Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

This was the ghoul that Harper had burst out in court was coming to kill the judge, living in the diseased mind of her grandson. Miriam Harper, lobotomized and brain destroyed, had cut her throat and then bled out on him and the blood never left. It had soaked into the boy’s skin. His mind. His dreams.

The eyes of Miriam, the supposed windows of the soul, held nothing in this photograph but reflected light. They had no spark of their own. It had be to terrifying, coming home to this every day as a child. The smell, it came across him, unbidden and unwanted, the musty old-woman smell that George would have inhaled when he embraced her, stale sweat and talcum powder.

There were very few notations on the sheet attached to this photograph. She was “better” and “much improved, husband reports.” At the bottom was a one-line scrawl: “Suicide, 1971.”

He turned the photograph over before flipping the folder shut, and there was another line of handwriting that froze him to his schoolboy’s chair.

“Lobotomized daughter, Frances Harper, 4/16/67. D.C. office. Last session.”

It took Jerry twenty minutes of digging in the stacks, but he eventually returned with the Frances Harper folder. While he was gone, Sully worked out the knots in his mind. The mom “off in Washington,” they’d said out there in Oklahoma. Christ. Schizophrenia. It ran in families. The father, seeing the traits of the mom blossoming in their only child, sent her for a cure before it could get worse. To Washington, to the great lobotomist himelf, the patron saint of lost causes.

Jerry set the folder on the table. There were only two photographs inside.

The first one, the day of the lobotomy: an attractive young woman, maybe thirty, fair features, full lips, shoulder-length blond hair that she had tucked behind her ear on one side. But her face was drawn, nervous. She wore a turtleneck sweater, arms folded across her chest, eyes bright, frightened, like a small animal in the grip of something more powerful.

Jerry, though, wasn’t looking at that at all. He was focused on the date, tapping it with his finger.

“Wow. Dude. Remember I told you Freeman died in disgrace? That’s because he kept doing the transorbitals in his office, long after everyone else had quit, after it was considered malpractice. The last session he did were two women. One died the day after. The other, it went bad. There was an investigation. That’s why his license got pulled. Manslaughter charges were considered. This chick here, she had to be the second lobotomy that day. She’s the very last lobotomy he ever did.”

The other photograph in the folder was the “after.” Sully pulled it out.

“Holy shit,” Jerry said.

Frances Harper lay on her back in a single bed, wearing nothing but a white smock. Her eyes were lidded, heavy, the eyes rolled up. The mouth gaped. The skin on her face was sallow, barely clinging to the underlying bone. The once blond hair was white, listless, cut boy short. The only note on the back was, “St. E’s, January 1970.”

Sully looked down in the folder, pulling out a small scrap of paper. It was a copy of a hospital ledger entry. “Harper, Frances, DOD, 11/26/1993. Plot seven, row seventy-two, grave nine.”

“You mean,” Sully said, “she lived another twenty-three years like that?’

And then it came to him, the nightmare he was supposed to understand. George Harper had known St. E’s nearly all his life. Freeman had destroyed his grandmother. His mother was sent to St. E’s and destroyed by Freeman, too. George Harper would have visited her for two decades, washing her face, her feet, brushing her hair, a mindless lump of flesh that wouldn’t die. And then she did, buried there still.

Who had killed his mother? It wasn’t a who. It was a what.

St. Elizabeths.

WHEN HE CAMEgimp-legging it out of the library, he was stunned to see it was after five, lines of cars pulling out of parking garages, the quad empty. The light was muted and diffuse overhead, thick gray clouds piling in. When he turned his cell back on, the messages were stacked up.

Clicking into the voicemails as he walked, he noticed, to his great exasperation, that the G.W. library at this time of year wasn’t a haven for taxis. Not a one. Not even in the distance. He started up H, past the quad, then hooked left on Twenty-first, realizing too late that it was a one-way running south, and now he was going to have to hoof it up to Pennsylvania Avenue before he’d be able to flag one.

The first two messages were from Josh, wondering if maybe he and Sully and Alexis could take the boat out this weekend, because he was flying home next weekend, and really, no kidding, it would be great if Alexis could come. The second message, five minutes after the first, was also from Josh, this one accentuating his fine record of emptying the dishwasher and throwing out the trash and cleaning even the countertops as meritorious conduct, fully deserving, if he hadn’t mentioned it in the first message, of letting him drive the boat. With Alexis there.

The shit started with the third voicemail.

“Sully Carter. Hey. Janice Miller, over at PDS. I need to know, like yesterday, why my client, I’m going to repeat that, my client, is going ape shit. Says he wants to make some sort of statement today at St. E’s-but if and only if you are there. Says he has a ‘bond’ with you. This is what I need to know. Why and how does my client have a bond with you . The fuck, Sully. Call me.”

He pulled it away from his ear, fumbling at the buttons to make it play the message again-holy shit, had George ratted him out? That he’d been in the asylum? He patted his pockets, his shirt, like a pen and paper was going to materialize, before he stopped and got one out of his backpack, writing on the back of his notes from the library.

The next message wasn’t any better.

“Mr. Carter. This is Eduardo Lantigua. I am the director of St. Elizabeths Hospital. For many years. I have a most unusual request from a pretrial inmate. His name is Terry Waters. He says he will end his case, of which you are acutely aware, this very evening. It is based upon the condition that you are present. He has become very agitated. This is a very unusual request. Please call to discuss.”

The fourth call, he could have predicted.

“Sullivan,” R.J.’s voice boomed. “One, where are you? Two, Special Agent Gill, that lovely woman from the FBI? She just crawled up my ass so far she could tickle my tonsils. She wants to know why Waters, or Harper, or who the fuck ever, is demanding you be at St. E’s tonight. Three, and savvy reporter that you are, you’ll already know this: Call me. Right. Fucking. Now.”

He leaned his head into a palm. George was playing some fucking cards, leading him by the nose after his visit. And there was nothing to do about it but go, take the bait, see what it was, and then make a decision about what to do with it. George was going to tell them all-the FBI, Janice, Lantigua, the U.S. attorney’s office-that he’d been there.

How could he do that and keep his job? He couldn’t.

No, wait, turning to look for a cab, Jesus, anywhere. Just hold your water , he thought to himself. This would still work. On the inside, the staff? Who was going to back George and say that they’d seen Sully in the place, that there had been a huge altercation this afternoon?

No contact of Sly Hastings who wanted to keep breathing, much less keep his job, that’s who. None of Sly’s sources were going to cross him. Nor were any of their colleagues, once it was explained exactly who it was they were about to cross. Most of the staff lived in Southeast, anyway. They would know the name of Sly Hastings, and they would know they did not ever, ever want to see the man up close.