Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

It was dark, darker than he expected, and he had to stop to let his eyes adjust. There was a deep stillness. He took in a full breath and let it out. The lives that had been lived inside these walls were erased and gone, just shadows and ghosts and faded voices left behind. If he stood there long enough, he would begin to hear them, the way he heard voices of the dead in the last, eyelid-fluttering moments before sleep. He’d been stunned when Eva Harris, the prosecutor back in D.C., told him she had the same thing, the voices of the homicide victims she represented sifting down into her mind in the darkness. He’d thought he was the only one. Whatever. He wasn’t going to hang around in here long enough for it to happen to him. Terry Waters was long gone from this place.

“The physical,” he whispered to himself. “Focus on the physical.”

Rotting carpet. Bags of trash. Part of the ceiling had rotted and collapsed, spilling old insulation onto the floor. Buckets, two coffee cans. An overturned sofa. Three, five steps brought him to the kitchen, the front hall. The sink had been pulled out, the plumbing taken. A wet mattress in a bedroom, stinking like a dead thing, rat pellets everywhere, the closet door off its tracks, leaning over on the mattress. One bathroom. The toilet pulled out of the floor, the sink and the tub still there but going from brown to black with grime and dust. Bird feathers. The smell of piss and animal shit.

It closed in on him fast, the house a tomb. He walked through the kitchen and pulled open the back door, getting outside, wanting to get out of there, feel the breeze, see the last rays of light.

The backyard wasn’t really worth the name. Packed earth and a fire pit. The old livestock pens lay twenty yards off to the west. There was a stand of trees farther out to the left, past the pond.

As he was turning back to the house, movement caught his eye. There, in the distance, a woman was coming out of the tree line to the far west. Some sort of checked shirt, jeans. She had long black hair and was walking head down, arms folded across her chest.

She came out of the woods, in the light now, walking toward the house, still a good quarter mile off. He started walking in her direction, an idea forming at the back of his mind.

When she raised her head, looking first up at the sky and then back down, Sully, still walking, smiled and waved. He was in the full light of the sun. He shaded his eyes with the notebook. No way she could miss him. He waved again, smiling, then calling out a long “Hellloooo,” across the plain.

The woman stopped. Her head turned slightly and she caught sight of him. She did not acknowledge hearing him or make any movement at all.

She just turned and disappeared back into the shadow of the woods, leaving him there, standing, arm raised, waving at a ghost.

HE WOULD NEVERcatch her. Running across the fields and into the woods, having no idea where she had gone, that was foolish. But he had to get to her, and fast. Just that quick, the idea had blossomed from the back to the front of his mind. He knew who she was.

Gimp-legging it around the side of the house at a half trot, he made it back through the weeds, to the concrete stretch in front of the house where the car was parked. Jiggling the keys out of his pocket, he dropped them, picked them up, and then slammed the door shut behind him. The car took him back down the driveway at a rattling clomp, shocks be damned. The gravel road came up on him quicker than he remembered and he slammed to a stop, the plume of dust catching back up with him, cascading over the car.

Left, back up to the road he came in on? Right?

“Fuck,” he shouted, banging the steering wheel with a fist. The lady at the rental counter, she’d tried to persuade him to rent one of those GPS things. He’d scoffed-like he couldn’t read a map-but now, here he was, time evaporating, stuck with pulling the folding map from the glove compartment.

Staring at it now, mashed flat on the seat beside him, he saw the county roads weren’t exactly a grid, but they were close. The woman had come out of the woods to the west. That meant she had to be coming from somewhere directly behind the Waters’ place. The properties, he was guessing, abutted, back to back. If true, that meant she would live on the next road to the west, and they would share a north-to-south property line. All he had to do was get there.

Where was he on the map, where was he…? He folded the map to a quarter panel to narrow it down. Spark Road… the creek… here. He was here.

If he turned right, going more or less south, there was another county road, like Spark, heading due west. That would take him-he followed it with a finger-here. Gotdamn. He was right. There was another north-south road, just like the one he was on, maybe two miles west. Complete with Spark Road at the north, it formed a box.

He set his odometer and pulled out hard to the south, spraying gravel. The light was going, fading by degrees. It got dark, he’d be fucked. He’d never find her tonight, and tomorrow she’d be gone or never answer the door even if he knocked on the right one.

Two point three miles down, across the open fields, he could see the intersecting road at least a half mile in the distance. Hallelujah. No plume of dust rose from it, so no car coming, and he swung the rental hard to the right as soon as he got to the intersection, no more than a tap on the brakes before he floored it west, the car fishtailing. He was plowing past a cemetery, goosing it up to fifty, sixty miles an hour. The road was nearly a straight shot. Two miles down to the next intersection and at the next dirt road, he swung back north, again resetting the odometer.

Now he’d need to come back north the same distance-two point three miles-and he’d be more or less directly west of Waters’s place.

Shadows falling, stretching across the road. Stars coming out above. He leaned forward over the steering wheel, willing the car forward, slowing when he got to the two-mile mark.

The land was still wide open, pastures with trees in clumps, the main tree line running far to the east from this perspective. A driveway up ahead led to a trailer built on a redwood platform. The windows were dark. He all but ran to the front door, catching his breath, then knocking. A dog barked from inside, a yapper. It came to the door on the other side, pissed off, jumping up against the door. Another knock. Nothing.

Back to the car, pulling out, shadows falling all the way across the road now. Dark don’t catch me here.

A quarter mile up, two trailers sat in their packed-dirt-and-crabgrass lawns, maybe fifty yards apart, a couple of fruit trees between them, a pickup in front of one, an old Buick in front of the other. The windows were dark in both. He was at a crawl, debating whether to stop, when, in the back pasture, coming past a sturdy wooden barn, he could see a figure moving. It was a black-haired woman. She wore an open checked shirt. Jeans. She was headed for the trailer on the left, slowing, her head coming up, looking at his car.

“Gotcha,” he breathed, throwing it into park right there at the side of the gravel road, not wanting to give her the chance to get inside.

By the time he was around the back of the car, she had reached the edge of the trailer. She had pulled out a pistol but was not walking any faster. She just came steadily toward him, past the trailer, into the scrubby front yard.

“Hi,” he called out, stopping three steps past the car, pulling both hands away from his body, but not being so ridiculous as to raise them. She stopped, halfway to the drive, a dog barking from her own trailer now. She recognized him from before, he could tell. Her eyes flickered with it. She didn’t speak. She didn’t raise the pistol. She just kept it at her side. That she didn’t raise it told him that she felt plenty capable of snapping it up, firing, and blowing him back into the gravel.