by Neely Tucker
“Passed out?”
“Not drunk,” he said, cutting her with a glance, “tired. On the couch. Shattered, the Brits would say. Facedown when Waters, this fucker, calls me this morning. Ran in here after that. Same clothes as yesterday.”
The office kitchen was fluorescent lighting, old linoleum, the smell of burnt coffee, crystals of spilled sugar on the countertop, yellow plastic chairs at a couple of brown tables. She pulled money out of her front pocket, waving him off. “I’ll buy hero boy a drink,” she said, fucking with him a little bit now, a smile reaching to the corner of her lips. “I wasn’t worried about your work on the story. I was worried, am worried, a little bit about you.”
A Coke clanged down the chute. He fished it out, then pointed to the little pack of orange crackers with peanut butter stuck in between them.
“Spot me?”
She did, then bought herself a Coke, popped it open, slurping at the top to keep it from fizzing over. “Mmm. You can handle yourself, that’s not what I’m saying. But when we, when we’re working abroad, the big bads aren’t looking for us. It’s just that we get in the way. Like when you got blown up.”
She reached forward, then, and touched his right temple, the welt of scar tissue there, the only person on the face of the Earth who could do that, and that sudden feminine grace had surfaced as if she’d called it up from the deep. She was close to him now, her perfume coming into his senses, the rustle of her blouse. It lasted less than three seconds. He closed his eyes at her touch, then opened them when she pulled her hand away, a little dizzy.
“This guy, he’s calling you, he’s looking for you,” she said. “And you, you got a habit of leading with your chin.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt again. And don’t invoke your mother like that,” she said, her eyes going dark, the only person on planet Earth who could say that to him, too.
“Okay, right, okay,” he said, sipping his soda. “I was just—”
“You just watch your skinny white ass,” she said. “You’re in the deep end of the pool with this guy. This isn’t some dimwit drug dealer in Frenchman’s Bend. I can’t come out there and save you every time you fuck up.”
He sat back in his chair, telling her about Waters asking about his mother, the pissing match with the FBI that morning, how Waters had asked him if he’d kill the man who killed his mother, and how that had set off ten minutes of conversation that he’d neglected to share with Eddie Winters and the paper’s brass, much less Special Agent Alma T. Gill.
“He talked about the years he’d been planning this, about how, you know, he thought the feds would get him and stick him in prison and that, since he was putting paid to his mother’s death, he was okay with that. Totally okay.”
“What did you say?”
“That it sounded reasonable to me.”
“Sully!”
“Under a couple of conditions,” he said, looking off from her now, not wanting to see her eyes while he finished talking. “I told him, look, that kind of thinking, it’s acid. It’ll eat right through you. And he said, well, it already has. And I said, see, that’s the problem. You went off killing a bunch of people that didn’t have nothing to do with your mother on your way to trying to set things straight for her, and you’re not even saying who killed her, or why, and that’s kind of bullshit, as to how I just told you about mine. He says, well, I will when I can. I said he should turn himself in, it’s over, look, you made your point, and he said he was sorry about fifteen times, and kept saying he didn’t expect even to be out right now. And I said, fine, just go turn yourself in. They’ll be glad to have you. And he said, but yeah, answer me. What if you were sure, you were absolutely sure you could kill just the man who shot your mother. So, well, then, I said if I ever find that son of a bitch, or the soldier who launched the shell that killed Nadia? I’ll do it between the breath and the sigh.”
TEN
THE VENDING-MACHINE crackers, he inhaled them all before he was back at his desk, rinsing them down with the soda. He settled in his chair, still hungry, spinning around a few times, bracing himself for the shit storm that was going to be his afternoon.
Fear hovered in the room, of getting beat, of being scooped. You could feel it, like humidity. R.J., he was hunkered down, phone in his ear, tapping away at the keyboard, looking up at the screen. He’d sent Sully a one-word note through the paper’s messaging system, in all caps, a subtle reminder of what he was to be working on: “TICKTOCK.”
The time line of events, the daily lede. Right right right. Like he already had something to fucking write—other than the call from Waters, which, for all he knew, he would be prohibited from using.
He clicked into the desk’s copyediting system, found the TICKTOCK slug that R.J. had created, and opened it. Nothing. He went back to the menu to see if other reporters assigned to the story, the ones who would file their reports, data, or sound bites with their initials tacked on after the slug, had filed anything yet. Of course not.
A drink, right about now, would be a lovely thing. Basil’s? Or maybe Blanton’s, with one big-ass cube in the middle of the glass?
He saw Keith over at his desk, moving in a hurry, picking up things from his desk drawer, putting them in a briefcase. Keith was a briefcase kind of guy. He covered Superior Court and was good at it, chatting up the lawyers and judges and pegging the cops who came through to testify, catching them all hanging on the second floor, leaning against the rail looking down into the maw of the first-floor lobby, the salmon stream of incoming people, perps, witnesses.
“What they got you doing?” Sully said, walking over, leaning on the cubicle wall.
Keith, never slowing: “U.S. attorney’s office. Thoughts and reaction. Since they’ll be handling the prosecution. Half the office is fighting the other half to get it, providing the feds don’t blow Waters’s head off first. You?”
“Rewrite. Lede-all.” Sully looked down at the briefcase. “But you’re headed back over to Super.”
Keith looked back at him, his no-bullshit brown eyes flat but intense.
“Yeah. Terry Waters had been in D.C. before yesterday; you pick that up?”
“Dazzle me.”
“Okay, that 911 call? He knew about St. E’s, even called it that, instead of St. Elizabeths? You just blow into town, that place isn’t on the tour.”
Sully squinted. “Hunh. You ever been up there?”
“Couple of times. Hinckley’s always looking for an appeal.”
“I’d forgotten that asshole.”
“It’s a holdover from when St. E’s had a national mandate, when it was the nation’s premier mental hospital. All the presidential assassins were held there. Richard Lawrence, tried to kill Andrew Jackson. Charles Guiteau should have been up there but they hung him first. Celebrities, too. Mary Fuller, the silent film star. Ezra Pound.”
“Guiteau. I remember Johnny Cash’s song from when I was a—wait, what did you say?”
“What did I say what?”
“Pound? The poet?”
“Yeah, Christ, they had him for a dozen years or something. Mostly ’cause he was a communist with a hard-on for Mussolini during the war. So look, it’s a straw, not a reed, that Waters has been living here, but I’ll do the clutching thing since he mentioned the place. Check the records at Superior, the arrest records at MPD, then hit social services, see if he had any contact with the system, maybe he was living under a bridge. I got Susan in research started on real estate transactions, just to see if he bought something.”
Sully nodded, deciding to keep it quiet, the details of the call that morning. He’d check if Pound and Eliot had been friends.
Keith put his sport coat on, the tie dangling, picked up his briefcase, and blew past Sully. “I get anything, I’ll send you a feed about six.”
ELEVEN
Half the afternoon, they’d all been watching it unfold on live television, transfixed, the anchors giving the play-by-play that Waters had been tracked to this dump in Northeast D.C. and was now holed up.
It was full-blown drama: helicopters two hundred yards up, hovering, intersection choked off, squad cars, SWAT vans, armored vehicles, an ambulance, canine units, guys in flak jackets, the parking lot blocked off.
Two tactical teams approached from opposite sides of the hotel. One from the front parking lot, the other from the back. The back unit went up the steps in the rear and came to the front via the second-story breezeway, about six doors down from the room in question. No doubt sniper units had it covered from across the street. Then the other SWAT unit came up the concrete steps in front in a flash, blew past their comrades giving them cover, and were down to the door in nothing flat, blowing it just that quick, the shock shattering the cheaply made plateglass window. It was just great damn television, Sully standing among the crowd in the newsroom, arms folded, chewing on the inside of his lip.
Twenty, maybe thirty seconds later, six guys came back out. They were like pallbearers, three on each side, a half-naked, ponytailed man between them, trussed up and carried like a casket. Down the steps they went, the man not appearing to move, and then they disappeared into the massed vehicles.
The paper had Chris, that sad sack motherfucker from Metro, out there breathlessly calling in updates. Keith had been rocketed out there from Superior Court and posted on the far side of New York Avenue, and Deena, who covered the Department of Justice, was there working sources, looking for that tip to get them an inside account.
And so it was Deena who called it in a few minutes later: Mr. Ponytail Man was a plumber from Gaithersburg who came to the big city to score some smack, shoot up, bang two hookers, and then pass out, dead to the world. The hookers had called it in, looking for a lifetime Get Out of Jail Free card.
“File it under ‘horseshit,’” Deena was saying, her voice rising on her editor’s speaker, so the assembled behind him could hear, and then she was saying she had to get fucking A across town to pick up the kid from the extended hours of summer camp she’d stuck them in this morning and she was twenty minutes late and being late meant a twenty dollar fine plus five dollars a minute and this had all turned into a steaming pile of crap—all this before the editor, Tom, could click the call from speaker to his headphones, the room getting a blast of maternal fury.
Deena’s attitude sluiced across Sully’s mind, wiping out any hopes of actual news. The raid, which had been shaping up to be the lede if the suspect was the Capitol murderer—they were going to nail the son of a bitch—slid south like owl shit on ice and now they didn’t have anything at all.
The channel they were still watching cut to a live shot of Dalton Talmadge, the hard-right senior senator from Oklahoma, bellowing at a presser on the western steps of the Capitol. Talmadge was treating the murder of his fellow legislator, a “man I know, and know his wife and family,” as a natural campaign platform for the reelection campaign of Dalton Talmadge.
“. . . and this, this piece of human garbage will not deter us from the work at hand!” Talmadge was saying, actually shaking his fist. “I am not afraid to be here! I will introduce legislation on the first day of business to secure our great Capitol from this sort of terrorism! I will see to it that this sick killer is caught and that he gets every lash of justice he is due!”
He looked at R.J. and R.J. looked at him.
“‘Lash of justice’?” R.J. said.
“Best quote I’ve heard all day. It’s also the only quote I’ve heard all day.”
“Story is slugged at seventy inches. That’s about twenty-five hundred words.”
“Are you trying to inspire me to greatness,” Sully said, sitting on the edge of a desk, folding his arms, the newsroom crowd filtering away now, “or compel me to quit?”
“I am all about inspiration, fear, motivation, blackmail, gunplay,” R.J. said, fiddling with his bow tie. Hand knotted. You could tell. Perfectly done. Probably had them tailor-made. “So how close are you?”
“To quitting?”
“Filing. You can quit tomorrow.”
“Ten or twelve of the approximately twenty-five feeds I was supposed to have had in hand an hour ago are actually in. Half of them ain’t worth shit and the other half are shit. I know feeds for somebody else’s story aren’t why anyone comes to work here, but Christ, man, a professional standard, I thought that sort—”
“So you don’t have anything but your dick in your hand.”
“Who said I’d gotten that far?”
Sully pushed himself off the desk, wandered into the hallway, threw his pen down the long, empty space in front of him, then picked it up and went down the steps and out of the building, the humidity assaulting him as soon as he pushed the glass doors open, coming out on the sidewalk.
To do, to do . . . what he wanted, what would fit the mental bill, was to be out on the boat, he thought, his crooked gait slowing, hands in his pockets, the din in his ears slowly being replaced by traffic, a jet overhead, the guy in the parking garage across the street, yelling for somebody pulling out to come back, come back.
The boat. Out on the Potomac in the gloaming, idling really, on that notch of the river just above the Key Bridge. The bluffs, densely green and overgrown this time of year, rose dramatically on both sides, but most prominently on the west, on the Virginia shore. The George Washington Parkway rose from river level beneath the Key Bridge to, what, a couple of hundred feet in less than a mile, the car lights winking in the oncoming darkness, flitting from behind the trees, emerging into an open stretch. Farther along, after the road turned inland, there were the mansions set on the bluffs, their patio lights barely visible this time of year, lost among the trees and the tangled overgrowth and shrubs.
That was the image that rose in his mind. Cut the engine on that notch of the river, just down from the rocks called the Three Sisters, letting it drift, bourbon on the rocks rattling in the glass, one hand on the wheel, not really thinking, night falling. . . .
As it was, he was stuck in the mosquito-breeding swamp called downtown, simmering at a low boil between the Potomac and the Anacostia. Looking up, taking in the snatches of sky between the buildings, it was all a hazy brown, not cloud-covered and not blue sky either, just heat and smog and asphalt and buildings of brick and concrete and glass, people walking around like clubbed fish, dazed but not quite dead. Washington in August. An Edward Hopper painting in three-quarter time.
Deadline, he thought, looking at his watch. It’s what writers had instead of religion. He was three minutes late for a meeting in Eddie Winters’s office.
* * *
“So what the FBI director wants,” Eddie was saying, before he even sat down, “in addition to the wiretaps on Sully’s line and our switchboard, is for Sully to cooperate”—he stressed the word, looking hard at Sully—“with their behavioral sciences unit. Go over any more calls the man makes. Assess tone, verbal tics, anything about his mother’s killing, or alleged killing, that might help them out.”
“Publication?” R.J. said, coughing, clearing his throat. “What’s their position on our publishing the call Waters made to Sully this morning?”
“To squelch. To hold off and not use it. They’re not thrilled, to master the understatement, about our using the 911 call that Sully overheard yesterday, his name, so on. The argument is that we’re giving this guy a platform, his fifteen minutes.”
Sully had plopped into the last available chair, which was right across from Eddie’s desk and next to Melissa Baird, the Metro editor. Paul Laine, the Natio
nal editor, bleary-eyed, sat next to her. Lewis leaned against the floor-to-ceiling window, as did R.J.
Melissa audibly rolled her eyes. Sully had not known that was possible. “Calls to 911 are public record, for God’s sake,” she said.
“Eventually,” Eddie said. “Not necessarily during an active shooter situation.”
“So that’s what they’re calling this, even today?”
Eddie patted the air with his right hand. “I’m just conveying their thoughts.”
Lewis pushed up off the glass but Eddie cut him off before he could say anything.
“I don’t think it’s a legal issue, Lew. Or that’s not the first issue. I think, before we get to that, we’ve got public safety, public service. We alone have information that may or may not be valuable to law enforcement in capturing a mass killer who is, if I may, making a mockery of national security. I don’t see us just telling the FBI to stuff it. We cooperated with them this morning by alerting them to the call to Sully. Sully then relayed that information to them. We haven’t published it on the Web yet. We’ve given them a head start, if nothing else. The question is if we continue to hold off until Waters is caught.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t take them into account,” Sully said, “but they don’t know any more about this guy than we do—or haven’t told us if they do. Like you say, we’ve played ball, done our civic duty, given them a head start. But who’s to say publishing the call wouldn’t help catch him? I mean, the Zodiac Killer? The San Francisco paper got letters from him and ran them.”
“Zodiac never got caught,” Melissa said. “I don’t know that’s the example we want here.”
“‘Hello from the gutters of NYC,’” R.J. said, eyes looking up and to the right, working to remember, “‘which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of NYC and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.’”
