The Ways of the Dead Read Free

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?”

three
    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