Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

The second book in the Sully Carter series, 2015

SULLY CARTER HADa pleasant little bourbon buzz going. It was a fine afternoon in the first spring of the twenty-first century. He’d been out on a fast boat in the Washington Channel, taking in the sunshine and the brisk spring breeze and the view of the dead body being pulled from the water. It was all pretty cool and mellow until he decided to go over to Frenchman’s Bend and see if that’s where the guy got popped.

He got there at a little after two in the afternoon, maybe four hours and change before deadline. Stillness. The wind tickling his ears, the sound of water slapping. Closed his eyes and the world was a warm yellow light behind his eyelids. Opening them again, it was almost… peaceful. He was walking past the first trees of the Bend, the buds tight along the branches, the faint scent of brackish water in his face, when he saw two enforcers for the drug crew that ran the place coming out of the apartment block to his right.

They let him pass, the little fuckers, let him walk deeper into the park, out toward the open grassy knob that stuck out into the channel like a thumb, and now they were sliding in behind him, cutting off his retreat. He did not have a clear view of either. The shorter figure came in behind him off his right, a too-big hoodie draped over his head. The other, taller, faster, but not in any real hurry, peeled off behind him toward the brick-wall boundary with Fort McNair, coming in off his left.

He could not hear them but didn’t expect to, what with the wind in his face. Their appearance wasn’t unexpected-it was the Bend, after all-but there was going to be some shit. There was going to be some shit now. Slowing his gimp-legged walk, dangling the motorcycle helmet from his right hand, the cycle jacket unzipped and open, doing his best white-man-without-a-clue impersonation. Under his breath, he swore at himself for getting involved in this two-bit homicide because now it was going to screw the entire day. He felt, somewhere behind his eyes, the bourbon beginning to burn off, his senses coming alive, calculating the moves of the men behind him without acknowledging their existence.

This was how your day went south without even trying.

He’d been having lunch with Dave Roberts and his crew from WCJT, having a gentleman’s drink or three at the Cantina Marina, on the waterfront. Dave got a call from the station about tourist boats shrieking to 911 that they’d seen a body floating in the waves. Good people from Iowa come to take a tour of your nation’s capital, starting out from the marina in Southwest D.C., just a few hundred yards from the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin, then heading down to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s place, for a picnic lunch. Then bam, they get a view of how the other half lives. The body was floating just off the tip of Hains Point, at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, not even three-quarters of a mile from the marina.

The station rented a boat on the fly; Sully bummed a ride because, hell, it sounded like fun. A quick story for the paper and away they went, roaring out into the channel, all boys, giggling that this was a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour, the camera man swaying, trying to get steady B-roll.

Two police department launches were already out there, the station’s boat skittering beyond them so that the camera guy could shoot back toward the city as a backdrop. The body was floating like a cork in a bathtub, tangled up with a clutch of driftwood. The police techs got a net under it and then the winch on the launch’s crane creaked. The net pulled the body up and up until it was in the air, water pouring, long thick hair, dreadlocks falling away from the skull, the corpse in jeans and a jacket of some sort and one shoe. It lay there like a dead cod pulled off the bottom.

“What do you know, we just made the six o’clock,” Dave said.

The camera guy spread his feet and the camera whirred, getting the focus tight, pulling the body into clarity. The police boats had a lot of guys in sunglasses and Windbreakers with DC MPD on the back. Dave talking to the camera guy, “You got the Monument in the background?”

“The money shot,” the man said, nodding.

Cops crowded around the corpse and after a few minutes the huddle broke up. Lt. John Parker, the chief of D.C. Homicide, emerged, walking to the rail, hands on his hips, feet at the width of his shoulders, sunglasses, and a blue-and-black Windbreaker over his suit, glaring at them like they were walking on his lawn.

“Hey John,” Dave called out, cupping his hands into a megaphone. “Any ID on floater man?”

“That thing off?” John yelled back, rolling a hand toward the camera, shades still down, that hard-ass cop look he had.

Dave sighed and nodded and the cameraman flicked the camera off and set it by his feet. The boats idled closer, pulling alongside, the sun splashing on John’s bald head, his sunglasses.

“All off the record,” John said, “and I mean, I don’t want to hear ‘police sources say,’ ‘a source familiar with the investigation,’ no shit like that. All y’all hear?”

Everybody on the boat on the forward rail, leaning to hear him, nodded: Dave, the former Redskins linebacker turned local news personality; Sully, the alleged hotshot for one of the nation’s great newspapers, nodding, yeah, yeah, whatever.

“No I.D., no name,” John said.

“Courageous, taking that sort of bombshell off the record,” Dave said.

“Was he still recognizable?” Sully chipped in.

“Mostly,” John said.

“What does that mean?”

“He still had a face.”

“Jesus,” said Dave.

“Fish, shrimp, crabs get after them when they been in a couple of days,” John said, “so I’m guessing our guy was a recent entry.”

“Cause of death?” This was Sully.

“I’m just a homicide cop, and I just got my body five minutes ago, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the extra hole in his head, entry at his left temple, exit on his right, contributed.”

“That’s actually two extra holes,” Sully said.

“Thank you, Pocahontas,” John said.

“The head shot is on or off the record?”

“Did I stutter?”

“Theories?”

“Drugs, guns, pussy, turf,” John said. “Take your pick. Brothers get popped like clockwork around here and you asking me, without so much as an ID, a motive?”

John was somewhere between irritated and angry, so when Dave said they were going to need to back the boat off and shoot some more B-roll, Sully just shrugged. He’d ask John more later, after the autopsy, in private, when he’d cooled off. The boats pushed back and the camera guy went back to filming the police boats at a distance.