Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“It’s your time, but you’re wasting it. I’ll put you in the room with the array. You can look at those pricks till I’m done. How soon can you get here?”

“Gimme ten minutes.”

“Come in the back.”

When he clicked off the phone and started pulling on his helmet, he noticed that a car up the block, maybe five spaces, was idling, lights off. He didn’t look directly, but he looked in the rearview when he pulled out. It wasn’t the Olds, but it was a heavy sedan, four-door, and appeared to have two silhouettes in the front seat. He pulled out to Georgia, revved it down the block, and then came back up Otis and Warder and back down Princeton, making the block.

When he got back to the bottom of Princeton, the car was gone, an empty spot next to the sidewalk.

Jasper, James. Darden, William. Turner, Darrell. Green, Andre…

The names and their sorry little pictures, clicking by on the array. Johns were a sad fucking bunch on the best of days, but this was the rock bottom of the trade, guys picking up women on the street for ten dollars, or thirty dollars, or just a rock, doing them in abandoned houses, maybe getting blown in the front seat, the car parked in an alley.

Sully wrote down the names and details of Turner and Green. Both were young, tall, and heavy-men who could strangle a woman if they wanted to-and they had priors for assault, and both lived within a few blocks of Princeton Place. On their last contact with police, both were unemployed.

Jasper, a stringy white dude who appeared to have a long love affair with meth, was another possible. He lived in an apartment block on North Capitol, not far away, but neither his picture nor his record gave off vibes of fatal violence.

Darden, Sully liked him because he liked his hookers young, which might have been a draw to Sarah, an impulse crime that went wrong before he could get her panties off. Sully’s eyebrows raised-one of Darden’s prior arrests was for assault with a deadly weapon-a butcher knife he’d pulled from his girlfriend’s kitchen.

John came in at ten till midnight. The room was otherwise empty.

“I’m going, which means you got to, too. You see anything I need to know about? That my aces missed?”

Sully gave him the marked cards, and John ran off two copies on the machine, handing one set back to Sully. He looked at the names. “Not a cast I’m worried about. Darden, I remember that asshole. Busted him, what was it, ten years ago? Beat the shit out of his woman at the time. I was working out of 4-D. You go see him? Tell him I said I got no problems popping his ass back to lockup just on GP.”

He was lying on his bed in the dark, sleepless, still wired, mind racing in circles, going in loops. The green LED numbers on the bedside clock read 2:23 a.m. Dusty finally answered.

“You just closed up?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Want to drive down?”

“From Baltimore?”

“I’ll come up. Always liked the bike late at night.”

“It’s closer to morning.”

“Details, details.”

“I guess not,” she said.

He was in basketball shorts and nothing else, the window open, the October coolness flooding the room, the soft orange light of the halogen streetlights filtering through the trees, casting the bedroom in shadows that moved and shifted, ghosts in the darkness. He was throwing a tennis ball up in the air and catching it, the phone in the crook of his neck.

“So, you know, I would like to see you,” he said.

“Other than at night, in bed?”

“Hey, wow, slow down. Yes. Sure. Daytime, a late lunch and a matinee. I’ll play hookey.”

“We tried that. You canceled on me.”

“The one time you were available,” he said.

“It was twice, and don’t try to flip this on me. It’s almost a year we’ve been trying to make this work. Basically I’ve been at your beck and call and you’ve been available when you want to. Nadia. Is this how you did it with Nadia?”

He caught the ball and held it.

“That’s one toke over the line,” he said.

“It always is, anytime someone says her name.”

A deep breath. “Okay, look, maybe I’ll-”

He heard an equally exasperated sigh come down the line back at him. “Okay, look. Look. Sorry. Our schedules don’t exactly match. You’re doing your thing, I’m doing mine. You’ve got irregular hours, I’ve got the bartending and nursing school. This isn’t easy.” The apology, yes, but her voice held that distant tone, the way she was when she was tired, or moody, or off, or whatever it was she was.

“Look, I voiced a desire, that’s all,” he said, the ball going back up, and then down. “I said I wanted to see you. Tell me again how that was wrong.”

A pause. She was walking. He could hear the footsteps.

“You walking to your car?” he said.

“The apartment.”

“You got home fast.”

“Yep.”

“Long night?”

“And I’ve got an early start. A nine-thirty class.”

“So-”

“So lemme call you back tomorrow afternoon. When I’m in a better mood. This place I’m working now? Not the harbor tourist crowd. Mangy. Makes John Waters look like a Boy Scout.”

“Can’t you land at a bar down here full-time?”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. Can’t you . Like it’s up to me. I’ve got another year of classes up here before I get the degree.”

“I know, I just-”

“It’s late, Sully. Really.”

“Okay, okay. We can-”

The line clicked off.

He looked at the receiver, then put the phone on the bed. Up the ball went again, back down. Higher, back down. Palmed it, a one-handed grab to end the inning. It helped to consider the opposing point of view. Their schedules were crazy, that was true. And maybe, he being the older one (seven years older? eight?), his career already established, maybe he was being the jerk and she was the patient and loving girlfriend. It could be. It might be. But he knew he wanted to hold her as he did the tennis ball, safe, strong, secure. He did. Really. But the gulf. The gap. To connect, like, really connect, it was-it was-it was a lock without a key. For the first time, he felt her slipping away through his fingers, like water, like blood, and he got the idea she had been feeling it for longer.

The clock now read 2:31. Sleep was not going to come. It was another four hours and change until daylight.

Up went the ball, down went the ball.

The morning mint julep was on the back step, just to make him feel right, something to beat back the sleep-deprivation headache, his mind turning, setting up moves on the chessboard for the day. R.J. had said three days and today was either day two, as Sully would count it, or day three, if you counted the half day when R.J. gave him the deadline, and it would be just like a fucking editor to call this the third day.

To do, to do. He punched in Eva’s office number on his cell and closed his eyes when it began to ring.

“Mr. Sully.” Her voice smooth.

“Screening our caller ID?”

“We have things to do.”

“You doing enough to know those knuckleheads didn’t kill Sarah Reese?”

There was a pause.

“We are talking on background?”

“Jesus. Everybody. Sure.”

“I would say the case is very strong. There is very solid evidence for obstruction of justice, possession of stolen property, and theft.”

“I didn’t hear ‘murder in the first.’”

“The rest of the case is developing, as they say in the courthouse.”

“But murder one was included in the presentation in court the other day.”

“It was, yes.”