Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

“Come again?”

“It’s going to run on B-12, not A-1, no matter what we do.”

“You southern people are so colorful. Well. Here’s a thought. You’ve had a run of vitamin stories of late, lad. Pop out front. Try the steak sauce.”

“We tie it to the Bend,” Sully said, pulling his feet down, rolling up the chair to the desk, “we’ll be getting somewhere. I went down there just now, two vampires show up, say they’ll cap my ass, I come nosing around again. I say to you, I just stepped on a nerve. I say to you, floater man went into the water right there, in Frenchman’s Bend. This is going to be the M Street Crew, the South Capitol Crew; they’re always beefing in Southwest. The Hall brothers run the-”

“‘Vampires’ being your term for drug dealers.”

“Bloodsuckers. Yeah.”

“They know anything about floater man?”

“Like they’re going to spout to me? But yeah, one of them, this kid, he blinked.”

“He blinked?”

“He blinked.”

“You’re fucking with me now, right? Just to have something to do?”

“He blinked a lot.”

R.J. looked at him, hard. Then blinked. Three times.

“Clearly the man is guilty of murder. How could anyone doubt this? ‘Blinker Man Kills Floater Man.’ I say we go hard with it on 1-A.”

“No, I mean, what I’m saying, he has this little affectation, this tic. He blinks bam bam bam , seven or eight times in a row. He knows something.”

“Good tracking, Kemo Sabe, but that’s not going to carry the water. Maybe you want to get your guy Parker to spout. He’s the homicide director, right?”

“Chief. John Parker is the chief of MPD Homicide. He ain’t going to say nothing until he knows for sure. There’s not even an ID on the body yet.”

“Maybe he could blink it to you.”

Sully rubbed his eyes. “I shouldn’a gone out there. I knew it and did it anyway.”

“Like blink blink, pause, blink. Blink. Morse code. You know?”

“I repeat.”

R.J., running with it now. “A homicide cop, blinking like that, I’d say means they just busted Pablo Escobar down at Twelfth and-”

“Did you have any sort of point in mind or-”

“-they got-what? What did you say? Are you with me here? Without a reliable source with an ID for floater man,” R.J. said, coming back to the point, opening his eyes wider, “we don’t have any connection to the Bend, correct? All we got is that there was a man in the water and he-”

“Scared the tourists,” Sully finished for him.

R.J. raised his eyebrows, mock incredulous. “Get the man the stuffed giraffe from the top rack! So we’re seeing it the same way.”

“Mas o menos.”

“Unless you can work some sort of miracle before the five o’clock.”

“Not happening,” Sully said. “I’ll send you something short and mean.” He sat up straight in his chair and poked his head up over the divider, seeing Chris two rows down, filing something, stuck on the cops beat, dying to move up to something more glamorous. He plunked back down. “And could you smooth it over with Chris? That I just happened across this?”

“Don’t want his panties in a twist because you bigfooted him again? Look. Get the ID. Then floater man becomes a Specific Dead Man, and Mr. Specific might just be a story.”

And then R.J. badda-badda-bapped the top of the cubicle, a little drum roll, like he’d told Sully something he didn’t know, and he was off, his loafers hushed on the carpet, going to talk Chris down off the ledge.

The clock on the wall was ticking past four. The newsroom at this hour was a place that if you didn’t want a drink before, you did after. Editors with armpits about to break into a sweat, stories that were evaporating or that were taking too damn long or just were too damn long. Copy editors settling in to examine the belly buttons and lint of newspaper copy. Reporters with fixed faces and ties or blouses askew, legs crossed at the knees, feet pumping, leaning forward and slapping keyboards like they were percussion instruments, talking too damn loud into the phone. Sully could swear, actually swear, that he could hear the clock tick from twenty paces.

He opened a file in the paper’s word processing system, tapped in a slug, floaterman , and then closed his eyes. The shrink. His shrink. Ah, Christ. He was supposed to have been there thirty minutes ago.

He picked up the phone and turned his shoulder into it so the words wouldn’t travel to the next cubicle and tapped in the psychiatrist’s number, and Gene Henderson himself picked up, surprising him.

“You’re not here,” Henderson said, his tone abrupt, no hi-hello, sounding exasperated. Sully didn’t mind the man, actually liked him a little.

“Astute, even for a former military man such as yourself.”

“Is there an explanation?”

“I’m working,” Sully said back down the line, pleasantly. “This dead guy turned up in the channel. It didn’t make sense to stop working to come talk about work, if you see what I’m saying here.”

“You didn’t call me beforehand to cancel.”

“The dead dude didn’t call me, either,” Sully said. “That’s the thing about dead people.”

Henderson was talking then, taking that official tone, telling him that by the contract the paper had signed, he now was required to inform HR that Sully had missed the appointment and that this was the third one this year, three in four months, and that was way over the line of-

“Peachy, peachy, peachy,” he said, cutting Henderson off. “Just be sure to tell them that I couldn’t make your appointment because I was covering the murder of a young man and having other young men with guns say they’ll shoot me if I come back and ask any more questions about it and, you know, if they’d like to cough up some combat pay for that sort of work I’d be pleased.”

“Three times in four months,” Henderson repeated.

Sully, looking in his desk for gum and not finding any, the worry about bourbon on his breath in the back of his mind. You’d think gum wouldn’t be a hard thing to keep in a desk. “So you’ll bill me for it,” he said. “You won’t go broke and neither will I.”

“Next week, same time,” Henderson said. “You’d do well to remember this isn’t an optional program.” The line disconnected. Sully looked at the phone and decided he liked Henderson a little less today than he did yesterday.

He slumped back in the chair so far his skinny ass was barely on the seat, stuck a pen in his mouth to chew, and proceeded to take the easy day-hit cheap shot:

Tourists aboard a sightseeing yacht in the Washington Channel were startled yesterday to see a corpse floating past their view of the Tidal Basin.

A few minutes later, across the way, R.J. hooted, reading behind him.

“My boy!” he exclaimed. “You’re so subtle!”

AFTER HE HADfiled- floaterman was a dozen inches, buried deep inside Metro-it was still just six thirty, middle of the week. The day had clouded over and now it was starting to mist. Ta-dum ta-dum. It was happy hour somewhere. There was a baseball or basketball game on at a sports bar, sure, but it wasn’t football so who gave a fuck? That left his late-night plans with Alexis.

She was back home for a couple of weeks, R &R from her posting in Cairo, in the middle of a photo project on the Israeli pullout from Southern Lebanon. Had he not been blown up in Bosnia, he mused, he likely would be in Jerusalem now himself, a room at the American Colony, a bottle of Basil Hayden’s with his name on it at the bar, evening runs up the hill to the Mount of Olives and then back, the sweat and the chill evening air and the Garden of Gethsemane in the middle distance, calling up some hot Israeli chick, Hey, we’re just having a drink at the Colony and…