Only the Hunted Run (17 page)

SLY HASTINGS SAID
he had two words for the idea, then, wait, no, it was three: “Oh,
hell
no.”

“You always telling me you go up to St. E's all the time,” Sully said, “that your mom used to take you to see her brother, dear old Uncle Reggie—”

“You the one needs to be locked up in there.”

“—and you still go, look in on him and all, 'cause your momma made you promise.”

“You going to do a lot better in life, you don't mention my momma to me,” Sly said. He fiddled with a toothpick. “The thing about that place, it's not hard to get
in
, never has been. But it always used to fuck with me, being a kid, you know, getting back
out
. They close them gates and shit, who's to say they won't call you as crazy as the rest of 'em?”

They were sitting at the usual meet-up, Kenny's BBQ Smokehouse on Eighth and Maryland Avenue on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks from Sully's house. They sat at a steel table with an umbrella in the shade. It was muggy, overcast, a few hours after he'd left the meeting at the paper. Felt like rain. Sully had been working on Sly with the idea since three in the afternoon, and now it was coming up on five.

“So I just don't see the reason, if it's so easy to walk in there, why it's a big deal to bring one lousy visitor with you one time.”

“Why you want to talk to this man if he crazy?”

“He tried to kill me.”

“Maybe he's not crazy.”

“Why is Reggie up in there, anyhow? Canan Hall, right? The baddest of the bad?”

“Why is Uncle Reggie in St. E's,” Sly said, leaning back in the chair, pausing to watch a lady walk her dog past the restaurant, then cross Maryland Avenue, heading for the corner store. It was a weird little dog, all the hair poofed up around its neck, the rest of him looking like he'd been skinned. “Used to not see white people 'round here at all. Now you got girlfriend here, walking the dog. My grandfather, he got himself killed just after the riots in Red Summer, 1919, you know about that?”

Sully nodded.

“He, his name was Lester, Lester Hastings. Sold life insurance to the black folks. Did real well at it, had been to Howard. A race man. He knew Du Bois, I mean, for real. The Talented Tenth. Then he got hisself killed and we wasn't the talented shit.”

“What happened?”

“Got pulled off a streetcar. Year after the riots. Crackers beat him like a dog in an alley. Left him there. He crawls out, some brother sees him, take him home, he dies two days later. Intestinal, no, internal bleeding. Septicemia. Blood poisoning. Not a good way to go. They had their own house, over in Anacostia. He died and Grandma went broke in ten minutes. Get this. He sold life insurance? But he didn't have any hisself. Just, I mean, Jesus. House repossessed, the family went to boarding houses, back rooms, public housing.

“Grandma's a drunk by then, you know? Worked at a saloon, gave it up for extra cash, to pay the rent, whatever. Reggie, he got born in '35, not even after a year after my mother got born. Different fathers,
so my mom always said. Who knows. Reggie wasn't ever right in the head. Got sent up to St. E's in 1981, I think it was. Drunk or high or crazy or all three all the time. Got through fifth, maybe sixth grade. Stabbed two niggers and shot another, was doing life on the installment plan at Lorton. So one day they send him up to St. E's for evaluation.”

“And been there ever since,” Sully said.

“And been there ever since. But, look, the real story, you want it straight up, is that we couldn't take him back, hear? He's family, but you know what a pain in the ass crazy people are? Tearing shit up, yelling at three in the morning, eating the neighbor's flowers, barking at they dog, getting a gun and shooting up the house, pistol-whipping other crazies in the parking lot of that whore hotel on New York Ave.? My mother, she had her own shit to deal with, me and a drug habit, both. She passed, there wasn't nobody left
for
him.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

“How often you go see him?”

“Once a month. Sometimes twice.”

“For how long?”

“Since 1981, the year he went in.”

Sully sat back. That was nineteen years, nineteen times twelve visits a year, that was, what, a little short of two hundred and forty visits. Well, exempting the times Sly had been in lockup himself.

“I didn't know this.”

Sly looked over at him. “Why would you?”

“I'm, I'm just saying. That's a hard thing.”

“You, you, don't know the half of it. I . . . it'll . . . eat you alive, that place. I won't lie to you. Uncle Reggie is my one tie to all that came before me, my family, my history, my people. Last of that generation. And he's in there, that shithole. He ain't ever coming out.”

He sat there, looking across the street. Sully had not seen Sly this way. It was a raw nerve, as deep as it was unexpected.

“I—”

“Shouldn't come out,” Sly said, softly.

“Shouldn't?”

“You don't know the man. You don't know the place.” He looked up at Sully. “There's places worse than prison.”

Sully let it sit.

“That'll work on you, brother,” Sly said, “the last of your people living that way, you let it sit in your head.”

“Does he know who you are? I mean, is he on this planet?”

“Depends. Half the time they got him on lockdown for trying to fuck somebody up in there. You know they don't call them inmates, right? It's
patients
. Motherfucker in a locked ward and ain't ever leaving, he's a
patient.
My black ass.”

“So, how you get a visit?”

“You family, they got days. You call ahead.”

“Do family members have to sign their name, state a relationship?”

“They know me. They don't know you. You don't look like family.”

“I'm the cousin you don't talk about.”

“And why is it you think,” Sly said, “once I get you in, that I can fix it for you to get in a room with this ice-pick motherfucker?”

“You just said they know you.”

He let that hang in the air. Nobody who knew who Sly Hastings was and what he did and what he could do to them with a flick of his finger was going to get in his way, particularly not anyone whose best job in life was emptying piss pots at the crazy house.

Sly looked back across the street. “It ain't for free. I mean, I got to take care of some people. You'n pay for this? I thought you guys couldn't pay for news, like that.”

“We can't.”

“Then you shit out of luck, brother.”

Sully took a deep breath.

“Noel,” he said, softly as a whisper in the dark.

A car pulled up to the traffic light and stopped. Birds flapped around in the tree above. Far above, a plane left ice trails across the sky. Sly's face did not move, not an eyebrow. He just kept looking at the corner market across the way, the door clanging open, like he was waiting for the lady with the crazy-looking dog to emerge. “Noel who?” he said.

“Don't play.”

Sly let it hang.

“That's the transaction?”

Sully nodded and now Sly looked over at him, his eyes black, tight. “One more. I do you one more solid on this and we're good. We clear? We do this thing, I don't hear that name again.”

Sully's mouth was dry, he could feel it at the corner of his lips, a little cracked piece of skin. This was vile. He thought of Lorena, Noel's sister, and wondered why he'd never stopped back up by her house to, you know, say hello, see if she'd ask him inside to have another drink on her back porch. It shouldn't have to be this way. A feeling in his chest, like a rock descending in deep water. When he couldn't feel it anymore, he licked his lips and let go of the last hope of justice that Noel Pittman's murder likely would ever have.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” Sly said. “Visiting's tomorrow. Me 'n Lionel'll pick you up right here, ten in the morning.”

Sully nodding, standing up, wanting to get this over with, changing subjects. “How's George these days, things in Frenchman's Bend?”

Sly stayed seated but waved his hand over his head and Sully heard Lionel crank up Sly's Camaro, where he had been parked on the street, the boss's righthand bodyguard, and saw the car pull up to the curb. “They all over his ass down there, the cops. Can't move so much as a ki. I been up at the apartments most of the summer, getting them ready to rent out. Good time to work. You can get them Hispanic brothers,
man, they work all day and half the night. Might have to put George to work up there, things don't pick up.”

*  *  *

He put tuna steaks on the grill that night, some shrimp that had marinated in a tequila and lime sauce of his own mixing. Alexis made the salad. Josh played disc jockey, putting on a bunch of crap Sully hadn't heard before but didn't mind, the more he listened to it. Something, anything, to take his mind off tomorrow, the number of ways that it could go wrong. Bourbon could be your friend, times like this. The Blanton's, half empty—Josh or Alexis had found it—was in the cabinet. He uncorked the pewter stopper and poured two fingers over some chunky ice cubes in a crystal tumbler, loving the gurgle.

Rattling it around, he wandered up to the front bay window, looking out, the light traffic, the streetlights winking on. Three people staying in the house. Hunh. Things happen you don't see coming. Somebody walking by out front on Sixth Street, getting the waft of the grill smoke, the music, Alexis and Josh bantering in the backyard, darkness descending? They could mistake it for domesticity.

They ate on the back patio. The table wobbled on the uneven bricks. Sully got two books of matches to prop up the short leg. The heat had given way to a breeze. It swirled up the alley and through the branches of the cherry tree, tracing over them, a delicate-fingered, invisible thing.

“Is that the first touch of fall?” Alexis wondered aloud.

She had her hair down, home from work, getting used to the pace of editing in the office, then coming home on time. She said she was liking it.

“You coulda stayed gone a couple more days,” she said.

“Yeah,” Josh said, looking over at her. “We were fine.”

Alexis wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse the color of sand. It set off her olive-brown skin. Josh, infatuated in the way only teenage boys can be, was turning her into his personal pinup, following her around with
a sketch pad and a charcoal pencil, getting lines down even while she was doing the dishes, for God's sake.

“You want to tell me what this plan is you've got to see the mystery man?” she said. “How exactly it is you're going to get in St. E's?”

“You don't even want to know.”

Josh put six, seven sketches beside him on the table. Sully wiped his hands and flipped through them, leaning back in his chair. All were of Alexis. In thoughtful repose. Smiling, looking off to the right. Walking out the door to work, hurried, lines blurred.

“Landscapes,” Sully said, putting a bite of tuna in his mouth, letting it dissolve on his tongue, it was that thin, that good. “I thought the class, what you were working on, was landscapes.”

Josh, not worried about it: “Random other assignments are good.”

“Yeah,” Alexis said, mock defensive. “Fresh eyes. Gotta have fresh eyes.”

After the dishes, in the basement—which Josh was turning into his own apartment, his sketches now tacked to the wall, making plans to come back for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, anything other than the endless oppression of Sunday School and Bible study in Phoenix—he had them watch
Alien.

“It's the third time,” Alexis complained.

“But that thing on his
face
,” Josh kept saying.

The boy was asleep by midnight. They left him on the couch and went up the steps, tiptoeing to the top floor, Sully with two or three bourbons in the bloodstream and Alexis with at least three glasses of wine in hers. They tumbled into the bed in a giggling rush, him tugging off her blouse and shorts, pulling the thong to the side, just enough, and her gasping, slow down, slow down.

“Thought you said you wouldn't with a kid in the house,” he whispered.

“You want me to stop?” she whispered back.

The darkness unfolded and he felt himself losing himself in it. Things
moved in his chest, his conscious mind fading from him, giving way to a deep well of lust and need and fury and fear and she was whispering in his ear again.

“With me, baby,” she was saying, her hips still moving, her left hand on his shoulder but her right on his chest, “with me. Not to me.”

ST. ELIZABETHS, NO
apostrophe, thank you, was not a happy place, and neither was its home in Southeast, the poorest, roughest quadrant of D.C. Almost entirely separated from the rest of town by the Anacostia, Southeast was its own world. It was a place that the majority of the population in, say, Northwest—the wealthiest, whitest part of town—had never been and had no intention of going.

Lionel took the Camaro uphill from the eastern banks of the river, the car thrumming alongside the brick boundary wall of St. E's. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the main drag through this part of the city, split the asylum grounds in two, on a roughly north-to-south basis, dividing the east campus from the west. The original brick boundary wall lined the street-front of the west campus, the oldest part of the hospital. It was high, imposing and solid.

It always stunned Sully, the few times he'd been up here, the size of the place. More than three hundred acres at its peak, seven thousand patients and who knows how many staff, back in its early twentieth-century glory days. The idea then that the mentally disturbed needed peace and quiet and sunshine, thus the working farm and huge grounds, removed from and across the river from the stresses and bad humors of Washington proper. It had been rural then.

The west campus, situated on a ridge line above the river, offered one of the most dramatic views in America—the U.S. Capitol across the river, the federal city swaddled by the Anacostia and the Potomac, the Washington Monument, the sun fading to the west, over the wide sweep of the continent—and it was the sole property of the insane.

It sort of explained Washington, in a way.

“You know, my hometown, it was maybe two thousand people,” Sully said, looking out the window, the boundary wall looking back at him, “and this place, it used to have two, three times that many crazy people, all behind that wall.”

“I thought everybody in Mississippi was crazy,” Sly said, drawing a snort of laughter from Lionel.

“Louisiana, hayseed. I'm from Louisiana. The other side of the river. It's different.”

“You say so.”

Sully, feeling butterflies in his gut, moved around on the backseat. How Sly came up here to see his crazy-ass uncle mystified him. The place had given him bad vibes the few times he'd set foot inside. Ghosts and lunatics, the long halls of madness. The nights in there. Jesus, what it must have sounded and smelled like back in the day. The howls. The stench.

Lionel pulled the Camaro into the main entrance and stopped alongside the security booth, letting the window down. The guard looked at him, leaned over to look in at Sly, who just looked straight ahead, tapping his right hand on his knee, and glanced at Sully, who looked out of the opposite window.

The guard did not speak. He leaned back in the booth. The gate swung open.

Unfolding before them, as Lionel slowly pulled into the property, was the wide sweep of dozens of seen-better-days brick buildings with red tile roofs. Most of them were a century old and looked like it, their façades
dotted by white-brick or cement inlays arched above the doors. Windows on upper floors looked to be set in crooked frames. The doors seemed to hang on hinges gone askew. Gargoyles, their eroded stone faces more impressionistic than detailed, looked like they were about to fall off the edifices they enhanced.

Oaks and elms and fruit trees stood withering in the heat. The grass was dry, uneven, and patchy. The feds, downsizing mental health facilities after Thorazine ended the warehousing of the mentally ill, had dumped the white elephant of St. E's on the overburdened city government decades ago, to the benefit of no one but federal taxpayers. Misery, a hopeless lack of funding, mismanagement, the exodus of talented medical staff, finger-pointing and exposés followed. Receivership, lawsuits about conditions. The patient load went from mostly well-to-do whites from across the country to impoverished blacks from D.C. Then the feds blamed the District for the horror show they had dumped in their lap . . . or, really, just another day in how the federal city worked.

Directly in front of them was the main administrative building. The white rectangular clock tower was perched neatly atop the center of the roof, just above the double row of white round columns. It was possible to believe it was a college admissions building on a small Southern campus, gone slightly to seed. Hitchcock Hall, the graceful old theater building, enhanced the effect: two stories, red brick and white trim, a black slate roof, the arched stone front over the door with
1908
at the top of the frame. Paned windows, set in an arch, were above that, and at the very top, the smiling face of a satyr. Two round, porthole-like windows were on the upper floor, left and right, like a set of eyes, white woodwork framing each.

Lionel idled through the grounds at the speed of a golf cart. There were only two people to be seen, both men in suits walking out of the administration building. He pulled down the ridge line to the left, the wards spreading out in wings from the center building, the windows a
series of blank, unseeing eyes. They eased forward on the narrow ribbon of asphalt, the streets named for trees on the grounds: Plum, Cedar, Birch, Redwood.

And then, bringing his eyes forward, Sully saw the hulking redbrick mass of Canan Hall. It loomed directly in front of them. The building was three stories. It lay on the grounds, heavy and squat, a faceless hulk that took human beings in and never let them out. It was more than a century old. It seemed to have absorbed all the pain and violence and madness into its bricks, into the rotting wood of the fascia that lay discolored and dark at the roof line, into the peeling white paint of the eaves and ledges and doors. The windows looked like cataracts, blind and unseeing. It looked like it could take an artillery hit. It had presence. Like movie stars. Like monsters.

Lionel parked in the shade of the only tree and cut the engine. Sly didn't move.

“Well,” Sully said.

“Hate this place,” Sly said.

A beat passed and then he opened his door, stepping out, already walking by the time Sully freed himself from the back.

“Okay,” Sly said, not slowing, “one, you got to remember is that this ain't D.C. Jail. These
patients
, they got rights. They walk right up on you, too. Sniff. Put they hand on your dick.”

Sully, squinting in the harsh light. “You skeered, Sly?”

“This one dude, he come up to me one time I'm up here, he looked alright,” Sly said. “And so I say, ‘Hey, nigger what you doing today?' You know, passing the time, waiting on Uncle Reggie to come out his room. And this dude, he says, just like a regular motherfucker, ‘I been in hell most of the day. They's Christians and Jews. Lots of Jews. All the Negroes are burned to toast, and many people speak Chinese. The hell god says, ‘Suck my balls.' And he goes on like that till they come get him up off me.”

“That would—”

“So I ask the orderly—guard, nurse, you can't tell—‘What'd he do?'”

“Yeah?”

“Killed his family. Every last one. Said that they were ‘servants of Satan.'”

“Shit,” Sully said. It was starting to feel like a roller coaster ride: it looked fun from a distance. Then you got up on the thing and started thinking, hey, wait, this shit is crazy.

A pause, then he couldn't help but ask: “That dude still in here?”

“Where else he got to go?”

“I was hoping maybe he died.”

“That'd be news. But if he did, he's still here. The ones ain't got no money? Bury 'em right there.”

Down the hill, far over, a small forest of tombstones on the slope, in the trees. “Talk about your life sentence,” he said.

Sly said, “Everybody up in here, it's a life sentence, 'cause there
ain't
no sentence. Your ‘indefinite hold.' But it's definite alright.”

They were coming up on the building before Sly spoke again, this time in the instructional. “Okay, look, going through here, signing in, all that? You make like you put your ID in the slot, but you don't. That's for the camera in the corner. You go past all these niggers, you don't say shit. You walk right with me, we go up in the ward, through the control room thing they got, they buzz us in, you sit in the chair right next to me in the big TV room and you don't say shit to nobody till I tell you. You hear?”

“Just out of curiosity, who's your connection in here?”

“I got connections, in what you call the plural,” Sly said, “wherever I need to be. If I don't got connections, I don't go. You want to talk to the freak, right?”

“I do.”

“Then listen. They ain't even gonna bring him out his room. We gonna go in there, sit and talk to Reggie. This orderly, he's gonna walk down the hall to boyfriend's door. You watch him. He's going to go in
and secure him. That ain't going to be but a minute. When he steps out the door, you step in. You got two minutes to chat. The orderly's going to wait right outside the door. Then he comes back in, party's over, you come out. Clear?”

Sully felt the adrenaline surge through his veins.
Hold it steady, champ
, he thought,
hold it steady.
“Yeah. I mean, sure.”

*  *  *

Doors and locks, people saying no, hey, you're not on the list, you can't go in there, that's a secure area, no access, back up before I make you back up, permit denied—that's what getting past guards was. That was the deal.

And that was how you made your money in this gig: getting past the guards. What kind of reporter stayed outside the tape with the rest of the proletariat? How could you find out anything there? You had to get
in.

They were coming up on the front door, frosted glass, a tiny black receptor to the right for your magnetic ID. If you didn't have one, you had to hit the button and wait for them to buzz you in. Sly—wearing slacks, a light blue-gray shirt, sleeves artfully rolled up, sunglasses propped on his head—pressed the buzzer. There was a pause and then the door clicked, Sly pulling it open.

Lock one, cleared.

The guard station, a box of bulletproof Plexiglas, was set into a long wall with a door on either side. It was a standard jail or prison two-lock process: Once they pressed the buzzer to unlock the first door, you walked in, stopped, and it locked behind you. You were then in a locked chamber adjacent to the guard station. Then a guard at the second level pressed the buzzer to open the second door to let you inside. The second door could not be opened unless the first door had locked behind it.

Sly walked to the Plexiglas, said hello to the guard behind it, put his driver's license in the tray that ran under the window. Then he said his
name and Uncle Reggie's, and with a jerk of his head back at Sully, “This my cousin. I told Vinny he was coming today.”

At the mention of “Vinny,” the guard, a heavyset black guy wearing a dark blue uniform, looked up from Sly's ID. He looked at Sly, then at Sully. He kept his eyes on Sully and said something to someone else in the booth. Another guard materialized behind him and then the security door clicked open on the right. Sly walked in, it shut behind him, the far door opened, and he was in.

Sully, not making eye contact with the guard, pulled out his wallet and his driver's license. He put his hand in the slot, but did not actually put his ID in it. The guard, looking over his head and not at him, pressed the button. The door clicked, he stepped into the lock box, and as soon as the door behind him clicked so did the one in front.

He pushed it open, the air stale and flat and a hundred years old. It smelled like the doors hadn't been opened since the Eisenhower administration. Sly was standing there, talking to one of the guards like they were best friends, Sly twirling his sunglasses around by one of the stems, smiling. “Hey, I already signed you in. Jamal here is gonna take us upstairs.”

Lock two.

The third lock was to get into the day room of the ward, and that was easy. Jamal put his badge to the buzzer and swung it open. He nodded to them both, said he'd get one of the orderlies to go get Reggie. Sully and Sly walked into the room. The door swung back behind them. From the other side, they could hear Jamal rattle it to make sure the lock had engaged.

“Hate that sound,” Sly muttered.

Sully started to razz him, to say, “I guess not,” but dropped it. The room, what did you want to say, did not invite levity.

You would not know it was a day room for the criminally insane if you saw it in a picture. You needed the smell, the tang, for that. Large,
airy, light-filled, some worn carpets by the window, some by the couches, which had no cushions. There were two televisions, both high on the wall, out of reach. Maybe the lobby of a cheap hotel, it looked about like that.

The smell was something like Pine-Sol poured over vomit and mopped up and left to dry.

Three patients were in the room. Two were watching television. One was staring out the floor-to-ceiling window. The two watching television turned to look at them, the new fish in the aquarium, then over at the control booth. After a minute, they went back to looking at the television. The third one, Sully didn't think that guy had moved since this morning, so he walked over and looked out the window, too. The view was over the grounds, the old cemetery, the bluff falling away toward 295, the Potomac way down there. A maintenance guy was mowing the yard, but without a grass catcher attached, just spewing the dead dry grass out of the blower.

He was about to turn and make a comment to Sly about the inmates—sorry, the patients'—multimillion-dollar view, when he heard Sly's raised voice behind him.

“Uncle REG-GIE,” Sly was saying, walking toward the couches. A burly man with a thick gray beard and matted hair coming up on him, swallowing Sly in a bear hug. “I mean, hey, brother. Look at you.”

Sully came over from the window and, keeping Sly between him and Uncle Reggie, joined them as they sat on the couches, taking a seat where he could see down the hallway toward the patients' rooms. As soon as he sat, Reggie stopped looking at Sly and looked at him. “Who this motherfucker here?”