The Ways of the Dead by Neely Tucker Read Free Book Online Page B

and Warder he saw Sly’s 1982 Camaro, black over gold. When he got within thirty feet of it, Lionel materialized, coming out of the corner market, head down, face obscured by a White Sox hat. The car alarm
beep-beep
ed and Sully opened the door and sat down, heavy, in the passenger seat.
    Lionel talked like he had to pay by the word, and Sully wasn’t in the mood this morning himself.
    They passed a couple of miles in silence, the easy rhythm of Saturday morning traffic going by, making good time.
    “This’s going to be some shit,” Lionel said finally.
    “He seems pissed,” Sully agreed.
    “When he’s like that? Nothing good happens.”
    “I’ll keep it in mind.”
    Lionel pulled into the narrow street and stopped in front of Stoney’s. The bike, a 1993 Ducati 916, sat alone, rear tire at the curb. He’d bought it, cash, through some highly creative expense reports during the war. It was known as filing for overtime.
    There had been a million ways to do it, the easiest of which was telling your employer that the bureau car in Sarajevo had been stolen, backed up with a police report. In reality, Sully and half the foreign press corps had kicked $500 per report to a compliant officer, who would complete the form—amazing, the bureaucracy that kept functioning—and then you sold your car, at an exorbitant price, through your interpreter (another $500 tip) to an aid agency or the UN or the highest bidder. You’d pocket $18,000 to $25,000 and change.
    When he straddled the bike and cranked it, the engine rumbled into life. The seat was still soaking wet and cold, a clammy hand grasping his crotch. He let out on the clutch, twisted the throttle, leaned over the gas tank, and lifted both feet off the ground. The rear wheel spun on the wet pavement and found traction, the bitch hitting seventy before the first light.
    •   •   •
    His place was small, narrow, a brick kiln in the summer, a 107-year-old row house on Capitol Hill, on Sixth Street. It was spare and decorated with pictures and carpets and paintings and things from his overseas postings. Persian rugs he’d bought in Beirut and a teak dining room table that had been made from railroad sleeper cars in what had been Rhodesia. The dishes and plates all came from a tiny ceramic studio in Warsaw. He’d bought the entire set on a freezing winter morning just after the fall of the Wall in Berlin. He’d thought, at the time, it might help domesticate him. There were post-impressionistic paintings from the Netherlands in a narrow hallway, and two framed pieces of mud cloth he’d bought at a market in Nigeria.
    Nadia’s photograph, a portrait he’d taken of her on a snowy morning in Sarajevo, was the only thing that passed for a picture of family or a friend. The black hair, long and only partly pulled back out of her eyes, no makeup, her prominent nose, the full lips. She was wearing jeans and one of his Chart Room T-shirts, from the bar where he’d worked in New Orleans. He had been leaving Sarajevo that morning for a reporting trek in the countryside and she’d walked him down the steps from her third-floor flat. She’d tugged on the clothes after their hurried predawn roll in the hay, he scrambling to meet the other reporters at the Holiday Inn before they left, and when the door swung open she had stepped into the snow and crossed her arms, shivering. When he’d brought the camera up, she’d playfully put her index finger to her pursed lips, making the sign to hush, don’t tell, don’t let anyone know . . . It was in a teak frame beneath the lamp by the couch.
    This morning, he grabbed a Corona from the fridge, stripped off, got in the shower, and thought of what to tell his bosses he was doing today—particularly before they called him with some bullshit assignment. The water beating down on his back, his skull, he decided that he believed Sly that the three suspects were bogus, and he did not want to get sucked into that if it was