Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

She looked at him evenly. Nothing about their physical relationship in those eyes, just a depth that spoke to their friendship. That stemmed back to Johannesburg, after Mandela’s release from Robben Island. She, who had been posted in Central and South America, got sent to South Africa as part of the media mob on the only story in the world anybody wanted to read. He had met her at Jameson’s on Commissioner Street. He saw a group of South African photographers he knew at a table toward the back and headed that way. She was sitting with them, this olive-skinned chick with thick black hair, all of them bellowing to be heard over the band.

She was drinking a gin and tonic and they were all laughing and she had giggled and it had come up through her nose and when he walked up she was facedown on the table, snorting and laughing, everybody howling, and she lifted her head and looked up and saw him and then sneezed and that sent them all into spasms, her leaning on the shoulder of Greg Marinovic, gasping and saying “Stopstopstop. My stomach hurts.”

He had gone to the bar to get his drink and a fresh one for her. When he got back, he slid it across the table, and she looked up to see who was buying the round and it had pretty much been lust at first sight, the festive mood of the nation spilling into the air, a glossy-eyed giddiness infecting a tribe that reported war and death for a living. That they worked for the same paper but had not met gave him an excuse for chatting her up, and before Mandela was out he had taken a suite at the Kinton, a boutique hotel over in Rosebank, where prying eyes would not see them returning to the same room late at night or lingering for hours at the restaurant, sitting way too close, talking, whispering.

It had been a fling, but an adult one, as an actual relationship was not possible, given they had jobs on different continents. They had drifted apart. She had been polite but distant when she saw him again in Sarajevo, during the Bosnian War. By then he was living, and very much in love, with Nadia. The shell took Nadia not long after that, then he was blown up by a grenade, and Alexis had been one of the correspondents who helped load him, unconscious and mangled, onto a chopper.

Now they were based on the same continent, in the same building, feeling each other out, seeing if there were long-term commitments to be found underneath their shared attraction, that mysterious chemistry pulling them one to the other.

She was saying, here-at least he thought she was saying-that as a friend who’d been through the bang-bang shit before, she damn well knew he would have needed somebody to talk with, drink with, calm down with last night after deadline, and that person could, or should, have been her. That’s what she was saying. He was pretty sure of it now. Since they were in the office, she was saying it from a polite, professional distance. Maybe she wasn’t as pissed as he’d thought.

“Walk with me,” he said, turning down the hallway, “get a Coke out of the machine.”

She did, the corridor empty, just the two of them and the paintings on the wall, and he felt his shoulders relax. He didn’t have to whisper, but he found himself doing it nonetheless. “If Josh wasn’t with me this summer, I would have knocked on your door, had a few drinks, talked it out with you in a hot shower. As it was, I got home, looked in on him, passed out on the couch.”

“Passed out?”

“Not drunk,” he said, cutting her with a glance, “tired. On the couch. Shattered, the Brits would say. Facedown when Waters, this fucker, calls me this morning. Ran in here after that. Same clothes as yesterday.”

The office kitchen was fluorescent lighting, old linoleum, the smell of burnt coffee, crystals of spilled sugar on the countertop, yellow plastic chairs at a couple of brown tables. She pulled money out of her front pocket, waving him off. “I’ll buy hero boy a drink,” she said, fucking with him a little bit now, a smile reaching to the corner of her lips. “I wasn’t worried about your work on the story. I was worried, am worried, a little bit about you.”

A Coke clanged down the chute. He fished it out, then pointed to the little pack of orange crackers with peanut butter stuck in between them.

“Spot me?”

She did, then bought herself a Coke, popped it open, slurping at the top to keep it from fizzing over. “Mmm. You can handle yourself, that’s not what I’m saying. But when we, when we’re working abroad, the big bads aren’t looking for us. It’s just that we get in the way. Like when you got blown up.”

She reached forward, then, and touched his right temple, the welt of scar tissue there, the only person on the face of the Earth who could do that, and that sudden feminine grace had surfaced as if she’d called it up from the deep. She was close to him now, her perfume coming into his senses, the rustle of her blouse. It lasted less than three seconds. He closed his eyes at her touch, then opened them when she pulled her hand away, a little dizzy.

“This guy, he’s calling you , he’s looking for you ,” she said. “And you, you got a habit of leading with your chin.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt again. And don’t invoke your mother like that,” she said, her eyes going dark, the only person on planet Earth who could say that to him, too.

“Okay, right, okay,” he said, sipping his soda. “I was just-”

“You just watch your skinny white ass,” she said. “You’re in the deep end of the pool with this guy. This isn’t some dimwit drug dealer in Frenchman’s Bend. I can’t come out there and save you every time you fuck up.”

He sat back in his chair, telling her about Waters asking about his mother, the pissing match with the FBI that morning, how Waters had asked him if he’d kill the man who killed his mother, and how that had set off ten minutes of conversation that he’d neglected to share with Eddie Winters and the paper’s brass, much less Special Agent Alma T. Gill.

“He talked about the years he’d been planning this, about how, you know, he thought the feds would get him and stick him in prison and that, since he was putting paid to his mother’s death, he was okay with that. Totally okay.”

“What did you say?”

“That it sounded reasonable to me.”

“Sully!”

“Under a couple of conditions,” he said, looking off from her now, not wanting to see her eyes while he finished talking. “I told him, look, that kind of thinking, it’s acid. It’ll eat right through you. And he said, well, it already has. And I said, see, that’s the problem. You went off killing a bunch of people that didn’t have nothing to do with your mother on your way to trying to set things straight for her, and you’re not even saying who killed her, or why, and that’s kind of bullshit, as to how I just told you about mine. He says, well, I will when I can. I said he should turn himself in, it’s over, look, you made your point, and he said he was sorry about fifteen times, and kept saying he didn’t expect even to be out right now. And I said, fine, just go turn yourself in. They’ll be glad to have you. And he said, but yeah, answer me. What if you were sure, you were absolutely sure you could kill just the man who shot your mother. So, well, then, I said if I ever find that son of a bitch, or the soldier who launched the shell that killed Nadia? I’ll do it between the breath and the sigh.”

THE VENDING-MACHINEcrackers, he inhaled them all before he was back at his desk, rinsing them down with the soda. He settled in his chair, still hungry, spinning around a few times, bracing himself for the shit storm that was going to be his afternoon.