Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

There were double metal doors marked EXIT.

She all but sprinted for them, pushing both doors open, ready to start running, but she was in a dark storage room and there was yet another door with an exit sign tacked to it. There was another tattered sign that read ALARM WILL SOUND.

She stopped. Fuckfuckfuck. She blinked. The storage room was dark and narrow and there were rows of boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling, left and right. She turned around and could see the front part of the store through the swinging double doors she had just pushed through.

Options, a nice word, came to the front of her mind. She could go out the exit door behind her and see where that went, but the alarm would sound and the police would come and she wasn’t going to do that. She could march back out front, past the boy who had bumped against her, and see what they had planned on the street out front.

That wasn’t going to happen, either.

No, she’d just call her mom from right here. Mom would be pissed and there would be a scene but she would know what to do. Sarah reached in her jacket for the Nokia and there was nothing. Her eyes flew open and she looked down, digging in the pockets, trying to turn the fabric inside out-nothing, no phone and no wallet. She patted her thighs, checking the pockets there, but she was wearing tights and there were no pockets. It dawned on her, in an ugly flash of memory, that she’d left the phone in her backpack at the studio. She smacked her thighs, twice and then three times, trying to make the pocket and the phone appear. She felt her shoulders start to shake and snot begin to bubble out of her nose.

The exit door behind her swung open, but the alarm didn’t sound. She turned, the shadows deepened, and then Sarah Reese dropped her change again.

Sully Carter, on his third Basil Hayden’s (on the rocks, water back), felt the October air blow into the bar through an open window near his booth. He closed his eyes for a second, it felt that good, like a kiss from home.

His white linen shirt, freshly pressed at the beginning of the day, was wrinkled and untucked from his jeans. The sleeves were rolled up at the cuffs and he had not bothered with the razor, it being a Friday. He was sitting in the back corner of Stoney’s, the Ducati racing jacket slung over the seat on the booth, the helmet beneath it. He felt good enough to punch somebody.

He rattled the ice in his glass, sipped, and felt the slight and lovely sting of bourbon on the tip of the tongue. Sneaking another glance at the bar, he caught a glimpse of Dusty, still working, taking orders next to Dmitri, the other bartender, the guy from the Ukraine. She didn’t see him look this time, but she had earlier, so maybe that could count as flirting or foreplay or something.

Lean as a light pole, Sully spoke in a slight rasp, a trace of a Louisiana accent, more centered on the Irish-German sections of Nawlins, but it took an ear. He was taller than most people, but because he tended to lean back on his left leg it wasn’t always apparent. The shrapnel blast he had taken while covering the Bosnian war, the hot metal that had eaten up his right knee, broken three ribs, and sliced open his left cheek-that bitch had tattooed its signature across his face and torso, too.

There were horizontal scars down his cheek, with tiny little welts around both eyes. There was a long, horizontal scar at the top of his forehead, but it was mostly concealed by the shock of black hair that fell slightly over it. He had twin scars that ran down his right side like a short set of railroad tracks, and the skin on his right knee looked like it had been put together by Dalí during a hangover.

The unusual gait, the scars, the posture, the distant manner-it all combined to create a menacing air of someone who cared less about his future than the people around him cared about theirs.

Stoney’s, his favorite dive, sat four blocks from the courthouse, three from the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters, and five from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. It catered to cops and prosecutors and assorted stiffs of the downtown proletarian set. It had worn hardwood floors, a mirror behind the bar that had lost most of its silvering, and an air that the smart set drank somewhere else.

Now he looked back across the booth at his dinner partner, Eva Harris, in Homicide for eight years, fifteen in the Agency.

“So why didn’t the-the jury-I mean, why didn’t they convict him for killing Fat Chucky?” he said.

“Self-defense,” she said.

“Self-defense from what?”

“Self-defense from Fat Chucky. Fat Chucky went six-one and three-twenty. Mr. Hastings testified that Chucky wanted to make him be ‘sexually submissive.’”

“At ten in the morning? On the general compound of D.C. jail?”

“That was the testimony.”

“How did Mr. Hastings defend himself?”

“With a ten-pound barbell from the weight-lifting thing.”

“Beat Chucky to death?”

“Beat him to death.”

“Mr. Hastings,” Sully said, “must not like to be sexually submissive.”

“Submissive, my ass. Chucky owed money. Sly Hastings beat the man’s skull open in front of a hundred and twenty-five witnesses and walked because everybody on the general compound knows better than to testify against him.”

“And how did Sly Hastings come to be in D.C. jail?”

“Weapons charge. This is, what, five, six years ago? He was awaiting trial.”

“And?”

“Beat that, too.”

“I’m detecting a pattern, counselor.”

“Yeah. There is. Mr. Hastings offs people and gets away with it,” Eva said, a little heat now. “He looks like a bookworm. Wears those little round John Lennon glasses, did you know that? Read Jean Toomer during the last trial. Cane . Fucker made notes in the margins.”

“You denying the man an interest in the Harlem Renaissance?”

“Your neighborhood don doesn’t usually have literary tastes more sophisticated than Penthouse Letters .”

“You sure this is his occupation? Because, what are we talking here-three trials, two hung juries, one acquittal? I don’t want to go wading in on a piece about a Teflon defendant if the dude is, what do I want to say, small time.”

“Then don’t.”

“But you-you think he’s a badass.”

“I don’t think anything. I’m telling you. Sly Hastings runs things. He runs things because he gets rid of people who get in the way of him running things, and then he skates on it.”

“You got hard feelings on the Fat Chucky thing,” he said.

She put a hand to her short dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail, touched her wineglass, and then set her hand back on the table. Eva, she would look at you for five seconds before saying anything, and then burst out, rat-a-tat-tat . She had grown up in West Virginia, went to Georgetown Law, and had no accent from anywhere unless she wanted to. When she did want to, it leaned more to city than country, Sully thought, her saying things like “he left out the house” and “my decedent.”

Sully ate a French fry. He liked Eva. She was one of the few people in the courthouse he allowed himself to address by first name. He had done so since shortly after he came back, blown up and fucked up, from Bosnia. He looked at her now, sitting back in her booth, that saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She was looking to the front of the bar, as if she recognized a cop coming in. On the plate in front of her was half a grilled cheese she had not touched in fifteen minutes.

He reached across the table, picked it up, took a bite, and there was a buzzing noise. Eva looked down at her right hip, lifted her pager, and said, “It’s not me.”