Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Fear hovered in the room, of getting beat, of being scooped. You could feel it, like humidity. R.J., he was hunkered down, phone in his ear, tapping away at the keyboard, looking up at the screen. He’d sent Sully a one-word note through the paper’s messaging system, in all caps, a subtle reminder of what he was to be working on: “TICKTOCK.”

The time line of events, the daily lede. Right right right. Like he already had something to fucking write-other than the call from Waters, which, for all he knew, he would be prohibited from using.

He clicked into the desk’s copyediting system, found the TICKTOCK slug that R.J. had created, and opened it. Nothing. He went back to the menu to see if other reporters assigned to the story, the ones who would file their reports, data, or sound bites with their initials tacked on after the slug, had filed anything yet. Of course not.

A drink, right about now, would be a lovely thing. Basil’s? Or maybe Blanton’s, with one big-ass cube in the middle of the glass?

He saw Keith over at his desk, moving in a hurry, picking up things from his desk drawer, putting them in a briefcase. Keith was a briefcase kind of guy. He covered Superior Court and was good at it, chatting up the lawyers and judges and pegging the cops who came through to testify, catching them all hanging on the second floor, leaning against the rail looking down into the maw of the first-floor lobby, the salmon stream of incoming people, perps, witnesses.

“What they got you doing?” Sully said, walking over, leaning on the cubicle wall.

Keith, never slowing: “U.S. attorney’s office. Thoughts and reaction. Since they’ll be handling the prosecution. Half the office is fighting the other half to get it, providing the feds don’t blow Waters’s head off first. You?”

“Rewrite. Lede-all.” Sully looked down at the briefcase. “But you’re headed back over to Super.”

Keith looked back at him, his no-bullshit brown eyes flat but intense.

“Yeah. Terry Waters had been in D.C. before yesterday; you pick that up?”

“Dazzle me.”

“Okay, that 911 call? He knew about St. E’s, even called it that, instead of St. Elizabeths? You just blow into town, that place isn’t on the tour.”

Sully squinted. “Hunh. You ever been up there?”

“Couple of times. Hinckley’s always looking for an appeal.”

“I’d forgotten that asshole.”

“It’s a holdover from when St. E’s had a national mandate, when it was the nation’s premier mental hospital. All the presidential assassins were held there. Richard Lawrence, tried to kill Andrew Jackson. Charles Guiteau should have been up there but they hung him first. Celebrities, too. Mary Fuller, the silent film star. Ezra Pound.”

“Guiteau. I remember Johnny Cash’s song from when I was a-wait, what did you say?”

“What did I say what?”

“Pound? The poet?”

“Yeah, Christ, they had him for a dozen years or something. Mostly ’cause he was a communist with a hard-on for Mussolini during the war. So look, it’s a straw, not a reed, that Waters has been living here, but I’ll do the clutching thing since he mentioned the place. Check the records at Superior, the arrest records at MPD, then hit social services, see if he had any contact with the system, maybe he was living under a bridge. I got Susan in research started on real estate transactions, just to see if he bought something.”

Sully nodded, deciding to keep it quiet, the details of the call that morning. He’d check if Pound and Eliot had been friends.

Keith put his sport coat on, the tie dangling, picked up his briefcase, and blew past Sully. “I get anything, I’ll send you a feed about six.”

THE AFTERNOON WASa disaster of dead ends and might haves and sweet fuck all, a roller coaster of false alarms and bullshit leads. A dozen bogus hits, chief among them a raid on the Motel 6 out on New York Avenue and Bladensburg Road.

Half the afternoon, they’d all been watching it unfold on live television, transfixed, the anchors giving the play-by-play that Waters had been tracked to this dump in Northeast D.C. and was now holed up.

It was full-blown drama: helicopters two hundred yards up, hovering, intersection choked off, squad cars, SWAT vans, armored vehicles, an ambulance, canine units, guys in flak jackets, the parking lot blocked off.

Two tactical teams approached from opposite sides of the hotel. One from the front parking lot, the other from the back. The back unit went up the steps in the rear and came to the front via the second-story breezeway, about six doors down from the room in question. No doubt sniper units had it covered from across the street. Then the other SWAT unit came up the concrete steps in front in a flash, blew past their comrades giving them cover, and were down to the door in nothing flat, blowing it just that quick, the shock shattering the cheaply made plateglass window. It was just great damn television, Sully standing among the crowd in the newsroom, arms folded, chewing on the inside of his lip.

Twenty, maybe thirty seconds later, six guys came back out. They were like pallbearers, three on each side, a half-naked, ponytailed man between them, trussed up and carried like a casket. Down the steps they went, the man not appearing to move, and then they disappeared into the massed vehicles.

The paper had Chris, that sad sack motherfucker from Metro, out there breathlessly calling in updates. Keith had been rocketed out there from Superior Court and posted on the far side of New York Avenue, and Deena, who covered the Department of Justice, was there working sources, looking for that tip to get them an inside account.

And so it was Deena who called it in a few minutes later: Mr. Ponytail Man was a plumber from Gaithersburg who came to the big city to score some smack, shoot up, bang two hookers, and then pass out, dead to the world. The hookers had called it in, looking for a lifetime Get Out of Jail Free card.

“File it under ‘horseshit,’” Deena was saying, her voice rising on her editor’s speaker, so the assembled behind him could hear, and then she was saying she had to get fucking A across town to pick up the kid from the extended hours of summer camp she’d stuck them in this morning and she was twenty minutes late and being late meant a twenty dollar fine plus five dollars a minute and this had all turned into a steaming pile of crap-all this before the editor, Tom, could click the call from speaker to his headphones, the room getting a blast of maternal fury.

Deena’s attitude sluiced across Sully’s mind, wiping out any hopes of actual news. The raid, which had been shaping up to be the lede if the suspect was the Capitol murderer-they were going to nail the son of a bitch-slid south like owl shit on ice and now they didn’t have anything at all.

The channel they were still watching cut to a live shot of Dalton Talmadge, the hard-right senior senator from Oklahoma, bellowing at a presser on the western steps of the Capitol. Talmadge was treating the murder of his fellow legislator, a “man I know, and know his wife and family,” as a natural campaign platform for the reelection campaign of Dalton Talmadge.

“… and this, this piece of human garbage will not deter us from the work at hand!” Talmadge was saying, actually shaking his fist. “I am not afraid to be here! I will introduce legislation on the first day of business to secure our great Capitol from this sort of terrorism! I will see to it that this sick killer is caught and that he gets every lash of justice he is due!”

He looked at R.J. and R.J. looked at him.

“‘Lash of justice’?” R.J. said.

“Best quote I’ve heard all day. It’s also the only quote I’ve heard all day.”