Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“Couldn’t you give me a heads-up, for Christ’s sake? I’m sitting here at the desk, Agent Gill calls, she’s in my ear before I even know what she’s talking about.”

“Just found out about it myself,” he said. “Apparently this went down this afternoon, while I was at the G.W. library.”

“The what?”

“It’s the key that turns the lock. Ask Susan, she’s got it solid. I don’t got time now. But, I mean, look, tell Eddie we’re going with this tonight for tomorrow’s paper. We got it cold, the whole thing. Save me fifty inches on the front. Tell Alexis to get herself or another shooter up there for fresh art of St. E’s, before it gets dark. This guy, he’s going to make a statement, a confession, something.”

“They’re saying this thing is at seven. You going to have time to write?”

“Keith will be coming back to the office before me. He can get the b-matter in, the background, the stuff Susan’s got, and I’ll come in and top it off.”

“It’s going to be tight,” R.J. said. “And we still don’t know what this meet-up is going to amount to, if anything. If there’s news, we write. If not, we sit on it for twenty-four hours.”

“Tonight, R.J. We can’t get beat on this. Not now.”

“Just calm down. Look. Go to this thing, sit there, take notes. Don’t say anything and don’t make any promises. You are there entirely as an observer. They going to let you use a recorder?”

“I haven’t worked it out with them yet, but of course. No deal without it.”

“Call me when it’s over. The instant. We’ll hold space on 1-A.”

The taxi had been working its way across town, across the Frederick Douglass Bridge into Southeast D.C., the Anacostia below, drops of rain spotting the windshield. Then they were on South Capital, the windows halfway down, the wind blowing his hair, hooking a right onto Xenia, the brick face of Covenant Baptist at the corner.

They were getting close, and Sully, after thinking about it, made one more call.

As they went up the hill, he talked into the phone. The mean little row of brick houses that lined the streets here tended to have additions tacked onto the back-weathered aluminum siding, decks cantering off to the side-giving them a weird, unsettled look. A faded deuce and a quarter sat in the backyard of one, listing like a battleship that had taken a torpedo to the hull.

He listened to the response for a while, then said, “I don’t care if there ain’t no visiting hours. You got to get there this evening.”

He paused to listen again.

“Because Noel, Sly. Noel. That was our deal. I let you walk on Noel, you get me in and out of St. E’s. We didn’t say one time only. You be in that patient area and keep your head on a gotdamn swivel.”

He hung up and rapped on the seat in front of him and got out before the man could stop.

“We’re here,” he said. “You’n wait just a minute, right?”

The house was a simple two-story brick construction with a black slate roof and a driveway on the side. It was typical post−World War II housing. A window on each side of the front door, dormer windows on the second. A rusting-out dark blue panel van, a ladder tied on the roof rack, sat in the driveway. Worn-out shrubs going brown in the front. Weeds, not grass, in the yard.

All of the houses on Xenia sat on the east side of the street. On the west side, there was a strip of grass and then trees and wild growth on the edge of the bluff. The Blue Plains water treatment facility and Bolling Air Force Base lay far below, across I-295, and then there was the river and National Airport due west, the Capitol to the northwest.

Still, despite the vista, the neighborhood had long been abandoned to the descendants of the slaves who had once worked farms on these same acres. The spot to shop down here wasn’t Mazza Galleria, like you had in moneyed Northwest D.C., but the Eastover Shopping Center, where you had the Get-a-Lot Grocery Store, the When You Need It check-cashing joint, empty storefronts, the Hot Pink Nail Palace, the Maximum You beauty salon and a third-rate florist shop so tired it didn’t even have a name. That was this place. And people wondered why the locals tended to have an attitude.

“Sully, hey, hey. Sully.”

The voice made him jump, coming back from his right. It was Keith, in jacket and tie, stepping out of one of the paper’s nondescript sedans, crossing the sidewalk, popping open an umbrella. “I was up in Chevy Chase, checking that George Harper up there, when Melissa called. The number for this place,” he said, nodding toward the house, “is disconnected. Nobody answers the door.”

Sully, glad to have the help, especially from Keith, turned and looked at the house. There were no lights on, and if someone was inside, they were being decidedly tolerant about two strangers standing at the front step.

“You tried front and back, right?”

Keith nodded, then added, with a smile. “Both locked.”

“Ha. Looked in the windows?”

Keith shrugged and Sully walked over, pushed his way through the thick green shrubs, and cupped his hands against the glass. The curtains were drawn but he peeked through the gap. Bare hardwood floors, the edge of a chair. The other room offered the same slice of domestic nothingness-the back of a cheap couch and some pizza boxes on a table in the far room.

“Nobody’s home next door on either side,” Keith said. “People still at work, maybe. I was chilling in the car waiting for folks to come home. Might go down on South Cap and get a burger, wait till it starts getting dark, come back. If this is our guy, somebody would have had to notice him.”

Sully nodded, looking at the upstairs windows, walking around the side of the house, coming back. “Seems like they would have called it in, though.”

Keith was over at the van. The “FKH Electrical” on the side was peeling. Closer inspection showed it had been done freehand, not with a stencil. It was ragged, done a long time ago, on the cheap, somebody with a can of paint and an artist’s brush.

“The dust,” Keith said, wiping a finger across the windshield.

The rain, picking up into a spatter, hit like small artillery in the caked dust, streaking it downward in rivulets. The taxi driver across the street put his window up, the movement catching Sully’s eye. The distraction made him check his watch. Fifteen till seven. Shit. Showtime. Walking backward toward the taxi, he said, “I’m getting to St. E’s. Hang out here, you like, looking for a neighbor. But, no shit, we got to file tonight. Check with Susan, soon as you get back to the mothership. She’s got the dope.”

“You sure you want to do this tonight?”

“Have to,” Sully said, now in the street. “Too many ways for this to leak after this meeting, too many people are going to know.”

Keith, calling out across the street: “Know what?”

LANTIGUA HAD THEMall meet in his office in the administration building. Sully; Janice, the head of PDS; Wesley Johnston, the AUSA; and the attorney for St. E’s, a fleshy man with sweaty palms who introduced himself as Eli Ezekiel, a man so pale it looked as if they kept him in the basement.

The office was a strange, musky space, breathing St. E’s Victorian-to-modern history. The heavy paneled walls, the magnificent mahogany door, the arched windows, the Queen Anne settee, the unironic scrolled writing desk with the scuffed edges in the corner, the well-worn Persian rug with the tear in the corner-all looking like stately ambassadors of another age, when Teddy Roosevelt was president and it was the nation’s most prestigious mental hospital. The dented metal filing cabinets, the sorry telephone receivers, the grime on the windows, the air-conditioning unit that was sealed with duct tape-all those testifying to the down-on-the-heels run of more recent decades, when it was a white elephant waiting for extinction.