Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Nods around the room, pursed lips, tension.

“Meanwhile, Sully,” Eddie said, “there are now unmarked patrol cars at the top and bottom of your street, then on Constitution and A. They want permission for a shooter on your roof.”

“On my roof ?”

“Best to be safe. Isn’t your nephew staying with you?”

“Until my sister has Jesus put a hit on me, yes.”

“They’ll also be giving you a ride home. Has Waters tried to reach you again?”

“No, but he couldn’t get through if he tried. I got forty-seven messages on my machine and about that many on the cell. Every television producer and assistant booker on the East Coast started bombing them both after our story went up last night. Today, every half-wit on the East Coast is calling to tell me they were in the Capitol and saw the whole thing.”

“No kidding,” Paul said. “Our phones are blowing up.”

“Is that what’s been giving me a headache all day?” Eddie asked.

“Could be ours on Metro,” Melissa said. “Every nutjob in town is calling to tell us they just saw Waters in their front yard, at the bus stop, in a blue Buick with a busted taillight, getting a Big Gulp at the 7-11.”

By eight, a little after, Sully was neck deep in rewrite, the feeds coming in fast from all over, ten, fifteen, now twenty different reports. His shirt was untucked, his hair unruly, his scarred face set. As the writer of the lede-all, he was the black hole of newsroom energy, everything and everybody orbiting him, his desk, because it would all pass through his mind and fingers and onto the front page of the paper and it had to do that in the next ninety fucking minutes.

He felt like a tuning fork that had been struck on a gong the size of Nebraska, the tension from across the room pouring into him, like he had sensor panels in his palms, on his chest. Every half-heard conversation, every argument, every bit of fear from across town-on Pennsylvania Avenue, on the Suitland Parkway, on the evening commute on a nearly empty Duke Ellington Bridge-people wondering if the killer was in the car next to them, easing a pistol up to the window at the next stoplight.

The feeling he had this morning when Waters called, the fear on Capitol Hill yesterday, the gun and the blood and the smoke from the flare, the percussion blast sending a shock wave through his skull, the hands on him, the voices screaming obscenities, arms pinning him…

Now, now it was all coming out of him, a sensation like ants crawling out of his pores. He was banging on the keyboard and sweeping his hands across his forearms to sweep the invisible little bastards away between keystrokes, his aching knee and the lack of a drink killing him.

The killer said he was scared, tired, and hungry.

Sorting through story files that were piling up now like corpses at the morgue, he pulled out quotes, cut and pasted lucid descriptions of street scenes and police and political actions from the dispatches other reporters were filing as the evening wore on.

In a brief phone call to the paper, Waters said he wasn’t watching much of the televised hunt for him that is riveting the nation and shutting down large parts of the nation’s capital. “I don’t really like Washington,” he said. “It’s all disease and filth.”

A tiny alert flashed in the top right corner of his screen every time a new dispatch came in and he would have to stop what he was writing and call it up, to see if there was a stark development that needed to be plugged in high in the story. Or perhaps there was a lesser development that, when taken together with other facts that were unknown to the reporter filing the dispatch, changed or mutated the overall narrative.

“Barry Edmonds knows why I killed him. He and I talked about that. Soon everybody else will.”

Mood, like this right here. Robert Barnes, the mayor. God, if there was a better synonym for a political hack than D.C.’s two-term chief elected official, it was unknown to Sully Carter. But Barnes, when asked about the level of fear in Washington, said, “My wife didn’t walk the pug today.”

How brilliant was that? The political elite, the bastards who ran this place, they were so unnerved by the specter of Terry Waters materializing on the front doorstep with a pair of ice picks in hand that the mayoral missus wouldn’t even walk the First Dog around the block . Made him poop in the backyard. You want a tangible, cut-the-meat-off-the-bones description of fear that would resonate from the white folks in Northwest to the black folks in Southeast? That right there.

The manhunt was still centered on D.C., where bloodhounds tracked phantom trails in Rock Creek Park and along the Anacostia riverbank. But it also was radiating out into the Shenandoah, the low-slung but densely forested mountains and gullies an hour or so west. The Coast Guard was patrolling the Chesapeake, roadblocks were set up around the Beltway and on I-95, heading both north and south, and west on I-66, turning traffic into a monstrous, slow-moving worm. You could see the tie-ups from space. He heard that from behind him, somebody with a television, the evening anchor blathering. He flicked his eyes up, the clock. 8:30.

One of the largest manhunts in the history of the nation’s capital blanketed the region yesterday, as the gunman seemed to vanish into the humid August air. Checkpoints choked traffic, airports heightened security, Amtrak routes were delayed for hours, and commuter traffic grew into a monster so large that tie-ups, when viewed from satellites, took on the size and forbidding shape of something prehistoric emerging from the earth beneath.

Terry Running Waters, as the gunman identified himself in a 911 call from the Capitol, apologized for killing everyone but Edmonds. He said what he wanted most, at the moment, was a “chicken sandwich and a cold beer.”

Deadline. Now it took physical form. It was a beast that chewed into his right shoulder with a saw-toothed glee, gnawing deeper beneath the shoulder blade with each passing minute. The later it got in the newsroom, the more other reporters filed out, the more an invisible bubble seemed to grow around him. No one dared speak to him, so low in his chair was he slung, so furiously was he chewing on his pen, so intently was he staring at the screen, so violently was he whisper-cursing at each clunky bit of narrative that refused to be transmitted from mind to fingers to screen.

Federal Washington all but ceased to exist. The Capitol, site of yesterday’s deadly rampage, was closed, with armed officers and yellow police tape blocking off the entire campus.

All adjacent congressional office buildings were closed, as was the Library of Congress. The Supreme Court was flanked by armed guards at each corner. The museums along the Mall were closed. So was the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. No tour buses ran. Pennsylvania Avenue, long known as America’s Main Street on its route between Congress and the White House, was largely deserted. Maître d’s at its high-priced restaurants leaned on the pulpits and awaited anyone-anyone at all-to ask for a corner booth.

His solitude was broken only by R.J. coming over every now and again to whisper in his ear that Eddie loved the story, he did, but if Sully could maybe move the second sentence of the third graf into the lede, and move the second sentence of the lede graf into the fourth, that would be lovely, just lovely, and Paul had the smallest of concerns about the eighth graf because that was going to be the one right before the jump. This kept up until Sully loudly broadcast, at 8:58, spying R.J. getting up from his seat once again, “I’m taking a swing blade to the next dickless wonder who comes within five fucking feet.”