Only the Hunted Run

by Neely Tucker

  He repeated it back to her. R.J.’s waiting call stopped, then, ten seconds later, started right back. “Okay, look, what about good old George Hudson Harper? He show up in LexisNexis?”

  “I pulled it, but it’s a common name. Lots of hits, all over the country.”

  “That land his grandad owned,” Sully said. “He could have been living out there, with the money from the business. All but off the grid.”

  “In D.C. and surrounding, there are four George Harpers between the ages of thirty-eight and forty, which would be in the range of our boy’s birthday. Two are African American. One of the Anglos lives in Chevy Chase, the other one in D.C. at . . .” she paused, “at 3964 Xenia.”

  “Bingo,” Sully said. “Tell Keith I’ll meet him there in twenty minutes.”

  He clicked off that line, then fumbled with the thing, trying to see how to click over to R.J. and tell the driver, at the same time, to switch directions, to bolt down to Southeast, for Xenia.

  Into the phone, talking to R.J., he said, preemptively, “I got no idea, so don’t be asking me.”

  “Sullivan? What?”

  “I got no idea why the man wants me to show up tonight, what the hell this is about.”

  “Bullshit,” R.J. said. “You leave here, saying you got a way to get in to see him, then, blam, he wants a meeting with you, PDS, what’s his name, the prosecutor.”

  “Wesley.”

  “Yeah, well, that guy’s an asshole. He was just on the phone, lighting up Eddie. Trying to light up Eddie.”

  “About what?”

  “Misconduct, your end, something. Says you’ll taint whatever it is the man wants to say, you’re there. So, what, did you get in to see him? You didn’t do anything stupid, did you?”

  Sully thought about this for a second, the driver’s eyes now searching his, mutely asking which way to go, Sully repeating the address.

  “I’m not taking you there,” the driver said.

  “3964 Xenia,” Sully repeated. “Come on, man, go go go.” To R.J., he said, “No. Didn’t get in.”

  “I thought you said you had a guy.”

  “I did, but it didn’t work out right.”

  The driver pulled the cab to the curb, put it in park, turned on his flashers. “No.”

  “What?” Sully said. “What are you doing?”

  “Who are you talking to?” R.J. said.

  “Buy your own drugs,” the driver said.

  R.J.: “Wait, drugs? What the hell is going on?”

  Sully, ready to punch somebody: “Pipe down, R.J., hold on. You, look, drive, goddammit. This ain’t a drug run. I’m a fucking reporter.”

  The driver, unmoved, motioning to the door.

  Sully reached into his back pocket, tugged out the wallet. “Look. What, I got forty, fifty dollars, there’s seventy . . . okay. Seventy-three. That’s all I got.” He handed it over the seat. “I can’t be buying drugs with money I don’t have. You got it.” His ID was there, so he handed that over, too. “See? A reporter.”

  The driver, hesitating now, looking at the rumpled clump of bills. “Reporters, you people do drugs, too.”

  “Not this one,” Sully said, “I drink. Now would you please drive?”

  Still not liking it, looking at the curb, the oncoming traffic, the driver clicked off the blinkers and pulled back into traffic, shaking his head.

  Sully pulled the phone off his lap, talking into it now, “Okay, R.J. No, we didn’t get in. I’m guessing, what, I don’t know, maybe Waters heard I was trying and he spooked.”

  “Couldn’t you give me a heads-up, for Christ’s sake? I’m sitting here at the desk, Agent Gill calls, she’s in my ear before I even know what she’s talking about.”

  “Just found out about it myself,” he said. “Apparently this went down this afternoon, while I was at the G.W. library.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s the key that turns the lock. Ask Susan, she’s got it solid. I don’t got time now. But, I mean, look, tell Eddie we’re going with this tonight for tomorrow’s paper. We got it cold, the whole thing. Save me fifty inches on the front. Tell Alexis to get herself or another shooter up there for fresh art of St. E’s, before it gets dark. This guy, he’s going to make a statement, a confession, something.”

  “They’re saying this thing is at seven. You going to have time to write?”

  “Keith will be coming back to the office before me. He can get the b-matter in, the background, the stuff Susan’s got, and I’ll come in and top it off.”

  “It’s going to be tight,” R.J. said. “And we still don’t know what this meet-up is going to amount to, if anything. If there’s news, we write. If not, we sit on it for twenty-four hours.”

  “Tonight, R.J. We can’t get beat on this. Not now.”

  “Just calm down. Look. Go to this thing, sit there, take notes. Don’t say anything and don’t make any promises. You are there entirely as an observer. They going to let you use a recorder?”

  “I haven’t worked it out with them yet, but of course. No deal without it.”

  “Call me when it’s over. The instant. We’ll hold space on 1-A.”

  The taxi had been working its way across town, across the Frederick Douglass Bridge into Southeast D.C., the Anacostia below, drops of rain spotting the windshield. Then they were on South Capital, the windows halfway down, the wind blowing his hair, hooking a right onto Xenia, the brick face of Covenant Baptist at the corner.

  They were getting close, and Sully, after thinking about it, made one more call.

  As they went up the hill, he talked into the phone. The mean little row of brick houses that lined the streets here tended to have additions tacked onto the back—weathered aluminum siding, decks cantering off to the side—giving them a weird, unsettled look. A faded deuce and a quarter sat in the backyard of one, listing like a battleship that had taken a torpedo to the hull.

  He listened to the response for a while, then said, “I don’t care if there ain’t no visiting hours. You got to get there this evening.”

  He paused to listen again.

  “Because Noel, Sly. Noel. That was our deal. I let you walk on Noel, you get me in and out of St. E’s. We didn’t say one time only. You be in that patient area and keep your head on a gotdamn swivel.”

  He hung up and rapped on the seat in front of him and got out before the man could stop.

  “We’re here,” he said. “You’n wait just a minute, right?”

  * * *

  The house was a simple two-story brick construction with a black slate roof and a driveway on the side. It was typical post−World War II housing. A window on each side of the front door, dormer windows on the second. A rusting-out dark blue panel van, a ladder tied on the roof rack, sat in the driveway. Worn-out shrubs going brown in the front. Weeds, not grass, in the yard.

  All of the houses on Xenia sat on the east side of the street. On the west side, there was a strip of grass and then trees and wild growth on the edge of the bluff. The Blue Plains water treatment facility and Bolling Air Force Base lay far below, across I-295, and then there was the river and National Airport due west, the Capitol to the northwest.

  Still, despite the vista, the neighborhood had long been abandoned to the descendants of the slaves who had once worked farms on these same acres. The spot to shop down here wasn’t Mazza Galleria, like you had in moneyed Northwest D.C., but the Eastover Shopping Center, where you had the Get-a-Lot Grocery Store, the When You Need It check-cashing joint, empty storefronts, the Hot Pink Nail Palace, the Maximum You beauty salon and a third-rate florist shop so tired it didn’t even have a name. That was this place. And people wondered why the locals tended to have an attitude.

  “Sully, hey, hey. Sully.”

  The voice made him jump, coming back from his right. It was Keith, in jacket a
nd tie, stepping out of one of the paper’s nondescript sedans, crossing the sidewalk, popping open an umbrella. “I was up in Chevy Chase, checking that George Harper up there, when Melissa called. The number for this place,” he said, nodding toward the house, “is disconnected. Nobody answers the door.”

  Sully, glad to have the help, especially from Keith, turned and looked at the house. There were no lights on, and if someone was inside, they were being decidedly tolerant about two strangers standing at the front step.

  “You tried front and back, right?”

  Keith nodded, then added, with a smile. “Both locked.”

  “Ha. Looked in the windows?”

  Keith shrugged and Sully walked over, pushed his way through the thick green shrubs, and cupped his hands against the glass. The curtains were drawn but he peeked through the gap. Bare hardwood floors, the edge of a chair. The other room offered the same slice of domestic nothingness—the back of a cheap couch and some pizza boxes on a table in the far room.

  “Nobody’s home next door on either side,” Keith said. “People still at work, maybe. I was chilling in the car waiting for folks to come home. Might go down on South Cap and get a burger, wait till it starts getting dark, come back. If this is our guy, somebody would have had to notice him.”

  Sully nodded, looking at the upstairs windows, walking around the side of the house, coming back. “Seems like they would have called it in, though.”

  Keith was over at the van. The “FKH Electrical” on the side was peeling. Closer inspection showed it had been done freehand, not with a stencil. It was ragged, done a long time ago, on the cheap, somebody with a can of paint and an artist’s brush.

  “The dust,” Keith said, wiping a finger across the windshield.

  The rain, picking up into a spatter, hit like small artillery in the caked dust, streaking it downward in rivulets. The taxi driver across the street put his window up, the movement catching Sully’s eye. The distraction made him check his watch. Fifteen till seven. Shit. Showtime. Walking backward toward the taxi, he said, “I’m getting to St. E’s. Hang out here, you like, looking for a neighbor. But, no shit, we got to file tonight. Check with Susan, soon as you get back to the mothership. She’s got the dope.”

  “You sure you want to do this tonight?”

  “Have to,” Sully said, now in the street. “Too many ways for this to leak after this meeting, too many people are going to know.”

  Keith, calling out across the street: “Know what?”

  THIRTY-TWO

  LANTIGUA HAD THEM all meet in his office in the administration building. Sully; Janice, the head of PDS; Wesley Johnston, the AUSA; and the attorney for St. E’s, a fleshy man with sweaty palms who introduced himself as Eli Ezekiel, a man so pale it looked as if they kept him in the basement.

  The office was a strange, musky space, breathing St. E’s Victorian-to-modern history. The heavy paneled walls, the magnificent mahogany door, the arched windows, the Queen Anne settee, the unironic scrolled writing desk with the scuffed edges in the corner, the well-worn Persian rug with the tear in the corner—all looking like stately ambassadors of another age, when Teddy Roosevelt was president and it was the nation’s most prestigious mental hospital. The dented metal filing cabinets, the sorry telephone receivers, the grime on the windows, the air-conditioning unit that was sealed with duct tape—all those testifying to the down-on-the-heels run of more recent decades, when it was a white elephant waiting for extinction.

  Lantigua, standing behind an oaken writing desk that might have been as ancient as the rest—you couldn’t tell, the papers stacked on it might have dated to Roosevelt, too—talked them through the procedure for the “the statement,” as he kept calling it. They would walk from here to Canan Hall (there were umbrellas for them all, he said primly, not to worry about the rain). They would meet Waters in a secured conference room in the ward.

  The ward doors would lock behind them, as would the ones in the conference room. Waters would already be there when they arrived. There would be chairs and a long table, with Waters seated at the end of the table. Lantigua would tell him to start, Waters would say what he had to say. If anyone had any questions—and by this he meant only for clarity’s sake about what had been said—they could write or whisper them to Lantigua, and he would or would not ask Waters, as he deemed medically appropriate.

  “Legal advice,” Janice said, looking at Lantigua.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “I just meant, ah—”

  “That you don’t want me asking him a damn thing,” Sully said.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it,” Lantigua said.

  The air in the office grew close and tense and unpleasant. The dampness, the humidity, from outside wormed its way into this inner chamber. Everyone sat with their legs crossed, wishing they were somewhere else.

  “I would just like to say again, for the record, that I object to the media presence,” Wesley said. “Carter here, he’s the colorful sort, and while that’s good for selling papers, it can’t be allowed to jeopardize the judicial process.”

  “Agreed,” Lantigua said. “Ms. Miller, is there not a way to call this off? Can you talk to your client again? The media here gives this an air of . . . the circus.”

  He didn’t look at Sully as he said it, but letting him know where on the food chain he sat.

  “It is my client’s wish that we are here to begin with,” she said, sounding resigned. “I spoke with him by phone at length this afternoon. I have just finished speaking with him, not thirty minutes ago. He says he has a statement he wants the public to hear. He would not tell me what it was, but said Sully would understand, which is why he wants him here.”

  Lantigua looked nonplussed.

  “Mr. Carter? Could you enlighten us?”

  Sully looked over at him, arching his eyebrows as if surprised by the question.

  “No,” he said.

  “See what I mean,” Wesley muttered.

  “Sully,” Janice said, impatiently.

  Sully leaned forward at the table, uncrossing his legs. “I mean ‘no,’ in the sense that I am literally unable, because I have no idea what this is about. But beyond that, ‘no’ in the sense of I would not. The door hadn’t even shut when y’all started pissing on me being here, acting like it’s beneath your professional standard. Like lawyers and the warden at the crazy house are two pegs up from reporters. And then you ask me for help. So, no.”

  “We don’t call it a ‘crazy house,’” Lantigua said, “and no one in polite society has for a very long time. It’s a mental health treatment facility.”

  “I guess you’d be up to speed on the terminology,” Sully said. “How long you been here?”

  “Since 1962 as a graduate student intern, since 1976 as executive director.”

  “Ah. Thank you. So the problem with your point of view, like I was saying, is that I’m the only one your patient wants to see. Why? Who knows? Maybe because I was there that day in the Capitol, or maybe because he’s got a crush on me, maybe because he’s just fucking crazy. I’m here to listen to what he has to say. Any of you who don’t want to be here, hey, there’s the door.”

  “Reckless,” Wesley said.

  “Wes, I been stared down before,” Sully said, “by people with guns who knew how to use them. You, you just look constipated.”

  Lantigua ignored the exchange and sighed, as if he were dealing with very small children. He flipped open a folder on his desk. Then he slid a sheaf of papers over to Sully.

  “Waivers and confidentiality agreements.” When Sully arched his eyebrows, Lantigua hastily clarified, “The confidentiality just applies to our policies and procedures, the privacy of other patients. Some of whom have a certain degree of notoriety.”

  “You’re worried I’m going to try to cop an interview with Hinckley on the way out?” Sully
said.

  Lantigua lowered his chin and gave Sully his best bureaucratic look, letting it sit over a two-second silence. “Just sign the form, Mr. Carter. Or, as you say, don’t. Now. Is everyone done? Thank you, thank you. Fine. I’ll leave these here. Now. If you would follow me.”

  * * *

  When they came into the ward, Sully was the last in line, save for the linebacker-sized orderly trailing them all. His eyes flew over the floor, taking it in, the patients wandering about, the big windows showing the fading gloom outside, the cloud cover ending the day early, the television on but not loud. The walls were dingy and aged, the paint was dull, the floor was shined but there was a dull yellow sheen to it.

  And there, in a lime-green chair in the television room, dressed in jeans and a white pullover shirt, untucked, sat Sly Hastings. His close-cropped hair was under a White Sox cap and his face was averted, looking out the window. Uncle Reggie sat next to him, muttering and looking at the television, then turning to take in the entourage.

  Sully cut his eyes away from the pair as soon as he saw Reggie start to turn his way. It wasn’t fast enough. There was a glint of recognition in the man’s eyes. He started to raise up, point. And, before he got fully out of his chair, Sully saw, from the corner of his eye, Sly’s right hand rise up the man’s back, grab his shirt tail, and jerk him back down.

  No one else noticed.

  Lantigua led them down the hall to the far end, past room 237, to a secured door that looked just like all the rest. He swiped the magnetic card that hung on a lanyard around his neck, looked in, and them stepped back, holding the door open to let them all in, the air flat, stale, recycled, and yet charged, like someone had cut all the ions loose and they were rocketing around the ward, colliding, crashing into one another, changing, reforming, shaping into something yet unseen.

  * * *

  Inside the conference room, the patient sat at the end of a long wooden table, head down. He could be dozing. You could think that, that tousled hair, the slack shoulders, not looking up, no recognition at all that the people he had summoned were filing in. He was wearing the same loose, standard-issue white jumpsuit he had worn earlier. His forearms were on the table, little plastic cuffs binding them together, his black hair pulled back in the same ponytail, a few strands loose and unmanaged, hanging over his forehead. He was looking down at his hands when they all filed in. An orderly flanked him on either side. One of them was Jamal, who studiously avoided eye contact with Sully.