Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Then, Jesus, there was another Old Testament assigned to Waters: his mysterious youth in Oklahoma, his alleged mental state, his juvenile arrests or misdemeanors or complaints or whatever about the animal mutilations. Did he or his family have any ties to protests or Native American causes? Had nobody really seen him for a decade? What was the state of mental health care out there? Could a doctor or nurse or aid worker be persuaded to comment? His old high school? Teachers, friends, classmates? There was at least one story on Sac and Fox, if not Native American, mysticism and the importance of eyes in folklore. What did the act of stabbing a man in the eyes mean? Did he stab the animals he mutilated in the eyes, too?

Washington being a company town, you also had the entire D.C. slice of the pie-stories about representatives and senators and staffers talking about their fears and safety, the outrage for once not partisan. There was a sidebar on a history of political assassinations and attacks in Washington (Lincoln, Garfield, Reagan), and assaults at the Capitol building (Jackson). There was a roundup of international reaction from other capitals, with feeds about attacks on other national parliaments and how security was handled in London, Paris, Moscow, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Mexico, Canada, South Africa, basically wherever the paper had a correspondent.

Investigative and Metro and the political desk were combining on a ticktock of the attack-tracking Waters’s access to the building, Edmonds’s movements that day until the two collided, the resulting chaos, and how Waters could have escaped.

Theories held that he’d used the subway that ran underneath the building, then popped out of one of the House or Senate office buildings. Others held that he’d taken a staffer’s ID badge and just walked right past police. Bolder ones suggested he’d changed into an MPD uniform.

There were at least three stories on the manhunt, on how airport security was so beefed up that the lines were forever and flights out of National, Dulles, and BWI were all delayed, screwing up air travel across the eastern half of the country, and how yesterday’s near-total shutdown of the Beltway had buggered traffic from Charlotte to Philadelphia.

This would amount to, more or less, Sully squinted an eye to figure, about fifteen thousand words, fifty pages in a book. It would all be reported and written-along with sports, features, local politics and zoning issues, the home section, movie reviews, real estate listings, classified ads, and wedding announcements, all adding up to a decent-sized novel-and then printed, more than eight hundred thousand times, for delivery to newsstands, gas stations, mini-marts, front porches, driveways, mailboxes, and apartment buildings in about, say, thirteen hours.

On the Waters story alone, any error, no matter how small, would have to be corrected in print and possibly to the detriment of the entire effort. Fifteen thousand words… and if, say, four of them were wrong-four errors-the paper’s staff would look like douche-bag half-wits, mocked in the trades for blowing the big one.

It gave him the beginnings of a renewed headache, made worse by a single line of writing on the whiteboard that began glowing. It was circled, set slightly apart from the rest.

“Sully,” it read. “Office/rewrite/phone.”

“Hey,” he said, walking to the board, tapping his name. “I’m the receptionist? I thought Special Agent Alma T. Gill was bluffing.”

R.J. looked up, peering. “Calm down. You’re writing the lede-all. If Waters has a hard-on for you, probably best for you to sit tight in the building. And answer your phone. Every time the thing buzzes. I don’t care if it’s a little old lady in Crystal City telling you that she’s looking at black U.N. helicopters hovering over the White House. Answer. Waters calls again, you got to pick it up. That’s from Eddie, that’s from the FBI, that’s probably from the fucking White House.”

Out in the hallway, a crowd came out of the elevator and there was Alexis, tense, walking head down, studying a sheaf of papers in her hands.

“Be back,” he said to R.J., then hustled out of the room, catching up to her in the narrow hallway. She stopped, stepping to the side to let the people behind them pass, raising her eyebrows half a notch. Sully stepped beside her. Her eyes were sharp, glittering, looking into him, reading what she could find.

“You look like shit,” she said.

“Thank you for noticing.”

“And-wait, is that you I smell ?”

“Don’t sniff me in the hall,” he said, leaning back. “People might-”

“This fucker nearly kills you yesterday, then calls you this morning, and I find out both through a Nat-Desk message-all?”

“Josh, he told-”

“What’s with your eye? What is this about?” Looking at him like he was falling apart.

“What, woman, what’s wrong with it?”

“It’s got a tic. The right one. Your other right.”

He pulled his hand back and looked at it, like it might have blood on it. “Been doing that since yesterday.”

“You’re lucky that’s the only thing wrong with you.”

“One pursues the news of the day.”

“From what I read , you certainly pursued.”

“What does that mean?”

“You didn’t run in the opposite direction.”

“No.”

“He had a gun, Sully.”

“Most people in America do.”

She rolled the papers in her hand into a tube and leaned back against the wall. “You weren’t playing cowboy in the Capitol?”

“Look,” he said, standing in front of her, a little off balance at the direct line of inquiry, “you said you wanted me to go back to being a foreign correspondent. So I act like one yesterday. Now you giving me flack about it.”

“I didn’t say be reckless.”

“Gosh, I had forgotten.”

“Don’t try me with that attitude you give everyone else around here.”

“Look,” he said, trying to reign this back in, “you, missy, have come back from being a foreign hack to riding a desk job. I don’t know that you-”

“We’re not talking about me.” A hair flip. Ah sweet Jesus, the hair flip. Now he was buggered. Now she was pissed. “And I wouldn’t say I’m riding the desk. It’s a promotion I’m thinking about accepting. You understand there’s an upward trajectory to this business, that you don’t always have to be out in the field eating dust?”

“Certainly not what I heard from you this spring, when we were eating at Jimmy T’s. You were preaching at me to get off my arse and get back in the field with badasses such as your adorable self.”

“They hadn’t offered me the gig this spring.”

“So how much more money is it?”

“Enough to think about,” she said. “My mom’s not getting any younger. It’d be nice to be on the same continent with her for a while. And, I’ve discovered, editors get stock options. Plus, you know, the business isn’t overrun with women in management.”

“So now you wanting to be on the masthead? Commencement speeches at the alma mater, all that?”

“Possible,” she said, ignoring the jibe. “But it’s not locked in, my side or theirs. I do it till December 31 and then Eddie and I sit down. If it’s good, I’ll take it. If not, I’ll take the posting in London or Beirut, wherever they want me.” Here she looked up at him. “And I’ll be looking for you in the field. With shit like you did yesterday. That was great. Really sensational. I’m not riding you about it. And I didn’t exactly expect you to return my call last night-”

“I had turned the phone off,” he said.

“-but, wait, listen.” Her voice softened, dropped a half key, making him almost have to lean forward. “I thought you would have called me. After deadline.”