by Neely Tucker
“What did Eddie say?” she said. “The FBI?”
“About what?”
“The call, nimrod. Could they trace it?”
“I’d be sitting next to them if they could.”
“Nothing?”
“It was a cell. Best they could do was narrow it down, that the call came from a tower in Northwest D.C.”
“So, he hasn’t blown town.”
“Apparently not, but I don’t know that’s news. Look, he could have been tooling down Georgia Avenue on a bus, sitting on a park bench at Carter Barron, under a log in Rock Creek Park, holed up in a basement on the Gold Coast, or driving the proverbial late-model sedan, dark in color, on the inner loop of the Beltway, heading for a burger at Mickey D’s. As I understand it, it’s about a fifteen-mile range, radius, something. Since then? Assuming he’s driving sixty miles an hour, forty-five on back roads? He could be anywhere from the Eastern Shore to West Virginia, from Pennsylvania to Richmond.”
She sat back, holding the drink in her lap. It dripped with condensation, with melting ice, with the still-present humidity that was frizzing her hair, that was wilting her linen blouse. Tiny crow’s-feet at the edge of her eyes, the years in the sun, the Third World.
The waiter came as she was finishing, the plates hot, both of them leaning back, breaking off the conversation, the man sliding the check by the side of Sully’s plate at the same time. It was that late.
“Joey, hey hey hey,” Sully said, reaching for the tab. The waiter, slim, tired, black slacks and a white shirt, already turning, coming back.
“Dos mas margaritas,” Sully said, handing him back the tab, “before you close us out.”
Joey, José, nodded, took the tab, and turned on a heel, gone before Sully could put a fork to his seafood burrito. Alexis sipped, long, slow, and lazy, on hers. She held the glass by its funky green stem—with a branch on it, like it was a cactus—in her right hand.
There were two other couples sitting outside. Maybe one or two more inside. Sully wasn’t really paying attention. One looked like a Senate staffer and a man who wasn’t her husband, the way they were sitting. The other was a gay couple he knew but couldn’t name. They lived over on Seventh. He had nodded at them when sitting down and they had nodded back and that was being neighbors on the Hill.
Joey brought the revised tab back and Sully looked at it and pulled out his wallet and put down three twenties, covering the tip. The woman and her friend a few tables over got up and left. The wind blew and the shadows floated and danced across them all.
“We got great art of that situation at the Motel 6,” Alexis said, “and then that went to shit and we had nothing.”
“What’d you go with?”
“On A-1, the center art? A soldier with an M-16, in front of the Capitol. Dramatic. And nothing related to the news of the day at all.”
“Hey, Sully?”
He looked up from his second margarita toward the door of the restaurant, expecting it to be Joey calling out something about closing up. But Joey wasn’t there and Alexis was nodding behind him toward the street, the opposite direction. He turned and the first gunshot was loud and flat and the bullet exploded Alexis’s margarita into a spray of flying glass and tequila.
The second and third and fourth shots came in blam blam blam, the man with the gun standing fifty feet away in the street. The shots skipped off the tabletop, shattered the ceramic tile, clipped off the wrought-iron chairs. Alexis fell backward, screaming, hands at her face. The plateglass window at the front of the restaurant blew out. Sully overturned the table toward the shooter and fell behind it, crawling toward his jacket, scrambling to get the Tokarev from the pocket. The shots were coming wildly now.
His right hand closed over the grip of the Tokarev.
The shooting stopped. Sully pulled out the pistol and forced himself to take a deep breath. The woman across from them was curled on the ground, crying. A plate dropped and shattered inside the restaurant.
Then the gunman’s voice arose in a guttural bellow, something primal and wounded and wretched that seemed to bounce off the pavement and echo off the buildings, filling Sully’s head and burning into the well of his memory:
“Sssssuuullllyyy!!”
And then the feds were rising from behind their flung-open car doors, guns aimed into the street, yelling over one another, “Drop it drop drop drop it drop it motherfucker DROP IT.” Sully, rising to his knees, saw the gunman lying in the middle of Mass Ave. bathed in an orange pool of light from an overhanging street lamp. He was putting his hands behind his back, his legs spread, assuming the position before the agents got there. The gun lay on the pavement, fifteen feet away. The man’s mouth hinged open and the voice that emerged sounded like a hoarse carnival barker, “Don’t shoot don’t shoot don’t shoot don’t SHOOT me goddammit.”
One of the feds pounced on him, planting a knee in his back, slamming his face into the pavement, pinning his arms to get the cuffs on. The other stayed five feet back, gun pointed, talking rapid fire into a squawking radio. Sirens in the distance.
Sully turned for Alexis. She was sitting up, dabbing at a slight cut across her forehead but otherwise unharmed. Sully rose to his feet and walked past the wrought-iron gate of the restaurant. He went over the brick sidewalk, finally remembering to tuck the pistol in the back of his waistband and let his shirt hang over it.
Then he was in the street, in the pool of light. The men on the ground were cursing and writhing. Sully kneeled on the pavement in front of them. The shooter looked up and saw him.
Blood dripped from his chin and poured from his nose. A knot rose on his forehead. Terry Waters spit a thin ribbon of blood from between his teeth.
“Still want to talk about my mom?”
THIRTEEN
ALEXIS WAS STILL rattled, still pissed off, even in the shower. Getting over the shooting maybe, but channeling her anger and shock into a lecture.
“You actually carried that gun to work.”
“I did.”
“Fucking unreal. Where did you get it?”
“Bosnia.”
“From?”
“The commander.”
“Which?”
“The Bosnian. From the night on the mountain. On Igman.”
She pulled the shower curtain back and looked at him, wiping the water from her eyes, shampoo thick and foamy in her hair. Her knuckles on the curtain trembled just slightly. “You didn’t come down with it. I was there when they loaded you on the chopper.”
“He sent it to me.”
“For what? So you could shoot somebody in America?”
He was sitting on the closed toilet seat, drying himself off. Looking at his toenails, a bone-deep exhaustion settled over him, a blanket that weighed two hundred pounds.
“Souvenir. Or something. It’s a long story.”
She let go of the curtain and stuck her head back under the water. “I’ve got all night.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I got to cover this fucker’s hearing tomorrow. They’ll present him in C-10. Superior Court.”
She turned the water off and reached for a towel. She put it to her hair, not bothering with her body. Sully appreciated the view and said so.
“Don’t you patronize me,” she snapped. “You took a gun to work today. A. Loaded. Gun. I can’t even.”
“Prudent, I thought, the way it turned out.” He felt thick-fingered, slow.
“Shots going everywhere, we go down on the ground, I look up, you’re fucking around with your cycle jacket, I’m thinking you’re trying to hide behind it, and then you pull out a pistol. For Christ’s sake. You’re lucky you got it back in there before the cops saw it.”
“I got this rule? It’s like, every time a psychopath kills people with ice picks and then calls me up to chat about our dead moms? I tote a pistol.”
“That right?” Bending to flip her hair over her head, wrapping it in the towel, then wiping the steam from the mirror, looking at the scratch across her forehead, an inch above the eyebrow.
“I got it written down somewhere, like on the refrigerator: ‘Get some milk,’ ‘Don’t forget the dry cleaning,’ like that.”
“Sully. A gun.”
“How’s your head?”
“Fine. It was just a little bit of glass.”
“Is Josh still awake?” Trying to change the subject. Opening the door a crack to let out the steam, pretending to listen for sounds from the basement.
“He barely woke up when we came in,” she said. “Didn’t seem fazed, a strange woman coming into the house late at night with his uncle, police cars out front. One wonders about the domestic environment.”
“One does?” He moved his feet to accommodate her stepping out of the shower. The bathroom was tiny. Her stomach was just in front of his face. Breasts were peaceful things, it flitted across his mind, just like that.
“Look. You can talk to me,” she said, lifting his chin up with her index finger. Just enough to make him raise his glance. It took him a second to get it.
“Later,” he said. “I’ma tell you about it later. Or your boobs. I’m sorry about the gun. I’m sorry about that, that fucking insanity at the restaurant. But it’s been a day, Alex. Two of them.”
It was three, three thirty in the morning, maybe four. What his mother would have called the witching hour.
When they had come into the house—driven back from the 1-D precinct by no less than Homicide Chief John Parker, who had come to check on him—Sully had walked upstairs and got three of the pills the doctor had given him from the little orange prescription bottle in the medicine cabinet, walked back downstairs, poured a Basil’s over ice, and slammed them home in three straight shots. He wasn’t supposed to take more than one at a time but he gave himself medical clearance.
Alexis wouldn’t let him drink after that but she was sitting up with him.
“I mean, you’ve talked to me, you’ve said, the nightmares, the PTSD things,” she was saying, pulling one of his T-shirts over her head, opening the door all the way now. “I’ve woken up next to you, you’re sleeping but sweating through your shirt, breathing so hard it wakes me up. You’ve had those ever since Igman.”
On the street outside, there was a marked patrol car at the top and bottom of the block. Another unmarked FBI van in the middle. Another unmarked on Constitution, covering the alley that ran to his backyard, and another on A Street. Just in case there was an accomplice, they said.
He followed her out into the darkened hall, the house silent. She turned into his room and got into bed, him following. Sheets and air-conditioning and her next to him. Don’t be pissed, Alex, he thought. This, this was nice. Fading fast now.
“That night in Bosnia,” she said, “I remember them bringing you down the mountain, not even daylight, the U.N. choppers coming in to airlift you out. Nobody said anything about a gun.”
“I was unconscious, so.”
“It was a bad winter.”
“Yes.”
“You’d just lost Nadia, too.”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“I was just saying I was worried about you. Am.”
“I am fine.”
“Said the idiot waltzing around with a gun.”
“I will be fine.”
“Where is this thing? As we speak?”
“Back in the closet. Alex, no kidding, can we sleep? I won’t shoot anybody before tomorrow morning, I promise.”
FOURTEEN
THE HIGH CHURCH of the Misbegotten met six days a week in Room C-10, a small hearing room at the bottom rear of D.C. Superior Court, beset by a smell that no one could ever quite place.
It was where each and every person arrested the day and night before in the nation’s capital was first presented to the judicial system. There was no bail in the District of Columbia. The brief services in C-10 were to determine if your lousy ass was a danger to the public.
If you weren’t, the magistrate gave you terms (stay away from witnesses, don’t get arrested again, don’t be an asshole), and you got to walk out of the well of the court and past the bulletproof Plexiglas, up the aisle, past the pews, out of the courthouse and into the sweet sunshine of freedom.
But if the same magistrate said you were a danger to the American People? You did not go into the sweet sunshine of anything. The marshals stepped you back and took you right back through the Door to Hell and your lousy ass would go to D.C. Jail until such a time as your right to a speedy trial came due.
That C-10 was across from the cafeteria, the smell of one often wafting into the other, had not gone unnoticed among its faithful constituents. It made you think about the food in there before you ate, but particularly after.
Fittingly, considering the human waste that channeled through C-10 for long hours each day, it was also noted by the faithful that C-10 was set at the ass end of Superior Court. The massive, charmless concrete mass of the courthouse fronted onto 500 Indiana Avenue. The back of the building, facing C Street, was several dozen feet lower, down a small hill. Entering from the front, you had to go down two stories, usually by the escalator, to the bottom floor. C-10 was at the back of that floor, hence the tag. This lowly status added to the misery and squalor of the atmosphere, for it made the room seem like a funeral parlor, like the worst storefront church in Christendom, like the outhouse at the end of the rainbow.
On the morning after the shooting, on the day when Representative Edmonds’s body began lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, Sully slept late, staggering downstairs to make brunch for Josh and Alexis, who seemed to be getting along fine without him. He spent thirty-five minutes on the phone convincing Lucinda that the weird shit was over. Alex said she would drive Josh to his class at the Corcoran on her way in to the office. So he dressed and made the mile-long walk down Capitol Hill, his dress shirt soaked at the small of his back by the time he got to the courthouse. There were tiny rivulets of sweat at his temples, the base of his throat, swelling to a puddle at the small of his back.
Stepping off the escalator onto the bottom floor, turning the corner into a short hallway, he groaned. There was already a herd in the hallway, well-dressed reporters he’d never seen before, network and cable news staff, the cut of their suits—hell, that they were wearing suits in C-10—gave them away as one-timers, big-footers, here for the headline. They talked into their cell phones, walked around in circles, leaned back against the wall, killing time, the men outnumbering the women about four to one.
“How’s church today, brother?” Sully said as he clamped a hand on the fleshy shoulder of Leonard Mahoney. Leo was a court-appointed attorney and a member of the flock in good standing. Right shoulder slumped against a wall, his plaid jacket, his sagging belly, his comb-over standing at a high wisp—Leo was instantly recognizable to any courthouse denizen. Eons from now, when they were excavating the remains of this place, they’d find the petrified remains of Leo, halfway between C-10 and a courtroom, calcified finger in place, scratching behind where his right ear had been.
Leo looked at him, then went back to staring at his hand.
“Why’d they come up with these things?” he replied, wagging a knobby little Nokia in his left hand, never lifting his shoulder from the wall. “It’s just another way for the ex to find me, is what it is. Wants to know, on a Friday morning in August, why our kids are going back to public school this year if I’m a lawyer. Says I have to be the only lawyer on the Hill whose kids are at Watkins. I say, nah, no, Jim Stevens, he’s got his kids there, and she says to me, she says, ‘I mean white people.’ When did my ex turn into a racist lunatic, that’s what I want to hear.”
“Our boy’s not up anytime soon is he?”
“
How she gets a call in down here, I can’t get a call out.”
“I’m guessing we’re not even close.”
“What, Waters? You’re here for Waters? Grab a seat if you can, hotshot. Slummers were here at sunup.”
The double doors swung open, some TV suit from New York coming out, walking fast, heading to do a stand-up out front. Sully tapped Leo’s shoulder, adios, and slipped into the sanctuary before the door could close.
The room had the fluorescent look and feel of a tuberculosis ward, a dark, phlegmy, cough and passed-gas rectangle of a courtroom dungeon. It was accessed by the double doors behind him if you were a civilian and by the Door to Hell, the locked door at the back right side of the well of the court, if you were coming from the holding cells. There were a handful of long wooden benches for observers, like pews, hence the room’s designation as The Church. A central aisle led into the well of the court, with the magistrate on an elevated platform, lording over the proceedings.
The benches on most days were not more than scattershot full. They held the rear ends and crossed legs of dead-tired mothers and aunts and sisters and cousins, of exasperated fathers and pissed-off uncles, the bouncing bottoms of toddlers brought in to sit this out till Daddy or Mama’s man came through his presentation to the court, him and a hundred other lunkheads, the tots there because there wasn’t money for a sitter, or the time to find one, or that cousin who sometimes watched the kid was across town when Daddy got popped for a bullshit traffic stop, a handgun and a dime bag beneath the seat. So the babies bounced, chomping down on pacifiers and wiggling across the seats, the only people in the room oblivious to the slow-motion train wreck of humanity on the other side of the bulletproof glass.
This—thrown in with the court-appointed lawyers and the remora-like reporters, the bored-ass assistant U.S. attorney detailed here for the day, the magistrate, the marshals up front, everybody baking, the air assaulting one’s nostrils if not one’s sense of decency—was Sully Carter’s world.