Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“But why,” R.J. harrumphed, “why would some psycho pretend to be a paranoid schizophrenic Indian from the plains?”

The pillow came down and he caught it.

“I don’t have to know that. Because he’s crazy, too? He’s Bruce Wayne, he’s Batman, he’s concealing his true identity. We don’t have to know why. We just have to know .”

“So she, this trailer-park broad, this Oracle of the Plains, she didn’t have any idea who Waters’s friend was, that kid was from way back when?”

“Not other than maybe some white folks who used to live down the road, maybe with a last name starting with H.”

“Jesus. So how did Waters, I mean that Waters out there, how did his mother die?”

“Unknown, but she was unknown, too. Well. Marissa. Her name. Our total bio at this point is that she was some hustler the old man knocked up while working at an oil rig down in, I think, Odessa. We poke around, I’m giving eight-to-five we’re going to find they were never married. She came up to play house with Daddy Waters once or twice, cut out for good when it appeared little Terry wasn’t going to be breaking any of Jim Thorpe’s old records.”

“This is incredibly fucked up, I want to tell you.”

“I had put that together all by myself.”

Sitting up now, a sip of the bourbon, rattling in a plastic cup from the bathroom. Baseball highlights on the screen, the sound off. He was in boxers and a wifebeater. He ran a finger along one of the long, hairless scars on his right knee, not so much purple anymore as just discolored. It itched. Scars itched. Nobody told you scars itched.

“We can’t even correct our story,” R.J. was saying. “What would we write, ‘According to one unnamed source who didn’t offer a shred of evidence, other than two metal stars nailed into two oak trees, in the middle of Bumfuck, Oklahoma, we now retract everything we’ve written about Terry Running Waters being a psychopathic, eye-stabbing Capitol Hill killer. Mr. Waters is, in fact, dead, and has been the entire Clinton administration. The paper regrets the error. The multiple errors. Pardon as we pick up our dick.’”

“Like I say, we can go dig ’em up, you want. Apparently we can buy the place out of probate on the cheap.”

“But now, you see this? We have major, major problems going forward using the name Terry Waters as the perp. I mean, we have serious reason to believe that’s false, but it doesn’t rise to a level of fact we can print.”

“Knowledge is a burden. I think that’s what God was trying to tell Adam.”

“You’re drinking, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“You’re rattling the ice in your cup. You always do. I just heard it.”

“It’s Coke.”

“Mixed with what, Jim Beam?”

“None but a savage pours Coke into bourbon. I won’t say what type of individual drinks Beam.”

“That’s a nondenial denial.”

“Are you worried about me or the shooter?”

“Okay, so okay. I got to call Eddie. I can only imagine his joy.”

Sully stood, batting the pillow to the side of the bed. “Am I the bearer of bad news? I’m turning the nation’s number one news story on its head in a mind-numbing exclusive. A thank you, a little bonus, that’d be nice to hear about.”

“Get all the tater tots at Sonic you want.”

“Holy cow.”

“Look,” R.J. said, “this may pan out, but right now it’s just a giant pain in the ass. So what’s the plan? What do I tell Eddie you’re doing?”

Sully flopped back on the bed, looking back at the ceiling and its water stains. The best news in his life: the NFL preseason was underway. Maybe he could get Alexis to the Dome for a Saints game this year. Stay in Uptown for a few days. October was always a good time to go. He was, he realized, starving. He never ate enough. The spaghetti, he should have done more than pick at it.

“When the doors open in the morning, I’ll be at the county land records office, maybe the tax assessor’s,” he said, then yawned loudly in R.J.’s ear, just for that tater-tots bit. “Wherever they keep the real estate records around here. Those, we get those, that’ll show land ownership, past and present. People tend to have acreage out this way. So likely not that big of a list. I mean, this lady, Elaine, she pointed down the road. Can’t be that many farms in that direction, the next several miles, whatever the last name. I look for something with an H and we see what we get.”

“Then what? Let me blue-sky this. Let’s say you find a guy with an H. How do we know that paleface is the shooter locked up in St. E’s?”

“We don’t. But, Christ, whoever the Capitol Killer is, he knows Terry Waters. That we know. And he knows something else nobody around here does, and that’s that Terry Waters has been worm food for a long time. How big is that universe of people? I’m thinking five or six, tops.”

“The lady you just talked to said both she and her brother knew.”

“They’re not homicidal maniacs, so I don’t know they count.”

“Apparently her brother might be.”

“If it was her brother doing the killing,” Sully said, “I’d be in the dirt next to Terry right about now. These people don’t fuck around.”

R.J. thought about it. “That’s actually true, Sullivan. You irritate almost everyone.”

“The county records, then school records, yearbooks, maybe the Census, that’s what I hit. The Census, if the family answered it, would be spectacular. But we’re looking for a white guy, possibly last name H, who would now be roughly forty years old. That would put him in middle or high school, what, twenty-five years ago. That’s a graduation date in the late nineteen seventies, a DOB ’round about nineteen sixtyish.”

There was a long quiet.

“Sullivan.”

“Yes, boss?”

“I’m going to prolong all of our lives and tell Eddie that this won’t take you more than a day or two. Because the longer we keep printing ‘Terry Waters,’ the more moronic we look with each usage if you’re actually right about this.”

“Not as much as the other guys, when we break this.”

“ If ,” R.J. said. “If , not ‘when.’ Your enthusiasm is as touching as it isn’t contagious.”

Sully signed off, standing there in his boxers, turning the television off. There was stubble on his cheeks-he had forgotten to shave. Hadn’t taken a shower before heading out this morning. This might be a good time for that. He started the water, decided to make it a bath so he could soak and sip, then sat on the edge of the tub. He called his house, popping his neck, then leaned over, stretching out his back, looking down at his bare toes while the phone rang.

“Hello, stranger,” Alexis said, her voice warm, a little sleepy. “How’s life on the investigative trail?”

He sat back upright, rattling the ice in the cup. “You ain’t gonna believe this shit.”

“You’re drinking,” she said. “Don’t even try to bullshit me.”

THE HANGOVER WASa thing of beauty. The headache banged on the front edge of his skull. Rolling to his right in the bed-it took him a moment to place the anonymous curtains, the pale white walls, the lone painting of a prairie sunset… where was-and then he lay back in the sheets.

Reassuring, that’s what it almost felt like, rubbing a palm over his forehead, his closed eyes, yawing. Familiar. Something he knew.

A rat’s-ass cup of coffee from the lobby downstairs and a complimentary doughnut, plus twenty minutes of driving around in the early light (behind sunglasses) brought him the realization that the county seat was in Chandler, a dozen or so miles west.