Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

She turned the water off and reached for a towel. She put it to her hair, not bothering with her body. Sully appreciated the view and said so.

“Don’t you patronize me,” she snapped. “You took a gun to work today. A. Loaded. Gun. I can’t even.”

“Prudent, I thought, the way it turned out.” He felt thick-fingered, slow.

“Shots going everywhere, we go down on the ground, I look up, you’re fucking around with your cycle jacket, I’m thinking you’re trying to hide behind it, and then you pull out a pistol. For Christ’s sake. You’re lucky you got it back in there before the cops saw it.”

“I got this rule? It’s like, every time a psychopath kills people with ice picks and then calls me up to chat about our dead moms? I tote a pistol.”

“That right?” Bending to flip her hair over her head, wrapping it in the towel, then wiping the steam from the mirror, looking at the scratch across her forehead, an inch above the eyebrow.

“I got it written down somewhere, like on the refrigerator: ‘Get some milk,’ ‘Don’t forget the dry cleaning,’ like that.”

“Sully. A gun.”

“How’s your head?”

“Fine. It was just a little bit of glass.”

“Is Josh still awake?” Trying to change the subject. Opening the door a crack to let out the steam, pretending to listen for sounds from the basement.

“He barely woke up when we came in,” she said. “Didn’t seem fazed, a strange woman coming into the house late at night with his uncle, police cars out front. One wonders about the domestic environment.”

“One does?” He moved his feet to accommodate her stepping out of the shower. The bathroom was tiny. Her stomach was just in front of his face. Breasts were peaceful things, it flitted across his mind, just like that.

“Look. You can talk to me,” she said, lifting his chin up with her index finger. Just enough to make him raise his glance. It took him a second to get it.

“Later,” he said. “I’ma tell you about it later. Or your boobs. I’m sorry about the gun. I’m sorry about that, that fucking insanity at the restaurant. But it’s been a day, Alex. Two of them.”

It was three, three thirty in the morning, maybe four. What his mother would have called the witching hour.

When they had come into the house-driven back from the 1-D precinct by no less than Homicide Chief John Parker, who had come to check on him-Sully had walked upstairs and got three of the pills the doctor had given him from the little orange prescription bottle in the medicine cabinet, walked back downstairs, poured a Basil’s over ice, and slammed them home in three straight shots. He wasn’t supposed to take more than one at a time but he gave himself medical clearance.

Alexis wouldn’t let him drink after that but she was sitting up with him.

“I mean, you’ve talked to me, you’ve said, the nightmares, the PTSD things,” she was saying, pulling one of his T-shirts over her head, opening the door all the way now. “I’ve woken up next to you, you’re sleeping but sweating through your shirt, breathing so hard it wakes me up. You’ve had those ever since Igman.”

On the street outside, there was a marked patrol car at the top and bottom of the block. Another unmarked FBI van in the middle. Another unmarked on Constitution, covering the alley that ran to his backyard, and another on A Street. Just in case there was an accomplice, they said.

He followed her out into the darkened hall, the house silent. She turned into his room and got into bed, him following. Sheets and air-conditioning and her next to him. Don’t be pissed, Alex , he thought. This, this was nice. Fading fast now.

“That night in Bosnia,” she said, “I remember them bringing you down the mountain, not even daylight, the U.N. choppers coming in to airlift you out. Nobody said anything about a gun.”

“I was unconscious, so.”

“It was a bad winter.”

“Yes.”

“You’d just lost Nadia, too.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“I was just saying I was worried about you. Am.”

“I am fine.”

“Said the idiot waltzing around with a gun.”

“I will be fine.”

“Where is this thing? As we speak?”

“Back in the closet. Alex, no kidding, can we sleep? I won’t shoot anybody before tomorrow morning, I promise.”

THE HIGH CHURCHof the Misbegotten met six days a week in Room C-10, a small hearing room at the bottom rear of D.C. Superior Court, beset by a smell that no one could ever quite place.

It was where each and every person arrested the day and night before in the nation’s capital was first presented to the judicial system. There was no bail in the District of Columbia. The brief services in C-10 were to determine if your lousy ass was a danger to the public.

If you weren’t, the magistrate gave you terms (stay away from witnesses, don’t get arrested again, don’t be an asshole), and you got to walk out of the well of the court and past the bulletproof Plexiglas, up the aisle, past the pews, out of the courthouse and into the sweet sunshine of freedom.

But if the same magistrate said you were a danger to the American People? You did not go into the sweet sunshine of anything. The marshals stepped you back and took you right back through the Door to Hell and your lousy ass would go to D.C. Jail until such a time as your right to a speedy trial came due.

That C-10 was across from the cafeteria, the smell of one often wafting into the other, had not gone unnoticed among its faithful constituents. It made you think about the food in there before you ate, but particularly after.

Fittingly, considering the human waste that channeled through C-10 for long hours each day, it was also noted by the faithful that C-10 was set at the ass end of Superior Court. The massive, charmless concrete mass of the courthouse fronted onto 500 Indiana Avenue. The back of the building, facing C Street, was several dozen feet lower, down a small hill. Entering from the front, you had to go down two stories, usually by the escalator, to the bottom floor. C-10 was at the back of that floor, hence the tag. This lowly status added to the misery and squalor of the atmosphere, for it made the room seem like a funeral parlor, like the worst storefront church in Christendom, like the outhouse at the end of the rainbow.

On the morning after the shooting, on the day when Representative Edmonds’s body began lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, Sully slept late, staggering downstairs to make brunch for Josh and Alexis, who seemed to be getting along fine without him. He spent thirty-five minutes on the phone convincing Lucinda that the weird shit was over. Alex said she would drive Josh to his class at the Corcoran on her way in to the office. So he dressed and made the mile-long walk down Capitol Hill, his dress shirt soaked at the small of his back by the time he got to the courthouse. There were tiny rivulets of sweat at his temples, the base of his throat, swelling to a puddle at the small of his back.

Stepping off the escalator onto the bottom floor, turning the corner into a short hallway, he groaned. There was already a herd in the hallway, well-dressed reporters he’d never seen before, network and cable news staff, the cut of their suits-hell, that they were wearing suits in C-10-gave them away as one-timers, big-footers, here for the headline. They talked into their cell phones, walked around in circles, leaned back against the wall, killing time, the men outnumbering the women about four to one.

“How’s church today, brother?” Sully said as he clamped a hand on the fleshy shoulder of Leonard Mahoney. Leo was a court-appointed attorney and a member of the flock in good standing. Right shoulder slumped against a wall, his plaid jacket, his sagging belly, his comb-over standing at a high wisp-Leo was instantly recognizable to any courthouse denizen. Eons from now, when they were excavating the remains of this place, they’d find the petrified remains of Leo, halfway between C-10 and a courtroom, calcified finger in place, scratching behind where his right ear had been.