Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“Then we’re both fucked,” Sully rasped, keeping eye contact, “’cause they told me you were a sketch artist.”

“I can’t sketch without a description.”

“I can’t describe what I didn’t see.”

“You said you were within ten, fifteen feet.”

“Yeah, Pocahontas, I was. And then your friends cut the lights. All I saw was him lit by a flare. Maybe five foot ten, could be six feet, thin but obviously strong, jeans or dark pants, a dark pullover. Ponytail. Clean shaven.”

“We’re trying to get a sketch to broadcast.”

“Know that.”

“This guy is still out there. The sketch might help someone recognize him.”

“Know that too.”

“He was wearing a baseball cap when he came through the security screening, so the cameras didn’t pick up much of his face.”

“Okay.”

The man frowned. “The other people who saw him, mostly around the Speaker’s office, were very frightened. What they said, it’s more impressionistic, and somewhat contradictory. I was hoping you, given your background, might provide better detail.”

Arms folded across his chest, his breathing steady but his left eye developing a tic, Sully nodded. He sat up in his chair. His ass hurt. Everything hurt.

“I would have thought the commando team, whoever, would have gotten a good look at him on their way in. The man just walked out. He wasn’t in a hurry. He told the 911 operator his name and where to find him.”

“Apparently there was some confusion.”

“Not on my end.”

The man didn’t respond.

“Look at me like that all night,” Sully said, lowering his head back into the cradle of his palms, closing his eyes. “It ain’t changin’ nothin’.”

After a moment, the man with the black hair said: “He’s not in the building, we know that. He’s beyond the perimeter. He’s loose. And armed. Which is why the description is critical. Anything jog your memory? Anything at all?”

The man waited. Sully heard the chair creak. The man was leaning forward, expectant. Sully recognized the drill without opening his eyes. He’d done it a million times to a million people himself. The patient interviewer looking for that last detail. Coaxing it forward with body language.

The noises of the night, the other conversations, the crowd of people in a small space, the light patter of rain tapping on the tent above, all these began to register on his conscious thought. But the image that danced on the back of his eyelids, the thing that he saw, like a still frame from a snuff film, was Edmonds’s face, his eyes, the gore-spattered ice picks sticking straight up out of them.

“Well?”

“I done told all I’n tell.”

The easel snapped back and there was the clatter of pencils on the table and the man walked away. The table and chair sat empty. Nobody else came.

The sound of the rain grew louder.

After a while, still bent over, still holding his forehead, he fished the phone out of his coat pocket. He pressed the green button and waited for it to come on. Once it did, he ignored the notice that he had six million missed calls and instead called the desk. Elliot, the news aide answering the call at this hour, immediately put R.J. on the line. Sully spoke for some time as the old man’s fingers flew over the keyboard, a loud clatter, keeping up with the narration.

Then R.J. stopped and said, “You are shitting me.”

“No.”

“Got to be.”

“It was pretty gotdamn original,” Sully said, talking with his eyes closed. Every now and then he leaned over to spit, trying to get the taste of the explosives out of his mouth. The jitters, now that the shit was all over, were starting. He could feel the tremors at his elbows radiating down to his palms. He shook his free hand to try to rid himself of the sensation and finally stood up, walking in a tight circle, over and over again. Sometimes, as they talked, he wandered outside the tent to feel the spattering rain. All the survivors or witnesses or what have you were quarantined out here in the shadows and humidity, standing around in clumps, waiting to be interviewed or reinterviewed or debriefed or whatever the feds were calling it.

Hours, this had been going on. Fucking hours . They’d let him use his phone once earlier, for five minutes, in which time he’d called the desk and given them the shooter’s name and a heads-up that a narrative was coming.

“Cooperators necklaced in South Africa,” Sully was saying. “Seen that. Serbians cut the cocks off the mujahideen. Seen that. Liberia. Fuck’s sake, man . All of Liberia. But this today, nah, I ain’t seen this. Ice picks through the eyes.”

“You’re positive?”

“Seriously, you ask me this?”

The hour was going on ten. Deadline, that merciless bitch, was moving in for the kill. It always got later faster than you thought. Sully would swear, actually give a sworn affidavit, that on some days the hours between seven and ten p.m. lasted twenty-three minutes.

“What about the name?” R.J. said. “Waters? The feds will neither confirm nor deny.”

“It’s what he told 911. It’s what I’m reporting.”

“We have to be one hundred percent,” R.J. said. “What you gave us, Terry Waters, from Oklahoma? We ran it. Got a hit out of central Oklahoma. An hour and change south-southwest of Tulsa. Indian Country. One ‘Terry Running Waters’ has been certifiable since high school at the local Native American reservation, which appears to be the Sac and Fox. He dropped out. In 1982. As a junior. In and out of wards and the local jailhouse for a year or two, then apparently kept at home. Something like two decades. He was a suspect in some animal mutilations. There are a couple of clips.”

“What you mean, ‘kept at home’?”

“I mean, like, kept at home,” R.J. said. “He’s the Boo fucking Radley of the res. Like nobody’s seen him in years. Except for, you know, the ‘shadow at the window,’ that sort of thing.”

“Come on.”

“We wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true.”

“Who’s reporting that?”

“Ellen, from the Chicago bureau. Quoting tribal officials by phone. Nobody else has the name, at least for now. Feds have a presser skedded at eleven; I’m guessing they’ll give it then. But nobody else has this for now. So you’re right, right?”

“As rain.”

Tulsa, Sully thought. Take out the “s” and you had his hometown in Louisiana. “Ellen’s solid,” he said. “And this guy, he told the 911 operator that was his name. Wanted credit. Couch it like that and we’re golden.”

“The feds aren’t releasing the 911.”

“I guess not. It sounded like the operator thought it was a prank.”

“Were you taking notes?”

“In the dark?”

“But, I mean, the name, the details of the call, sometimes it’s hard to remember-”

“Terry Waters and Oklahoma and ice picks. I can remember that much. What’s the town Terry’s from?”

“They’re calling it Stroud, which I personally have never heard of, but apparently he lived way out on or near the Sac and Fox Reservation, which is apparently in your greater metropolitan Stroud.”

“In other words, East Jesus.”

“Jim Thorpe grew up there. I learned that today.”

Sully, staying outside the tent now, took a seat on the curb, a blanket draped over his shoulders-what was with paramedics and blankets?-in a grove of trees in back of the Capitol, emergency lights throwing crazy shadows, ambulances and police cars, lights revolving. There was still a light rain falling, but it wasn’t bad under the trees that lined the drive. The Capitol was fully illuminated now-but depopulated of everyone save for the techs inside poring over blood spots and counting ejected shells.