Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

They were coming up on the front door, frosted glass, a tiny black receptor to the right for your magnetic ID. If you didn’t have one, you had to hit the button and wait for them to buzz you in. Sly-wearing slacks, a light blue-gray shirt, sleeves artfully rolled up, sunglasses propped on his head-pressed the buzzer. There was a pause and then the door clicked, Sly pulling it open.

Lock one, cleared.

The guard station, a box of bulletproof Plexiglas, was set into a long wall with a door on either side. It was a standard jail or prison two-lock process: Once they pressed the buzzer to unlock the first door, you walked in, stopped, and it locked behind you. You were then in a locked chamber adjacent to the guard station. Then a guard at the second level pressed the buzzer to open the second door to let you inside. The second door could not be opened unless the first door had locked behind it.

Sly walked to the Plexiglas, said hello to the guard behind it, put his driver’s license in the tray that ran under the window. Then he said his name and Uncle Reggie’s, and with a jerk of his head back at Sully, “This my cousin. I told Vinny he was coming today.”

At the mention of “Vinny,” the guard, a heavyset black guy wearing a dark blue uniform, looked up from Sly’s ID. He looked at Sly, then at Sully. He kept his eyes on Sully and said something to someone else in the booth. Another guard materialized behind him and then the security door clicked open on the right. Sly walked in, it shut behind him, the far door opened, and he was in.

Sully, not making eye contact with the guard, pulled out his wallet and his driver’s license. He put his hand in the slot, but did not actually put his ID in it. The guard, looking over his head and not at him, pressed the button. The door clicked, he stepped into the lock box, and as soon as the door behind him clicked so did the one in front.

He pushed it open, the air stale and flat and a hundred years old. It smelled like the doors hadn’t been opened since the Eisenhower administration. Sly was standing there, talking to one of the guards like they were best friends, Sly twirling his sunglasses around by one of the stems, smiling. “Hey, I already signed you in. Jamal here is gonna take us upstairs.”

Lock two.

The third lock was to get into the day room of the ward, and that was easy. Jamal put his badge to the buzzer and swung it open. He nodded to them both, said he’d get one of the orderlies to go get Reggie. Sully and Sly walked into the room. The door swung back behind them. From the other side, they could hear Jamal rattle it to make sure the lock had engaged.

“Hate that sound,” Sly muttered.

Sully started to razz him, to say, “I guess not,” but dropped it. The room, what did you want to say, did not invite levity.

You would not know it was a day room for the criminally insane if you saw it in a picture. You needed the smell, the tang, for that. Large, airy, light-filled, some worn carpets by the window, some by the couches, which had no cushions. There were two televisions, both high on the wall, out of reach. Maybe the lobby of a cheap hotel, it looked about like that.

The smell was something like Pine-Sol poured over vomit and mopped up and left to dry.

Three patients were in the room. Two were watching television. One was staring out the floor-to-ceiling window. The two watching television turned to look at them, the new fish in the aquarium, then over at the control booth. After a minute, they went back to looking at the television. The third one, Sully didn’t think that guy had moved since this morning, so he walked over and looked out the window, too. The view was over the grounds, the old cemetery, the bluff falling away toward 295, the Potomac way down there. A maintenance guy was mowing the yard, but without a grass catcher attached, just spewing the dead dry grass out of the blower.

He was about to turn and make a comment to Sly about the inmates-sorry, the patients’-multimillion-dollar view, when he heard Sly’s raised voice behind him.

“Uncle REG-GIE,” Sly was saying, walking toward the couches. A burly man with a thick gray beard and matted hair coming up on him, swallowing Sly in a bear hug. “I mean, hey, brother. Look at you.”

Sully came over from the window and, keeping Sly between him and Uncle Reggie, joined them as they sat on the couches, taking a seat where he could see down the hallway toward the patients’ rooms. As soon as he sat, Reggie stopped looking at Sly and looked at him. “Who this motherfucker here?”

Sly looked over at him, like he’d just noticed Sully. “Friend of the family,” he said.

“Not mine,” Reggie said, lumbering to stand back up. “Not this family. The fuck’s with his face? Talk to me, boy.” Sully scratched the back of his neck and looked down. Sly pulled on Reggie’s sleeve and said, “Calm down, Unc. He was a friend to momma back in the day. He straight.”

Reggie sat, still confused but glaring, scratching at his neck, just like Sully was. Behind him Sully could see an orderly walk by in his white sneakers and sky-blue scrubs. He went to a door halfway down the corridor on the left, stopped and looked back at Sly. He pressed his magnetic stripe to the keypad, it buzzed, and he went in.

“Okay,” Sly said. “Go.”

Sully pressed down on the balls of his feet and stood, his heartbeat coming up harder in his chest.

“Now where he going?” Reggie said.

“You talk to me,” Sly said. “You tell me about why this skinny white motherfucker, Hinckley, is getting some ass up in here and you just wearing out your left hand.”

“’Cause I eat with my right,” Reggie said, throwing back his head to laugh, half his teeth gone, Sully moving past him, smiling, walking like he wasn’t in a hurry to the door.

He had worn hard-soled shoes and now he regretted it, the clicking on the tile. Everything seemed loud, the television, Uncle Reggie, the muttered conversation of the other two patients, the click of the locks. The security cameras, they had to be up on a wall someplace, tracking him, and he fought the urge to look up and find them. Act like you been here before. Act like this is routine.

When he got to the door-it had only the number 237 on it-he rapped it, three times, softly. The hallway back to Sly looked a mile long. In the chest pocket of his sport coat was his recorder. Fumbling with it, he clicked it and saw the tiny red recording light go on.

The door in front of him swung open a moment later. The attendant walked past and did not speak or make eye contact. Sully stepped inside and the door hissed shut behind him and he heard the bolt click back into its slot.

Nine feet away, staring at him with cloudy, heavily-lidded eyes-hazel, green and brown, swirling-was the killer he’d seen in the Capitol, on the street on Massachusetts Avenue.

He was seated on the side of a bed, his wrists handcuffed in front of him. The cuffs were part of a padded chain that ran around his waist and then to a bolt in the floor. His ankles were bound and these restraints were also connected to the bolt. Wispy black hair fell to his shoulders.

Sully put his hands behind him, his palms against the door, and leaned back against it. He smiled, just a bit at the corners of his mouth, looking at the raptor-like edges of the man’s teeth-had he never gone to the dentist?- the lowered chin, the slightly opened mouth, then said what he’d come to say.

“Hi, George,” he said. “Pity about your grandma.”

IT CONFUSED HIM,you could tell. The gaping mouth, opening and closing, a fish on the bottom of the boat.

He was ragged-headed, unshaven, raccoon pouches beneath the eyes, the cheeks puffy, the shoulders sagging under the restraints. The white jumpsuit was a size too big, billowing out like a balloon, making him appear small and lost beneath it. His knees rattled back and forth, his fingers reached and plucked under the cuffed restraints, as if he were playing an invisible accordion. It wasn’t clear if the movement was voluntary.