The Ways of the Dead by Neely Tucker

Author:Neely Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

twenty-four

Just after nine the next morning, Sully edged the Ducati around stalled traffic on C Street, wedging it into a space between cars illegally parked in the designated “Motorcycles Only” spots.

He walked past five or six cars and there was the hot dog cart at the curb in front of the Department of Motor Vehicles. A half smoke with mustard and ketchup, lord yes, he ate it sitting on the steps, washing it down with some sort of crappy iced tea they sold in a glass bottle. He’d reached Doyle on the phone earlier, making plans to meet him at the store later in the day. The man had offered no clue as to what had been on his mind the night before, or why he couldn’t say what he had to say over the phone. This was annoying but it wasn’t like he was being Jensen, blaming him for homicides that cops couldn’t solve. Sully burped softly into his fist. Half smokes.

Just the other side of the two lanes was the U.S. District Courthouse, the federal seat of power, where the United States sued and was sued, where David Reese was the highest-ranking judge. It sat at the foot of Capitol Hill. Pennsylvania Avenue ran in front of it, America’s Main Street, and in the course of a dozen blocks to the west encompassed the Department of Justice, FBI headquarters, the U.S. Treasury, and the White House.

C Street, all of two blocks long, ran just behind the court, the ass end of it, and offered nothing but a portal into the shithole of Washington. The DMV squatted on one end, the great time-waster of urban bureaucracy, and upstairs, in the headquarters of the MPD, were the cops who plowed into the city’s drug deals, stolen cars, burglaries, phone scams, homicides, rapes, and beat downs, usually to little effect.

Next door, across a small park, was Superior Court, where the vast majority of defendants were no-papered the morning after their arrest, down in C-10, the same arraignment room that the Reese suspects had passed through. You could smell the depression in the room amid the piss and the plumbing and the burnt toast from the cafeteria down the hall. A tunnel ran between the court and MPD, used to shuttle defendants between the two without bringing them into daylight. If the defendants actually got charged, their plea bargains and their trials were heard in the brown-paneled courtrooms upstairs, where no one but a few family members and victims’ relatives were ever likely to show up.

Sully threw his foil wrapper and the bottle into a curbside trash can and walked in the DMV entrance, taking the back entrance into police headquarters, so that any beat reporters around the front entrance would not see him enter the place. He turned left and then right and walked around the long corridor, passing through security and heading for the Youth and Preventive Services division on the third floor, the dead end of missing persons cases.

The counter, a long marble divide that ran the length of the room, was not staffed.

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