Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“Okay.”

“I been knowing her a while.”

“That’s good.”

“Are you actually listening or just spouting one-word answers to anything I say?”

“Yes.”

His ears were still ringing from the fire alarm. But it was all less now. Everything was less now. Bourbon was a wonderful thing. Coming down now, a plane for landing, altitude descending. All things shining.

“So tell me, what’s this on now?” he said, forcing his eyes open. He didn’t like yelling at the boy, clueless as he sometimes was. Must get all he could stand of that at home. Crazy-assed Lucinda. He ought to adopt the boy on general principle. “What are we, what are we watching here?”

“ In the Mouth of Madness. ”

“It has a plot of some sort, I just know it.”

“It’s awesome. This guy, this one right here-”

“Isn’t that Sam Neill?”

“-he’s supposed to go, no, yeah, that’s him, see, he’s supposed to go get the copy of this book that this other guy wrote, this horror-writer guy…”

Later, a hand on his shoulder, shaking.

“Sully? It’s over. The movie. You going to sleep here? ’Cause I’m turning out the light.”

DEEP BREATHING, SLOWdrag on the respirator. Deep and slow.

Buzz.

Darkness reigned. He was somewhere, he was somewhere. He was three thousand feet underwater, that’s where he was. No light at these depths. The cold, bitter, empty darkness of salt and water. Currents moved you with them; you could not see or sense them coming, they just waved you from side to side, like a little human palm frond, as they passed. There was no sound at all.

Buzz buzz.

That couldn’t be, no no. No buzzing. No sound. That had to be some sort of weird jellyfish squid whale… one eye opened, and he was horrifically lifted from the depths of subaquatic oblivion to a roiling, light-shattered room and the jolt sent him upright, lurching, the heave coming from his gut but catching in his throat. He was awake and rolling sideways, upright, the basement a blur, then the sharp, hard edges of reality and right angles.

Light burst in through the half window. Josh hadn’t pulled the shades. It was whiter than the sun, reflecting off car windows or something out front. He swallowed the bile, the burning.

There was the buzzing again. A bee sting, a dog’s bite, a tiny tin hammer banging.

The phone. The motherfucking phone.

It was there on the glass top of the coffee table, humping up in the air on each buzz. He leaned forward on the couch, finding a paper towel by the pizza box, a lame attempt to wipe the worst taste in America out of his mouth. Wet cigarette butts in old ashtrays, rainwater in a motel gutter spout.

“Lucinda,” he said into the phone, “I gotdamn well-”

“Mr. Carter? Mr. Carter?”

The voice cutting him off.

He closed his eyes again. Never answer the phone on a day you have a story on the front page. Never answer the phone on-

“Yes, this is.” And after a moment, “Mr. Carter.”

Coughing, throat clearing. “Okay. Okay. This is, this is Terry Waters.”

It didn’t make him jump, he would remember later. It didn’t make him do much of anything. He just tried to lather his dried-out lips with his equally dried-out tongue and leaned back into the soft recesses of the couch, croaking with the voice of a hundred years, “Who thinks this is funny?”

“I, I thought I said,” the voice came back, after a moment. It was like the guy was talking on a weird radio frequency that was only now beginning to come in clear through the static and sunspots. “This is Terry Waters. You, uh, wrote a story about me. It’s right here on the front page. You, you were the one hiding in the bathroom.”

The sensation came over him like a tuning fork struck on the spine, his nerve endings lighting up like a dormant Christmas tree. He stood up without realizing it.

“Mr. Carter? Are you there? I, I’m guessing this is a surprise. I’m sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. But I had to call. When I read about your mother. I think, I think we should talk. Is that okay?”

“YOUR MOTHER?”

“Yeah.”

“And his?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“That’s what I told him.”

“And what specifically about them?”

“That they were both murdered.”

This brought FBI Special Agent Gill’s gaze up from her notes to his face. They were looking at each other across a conference table at the paper, a little after noon, maybe ninety minutes since Waters had hung up on him.

An agent sat on either side of her. R.J. and Lewis Beale, the paper’s attorney, flanked him. Sully had called the paper after Waters’s call and was transferred to Eddie Winters’s office. Eddie had listened and told him to come in immediately. He’d also alerted the FBI, who got there almost as fast as Sully. Eddie had walked them all into the conference room, made the introductions, and then left to run the daily.

Now everybody had little water bottles and nobody touched them. They were on the eighth floor, the executive suite, far away from the newsroom below. The windows overlooked a parking garage. Haze and glare and shimmering heat.

She held the gaze-on his eyes, not flitting to his scars; it took discipline not to do that, he knew from past experience-and waited on him to elaborate.

He didn’t.

“That is an unusual connection,” she said, finally.

“Also,” Sully said, “that neither of their killers were caught.”

“I see.” Another pause. “And how would you say it made you feel, when he said that?”

Sully tilted his head to one side, ever so slightly, and crossed his bad leg over his good one. All three of them, she and the men flanking her, looked like they ate nails for breakfast and shit steel before lunch. Suits, folders, and briefcases. Acting like they owned the place ever since they walked in.

After a while, he said, “What did you say your name was, ma’am?”

“Agent Gill.”

“Do you have a first name, Agent Gill?”

“We seem to be losing the thread,” she said.

“Your thread,” Sully said, “and mine are not the same.”

He got a glare this time, from the guy on her right. The guy’s pen had been twitching the whole time, taking notes, and now he raised his chin and leaned into the table, like you do when you have to pull up your socks. “Look, Carter,” he said. “This-”

“Special Agent Alma T. Gill,” she said.

“Well then, Special Agent Alma T. Gill,” Sully said, “the fuck business is it of yours?”

“Hey hey HEY,” Chin Man said, bolting upright, his partner doing the same on her left, R.J. and Lewis matching them, everybody pointing and raising voices, tempers flaring for the second or third time now.

“I’d heard about you, Carter,” the man on her right started in again, “and I’m not going to-”

“I wasn’t talking to you, champ,” Sully interrupted, not even glancing his way. “I’s talking to your boss.”

“-put up with, what did you say to me?”

“You heard. I’m not being deposed here. My boss calls to tell you we have likely contact with the nation’s Most Wanted and you guys show up twenty minutes later all ‘hunh who what,’ like we work for you. Which we don’t. So mind your fucking manners. Agent Gill here, she asked an odd question. You don’t like my answers, yonder’s your door.”

Now he stood, pushing his chair back and taking three steps, no fooling around with this bullshit.

“I was asking,” she said, her voice smooth as buttermilk, “because I wanted to know if you thought he was baiting you. Taunting you that your mother’s killer was never caught.”