. Bolder ones suggested he’d changed into an MPD uniform.

  There were at least three stories on the manhunt, on how airport security was so beefed up that the lines were forever and flights out of National, Dulles, and BWI were all delayed, screwing up air travel across the eastern half of the country, and how yesterday’s near-total shutdown of the Beltway had buggered traffic from Charlotte to Philadelphia.

  This would amount to, more or less, Sully squinted an eye to figure, about fifteen thousand words, fifty pages in a book. It would all be reported and written—along with sports, features, local politics and zoning issues, the home section, movie reviews, real estate listings, classified ads, and wedding announcements, all adding up to a decent-sized novel—and then printed, more than eight hundred thousand times, for delivery to newsstands, gas stations, mini-marts, front porches, driveways, mailboxes, and apartment buildings in about, say, thirteen hours.

  On the Waters story alone, any error, no matter how small, would have to be corrected in print and possibly to the detriment of the entire effort. Fifteen thousand words . . . and if, say, four of them were wrong—four errors—the paper’s staff would look like douche-bag half-wits, mocked in the trades for blowing the big one.

  It gave him the beginnings of a renewed headache, made worse by a single line of writing on the whiteboard that began glowing. It was circled, set slightly apart from the rest.

  “Sully,” it read. “Office/rewrite/phone.”

  “Hey,” he said, walking to the board, tapping his name. “I’m the receptionist? I thought Special Agent Alma T. Gill was bluffing.”

  R.J. looked up, peering. “Calm down. You’re writing the lede-all. If Waters has a hard-on for you, probably best for you to sit tight in the building. And answer your phone. Every time the thing buzzes. I don’t care if it’s a little old lady in Crystal City telling you that she’s looking at black U.N. helicopters hovering over the White House. Answer. Waters calls again, you got to pick it up. That’s from Eddie, that’s from the FBI, that’s probably from the fucking White House.”

  Out in the hallway, a crowd came out of the elevator and there was Alexis, tense, walking head down, studying a sheaf of papers in her hands.

  “Be back,” he said to R.J., then hustled out of the room, catching up to her in the narrow hallway. She stopped, stepping to the side to let the people behind them pass, raising her eyebrows half a notch. Sully stepped beside her. Her eyes were sharp, glittering, looking into him, reading what she could find.

  “You look like shit,” she said.

  “Thank you for noticing.”

  “And—wait, is that you I smell?”

  “Don’t sniff me in the hall,” he said, leaning back. “People might—”

  “This fucker nearly kills you yesterday, then calls you this morning, and I find out both through a Nat-Desk message-all?”

  “Josh, he told—”

  “What’s with your eye? What is this about?” Looking at him like he was falling apart.

  “What, woman, what’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s got a tic. The right one. Your other right.”

  He pulled his hand back and looked at it, like it might have blood on it. “Been doing that since yesterday.”

  “You’re lucky that’s the only thing wrong with you.”

  “One pursues the news of the day.”

  “From what I read, you certainly pursued.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You didn’t run in the opposite direction.”

  “No.”

  “He had a gun, Sully.”

  “Most people in America do.”

  She rolled the papers in her hand into a tube and leaned back against the wall. “You weren’t playing cowboy in the Capitol?”

  “Look,” he said, standing in front of her, a little off balance at the direct line of inquiry, “you said you wanted me to go back to being a foreign correspondent. So I act like one yesterday. Now you giving me flack about it.”

  “I didn’t say be reckless.”

  “Gosh, I had forgotten.”

  “Don’t try me with that attitude you give everyone else around here.”

  “Look,” he said, trying to reign this back in, “you, missy, have come back from being a foreign hack to riding a desk job. I don’t know that you—”

  “We’re not talking about me.” A hair flip. Ah sweet Jesus, the hair flip. Now he was buggered. Now she was pissed. “And I wouldn’t say I’m riding the desk. It’s a promotion I’m thinking about accepting. You understand there’s an upward trajectory to this business, that you don’t always have to be out in the field eating dust?”

  “Certainly not what I heard from you this spring, when we were eating at Jimmy T’s. You were preaching at me to get off my arse and get back in the field with badasses such as your adorable self.”

  “They hadn’t offered me the gig this spring.”

  “So how much more money is it?”

  “Enough to think about,” she said. “My mom’s not getting any younger. It’d be nice to be on the same continent with her for a while. And, I’ve discovered, editors get stock options. Plus, you know, the business isn’t overrun with women in management.”

  “So now you wanting to be on the masthead? Commencement speeches at the alma mater, all that?”

  “Possible,” she said, ignoring the jibe. “But it’s not locked in, my side or theirs. I do it till December 31 and then Eddie and I sit down. If it’s good, I’ll take it. If not, I’ll take the posting in London or Beirut, wherever they want me.” Here she looked up at him. “And I’ll be looking for you in the field. With shit like you did yesterday. That was great. Really sensational. I’m not riding you about it. And I didn’t exactly expect you to return my call last night—”

  “I had turned the phone off,” he said.

  “—but, wait, listen.” Her voice softened, dropped a half key, making him almost have to lean forward. “I thought you would have called me. After deadline.”

  She looked at him evenly. Nothing about their physical relationship in those eyes, just a depth that spoke to their friendship. That stemmed back to Johannesburg, after Mandela’s release from Robben Island. She, who had been posted in Central and South America, got sent to South Africa as part of the media mob on the only story in the world anybody wanted to read. He had met her at Jameson’s on Commissioner Street. He saw a group of South African photographers he knew at a table toward the back and headed that way. She was sitting with them, this olive-skinned chick with thick black hair, all of them bellowing to be heard over the band.

  She was drinking a gin and tonic and they were all laughing and she had giggled and it had come up through her nose and when he walked up she was facedown on the table, snorting and laughing, everybody howling, and she lifted her head and looked up and saw him and then sneezed and that sent them all into spasms, her leaning on the shoulder of Greg Marinovic, gasping and saying “Stopstopstop. My stomach hurts.”

  He had gone to the bar to get his drink and a fresh one for her. When he got ba
ck, he slid it across the table, and she looked up to see who was buying the round and it had pretty much been lust at first sight, the festive mood of the nation spilling into the air, a glossy-eyed giddiness infecting a tribe that reported war and death for a living. That they worked for the same paper but had not met gave him an excuse for chatting her up, and before Mandela was out he had taken a suite at the Kinton, a boutique hotel over in Rosebank, where prying eyes would not see them returning to the same room late at night or lingering for hours at the restaurant, sitting way too close, talking, whispering.

  It had been a fling, but an adult one, as an actual relationship was not possible, given they had jobs on different continents. They had drifted apart. She had been polite but distant when she saw him again in Sarajevo, during the Bosnian War. By then he was living, and very much in love, with Nadia. The shell took Nadia not long after that, then he was blown up by a grenade, and Alexis had been one of the correspondents who helped load him, unconscious and mangled, onto a chopper.

  Now they were based on the same continent, in the same building, feeling each other out, seeing if there were long-term commitments to be found underneath their shared attraction, that mysterious chemistry pulling them one to the other.

  She was saying, here—at least he thought she was saying—that as a friend who’d been through the bang-bang shit before, she damn well knew he would have needed somebody to talk with, drink with, calm down with last night after deadline, and that person could, or should, have been her. That’s what she was saying. He was pretty sure of it now. Since they were in the office, she was saying it from a polite, professional distance. Maybe she wasn’t as pissed as he’d thought.

  “Walk with me,” he said, turning down the hallway, “get a Coke out of the machine.”

  She did, the corridor empty, just the two of them and the paintings on the wall, and he felt his shoulders relax. He didn’t have to whisper, but he found himself doing it nonetheless. “If Josh wasn’t with me this summer, I would have knocked on your door, had a few drinks, talked it out with you in a hot shower. As it was, I got home, looked in on him, passed out on the couch.”