Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“Don’t play.”

Sly let it hang.

“That’s the transaction?”

Sully nodded and now Sly looked over at him, his eyes black, tight. “One more. I do you one more solid on this and we’re good. We clear? We do this thing, I don’t hear that name again.”

Sully’s mouth was dry, he could feel it at the corner of his lips, a little cracked piece of skin. This was vile. He thought of Lorena, Noel’s sister, and wondered why he’d never stopped back up by her house to, you know, say hello, see if she’d ask him inside to have another drink on her back porch. It shouldn’t have to be this way. A feeling in his chest, like a rock descending in deep water. When he couldn’t feel it anymore, he licked his lips and let go of the last hope of justice that Noel Pittman’s murder likely would ever have.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” Sly said. “Visiting’s tomorrow. Me ’n Lionel’ll pick you up right here, ten in the morning.”

Sully nodding, standing up, wanting to get this over with, changing subjects. “How’s George these days, things in Frenchman’s Bend?”

Sly stayed seated but waved his hand over his head and Sully heard Lionel crank up Sly’s Camaro, where he had been parked on the street, the boss’s righthand bodyguard, and saw the car pull up to the curb. “They all over his ass down there, the cops. Can’t move so much as a ki. I been up at the apartments most of the summer, getting them ready to rent out. Good time to work. You can get them Hispanic brothers, man, they work all day and half the night. Might have to put George to work up there, things don’t pick up.”

He put tuna steaks on the grill that night, some shrimp that had marinated in a tequila and lime sauce of his own mixing. Alexis made the salad. Josh played disc jockey, putting on a bunch of crap Sully hadn’t heard before but didn’t mind, the more he listened to it. Something, anything, to take his mind off tomorrow, the number of ways that it could go wrong. Bourbon could be your friend, times like this. The Blanton’s, half empty-Josh or Alexis had found it-was in the cabinet. He uncorked the pewter stopper and poured two fingers over some chunky ice cubes in a crystal tumbler, loving the gurgle.

Rattling it around, he wandered up to the front bay window, looking out, the light traffic, the streetlights winking on. Three people staying in the house. Hunh. Things happen you don’t see coming. Somebody walking by out front on Sixth Street, getting the waft of the grill smoke, the music, Alexis and Josh bantering in the backyard, darkness descending? They could mistake it for domesticity.

They ate on the back patio. The table wobbled on the uneven bricks. Sully got two books of matches to prop up the short leg. The heat had given way to a breeze. It swirled up the alley and through the branches of the cherry tree, tracing over them, a delicate-fingered, invisible thing.

“Is that the first touch of fall?” Alexis wondered aloud.

She had her hair down, home from work, getting used to the pace of editing in the office, then coming home on time. She said she was liking it.

“You coulda stayed gone a couple more days,” she said.

“Yeah,” Josh said, looking over at her. “We were fine.”

Alexis wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse the color of sand. It set off her olive-brown skin. Josh, infatuated in the way only teenage boys can be, was turning her into his personal pinup, following her around with a sketch pad and a charcoal pencil, getting lines down even while she was doing the dishes, for God’s sake.

“You want to tell me what this plan is you’ve got to see the mystery man?” she said. “How exactly it is you’re going to get in St. E’s?”

“You don’t even want to know.”

Josh put six, seven sketches beside him on the table. Sully wiped his hands and flipped through them, leaning back in his chair. All were of Alexis. In thoughtful repose. Smiling, looking off to the right. Walking out the door to work, hurried, lines blurred.

“Landscapes,” Sully said, putting a bite of tuna in his mouth, letting it dissolve on his tongue, it was that thin, that good. “I thought the class, what you were working on, was landscapes.”

Josh, not worried about it: “Random other assignments are good.”

“Yeah,” Alexis said, mock defensive. “Fresh eyes. Gotta have fresh eyes.”

After the dishes, in the basement-which Josh was turning into his own apartment, his sketches now tacked to the wall, making plans to come back for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, anything other than the endless oppression of Sunday School and Bible study in Phoenix-he had them watch Alien.

“It’s the third time,” Alexis complained.

“But that thing on his face ,” Josh kept saying.

The boy was asleep by midnight. They left him on the couch and went up the steps, tiptoeing to the top floor, Sully with two or three bourbons in the bloodstream and Alexis with at least three glasses of wine in hers. They tumbled into the bed in a giggling rush, him tugging off her blouse and shorts, pulling the thong to the side, just enough, and her gasping, slow down, slow down.

“Thought you said you wouldn’t with a kid in the house,” he whispered.

“You want me to stop?” she whispered back.

The darkness unfolded and he felt himself losing himself in it. Things moved in his chest, his conscious mind fading from him, giving way to a deep well of lust and need and fury and fear and she was whispering in his ear again.

“With me, baby,” she was saying, her hips still moving, her left hand on his shoulder but her right on his chest, “with me. Not to me.”

ST. ELIZABETHS, NOapostrophe, thank you, was not a happy place, and neither was its home in Southeast, the poorest, roughest quadrant of D.C. Almost entirely separated from the rest of town by the Anacostia, Southeast was its own world. It was a place that the majority of the population in, say, Northwest-the wealthiest, whitest part of town-had never been and had no intention of going.

Lionel took the Camaro uphill from the eastern banks of the river, the car thrumming alongside the brick boundary wall of St. E’s. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the main drag through this part of the city, split the asylum grounds in two, on a roughly north-to-south basis, dividing the east campus from the west. The original brick boundary wall lined the street-front of the west campus, the oldest part of the hospital. It was high, imposing and solid.

It always stunned Sully, the few times he’d been up here, the size of the place. More than three hundred acres at its peak, seven thousand patients and who knows how many staff, back in its early twentieth-century glory days. The idea then that the mentally disturbed needed peace and quiet and sunshine, thus the working farm and huge grounds, removed from and across the river from the stresses and bad humors of Washington proper. It had been rural then.

The west campus, situated on a ridge line above the river, offered one of the most dramatic views in America-the U.S. Capitol across the river, the federal city swaddled by the Anacostia and the Potomac, the Washington Monument, the sun fading to the west, over the wide sweep of the continent-and it was the sole property of the insane.

It sort of explained Washington, in a way.

“You know, my hometown, it was maybe two thousand people,” Sully said, looking out the window, the boundary wall looking back at him, “and this place, it used to have two, three times that many crazy people, all behind that wall.”

“I thought everybody in Mississippi was crazy,” Sly said, drawing a snort of laughter from Lionel.