by Neely Tucker
Sully shifted his weight, time getting short. You could only talk to dickheads like this for so long before it got ugly, and the clock was about to strike half past. “I already done said. This dude floating out there in the channel? Had six holes in his head instead of the usual five. Seven, you want to count the exit wound. Tourist boat spotted him riding the waves, they freaked, so now it’s all over television. Police? They figure he’s military, went in the water off the fort over there. Turns out you got to have a pass to get in. Which I don’t got. Like I said.”
“Whyn’t you think he didn’t fall off a yacht?” Yat.
“’Cause that’s not what MPD thinks.”
Short Stuff snorted like he was about to hawk up a wad. “Like they know shit.”
“John Parker,” Sully said, cutting his gaze back to Shorty. “When I say MPD? I’m meaning John Parker.”
He threw the name out there—the head of D.C. Homicide—to show he wasn’t a fuckhead, right, and to see if they knew the name, to get a gauge of what level of the crew he was dealing with. Short Stuff clocked his head a quarter turn.
“Hey, Parker? John Parker? Hey, fuck him, fuck you,” he said. “You know where you at, fool?”
“The Bend.”
“Then you ought to fucking know better.”
“So you saying you didn’t see nobody down here last night, picking up a couple dime bags? Gunshots? Nothing?”
The two didn’t speak or look at one another. But Lanky Dreads blinked again—three, four times, bap bap, just like that—and it gave Sully the idea that maybe Lanky didn’t have the heart for what had gone down. That was all the confirmation he needed.
“MPD been down here?” Sully said, putting the top back on the pen, flipping the notebook shut. Short Stuff and Lanky were ten feet away, standing maybe three feet apart, between him and the rest of the park.
“Parker’s your bitch,” Short Stuff said. “Ask him.” Axt.
Sully nodded, a half smile, not putting much into it. “Well. Yeah. So.” He picked up the helmet and backpack, moving forward, right between them because going around would have been giving ground and if you flinched, hunched over, slowed, showed any sign of deference, they’d beat your ass into the dirt for being that weak. It was the same everywhere you went. Bosnia, Somalia, South Africa, Lebanon, the Bend. Dudes, half-cocked.
He got within two steps of them and Lanky said, “That your Ducati at the curb?” Sully got the smell of sweat, of flesh, of ganja, of closed rooms and broken mirrors and moldy carpet, the smell and feel of the projects.
“The 916. Yeah.”
“Bring that out to the Cove. Run you for pinks.”
Sully worked up a cough, laughing, the you-gotta-be-kidding-me thing, turning his shoulders to edge through, making sure he didn’t bump either one of them. “For pinks? Nah, nah, you ride what, I’m guessing here, a ’Busa?” he said. “And it’s an eleven-second bike in the quarter, some shit like that?”
“Ten-eight.”
He was past them now, walking backward, keeping eye contact, keeping it light. “Doubt that. But the Duc ain’t a straight-line bike. I’d be looking at your ass the last two hundred.”
“Reporter man?” This from Short Stuff.
Sully kept walking backward, not slowing down but not going any faster than he had to, either, and now he switched his gaze to acknowledge who was talking. Short Stuff had shucked his piece down into his hand, which was now out of his jacket pocket, flat against his leg.
“Stop walking.”
“I’m on deadline.”
“I say stop walking.”
Sully, still moving, looked at his watch, looked up and smiled. “I got an hour and fifteen. And I got to—”
Short Stuff flipped the pistol forward and brought it level, pointed sideways, gangster chic, aiming at Sully’s chest.
Sully stopped, still smiling, but raising his eyebrows, giving the man the respect he wanted. He brought his hands up a hey-you-got-me motion. “Okay. What? What are we talking about here?”
“Don’t be bringing that broke-ass bike back down here, ’less you want to float yourself. You feel me?”
“Yeah. I do. Yeah. Okay? I hear you. But you got to know MPD’s gonna come down here in a couple hours, start sweating you, the Hall brothers, everybody? You know that, right? That throwing the dude in the channel didn’t fool anybody with a double-digit IQ?”
Short Stuff brought his chin up. “Thought you said they made the floater for military. From the fort. Over there.”
Sully, giving him that same shrug, moving backward again. “Me, myself? I don’t trust MPD for shit.”
TWO
“IT’S A FLOATER story, but I don’t know how good,” he was saying, back in the newsroom, back in the recycled air of the office, the quiet hum of the overhead fluorescents making him wish he was back out on the water, wishing R.J. would get up off him for a minute.
“Dead body in the Washington Channel, scaring the tourists, what’s not to love?” R.J. said, leaning over the wall of his cubicle, an editor looking for fresh meat for the final edition. He was rubbing his beard, the paper’s wise old man in high good humor, his still-black hair slicked back over his scalp, the bow tie knotted at the button-down collar, all but chortling about this one. “I saw it on the television a few minutes ago. It’s all over cable now, did you know? Talking heads yammering about floating bodies, the nation’s capital gone to hell in a handbasket.”
“I sort of thought it did that a while back.”
“And you got the tourists, right?” R.J. said, looking down at him, his eyes big and weird through the bifocals. “Yahoos from flyover, a-damn-mazed this happened in sight of the Capitol Building?”
“Yes. At the marina. They were quite upset.”
“You’d think they’d read the papers before they got here,” R.J. snorted. “We’ve been the murder capital since when, Bush? Reagan? Carter? You get anything great? Like, ‘I had to cover my kid’s eyes,’ or—”
“Two of them said it was Clinton’s fault.”
“Any logic ascribed to that position?”
“Are you serious?”
“Like maybe they thought he tossed Monica in the water, and—”
“Floater was black. And male.”
R.J. sighed, still with the beard. “Well. That’s not very creative.”
“No.”
“That’s going to put a dent in the story—I mean, not that it should, but you know—”
“I could just make some shit up.”
“Nah,” R.J. said absently, looking at his nails now, not getting it. “Nobody has a sense of humor anymore.” He blew out his lips, looking around, coming out of a trance, realizing the hour. “We gotta do something for the daily.”
“I know it.”
“You got out on the water, talked to the cops?”
“With Dave, on the WCJT launch. I been thinking about getting me a little boat myself.”
“Thrilled. Look, if you can get MPD to say it was drug related, that’d help. Could you do that? You know, ‘Drug wars spilling out into tourist country,’ yada yada. But what would be great, I mean give this thing some elevation, if he’s some sort of diplomat, an attaché at an embassy, or an, an operative, with a couple of passports—”
“A diplomat in baggy jeans and dreads,” Sully said, rolling back in his chair, propping his feet on his desk. “The Ambassador to the State of the Most High.”
“Jamaican! He could be, like, an operative of—”
“—the dreaded Blue Mountain coffee mafia? Rastas don’t get into the diplomat thing, R.J. And he might be a narc, but that’s hardly your CIA henchman.”
R.J., pulling off his glasses, polishing them, looking at his watch. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Trying to get us somewhere. Look, unless we get some sort of ID on floater man? I’
m talking twelve inches below the fold on the Metro front. Maybe even inside. A lost day.”
Ah, shit, Sully thought. Little in the life of R.J. was worse than a lost day. He’d won two Pulitzers, been a finalist twice more, never mind the George Polks. The man was carpe diem and kick over the sandbox of life.Front page and cleavage or it was bullshit, that was R.J.’s take.
“Sometimes it’s just vitamins, brother, not steak sauce,” Sully said.
“Come again?”
“It’s going to run on B-12, not A-1, no matter what we do.”
“You southern people are so colorful. Well. Here’s a thought. You’ve had a run of vitamin stories of late, lad. Pop out front. Try the steak sauce.”
“We tie it to the Bend,” Sully said, pulling his feet down, rolling up the chair to the desk, “we’ll be getting somewhere. I went down there just now, two vampires show up, say they’ll cap my ass, I come nosing around again. I say to you, I just stepped on a nerve. I say to you, floater man went into the water right there, in Frenchman’s Bend. This is going to be the M Street Crew, the South Capitol Crew; they’re always beefing in Southwest. The Hall brothers run the—”
“‘Vampires’ being your term for drug dealers.”
“Bloodsuckers. Yeah.”
“They know anything about floater man?”
“Like they’re going to spout to me? But yeah, one of them, this kid, he blinked.”
“He blinked?”
“He blinked.”
“You’re fucking with me now, right? Just to have something to do?”
“He blinked a lot.”
R.J. looked at him, hard. Then blinked. Three times.
“Clearly the man is guilty of murder. How could anyone doubt this? ‘Blinker Man Kills Floater Man.’ I say we go hard with it on 1-A.”
“No, I mean, what I’m saying, he has this little affectation, this tic. He blinks bam bam bam, seven or eight times in a row. He knows something.”
“Good tracking, Kemo Sabe, but that’s not going to carry the water. Maybe you want to get your guy Parker to spout. He’s the homicide director, right?”
“Chief. John Parker is the chief of MPD Homicide. He ain’t going to say nothing until he knows for sure. There’s not even an ID on the body yet.”
“Maybe he could blink it to you.”
Sully rubbed his eyes. “I shouldn’a gone out there. I knew it and did it anyway.”
“Like blink blink, pause, blink. Blink. Morse code. You know?”
“I repeat.”
R.J., running with it now. “A homicide cop, blinking like that, I’d say means they just busted Pablo Escobar down at Twelfth and—”
“Did you have any sort of point in mind or—”
“—they got—what? What did you say? Are you with me here? Without a reliable source with an ID for floater man,” R.J. said, coming back to the point, opening his eyes wider, “we don’t have any connection to the Bend, correct? All we got is that there was a man in the water and he—”
“Scared the tourists,” Sully finished for him.
R.J. raised his eyebrows, mock incredulous. “Get the man the stuffed giraffe from the top rack! So we’re seeing it the same way.”
“Mas o menos.”
“Unless you can work some sort of miracle before the five o’clock.”
“Not happening,” Sully said. “I’ll send you something short and mean.” He sat up straight in his chair and poked his head up over the divider, seeing Chris two rows down, filing something, stuck on the cops beat, dying to move up to something more glamorous. He plunked back down. “And could you smooth it over with Chris? That I just happened across this?”
“Don’t want his panties in a twist because you bigfooted him again? Look. Get the ID. Then floater man becomes a Specific Dead Man, and Mr. Specific might just be a story.”
And then R.J. badda-badda-bapped the top of the cubicle, a little drum roll, like he’d told Sully something he didn’t know, and he was off, his loafers hushed on the carpet, going to talk Chris down off the ledge.
The clock on the wall was ticking past four. The newsroom at this hour was a place that if you didn’t want a drink before, you did after. Editors with armpits about to break into a sweat, stories that were evaporating or that were taking too damn long or just were too damn long. Copy editors settling in to examine the belly buttons and lint of newspaper copy. Reporters with fixed faces and ties or blouses askew, legs crossed at the knees, feet pumping, leaning forward and slapping keyboards like they were percussion instruments, talking too damn loud into the phone. Sully could swear, actually swear, that he could hear the clock tick from twenty paces.
He opened a file in the paper’s word processing system, tapped in a slug, floaterman, and then closed his eyes. The shrink. His shrink. Ah, Christ. He was supposed to have been there thirty minutes ago.
He picked up the phone and turned his shoulder into it so the words wouldn’t travel to the next cubicle and tapped in the psychiatrist’s number, and Gene Henderson himself picked up, surprising him.
“You’re not here,” Henderson said, his tone abrupt, no hi-hello, sounding exasperated. Sully didn’t mind the man, actually liked him a little.
“Astute, even for a former military man such as yourself.”
“Is there an explanation?”
“I’m working,” Sully said back down the line, pleasantly. “This dead guy turned up in the channel. It didn’t make sense to stop working to come talk about work, if you see what I’m saying here.”
“You didn’t call me beforehand to cancel.”
“The dead dude didn’t call me, either,” Sully said. “That’s the thing about dead people.”
Henderson was talking then, taking that official tone, telling him that by the contract the paper had signed, he now was required to inform HR that Sully had missed the appointment and that this was the third one this year, three in four months, and that was way over the line of—
“Peachy, peachy, peachy,” he said, cutting Henderson off. “Just be sure to tell them that I couldn’t make your appointment because I was covering the murder of a young man and having other young men with guns say they’ll shoot me if I come back and ask any more questions about it and, you know, if they’d like to cough up some combat pay for that sort of work I’d be pleased.”
“Three times in four months,” Henderson repeated.
Sully, looking in his desk for gum and not finding any, the worry about bourbon on his breath in the back of his mind. You’d think gum wouldn’t be a hard thing to keep in a desk. “So you’ll bill me for it,” he said. “You won’t go broke and neither will I.”
“Next week, same time,” Henderson said. “You’d do well to remember this isn’t an optional program.” The line disconnected. Sully looked at the phone and decided he liked Henderson a little less today than he did yesterday.
He slumped back in the chair so far his skinny ass was barely on the seat, stuck a pen in his mouth to chew, and proceeded to take the easy day-hit cheap shot:
Tourists aboard a sightseeing yacht in the Washington Channel were startled yesterday to see a corpse floating past their view of the Tidal Basin.
A few minutes later, across the way, R.J. hooted, reading behind him.
“My boy!” he exclaimed. “You’re so subtle!”
THREE
AFTER HE HAD filed—floaterman was a dozen inches, buried deep inside Metro—it was still just six thirty, middle of the week. The day had clouded over and now it was starting to mist. Ta-dum ta-dum. It was happy hour somewhere. There was a baseball or basketball game on at a sports bar, sure, but it wasn’t football so who gave a fuck? That left his late-night plans with Alexis.
She was back home for a couple of weeks, R&R from her posting in Cairo, in the middle of a photo project on the Israeli pullout from S
outhern Lebanon. Had he not been blown up in Bosnia, he mused, he likely would be in Jerusalem now himself, a room at the American Colony, a bottle of Basil Hayden’s with his name on it at the bar, evening runs up the hill to the Mount of Olives and then back, the sweat and the chill evening air and the Garden of Gethsemane in the middle distance, calling up some hot Israeli chick, Hey, we’re just having a drink at the Colony and . . .
As it was, here he sat, fucked-up leg, fucked-up story, fucked-up life.
He thought about calling Alexis, see if she could meet him early, but nah, she was supposed to have dinner with the brass: the publishers; Eddie Winters, the executive editor; the honchos running the foreign desk. The kind of evening that would start at the Palm and move to the bar of the Hay-Adams, going past the Washington witching hour of ten—amazing, how the powers that be in this town ran for home at that hour. Given that, he and Alexis had made plans for drinks at his place at eleven.
But that was what, four hours and change? To do, to do. Movie listings, flapping open the Features section, staring at the agate type: costume drama, rom com, rom com, horror. Christ. He didn’t want to go to his row house on Capitol Hill and stare at his backyard thinking he should have mowed his tiny rectangle of grass last weekend, he didn’t want—
He picked up the phone.
“John? Hey, Parker?” he said into the cop’s cell-phone voice mail. “No shit. Need the ID of floater man, partner. Call me when you get it. Anytime.”
He clicked off and looked around until his eyes settled on his murder map of the city. It was new for the year but there were already sixty or seventy pins on it, each marking a killing. The map—his oracle, his witchcraft, his guide to understanding the ways of the living by divining the ways of the dead—was a poster-sized replica of the city’s seven police districts, with homicides marked in each.
There were already three in or near the Bend, each of them noted with black pins and little red crosses that he marked on the map at the place of the killing. The color of the pin denoted that they were black men. The red crosses, marked with a colored pencil, denoted that their cases were unsolved. White victims got white pins; Hispanic, yellow; women, pink. No matter the color of the pin, most of them had red crosses, too.
