Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

She flicked her tongue across her lips, taking care of the salt crystals, then sipped from part of the rim that was salt-free. “Sounds like your deer would just get away, great white hunter.”

He snorted.

“I’ll send you down to Mr. Gentry’s hunt camp,” Sully said, “like my daddy sent me. Out there off the bayou. You don’t kill down there, you don’t eat. You tell Mr. Gentry, you tell him he’s got it wrong all this time.”

He was loving the breeze, the shadows. Nothing was so wonderful as putting a monster piece on 1-A with I-can’t-believe-that-shit detail. He wished La Loma stayed open all night. He’d sit here with Alexis till the sun came up.

“What did Eddie say?” she said. “The FBI?”

“About what?”

“The call, nimrod. Could they trace it?”

“I’d be sitting next to them if they could.”

“Nothing?”

“It was a cell. Best they could do was narrow it down, that the call came from a tower in Northwest D.C.”

“So, he hasn’t blown town.”

“Apparently not, but I don’t know that’s news. Look, he could have been tooling down Georgia Avenue on a bus, sitting on a park bench at Carter Barron, under a log in Rock Creek Park, holed up in a basement on the Gold Coast, or driving the proverbial late-model sedan, dark in color, on the inner loop of the Beltway, heading for a burger at Mickey D’s. As I understand it, it’s about a fifteen-mile range, radius, something. Since then? Assuming he’s driving sixty miles an hour, forty-five on back roads? He could be anywhere from the Eastern Shore to West Virginia, from Pennsylvania to Richmond.”

She sat back, holding the drink in her lap. It dripped with condensation, with melting ice, with the still-present humidity that was frizzing her hair, that was wilting her linen blouse. Tiny crow’s-feet at the edge of her eyes, the years in the sun, the Third World.

The waiter came as she was finishing, the plates hot, both of them leaning back, breaking off the conversation, the man sliding the check by the side of Sully’s plate at the same time. It was that late.

“Joey, hey hey hey,” Sully said, reaching for the tab. The waiter, slim, tired, black slacks and a white shirt, already turning, coming back.

“Dos mas margaritas,” Sully said, handing him back the tab, “before you close us out.”

Joey, José, nodded, took the tab, and turned on a heel, gone before Sully could put a fork to his seafood burrito. Alexis sipped, long, slow, and lazy, on hers. She held the glass by its funky green stem-with a branch on it, like it was a cactus-in her right hand.

There were two other couples sitting outside. Maybe one or two more inside. Sully wasn’t really paying attention. One looked like a Senate staffer and a man who wasn’t her husband, the way they were sitting. The other was a gay couple he knew but couldn’t name. They lived over on Seventh. He had nodded at them when sitting down and they had nodded back and that was being neighbors on the Hill.

Joey brought the revised tab back and Sully looked at it and pulled out his wallet and put down three twenties, covering the tip. The woman and her friend a few tables over got up and left. The wind blew and the shadows floated and danced across them all.

“We got great art of that situation at the Motel 6,” Alexis said, “and then that went to shit and we had nothing.”

“What’d you go with?”

“On A-1, the center art? A soldier with an M-16, in front of the Capitol. Dramatic. And nothing related to the news of the day at all.”

“Hey, Sully?”

He looked up from his second margarita toward the door of the restaurant, expecting it to be Joey calling out something about closing up. But Joey wasn’t there and Alexis was nodding behind him toward the street, the opposite direction. He turned and the first gunshot was loud and flat and the bullet exploded Alexis’s margarita into a spray of flying glass and tequila.

The second and third and fourth shots came in blam blam blam , the man with the gun standing fifty feet away in the street. The shots skipped off the tabletop, shattered the ceramic tile, clipped off the wrought-iron chairs. Alexis fell backward, screaming, hands at her face. The plateglass window at the front of the restaurant blew out. Sully overturned the table toward the shooter and fell behind it, crawling toward his jacket, scrambling to get the Tokarev from the pocket. The shots were coming wildly now.

His right hand closed over the grip of the Tokarev.

The shooting stopped. Sully pulled out the pistol and forced himself to take a deep breath. The woman across from them was curled on the ground, crying. A plate dropped and shattered inside the restaurant.

Then the gunman’s voice arose in a guttural bellow, something primal and wounded and wretched that seemed to bounce off the pavement and echo off the buildings, filling Sully’s head and burning into the well of his memory:

“ Sssssuuullllyyy!!”

And then the feds were rising from behind their flung-open car doors, guns aimed into the street, yelling over one another, “Drop it drop drop drop it drop it motherfucker DROP IT.” Sully, rising to his knees, saw the gunman lying in the middle of Mass Ave. bathed in an orange pool of light from an overhanging street lamp. He was putting his hands behind his back, his legs spread, assuming the position before the agents got there. The gun lay on the pavement, fifteen feet away. The man’s mouth hinged open and the voice that emerged sounded like a hoarse carnival barker, “Don’t shoot don’t shoot don’t shoot don’t SHOOT me goddammit.”

One of the feds pounced on him, planting a knee in his back, slamming his face into the pavement, pinning his arms to get the cuffs on. The other stayed five feet back, gun pointed, talking rapid fire into a squawking radio. Sirens in the distance.

Sully turned for Alexis. She was sitting up, dabbing at a slight cut across her forehead but otherwise unharmed. Sully rose to his feet and walked past the wrought-iron gate of the restaurant. He went over the brick sidewalk, finally remembering to tuck the pistol in the back of his waistband and let his shirt hang over it.

Then he was in the street, in the pool of light. The men on the ground were cursing and writhing. Sully kneeled on the pavement in front of them. The shooter looked up and saw him.

Blood dripped from his chin and poured from his nose. A knot rose on his forehead. Terry Waters spit a thin ribbon of blood from between his teeth.

“Still want to talk about my mom?”

ALEXIS WAS STILLrattled, still pissed off, even in the shower. Getting over the shooting maybe, but channeling her anger and shock into a lecture.

“You actually carried that gun to work.”

“I did.”

“Fucking unreal. Where did you get it?”

“Bosnia.”

“From?”

“The commander.”

“Which?”

“The Bosnian. From the night on the mountain. On Igman.”

She pulled the shower curtain back and looked at him, wiping the water from her eyes, shampoo thick and foamy in her hair. Her knuckles on the curtain trembled just slightly. “You didn’t come down with it. I was there when they loaded you on the chopper.”

“He sent it to me.”

“For what ? So you could shoot somebody in America?”

He was sitting on the closed toilet seat, drying himself off. Looking at his toenails, a bone-deep exhaustion settled over him, a blanket that weighed two hundred pounds.

“Souvenir. Or something. It’s a long story.”

She let go of the curtain and stuck her head back under the water. “I’ve got all night.”

“I don’t,” he said. “I got to cover this fucker’s hearing tomorrow. They’ll present him in C-10. Superior Court.”