Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

Sully rolled his eyes, still chewing, and opened his backpack. He pulled out the chunky little cellphone. The screen was illuminated and the unit vibrated. He looked at the numbers that came up on the screen and his eyebrows furrowed. “They give me this thing this summer,” he said. “It’s supposed to be like a perk. What it is? It’s like one of those electronic tether anklets they put on parolees. It’s a way for the bosses to find you.”

He extended a finger and punched the little green handset sign to open the line, then put it to his ear.

“R.J., brother. It’s Friday night. What?”

The low baritone burst into his ear, aural shrapnel that made him tilt his head away from the phone.

“Waitwaitwaitwait. Just wait. Is-is Chris sure? I mean, come on . That don’t even make-” Sully looked down at his watch. It was nearly eight. “You want Chris to write it, why are we talking?” He motioned to Eva for a pen, a fetching motion with the fingers of his left hand. She pulled one from her purse and Sully scribbled an address on a cocktail napkin. He said yes and yes and then fuck and clicked it off.

He set the phone down on the table and gave Eva her pen and drained the whiskey. He put his fist against his mouth to stifle a cough. He pulled three twenties from his wallet and dropped them on the table.

“Somebody just killed David Reese’s daughter,” he said, coughing now. “Tossed the body, a dumpster up on Georgia.” He looked at his napkin. “The 3700? Right around the intersection with, what’s that gonna be, New Jersey?”

Eva blinked once but did not otherwise move, the same inscrutable expression he’d seen her use in court, the judge allows an objection, her face, the mouth in a line, she’d just say to the air, to God, to the witness, So then you just didn’t see anything after the gun went off …

“I thought Reese lived out to McLean,” she said.

“He does. Maybe the girl-” He looked down at the napkin. “Sarah, it’s Sarah, was just dumped there. If this shit ain’t right and Chris is, what, peeing in his pants and getting R.J. worked up-I mean, you piss off the brass and-”

The cell buzzed again and he looked down. “Goddammit. He’s outside already. Chris. R.J. sent him over here to pick me up. Said he figures my blood alcohol is over the limit for the bike but not to file.”

“Isn’t R.J. your editor?”

“At last report.”

“And he doesn’t care if you’re half lit?”

“Anybody who can’t file drunk,” Sully said, “oughta turn in their fucking press card.”

He grabbed his cycle gear and pushed himself out of the booth, Eva following. Sully pushed through the light crowd, the drinkers at the bar, making for the front door, Eva a step behind. The light seemed to him uneven, the voices too loud, the energy he felt a few moments ago dissipating, switching gears. He did not see Dusty behind the bar, just Dmitri, and then they were outside, the sky giving up the last bit of light. He felt the cool evening air as a tactile sensation, as if a butterfly landed on his forearm and sat there, wings beating.

“What kind of death wish do you have to have,” he asked Eva, giving her a distracted peck on the cheek before walking to Chris Hunter’s car idling at the curb, “to kill the daughter of the chief judge of the federal court at the foot of Capitol Hill?”

Sully flung open the passenger door of Chris’s beater, a nine-year-old Honda CRX, shoving notebooks and a camera and a stack of newspapers from the seat onto the floorboard. He slung the jacket and the helmet to the back and tumbled into the front seat.

Chris, pudgy faced, fat little fingers on the steering wheel, pulled out hard, jerking Sully backward into the seat and, by force of forward motion, slamming the door shut behind him.

“She’s already dead, bubba,” Sully said, wondering whether the vowels were slurred.

“Dead line ,” Chris shot back, shifting into third. “Reese is supposed to be the next nominee to the Supreme Court. This is monster. ”

Sully stifled a snort. The youth, the enthusiasm. He looked down and there were wrappers of fast-food sandwiches and paper cups. He burped. The backseat had three cardboard boxes and a mound of clothes on the floor.

“I see you’ve started your sophomore year,” he said.

“Just moved to a new place,” the younger man said, not taking his eyes off the road but sensing the look-around.

“When was that?”

“June.”

Chris took them up through the few ragged blocks of Chinatown on Seventh, crossed Massachusetts Avenue, and headed north on Georgia. The austere beauty of Federal Washington faded into a charmless strip of storefronts and row houses with window units sagging out of their upstairs windows. Black iron bars covered the street-front doors and plate-glass windows. Men stood or sat by open doorways, beer cans and cigarettes in their hands, the fresh evening drawing them out. Sully let his window down and let the air rush in.

After a while, he said, “It’s October, ace.”

Chris, leaning forward, ignoring the jibe, both hands on the wheel, was going on about the way he’d gotten the call from a beat cop almost an hour earlier. He seemed impressed the officer had thought to call him, an honest-to-god tip on something big. He was talking rapidly and his eyes were darting back and forth. Sully kept his mouth zipped.

A few minutes later, traffic stalled. Sully leaned out the window. Georgia was blocked off up ahead, the revolving lights of the police squad cars and fire trucks marking the edge of the crime scene barricade.

Chris cut the wheel hard to the left to make the turn onto Park Road, three blocks short of their destination. He went up to an alley, turned right, and then pulled into the parking lot of a bank and Giant Liquors, the letters on the sign in banana-yellow neon. He was turning off the ignition when his cell rang.

“Hey, man. I’m here, parking. Where are you? Yeah. The where? I can go with that?” He listened again. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, right. Just as a basis of knowledge. Not attributing to you.”

He hung up after a moment.

“Sorry. My buddy. Gives us official confirmation on one Sarah Emily Reese, DOB February 14, 1984. Parents notified and are here. In the chief’s car at the moment, inside the cordon. FBI is here, so are the U.S. Marshals. Secret Service. D.C. cops. The mayor. It’s a cluster-fuck. The kid was at a dance class or something. My guy says it’s on the west side of Georgia. Apparently Sarah went to get a soda at the store catty-corner across the street. Ran out the back. Found in the dumpster in an alley behind the store. Body’s already been removed.”

Sully wrote it all down.

“Why was she taking classes here and not in some tony studio out in Potomac?”

“The owner, what, Regina something or other, used to be a dancer in Alvin Ailey in New York.”

“Why’d she run out the back?”

“I don’t know.”

“That would seem to be the question we would want to know.”

They got out of the car and walked down to the commercial strip of Georgia, then up the sidewalk, Sully twisting his shoulders to get through the mass of bodies, the crowd stalling and spreading out against the yellow tape.

Three squad cars were blocking off Georgia northbound at the intersection of Otis Place. Sully could see a knot of uniformed officers outside a building on the west side of Georgia, which he presumed to be the dance studio. There was another knot on the far side of the street, in front of Doyle’s Market.

They were on the south side of the scene and the police barricade was keeping the crowd a block away from the store where the girl had been killed. Sully guessed they would also be blocking the north approach from the same distance. If the east and west approaches were also blocked off like that, the perimeter would be four city blocks. He wrote that down in his notebook, too. The wide swath of roped-off real estate told him MPD was clueless and was casting a wide net.