Only the Hunted Run by Neely Tucker

car windows or something out front. He swallowed the bile, the burning.
    There was the buzzing again. A bee sting, a dog’s bite, a tiny tin hammer banging.
    The phone. The motherfucking phone.
    It was there on the glass top of the coffee table, humping up in the air on each buzz. He leaned forward on the couch, finding a paper towel by the pizza box, a lame attempt to wipe the worst taste in America out of his mouth. Wet cigarette butts in old ashtrays, rainwater in a motel gutter spout.
    â€œLucinda,” he said into the phone, “I gotdamn well—”
    â€œMr. Carter? Mr. Carter?”
    The voice cutting him off.
    He closed his eyes again. Never answer the phone on a day you have a story on the front page. Never answer the phone on—
    â€œYes, this is.” And after a moment, “Mr. Carter.”
    Coughing, throat clearing. “Okay. Okay. This is, this is Terry Waters.”
    It didn’t make him jump, he would remember later. It didn’t make him do much of anything. He just tried to lather his dried-out lips with his equally dried-out tongue and leaned back into the soft recesses of the couch, croaking with the voice of a hundred years, “Who thinks this is funny?”
    â€œI, I thought I said,” the voice came back, after a moment. It was like the guy was talking on a weird radio frequency that was only now beginning to come in clear through the static and sunspots. “This is Terry Waters. You, uh, wrote a story about me. It’s right here on the front page. You, you were the one hiding in the bathroom.”
    The sensation came over him like a tuning fork struck on the spine, his nerve endings lighting up like a dormant Christmas tree. He stood up without realizing it.
    â€œMr. Carter? Are you there? I, I’m guessing this is a surprise. I’m sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. But I had to call. When I read about your mother. I think, I think we should talk. Is that okay?”

EIGHT
    â€œYOUR MOTHER?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œAnd his?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œThat’s very interesting.”
    â€œThat’s what I told him.”
    â€œAnd what specifically about them?”
    â€œThat they were both murdered.”
    This brought FBI Special Agent Gill’s gaze up from her notes to his face. They were looking at each other across a conference table at the paper, a little after noon, maybe ninety minutes since Waters had hung up on him.
    An agent sat on either side of her. R.J. and Lewis Beale, the paper’s attorney, flanked him. Sully had called the paper after Waters’s call and was transferred to Eddie Winters’s office. Eddie had listened and told him to come in immediately. He’d also alerted the FBI, who got there almost as fast as Sully. Eddie had walked them all into the conference room, made the introductions, and then left to run the daily.
    Now everybody had little water bottles and nobody touched them. They were on the eighth floor, the executive suite, far away from thenewsroom below. The windows overlooked a parking garage. Haze and glare and shimmering heat.
    She held the gaze—on his eyes, not flitting to his scars; it took discipline not to do that, he knew from past experience—and waited on him to elaborate.
    He didn’t.
    â€œThat is an unusual connection,” she said, finally.
    â€œAlso,” Sully said, “that neither of their killers were caught.”
    â€œI see.” Another pause. “And how would you say it made you feel, when he said that?”
    Sully tilted his head to one side, ever so slightly, and crossed his bad leg over his good one. All three of them, she and the men flanking her, looked like they ate nails for breakfast and shit steel before lunch. Suits, folders, and briefcases. Acting like they owned the place ever since they walked in.
    After a while, he said, “What did you say your name was, ma’am?”
    â€œAgent Gill.”
    â€œDo you