by Neely Tucker
“Son of Sam,” Paul said. “a.k.a. David Berkowitz. The letter he sent to Jimmy Breslin. Hell of a column.”
“And published while Berkowitz was on the lam,” R.J. said. “It helped convict him.”
“Ted Kaczynski, Eddie,” Paul continued. “The Unibomber. The manifesto. Published by Brand X, the Post. With the urging of Freeh, who was then running the FBI, and Reno, over at Justice. Kaczynski’s brother recognized the writing when he saw it in the paper, boom, arrest. Puts us on precedent, particularly with Freeh and Reno backing it.”
Eddie leaned back in his chair. He had taken the time to put a suit on before coming in after R.J. had reached him at home with the news of Waters’s call, but there was still no tie. His gray hair was unruly, and he had not shaved. His shirtsleeves were neatly rolled. He hadn’t taken the time for cuff links.
“Do we know exactly how he tracked you down?” Looking at Sully.
“My cell,” he said, “is on my office answering machine. ‘And if it’s urgent, you can call me on,’ right there at the end. Available to any psychopath who has the nerve to call our switchboard and ask for me.”
Eddie nodded. “But nothing, you think, nothing he said, what, followed you home, called you from across the street?”
“No.”
“Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. I’m going to tell the FBI we’re going ahead, with reasonable prudence and concern. Lead the story with the call, but completely straight. Understated. Sully, quote him before the jump. Twice after. Nothing sensational. The rest of the piece, that’s the manhunt, you’ve got everybody filing to you on that. We’ll reconvene to look it over. For now. If this drags out over the next several days, and he calls you again, we’ll decide case by case how to handle it.”
Nods around the room, pursed lips, tension.
“Meanwhile, Sully,” Eddie said, “there are now unmarked patrol cars at the top and bottom of your street, then on Constitution and A. They want permission for a shooter on your roof.”
“On my roof?”
“Best to be safe. Isn’t your nephew staying with you?”
“Until my sister has Jesus put a hit on me, yes.”
“They’ll also be giving you a ride home. Has Waters tried to reach you again?”
“No, but he couldn’t get through if he tried. I got forty-seven messages on my machine and about that many on the cell. Every television producer and assistant booker on the East Coast started bombing them both after our story went up last night. Today, every half-wit on the East Coast is calling to tell me they were in the Capitol and saw the whole thing.”
“No kidding,” Paul said. “Our phones are blowing up.”
“Is that what’s been giving me a headache all day?” Eddie asked.
“Could be ours on Metro,” Melissa said. “Every nutjob in town is calling to tell us they just saw Waters in their front yard, at the bus stop, in a blue Buick with a busted taillight, getting a Big Gulp at the 7-11.”
* * *
By eight, a little after, Sully was neck deep in rewrite, the feeds coming in fast from all over, ten, fifteen, now twenty different reports. His shirt was untucked, his hair unruly, his scarred face set. As the writer of the lede-all, he was the black hole of newsroom energy, everything and everybody orbiting him, his desk, because it would all pass through his mind and fingers and onto the front page of the paper and it had to do that in the next ninety fucking minutes.
He felt like a tuning fork that had been struck on a gong the size of Nebraska, the tension from across the room pouring into him, like he had sensor panels in his palms, on his chest. Every half-heard conversation, every argument, every bit of fear from across town—on Pennsylvania Avenue, on the Suitland Parkway, on the evening commute on a nearly empty Duke Ellington Bridge—people wondering if the killer was in the car next to them, easing a pistol up to the window at the next stoplight.
The feeling he had this morning when Waters called, the fear on Capitol Hill yesterday, the gun and the blood and the smoke from the flare, the percussion blast sending a shock wave through his skull, the hands on him, the voices screaming obscenities, arms pinning him. . . .
Now, now it was all coming out of him, a sensation like ants crawling out of his pores. He was banging on the keyboard and sweeping his hands across his forearms to sweep the invisible little bastards away between keystrokes, his aching knee and the lack of a drink killing him.
The killer said he was scared, tired, and hungry.
Sorting through story files that were piling up now like corpses at the morgue, he pulled out quotes, cut and pasted lucid descriptions of street scenes and police and political actions from the dispatches other reporters were filing as the evening wore on.
In a brief phone call to the paper, Waters said he wasn’t watching much of the televised hunt for him that is riveting the nation and shutting down large parts of the nation’s capital. “I don’t really like Washington,” he said. “It’s all disease and filth.”
A tiny alert flashed in the top right corner of his screen every time a new dispatch came in and he would have to stop what he was writing and call it up, to see if there was a stark development that needed to be plugged in high in the story. Or perhaps there was a lesser development that, when taken together with other facts that were unknown to the reporter filing the dispatch, changed or mutated the overall narrative.
“Barry Edmonds knows why I killed him. He and I talked about that. Soon everybody else will.”
Mood, like this right here. Robert Barnes, the mayor. God, if there was a better synonym for a political hack than D.C.’s two-term chief elected official, it was unknown to Sully Carter. But Barnes, when asked about the level of fear in Washington, said, “My wife didn’t walk the pug today.”
How brilliant was that? The political elite, the bastards who ran this place, they were so unnerved by the specter of Terry Waters materializing on the front doorstep with a pair of ice picks in hand that the mayoral missus wouldn’t even walk the First Dog around the block. Made him poop in the backyard. You want a tangible, cut-the-meat-off-the-bones description of fear that would resonate from the white folks in Northwest to the black folks in Southeast? That right there.
The manhunt was still centered on D.C., where bloodhounds tracked phantom trails in Rock Creek Park and along the Anacostia riverbank. But it also was radiating out into the Shenandoah, the low-slung but densely forested mountains and gullies an hour or so west. The Coast Guard was patrolling the Chesapeake, roadblocks were set up around the Beltway and on I-95, heading both north and south, and west on I-66, turning traffic into a monstrous, slow-moving worm. You could see the tie-ups from space. He heard that from behind him, somebody with a television, the evening anchor blathering. He flicked his eyes up, the clock. 8:30.
One of the largest manhunts in the history of the nation’s capital blanketed the region yesterday, as the gunman seemed to vanish into the humid August air. Checkpoints choked traffic, airports heightened security, Amtrak routes were delayed for hours, and commuter traffic grew into a monster so large that tie-ups, when viewed from satellites, took on the size and forbidding shape of something prehistoric emerging from the earth beneath.
Terry Running Waters, as the gunman identified himself in a 911 call from the Capitol, apologized for killing everyone but Edmonds. He said what he wanted most, at the moment, was a “chicken sandwich and a cold beer.”
Deadline. Now it took physical form. It was a beast that chewed into his right shoulder with a saw-toothed glee, gnawing deeper beneath the shoulder blade with each passing minute. The later it got in the newsroom, the more other reporters filed out, the more an invisible bubble seemed to grow around him. No one dared speak to him, so low in his chair was he slung, so furiously was he chewing on his pen, so intently was he staring at the screen, so violently was he whisper-cursing at each clunky bit of narrative that refused
to be transmitted from mind to fingers to screen.
Federal Washington all but ceased to exist. The Capitol, site of yesterday’s deadly rampage, was closed, with armed officers and yellow police tape blocking off the entire campus.
All adjacent congressional office buildings were closed, as was the Library of Congress. The Supreme Court was flanked by armed guards at each corner. The museums along the Mall were closed. So was the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. No tour buses ran. Pennsylvania Avenue, long known as America’s Main Street on its route between Congress and the White House, was largely deserted. Maître d’s at its high-priced restaurants leaned on the pulpits and awaited anyone—anyone at all—to ask for a corner booth.
His solitude was broken only by R.J. coming over every now and again to whisper in his ear that Eddie loved the story, he did, but if Sully could maybe move the second sentence of the third graf into the lede, and move the second sentence of the lede graf into the fourth, that would be lovely, just lovely, and Paul had the smallest of concerns about the eighth graf because that was going to be the one right before the jump. This kept up until Sully loudly broadcast, at 8:58, spying R.J. getting up from his seat once again, “I’m taking a swing blade to the next dickless wonder who comes within five fucking feet.”
R.J. sat back down without making eye contact, acting like he was straightening the crease in his khakis.
Despite the massive police presence, despite the assurances from the nation’s highest levels of law enforcement, a gunman who was executing people in the Rotunda of the Capitol yesterday was still on the lam as night fell for a second day. Darkness came and a sense of safety, of national security, fell with it.
His cell buzzed at 9:26. The top of his head nearly fucking blew off. He let go of the keyboard—he’d been clinging to it for so long it felt like a life raft—and fished the cell out of his backpack. “This is Carter and this better be fucking good.”
“Sully?” the man’s voice said. “You know one of the things I discovered about paranoia today? That thing assholes say at bars, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t following you’? You know, that, that, that’s actually true.”
“Hadn’t occurred to me,” Sully said. “So how you livin’, Mr. Waters?”
TWELVE
“I’M A LITTLE disappointed, tell you the truth,” Waters said down the line, the voice clear and steady. Sounded like a landline, but Sully couldn’t be sure. You got into trouble trying to overinterpret tiny impressions into major facts, and he didn’t want to do that here. He just wanted to keep the guy talking long enough until he gave something away. Possibly gave something away.
“Welcome to America,” Sully said, wedging the phone between his ear and shoulder, keeping both hands on the keyboard, typing furiously.
“I think my people should be saying that to yours.”
“Touché,” Sully said, “but you’re going to have to be more specific. Everybody comes to America, hates it, but never goes home. It’s like a bigger version of Washington.”
Waters let out a long breath. Like he was a smoker and was blowing out the cloud. “I thought somebody would have caught me by now,” he said. “I mean, how many dickheads do they have looking for me, about eight thousand?”
“I hear you,” Sully said, standing, waving both arms above his head, making a huge X, then making it again, trying to get somebody’s attention, anyone at all. “I thought that was you at the Motel 6 today.”
A short bark of a laugh.
“Sully, look now. If we’re going to talk, and I like talking to you, we’ve got to understand each other better. That hotel is for hookers and gangbangers.”
No one was looking. It was like he was doing calisthenics and nobody could stand to watch.
“Apologies,” Sully said, working to keep his breathing even. “I thought they left the light on for everybody. I figured maybe in reduced circumstances and all, you might, ah, be a lonely man in shirtsleeves, leaning out of a window.”
In desperation, he picked us his stapler and fired it at R.J., missing the back of the man’s head and his computer screen by inches, but hitting the framed picture of R.J. and Elwood dead center, shattering the glass and sending it clattering against the other tchotchkes in his cubicle. The man came three inches out of his seat, then turned, face going red until he saw Sully pointing his finger like a pistol, then pointed to the phone, then plunked back down, typing at knuckle-busting speed to try to keep up.
There was a sigh. Waters said, “‘Lonely men in shirtsleeves.’ You spent the afternoon brushing up on your Eliot.”
“Well, sure,” Sully said. “Thought you were trying to tell me something.”
R.J. was loping across the newsroom to Eddie’s office.
“I was, I mean, I am,” Waters said. Not stuttering, more confident than this morning. Not apologizing about anything. “I was thinking, I mean today, and I decided it’s a good thing we met. And that we meet again. We have things to discuss. You can tell my story for me. It’s like it was meant, you know? I hadn’t thought about this part of it.”
Eddie was talking into the phone, standing up, looking out from his office all the way over to Sully, rolling his extended index finger around and around, telling him to keep the man talking.
“Don’t know how you’re going to do that, being on the run and all,” Sully said. “Maybe you check in with the feds, then we can sit down and have a long chat. Your mom. Remember? You were going to tell me about her.”
Breathing, down the line. Labored. Was he walking? Pissed off? “Sully, okay. You’ve got to understand this. It’s key. Only the hunted run. I, me, I’m not the hunted. I’m not running. I hunt. I am the hunter.”
* * *
“The hell does that even mean?” Alexis said, looking over her margarita at him, three or four or five tiny crystals of salt sticking to her upper lip. “The most hunted man in America thinks he’s the predator?”
Her eyes were bright, despite the hour, despite the waning light of the outdoor café, and the shadows that fell and swooped across her face, the waving branches of the trees in the courtyard and light breeze that came down Massachusetts Avenue. She was leaning forward over the ceramic outdoor table, her hair undone, falling over her shoulders. Jesus Mary and Joseph, she was something. You could just feel her presence coming across the table. The tilt to her chin, the way she’d kicked off her shoes when they sat down, the direct nature of her gaze. Every now and again the breeze would catch and lift her bangs over her forehead and they would flutter down again, a little more askew each time.
“We’re talking a delusional psycho,” Sully said, settling his cycle jacket over the back of his chair, bringing it home out of habit, even if the bike was back in the garage at the paper. “So I wouldn’t put too much into it. He’s right about the hunting thing, though. Our boy has stalked some game.”
“How so?”
It was closing in on midnight and they were sitting on the brick courtyard of La Loma. The Mexican place on the Hill. A converted two-story row house in a block of them. They were drinking margaritas on the rocks but the food hadn’t come yet. The FBI had insisted that agents drive him home after the phone call from Waters, thinking he might be obsessing on Sully, trailing him. Since Alexis was still at the paper, and since she’d given him shit for not calling her the previous night, he’d invited her to come for a late dinner and then shack at his place.
On the short drive, Sully called Josh, who was happily glued to Cheerleaders on Top, or whatever he was watching that was sending Sully’s pay-per-view bill into triple digits. Sully reminded him not to leave the house and if he heard clambering from the backyard, that was just the feds’ sniper getting to the roof. He tried to pass this off as something that happened, like it was a regular thing, worrying the boy was going to freak. Josh just said that was awesome. Also, reading Sully’s
mind, he said that his mom had called but not to worry, he hadn’t told her anything.
By that time, the car was moving up deserted Mass Ave., the yellow and red lights of La Loma gleaming off to the left. They pulled to the curb. Sully asked the agents if they wanted to eat. The crewcut on the right, chewing gum and staring straight ahead, said they’d wait in the car. Pissed, you could tell.
The tequila was going straight to his head. It was the best feeling he’d had all day.
He dipped a tortilla chip in the salsa and let it flit across his mind just how walk-into-a-wall gorgeous Alexis was, looking at him like this, just the two of them. He hoped she wouldn’t go back abroad. He’d been thinking all summer, ever since she came back, of a way he could communicate this without saying it outright.
“Hunting, tracking game, if you’re running? You can’t hear nothing,” he said, munching. “You can’t hear what your deer or whatever is doing. You also can’t see. You miss things. So. Whenever possible, you stop. You listen. You learn where your prey is and where it’s going. Then you track until you can get a clear shot.”
She flicked her tongue across her lips, taking care of the salt crystals, then sipped from part of the rim that was salt-free. “Sounds like your deer would just get away, great white hunter.”
He snorted.
“I’ll send you down to Mr. Gentry’s hunt camp,” Sully said, “like my daddy sent me. Out there off the bayou. You don’t kill down there, you don’t eat. You tell Mr. Gentry, you tell him he’s got it wrong all this time.”
He was loving the breeze, the shadows. Nothing was so wonderful as putting a monster piece on 1-A with I-can’t-believe-that-shit detail. He wished La Loma stayed open all night. He’d sit here with Alexis till the sun came up.
