The Ways of the Dead by Neely Tucker Page A

netless hoop nailed to a telephone pole. He was three steps in the alley and the players were taunting him.
    “Hey, paleface, the fuck you doin’?”
    “’less you got a warrant, keep walking, bitch.”
    “Whyn’t you walk right?”
    He went a block up. There were two houses, crack squats, a small cluster of zombies out front, guys with hands in their pockets, eyeing him, seeing if he was trolling for a dime bag, a nickel rock . . . A woman sitting on the front step of an abandoned house—flabby, ashy knees, bloodshot eyes—offered to blow him for twenty bucks. When he turned to say something to that, she said, “Ah, you know the price, yeah? Gimme ten.”
    Roll-down steel gates shuttered the entrance to the Big Apple. The gates were at half-staff at Doyle’s, lab techs ducking their way in and out. He remembered that Doyle lived somewhere near the store but he didn’t have an address. Directory assistance said there was no such person listed. He should have thought to have news research run property records last night.
    The strip joint up the block was the Show Bar. It hadn’t changed since he’d stopped in while working on the Lana Escobar story. Six customers, one woman on the pole, a bartender with a light thumb, a queasy reddish light to the interior. Les Samuels, the manager in the jumbled office in the back, not telling him anything he didn’t already know.
    By three in the afternoon, Sully had knocked on fifteen doors, talked to half a dozen store owners, heard nothing about the three suspects, and was getting the distinct idea that nobody in or around Princeton Place gave a good goddamn about Sarah Emily Reese.
    A beer delivery man got out of a truck in front of the Hunger Stopper, the vehicle burping exhaust from the tailpipe. Sully, half jogging up the street now, deadline looming, flagged him down with an “Excuse me.” Getting a dolly out of the back, the man eyed Sully, the grayness of the day reflected in his expression.
    “Not to be any sort of way about it,” he said when Sully said what he was doing and why, “but you a little late to the party, aren’t you, brother?” He broke eye contact to look at the scars, then back at Sully directly. “Park View’s been beat to shit for years. That Hispanic girl, she got killed last year. Noel went missing? I didn’t read nothing ’bout
that
in the
news
paper.”
    He kept going, white girl gets it, lookit the TV cameras, white girl gets it, lookit the papers . . . But the name blossomed over Sully—Noel. Noel Pittman. That was the incident he’d been trying to remember the night before. Howard student, party girl. Disappeared after leaving a club last year. She’d been living on Princeton Place.
    Sully leaned back on his good leg, letting the man talk but working his way into the monologue. “Lana, Lana, I remember Lana,” he finally elbowed in. “I wrote a little something on her. But you’re right, it wasn’t much. Back of Metro.” A shrug. “Her dad was a federal judge, I imagine we would have done more.”
    “Daddy was a federal judge,” the man said, “it would have gotten solved.”
    Sully smiled. “Sounds like you knew the other one? Noel?”
    “Don’t I wish. To say hello. You’d see her at the clubs. She was one of the dancers out at Halo, on the elevated platforms? Then one day I’m making the rounds and see her face on a ‘Missing’ poster.”
    “And that was it? She was just gone? No loco boyfriend?”
    The man leaned on the dolly, reaching a hand out, shaking it, as if flicking water from his fingertips. “You heard neighborhood talk, flapping gums.” He stepped inside the truck and opened the glove compartment. He sifted through a stack of papers, then unfolded a sheet, eleven by fourteen, that had holes in the top and bottom where it had once been stapled to a telephone pole.
    The picture showed a young woman smiling at the camera, brown eyes, brown skin, radiant complexion. Bold-faced lettering