Only the Hunted Run (9 page)

ALEXIS WAS STILL
rattled, still pissed off, even in the shower. Getting over the shooting maybe, but channeling her anger and shock into a lecture.

“You actually carried that gun to work.”

“I did.”

“Fucking unreal. Where did you get it?”

“Bosnia.”

“From?”

“The commander.”

“Which?”

“The Bosnian. From the night on the mountain. On Igman.”

She pulled the shower curtain back and looked at him, wiping the water from her eyes, shampoo thick and foamy in her hair. Her knuckles on the curtain trembled just slightly. “You didn't come down with it. I was there when they loaded you on the chopper.”

“He sent it to me.”

“For
what
? So you could shoot somebody in America?”

He was sitting on the closed toilet seat, drying himself off. Looking at his toenails, a bone-deep exhaustion settled over him, a blanket that weighed two hundred pounds.

“Souvenir. Or something. It's a long story.”

She let go of the curtain and stuck her head back under the water. “I've got all night.”

“I don't,” he said. “I got to cover this fucker's hearing tomorrow. They'll present him in C-10. Superior Court.”

She turned the water off and reached for a towel. She put it to her hair, not bothering with her body. Sully appreciated the view and said so.

“Don't you patronize me,” she snapped. “You took a gun to work today. A. Loaded. Gun. I can't even.”

“Prudent, I thought, the way it turned out.” He felt thick-fingered, slow.

“Shots going everywhere, we go down on the ground, I look up, you're fucking around with your cycle jacket, I'm thinking you're trying to hide behind it, and then you pull out a pistol. For Christ's sake. You're lucky you got it back in there before the cops saw it.”

“I got this rule? It's like, every time a psychopath kills people with ice picks and then calls me up to chat about our dead moms? I tote a pistol.”

“That right?” Bending to flip her hair over her head, wrapping it in the towel, then wiping the steam from the mirror, looking at the scratch across her forehead, an inch above the eyebrow.

“I got it written down somewhere, like on the refrigerator: ‘Get some milk,' ‘Don't forget the dry cleaning,' like that.”

“Sully. A gun.”

“How's your head?”

“Fine. It was just a little bit of glass.”

“Is Josh still awake?” Trying to change the subject. Opening the door a crack to let out the steam, pretending to listen for sounds from the basement.

“He barely woke up when we came in,” she said. “Didn't seem fazed, a strange woman coming into the house late at night with his uncle, police cars out front. One wonders about the domestic environment.”

“One does?” He moved his feet to accommodate her stepping out of the shower. The bathroom was tiny. Her stomach was just in front of his face. Breasts were peaceful things, it flitted across his mind, just like that.

“Look. You can talk to me,” she said, lifting his chin up with her index finger. Just enough to make him raise his glance. It took him a second to get it.

“Later,” he said. “I'ma tell you about it later. Or your boobs. I'm sorry about the gun. I'm sorry about that, that fucking insanity at the restaurant. But it's been a day, Alex. Two of them.”

It was three, three thirty in the morning, maybe four. What his mother would have called the witching hour.

When they had come into the house—driven back from the 1-D precinct by no less than Homicide Chief John Parker, who had come to check on him—Sully had walked upstairs and got three of the pills the doctor had given him from the little orange prescription bottle in the medicine cabinet, walked back downstairs, poured a Basil's over ice, and slammed them home in three straight shots. He wasn't supposed to take more than one at a time but he gave himself medical clearance.

Alexis wouldn't let him drink after that but she was sitting up with him.

“I mean, you've talked to me, you've said, the nightmares, the PTSD things,” she was saying, pulling one of his T-shirts over her head, opening the door all the way now. “I've woken up next to you, you're sleeping but sweating through your shirt, breathing so hard it wakes
me
up. You've had those ever since Igman.”

On the street outside, there was a marked patrol car at the top and bottom of the block. Another unmarked FBI van in the middle. Another unmarked on Constitution, covering the alley that ran to his backyard, and another on A Street. Just in case there was an accomplice, they said.

He followed her out into the darkened hall, the house silent. She turned into his room and got into bed, him following. Sheets and
air-conditioning and her next to him.
Don't be pissed, Alex
, he thought. This, this was nice. Fading fast now.

“That night in Bosnia,” she said, “I remember them bringing you down the mountain, not even daylight, the U.N. choppers coming in to airlift you out. Nobody said anything about a gun.”

“I was unconscious, so.”

“It was a bad winter.”

“Yes.”

“You'd just lost Nadia, too.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“I was just saying I was worried about you. Am.”

“I am fine.”

“Said the idiot waltzing around with a gun.”

“I
will
be fine.”

“Where is this thing? As we speak?”

“Back in the closet. Alex, no kidding, can we sleep? I won't shoot anybody before tomorrow morning, I promise.”

THE HIGH CHURCH
of the Misbegotten met six days a week in Room C-10, a small hearing room at the bottom rear of D.C. Superior Court, beset by a smell that no one could ever quite place.

It was where each and every person arrested the day and night before in the nation's capital was first presented to the judicial system. There was no bail in the District of Columbia. The brief services in C-10 were to determine if your lousy ass was a danger to the public.

If you weren't, the magistrate gave you terms (stay away from witnesses, don't get arrested again, don't be an asshole), and you got to walk out of the well of the court and past the bulletproof Plexiglas, up the aisle, past the pews, out of the courthouse and into the sweet sunshine of freedom.

But if the same magistrate said you were a danger to the American People? You did not go into the sweet sunshine of anything. The marshals stepped you back and took you right back through the Door to Hell and your lousy ass would go to D.C. Jail until such a time as your right to a speedy trial came due.

That C-10 was across from the cafeteria, the smell of one often wafting into the other, had not gone unnoticed among its faithful constituents. It made you think about the food in there before you ate, but particularly after.

Fittingly, considering the human waste that channeled through C-10 for long hours each day, it was also noted by the faithful that C-10 was set at the ass end of Superior Court. The massive, charmless concrete mass of the courthouse fronted onto 500 Indiana Avenue. The back of the building, facing C Street, was several dozen feet lower, down a small hill. Entering from the front, you had to go down two stories, usually by the escalator, to the bottom floor. C-10 was at the back of that floor, hence the tag. This lowly status added to the misery and squalor of the atmosphere, for it made the room seem like a funeral parlor, like the worst storefront church in Christendom, like the outhouse at the end of the rainbow.

On the morning after the shooting, on the day when Representative Edmonds's body began lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, Sully slept late, staggering downstairs to make brunch for Josh and Alexis, who seemed to be getting along fine without him. He spent thirty-five minutes on the phone convincing Lucinda that the weird shit was over. Alex said she would drive Josh to his class at the Corcoran on her way in to the office. So he dressed and made the mile-long walk down Capitol Hill, his dress shirt soaked at the small of his back by the time he got to the courthouse. There were tiny rivulets of sweat at his temples, the base of his throat, swelling to a puddle at the small of his back.

Stepping off the escalator onto the bottom floor, turning the corner into a short hallway, he groaned. There was already a herd in the hallway, well-dressed reporters he'd never seen before, network and cable news staff, the cut of their suits—hell, that they were
wearing
suits in C-10—gave them away as one-timers, big-footers, here for the headline. They talked into their cell phones, walked around in circles, leaned back against the wall, killing time, the men outnumbering the women about four to one.

“How's church today, brother?” Sully said as he clamped a hand on the fleshy shoulder of Leonard Mahoney. Leo was a court-appointed attorney and a member of the flock in good standing. Right shoulder
slumped against a wall, his plaid jacket, his sagging belly, his comb-over standing at a high wisp—Leo was instantly recognizable to any courthouse denizen. Eons from now, when they were excavating the remains of this place, they'd find the petrified remains of Leo, halfway between C-10 and a courtroom, calcified finger in place, scratching behind where his right ear had been.

Leo looked at him, then went back to staring at his hand.

“Why'd they come up with these things?” he replied, wagging a knobby little Nokia in his left hand, never lifting his shoulder from the wall. “It's just another way for the ex to find me, is what it is. Wants to know, on a Friday morning in August, why our kids are going back to public school this year if I'm a lawyer. Says I have to be the only lawyer on the Hill whose kids are at Watkins. I say, nah, no, Jim Stevens, he's got his kids there, and she says to me, she says, ‘I mean white people.' When did my ex turn into a racist lunatic, that's what I want to hear.”

“Our boy's not up anytime soon is he?”

“How she gets a call
in
down here, I can't get a call
out
.”

“I'm guessing we're not even close.”

“What, Waters? You're here for Waters? Grab a seat if you can, hotshot. Slummers were here at sunup.”

The double doors swung open, some TV suit from New York coming out, walking fast, heading to do a stand-up out front. Sully tapped Leo's shoulder, adios, and slipped into the sanctuary before the door could close.

The room had the fluorescent look and feel of a tuberculosis ward, a dark, phlegmy, cough and passed-gas rectangle of a courtroom dungeon. It was accessed by the double doors behind him if you were a civilian and by the Door to Hell, the locked door at the back right side of the well of the court, if you were coming from the holding cells. There were a handful of long wooden benches for observers, like pews, hence the room's designation as The Church. A central aisle led into the well of the court, with the magistrate on an elevated platform, lording over the proceedings.

The benches on most days were not more than scattershot full. They held the rear ends and crossed legs of dead-tired mothers and aunts and sisters and cousins, of exasperated fathers and pissed-off uncles, the bouncing bottoms of toddlers brought in to sit this out till Daddy or Mama's man came through his presentation to the court, him and a hundred other lunkheads, the tots there because there wasn't money for a sitter, or the time to find one, or that cousin who sometimes watched the kid was across town when Daddy got popped for a bullshit traffic stop, a handgun and a dime bag beneath the seat. So the babies bounced, chomping down on pacifiers and wiggling across the seats, the only people in the room oblivious to the slow-motion train wreck of humanity on the other side of the bulletproof glass.

This—thrown in with the court-appointed lawyers and the remora-like reporters, the bored-ass assistant U.S. attorney detailed here for the day, the magistrate, the marshals up front, everybody baking, the air assaulting one's nostrils if not one's sense of decency—was Sully Carter's world.

It was the bargain-basement realm of the criminal justice planet, the justice-by-mass-discount world of the black and brown and every now and then, at least in D.C., some random white dude, almost always picked up for solicitation or something to do with sex and, what do you know, today his perp, the one and only Native American. Terry Waters was the reason television trucks were lining the street outside, their antennae spiraling up into the stagnant heat, cameramen in shorts and T-shirts, sitting on the shaded side of the vehicles. It wasn't even noon, still
hours
before Waters would have his five-minute hearing, and the room already smelled of stale sweat, of the loss of hope, of desperation, of a three-year bid against a twelve-year charge.

He came around the back right of the room, behind the pews, catching the eye of Keith, sitting next to Dave, the WCJT reporter, both far off to the left. They raised eyebrows at him in recognition, but their bench was packed, nowhere for him to slide in. He parked himself on
the front bench, marked
LAWYERS ONLY
. The U.S. marshal in the well of the court, who knew him and knew he wasn't a lawyer, gave him a bored glance, stifled a yawn behind a closed fist, and turned away.

*  *  *

By the time Waters finally emerged from the Door to Hell, six hours had passed.

The reporters packing the room had gone from a well-heeled group of professionals to a sweaty mob who had already filled out the
Times
crossword puzzle (with help from the entire bench they were on), studied the box scores until they had them memorized, stepped out to the bathroom, made a coffee run, made a sandwich run, made an I-can't-take-this-shit-anymore run. They did deep knee bends by the escalators, beating back the nodding-head monster of drowsiness. They called their editors and their spouses from the hallway, wandered over to the cafeteria, were asked to pipe down by the deputy clerk, were reminded that they could not bring food or drink into the spectators' gallery. One of their tribe, an Australian television reporter, was booted from the room after approaching the well of the court for the third time and asking Magistrate Raymond Estes, who was not having the best day of his life, exactly how much fucking longer could it possibly take to bring forward the one defendant anyone was there to see. Scattered applause followed him out the door.

Sully had been over to hobnob with Dave and his WCJT crew, stepped outside to call Josh and Alexis twice, and now, late in the day, everybody musky and irritable, looked up from his paper to see Janice Miller, the head of the Public Defender Service, emerge from the Door to Hell, make her way around the tables and chairs in the well of the court, and slide in next to him.

“You're not a lawyer, mister,” she whispered in his ear, smelling of expensive perfume, coffee heavy on her breath.

“You ain't much a one,” Sully whispered back.

Janice—she pronounced it
Jah-niece
—tucked her chin down and grinned, squeezed his hand and let go, easygoing, even today. Born and raised in the Five Points neighborhood in Denver. Full-ride scholarship to USC Law. She could ski double-black diamonds and then call in from the bottom of the slope to tell twenty-four-year-old fuckups—who were now having second thoughts about the plea deal she'd spent weeks negotiating—that they'd sign the papers in front of them or she'd cut them off from agency representation and they'd spend the next thirty in a federal pen wishing they goddamn well had listened to her. But, hey, she'd tell them, it's up to you. Totally up to you.

“What's been the deal,” Sully whispered, “I mean, I know—”

“Floridly psychotic,” Janice nodded, tilting her head toward the Door to Hell. “Our boy is
florid
. Can't get anything out of him for an hour, and then he'll spout about radio transmissions in his molars.”

“Come on. I talked to him. He was, like, regular.”

Janice held her right hand up, as if taking the oath.

“Can I use it?” Sully asked.

“Just state it as a fact, not sourced to me. This is going to be a problem.”

“How you mean?”

“The state, they're going to want to force him to take medication.”

“To make him sane enough to stand trial,” Sully whispered back, shrugging.

She grimaced and shook her head, long brown hair, coming to rest on her shoulders. “Not happening.”

“
Pero por qué, muchacha?
”

She looked over at him, bemused, slightly put off that he hadn't thought this through. Now her face was turning tutorial, the eyes expanding, the mouth elongating, talking to the slowest student in her Georgetown Law seminar. “The man is charged with killing ten people in the U.S. Capitol, four of them officers, one of them a woman,” she whispered. “Does that sound like a capital offense?”

“I thought it was nine dead.”

“One of the criticals died this morning, two hours ago.”

“But the District doesn't have the death penalty,” Sully said, eyeing her up, thinking. “The feds do. They'll claim jurisdiction, a case like this. So they'll kick it out of 500 Indiana over to 333 Constitution.” He indicated this with a jerk of his head, the federal courthouse being catty-corner across Marshall Park.

“So the State,” she said, nodding, “is going to want to medicate my client into sound mental health so that—”

“—that, that, they can execute him,” Sully said, finishing the sentence, getting it. “They'll want to make him sane enough to execute.”

She patted his knee, teasing, playfully patronizing, but her tone betraying an undertone of bitterness. “Exxxactly. Know what a legal conundrum is? When the best thing you can do for your client is to keep him mentally ill.”

“Don't they call this a Hobbesian trap?”

“I thought it was a Catch-22. As his lawyer, it would be insane for me to make him sane. And no, you can't quote my quote.”

He started to respond but she was already gone, the Door to Hell swinging open, her client emerging, the room coming alive, the air gaining a static charge.

*  *  *

Waters entered, flanked by two U.S. marshals, one on each side, holding an elbow, another walking close behind. They had him in an orange jail-issue jumpsuit, his black hair pulled back in a ratty ponytail. He had a scraggly beard. One eye partially swollen shut, deep bags beneath them both, like he'd been up all night. A red gash on the right side of his forehead. Sully put his height at about five foot eleven, not that tall, really, slender if not muscular, hard to tell with the jumpsuit.

His hands were cuffed in front of him and a chain ran down to a pair of leg restraints, making him rattle when he walked. But the most startling thing about him, the one thing that stood so wildly out of place,
was his demeanor. He did not smile, he
beamed
, absorbing the energy of the courtroom. He moved forward by shuffling his feet in a kind of jig, looking out at the crowd, happy as a clam. For a second, Sully thought he was going to wave when they made eye contact.

The spectator gallery came to attention, the small talk dying, even the babies seeming to hush, people turning now to see. The courtroom artist, perched in the jury box, his charcoal pencil skittering across the pad with such speed that it could be heard across the room, the only image from today that the outside world would see.

The deputy clerk, seated just in front of the judge, scarcely looked up. Her monotone, born of a thousand days and a million defendants, had all the spontaneity and excitement of a washing machine clicking over to the rinse cycle. “Your Honor, now before the court, we have the United States versus Terry Running Waters, criminal case two zero two eight. Counsel, please introduce yourself for the record.”