Only the Hunted Run (18 page)

Sly looked over at him, like he'd just noticed Sully. “Friend of the family,” he said.

“Not mine,” Reggie said, lumbering to stand back up. “Not this family. The fuck's with his face? Talk to me, boy.” Sully scratched the back of his neck and looked down. Sly pulled on Reggie's sleeve and said,
“Calm down, Unc. He was a friend to momma back in the day. He straight.”

Reggie sat, still confused but glaring, scratching at his neck, just like Sully was. Behind him Sully could see an orderly walk by in his white sneakers and sky-blue scrubs. He went to a door halfway down the corridor on the left, stopped and looked back at Sly. He pressed his magnetic stripe to the keypad, it buzzed, and he went in.

“Okay,” Sly said. “Go.”

Sully pressed down on the balls of his feet and stood, his heartbeat coming up harder in his chest.

“Now where he going?” Reggie said.

“You talk to me,” Sly said. “You tell me about why this skinny white motherfucker, Hinckley, is getting some ass up in here and you just wearing out your left hand.”

“'Cause I eat with my right,” Reggie said, throwing back his head to laugh, half his teeth gone, Sully moving past him, smiling, walking like he wasn't in a hurry to the door.

He had worn hard-soled shoes and now he regretted it, the clicking on the tile. Everything seemed loud, the television, Uncle Reggie, the muttered conversation of the other two patients, the click of the locks. The security cameras, they had to be up on a wall someplace, tracking him, and he fought the urge to look up and find them. Act like you been here before. Act like this is routine.

When he got to the door—it had only the number 237 on it—he rapped it, three times, softly. The hallway back to Sly looked a mile long. In the chest pocket of his sport coat was his recorder. Fumbling with it, he clicked it and saw the tiny red recording light go on.

The door in front of him swung open a moment later. The attendant walked past and did not speak or make eye contact. Sully stepped inside and the door hissed shut behind him and he heard the bolt click back into its slot.

Nine feet away, staring at him with cloudy, heavily-lidded eyes—
hazel, green and brown, swirling—was the killer he'd seen in the Capitol, on the street on Massachusetts Avenue.

He was seated on the side of a bed, his wrists handcuffed in front of him. The cuffs were part of a padded chain that ran around his waist and then to a bolt in the floor. His ankles were bound and these restraints were also connected to the bolt. Wispy black hair fell to his shoulders.

Sully put his hands behind him, his palms against the door, and leaned back against it. He smiled, just a bit at the corners of his mouth, looking at the raptor-like edges of the man's teeth—had he never gone to the dentist?— the lowered chin, the slightly opened mouth, then said what he'd come to say.

“Hi, George,” he said. “Pity about your grandma.”

IT CONFUSED HIM,
you could tell. The gaping mouth, opening and closing, a fish on the bottom of the boat.

He was ragged-headed, unshaven, raccoon pouches beneath the eyes, the cheeks puffy, the shoulders sagging under the restraints. The white jumpsuit was a size too big, billowing out like a balloon, making him appear small and lost beneath it. His knees rattled back and forth, his fingers reached and plucked under the cuffed restraints, as if he were playing an invisible accordion. It wasn't clear if the movement was voluntary.

Silence, breathing. Silence, breathing.

“Wait, wait,” he said thickly, his tongue slow and lugubrious. “Sully?”

“We got to go a little quicker,” Sully said. “I only got two minutes.”

The man tried to rub his eyes, bringing a sharp rattle when his wrists hit the limit of their chains, startling him. He'd just woken up, they had him laced on some sedative, something.

“How'd you, how'd the fuck you get in here?”

“Introductions,” Sully said, ignoring him. “You know who I am, George. But you seem to be telling everybody you're Terry Waters, your schizoid elementary-school buddy from Oklahoma, though you haven't seen him in donkey's years. You've been back by there, though, haven't
you? You went to see them, Terry and his dad. You drove right up there to the door. Did his dad tell you Terry was dead, buried out there in the woods by the creek, or did you figure that out all by yourself?”

The man coughed, cleared his throat. “Okay, no, wait.”

He blinked, the eyes still cloudy. Sully tried to set the man's features in his mind's eye. It was difficult to get a fix, the man sitting down, wrapped up. His hair and bronzed features the only color in the all-white room.

“Didn't just happen to kill Dad, too, did you,” Sully said, “so that then you'd have Terry's identity to yourself? I mean, the man had been dead three days when he was found. You choked him out, you know, I don't know there'd be a lot of evidence of that.”

This time, the man in the jumpsuit reared back, regarded Sully as from a great distance, as if he'd been speaking to him through a long, dark tunnel, and only now could he make out the words. The eyes gained focus. For the life of him, Sully would swear he'd just offended the man.

“You, what you got to understand is, see, Sully, you don't know everything,” he said, voice still thick, but clearing up now. “Sully. Sully. Look. This has gotten sort of fucked around. We got a bond, see, our mothers. I got a story to tell, you got stories to, to write. Us. Injustice. There are larger—”

“You tried to
shoot
me,” Sully said, voice rising. “Bond, my lily-white ass.”

“—themes to what we're, no, see, no.” A deep breath, pulling it from the base of the lungs, like he'd learned it in yoga and he was restoring his balance here. Another deep one. “I'da wanted to kill you, I would have. Had the drop. I just wanted to get your attention. I wanted to get—” he stopped. “I shot some glasses on your table. I wanted us to meet, before they found me. See, what came to me,” another rumbling cough rattled his chest, “seeing all that shit on TV? They wanted to kill me. They did not want to take me alive. Or they wouldn't be able to, just some trigger-happy asshole with no training, blam blam and too bad for me. So it
dawns on me, what I needed to do is make sure that I'm safe. Make sure that they arrest me and not shoot me like a dog. I needed a
witness
, somebody to make sure they didn't blow my head off and then put a pistol in my hand and call it self-defense. And who better a witness? Who better to keep them honest? Who better to tell the tale?”

He gestured forward, palms up, hands open, extended fingers, a wan smile. “You.”

Sully looked at him. “George?”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“That is bullshit.”

Waving the hands, no-no-no. Warming up to it now. “It isn't. It really isn't. You were there at the beginning, with Edmonds. You saw.
Only
you. Only
you
will understand. Can understand.”

“Understand what.”

“The nightmare.”

“Okay, look, let's cut the crazy-man, mystical bullshit. Superior Court, fucking Glen Campbell. I'm not here for the circus. I'm here—” and, on instinct, on the fly, he changed. He'd been about to demand an explanation, or what passed for an explanation, on the murder of Edmonds. That was why George was here, that was the linchpin upon which the rest of this all revolved. But he saw playing the hard-ass wasn't the right option, not now.

“I'm here,” Sully said, making himself slow down, his voice softer now, sliding to the floor, sitting cross-legged, back against the door, keeping eye contact, looking as deeply into the man as he dared.

“I'm here,” he repeated, faintly now, bringing it down to imitate an intimate conversation, “to hear about what happened to your grandmother. Miriam. The knife.”

“Miriam, the knife? Isn't it supposed to be ‘Mack'? You know, the song?'”

Gently, again. The word had popped into his mind,
gentle
, and your instincts were there for a reason. Sully curled his fingernails in against his palms. The man in front of him, he wasn't the killer in the Capitol.
He was the boy in the back of the patrol car. He was the boy bathed in blood. The horror this man's life had been. Gentle. Nobody had been gentle with him in, what, how long? Sully had a flash vision of George leading prostitutes into hotel rooms, rough sex, taking them from behind, handcuffs and blindfolds, sex doubling as hostility.

And it slipped into his mind, as natural as the Mississippi running into the Gulf, Alexis whispering in the dark
with me not to me
, the way he had needed to take Dusty on her knees, the hands cuffed behind her, the others he couldn't remember, the ones who had loved and encouraged it and the ones who had complained, the way he tended to black out afterward, not just fall asleep.

We have a bond our mothers only you the nightmares. . . .

And George, having read about his mother, not even Nadia, had him pegged to the marrow.

“Miriam,” Sully forced himself to say out loud, to snap back to the urgency of now. What did he have remaining, sixty seconds? Less? “You said her name in court the other day, George. In C-10. You slipped, brother. You were doing your crazy-man rant, and you shouted ‘Miriam,' at the judge. Party's over. Miriam Harper was your grandmother. You're not Terry Waters, that was a kid you played baseball with. Rode horses. Your grandmother, Miriam, she slit her throat in a two-story country house outside of Stroud, Oklahoma. You called the sheriff. She bled out on you in the back of the patrol car. Miriam. It wasn't your fault, George. But you got stuck with it. A terrible goddamn thing.”

The man staring at him, the accordion playing forgotten, his hands frozen in place. Stammering, the balloon of self-confidence punctured, all the air escaping. “You, you, are so off the, what is it, the—”

“Your granddad took you to the funeral home,” Sully said, quietly, as if someone might overhear. “William. He didn't take you to the funeral because there wasn't one.”

Softly as the benediction now: “It's over, George. I know. I was there. The old house. Your old room. Tell me about her. Miriam.”

Nothing but emptiness, the eyes gone vacant, hollow, a canyon, still locked onto his.

“Tell me about what Barry Edmonds did that you had to kill him. Tell me about your mother. Frances. I can help. We got this bond, George. It's only me. Only you. Tell me about Frances, George. Tell me who killed your mother.”

George Harper stared at him. A single tear, shiny as a diamond, seeped from the inside corner of his right eye. And then, in a sudden flash of movement, he was barking, bellowing, weeping, shouting, and crying all at once, yanking on his chains, stomping on the floor, spittle flecking from his mouth, howling, the sound tremendous in the room, the man losing his balance, nearly falling, careening into the wall.

The door behind Sully burst into his back, the orderly shoving it in, knocking Sully to his side, stepping in over him. Before Sully could roll over, another orderly—larger, beefier—stormed in behind him. Sully seeing them from the floor, the pair of them looking fifteen feet tall, outlined in grotesque proportions against the all-white environment.

“Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!” the second orderly was bellowing, and George was bellowing back at him, spewing obscenities and slurs and now the first orderly was yelling down at Sully, into his face, “What did you do? What did you do to him?”

Hands were on him, pulling him upright. He shuffled his feet, slipped, went down, was pulled back up. “I didn't do shit,” he shouted above the din, “I didn't do shit! I didn't do shit!”

They were dragging him out of the room, his feet sliding. He could see Sly and Uncle Reggie and the rest of them down the hall, staring. Now George, looking straight at him from the back of his cell, bellowing over the shoulders of the orderly, “Ice picks! Ice picks! Freeman! Ice picks!!”

HE PLAYED THE
tape, and replayed it, and replayed it, leaning forward from the backseat in the car so that Sly and Lionel could hear. They were driving out of the place, the gate swinging up, and they were back in the land of the relatively sane, heading down the hill. The sun was too bright. They were merging into midday traffic. Sully's head was killing him.

“Shit,” said Lionel. Which, for him, constituted a soliloquy.

Sly didn't even turn around. “I told you. Crazy people. What did I tell you about crazy people.”

“The sound and the fury,” Sully muttered, rewinding the tape yet again, like the man was going to say something different this time.

“Sound of bullshit, you mean.”

“Look, what does he say there? Everybody's yelling like the place is on fire. ‘Free ice picks'? ‘Free, man, ice picks'? ‘Freeman's ice picks'? I can't hear shit. You roll that window up?”

Sly gave a half glare back over the seat, leaned forward to roll his window up and then turned up the AC.

“Can't hear with that thing blowing, either.”

This time, the full glare, Sly turning in the seat to look back at him, leaving the AC just where it was. “I ain't one to tell a man how to run his
business? But you know how close you came to getting busted up in there? Setting off shit like that?”

“Thought you said you had contacts,” Sully said, still holding the recorder to his ear, squinting, like narrowing his eyes would improve his hearing, “in the plural.”

“Didn't say I
ran
the place. Staff. I got contacts on staff, the help. Not with the shrinks and shit. There's what you call protocols, that ward there in particular. That fucker is celebrity of the week. Jamal had to get back to the booth to keep them from hitting the button to call the medicals. They were halfway to getting Lantigua down there.”

“Who's Lantigua.”

“The man what runs the place. Him, you do not fuck with. They got protocols, I'm telling you. Anything funky with psycho boy there, anything with any of them in Canan, they get Lantigua on a rope.”

“You didn't mention that.”

“Didn't think I
needed
to.”

The tape. Stop, rewind, pause, play. Again, pressing the tiny speaker to his ear. “Freeman? I think he said Freeman.”

“Lantigua'd come down there, you'd been in deep shit.”

“Me? What about you?”

“You who, Kemo Sabe? I'm a devoted nephew, visiting Unc. You, you're—”

“The unethical hack who snuck in the place.”

“Exactly.”

Sully sat back in the seat. His shirt was half untucked, his jacket rumpled. He was lucky it didn't get torn in that clusterfuck. Six, seven orderlies by the end, shoving him against the wall, Jamal yelling at Sly to get him out get him out get him out, the fuck was this even about.

Lionel took them down 295, across the river, bringing them the back way onto Capitol Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Capitol lay up ahead, the neighborhood around them sagging two- and three-story
town houses, gloomy child-care centers, check-cashing joints, a thrift store. They were, he realized dully, taking him back to his house. Josh would be there. Or would he? Didn't he say they had some sort of field trip? National Cathedral?

But home, no, he didn't want to be there. The office, no, you got to be kidding, sit in there and look at people looking at him. Alexis? And tell her what, he'd just snuck into the city's hellhole of an insane asylum with a drug dealer and killer? No, no, no. Big boys held their water.

Restless, he punched numbers into the phone, the paper's Research desk. Susan, picking it up, sounding jumpy when he said hey. She said she was all over the family research, okay, and he jumped in, knowing he was just going to make it worse.

“Look, I hear you. I hear you. Do me a solid, though, one more? You in front of your computer? Great, that's great. Okay, look up the name Freeman, like free man, and ice picks. You get any hits on that?” She went on for a minute until he said, “Yes, I mean, for real.”

He waited, looking out at the city, until she picked the phone back up and said, “Jesus, Sully, what is wrong with you?”

“Lots. What do you mean?”

“The pictures.”

He waited, but she didn't elaborate. He could hear the keyboard clacking somewhere in the background, pictured her at her desk, the far back right of the newsroom, lost in a corner, a shot glass with Hershey's kisses in them, pictures of her dog, Frank.

Finally, he said, “What pictures we talking about here?”

“I don't even . . . okay, I can't look at this.”

“Susan, hey? I got no idea what you're talking about.”

“Lobotomies. Walter Jackson Freeman II, M.D., pioneer of.”

“I don't get this.”

Clicking on the keyboard, silence. “He was the research director at St. E's.”

Sully rocked forward in his backseat, leaning forward from the hips,
his forearms coming down on his knees, forehead nearly hitting the back of Lionel's bucket seat. “You're saying some lobotomy lunatic worked in
Washington
?”

“Yeah,” she said, still reading. “Look at this. His papers are at George Washington University, just up the street.”