Hard News

29

At first, Randy Boggs thought he'd been cheated by the bank.

He'd never had a good relationship with financial institutions. Although he'd never robbed any, several Georgia and Florida savings and loans (with the word "Trust" in their names, no less) had foreclosed on his family's houses after his father had missed various numbers of mortgage payments.

He was therefore predisposed to be suspicious.

So now, when the pretty girl behind the window handed him eleven tiny piles of cash so thin that they looked like a kid's building blocks, he thought in panic they'd kept most of the money for a fee or something.

She looked at his expression and asked, "Is everything all right?"

"That's one hundred ten thousand?"

"Yessir. They just look small 'cause they're new bills.

I counted 'em once and our machine there counted 'em twice – you want me to do it again?"

"No, ma'am." Looked right at Ben Franklin, who stared back at him with that weird smile as if was as natural for him as for anyone else to be holding a fortune. A hundred ten thousand and some change -the extra being thanks to the interest Jack Nestor had mentioned.

"Kind of thought a hundred thousand'd be a bigger pile."

"You got it in nickels and dahms, it'd be pretty sizable then."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Y'all want an escort? Lahk a guahd or anything?"

"No, ma'am."

Boggs loaded the money in his paper bag and left. Then he wandered around downtown Atlanta for an hour. He was astonished at the changes. It was clean and landscaped. He laughed at the number of streets with "Peachtree" in them – laughed because he remembered his daddy saying most people thought that referred to peaches when in fact the name came from "pitch tree," like tar. He passed the street named Boulevard and laughed again.

This was a town where it seemed you could laugh at something like that and nobody would think you were crazy – as long as you eventually stopped laughing and went about your business. Boggs went into a luggage store and bought an expensive black-nylon backpack because he'd always wanted one, something made for long-distance carrying. He slipped the money and his change of shirt into the bag, which put him in mind of clothes.

He passed a fancy men's store but felt intimidated by the weird, headless mannequins. He walked on until he found an old-time store, where the fabrics were mostly polyester and the colors mostly brown and beige. He bought a tan off-the-rack suit and a yellow shirt, two pairs of black-and-red argyle socks and a striped tie. He though this might be too formal for a lot of places so he also bought a pair of double-knit brown slacks and two blue short-sleeve sport shirts. He thought about wearing the new clothes and having the clerk bag his jeans and work shirt. But they'd think that was odd and they might remember him.

Which probably wouldn't matter at all. So-what if they remembered him? He hadn't done anything illegal here. And so-what if they thought he was odd? If he'd been a rich Buckhead businessman who'd decided on a whim to buy some clothes and wear them home nobody'd think twice.

But he wasn't a businessman. He was a former convict. Who wasn't supposed to leave New York. And so he paid fast and left.

He walked into a Hyatt and strolled past the fountains. Boggs had always loved hotels. They were places of adventure, where nothing was permanent, where you could always leave and go elsewhere if you weren't happy. He liked the meeting rooms, where every day there was a new group of people, learning things for their jobs or maybe learning a new skill, like real estate investing or how to become Mary Kay pink-Buick saleswomen.

Every guest in a hotel stayed there because they were traveling.

And a traveling person, Randy Boggs knew, was a happy person.

He went into the washroom on one of the banquet room levels and, in a spotless stall, changed into his suit. He realized then that he was still wearing his beat-up loafers with the 1943 steel penny in the slit on the top. That afternoon he'd get some new shoes. Something fancy. Maybe alligator skin or snakeskin. He looked at himself in the mirror and decided he needed more color; he was pretty pale. And he didn't like his hair – very few men wore it slicked back the way he did nowadays. They wore it bushier and drier. So, after lunch: a haircut too.

He walked out of the John and into the coffee shop. He was seated and the waitress brought him an iced tea without his saying a word. He'd forgotten about this Southern custom. He ordered his second steak since he'd been Outside – a sandwich on garlic bread – and this one, along with the Michelob that went with it, was much better than the first. Boggs considered this his first real meal of freedom.

By three he'd bought new shoes and a new hairstyle and was thinking of taking the MARTA train out to the airport. But he liked the hotel so much he decided to stay the night.

He checked in, and asked for a room close to the ground.

"Yessir. Not a problem, sir."

He tried out the room and the bed and felt comforted by the closeness of the walls. He realized only then that he was uncomfortable in the spaciousness of Atlanta. With their tall, dark canyons of buildings, the streets of New York had made him feel less vulnerable. In Atlanta, he felt exposed. He took a nap in the darkened room and then went out for dinner. He saw an airline ticket office and went inside.

He walked up to the United counter. He asked the pretty ticket agent what was nice.

"Nice?"

"A nice place to go."

"Uh-"

"Outside of the country."

"Paris'd be beautiful. April in Paris, you know."

Randy Boggs shook his head. "Don't speak the language. Might be a problem."

"Interested in a vacation? We have a vacation service. Lots of good packages."

"Actually I was thinking 'bout moving." He saw a poster. Silver sand, exquisite blue water crashing onto it. "What's the Caribbean like?"

"I love it. I was to St Martin last year. Me and my girlfriends had us a fine time."

Man, that sand looked nice. He liked the idea. But then he frowned. "You know, my passport expired. Do you need a passport to go to any of those places?"

"Some countries you do. Some all you need is a birth certificate."

"How would I tell?"

"Maybe what you could do is buy a guidebook. There's a bookstore up the street. You make a right at the corner and it's right there."

"Now there's an idea."

"You might want to think about Hawaii. They got beaches there that've just as nice as the Islands."

"Hawaii." Boggs nodded. That was a good thought. He could just buy a ticket and go and sit on the beach for as long as he wanted.

"Find out what those tickets cost, wouldya?"

As she typed information into her computer he hesitated for a moment then quickly asked, "You be interested in having dinner with me?"

She blushed and consulted her computer terminal. Immediately he wanted to retract his words. He'd stepped over some line, something that people on the Outside – people who stay in Hyatt hotels

and buy airline tickets – instinctively knew not to do.

She looked up shyly. "The thing is, I sort of have a boyfriend."

"Sure, yeah." He was as red as a schoolboy's back in August. "I'm sorry."

She seemed started at his apology. Then she smiled. "Hey, nothing's harmed. Nobody ever died from being asked out." As she looked back to her terminal Randy Boggs thought, This being out in the real world… it's going to take a little time to get used to.

Sam Healy, sitting on his couch, looked over his lawn as he hung up from the phone call that had delivered the terrible news and told himself to stand up but his legs didn't respond. He stayed where he was and watched Courtney playing with a set of plastic blocks. He took a deep breath. When Healy was a kid blocks were made of varnished hardwood and they came in a heavy corrugated cardboard box. The ones the little girl was making a castle out of were made of something like Styrofoam. They came in a big clear plastic jar.

Castles. What else would Rune's child build?

Magic castles.

Sam Healy stared at the colored squares and circles and columns, wondering not so much about the toys of his childhood as about the human capacity for violence.

People'd think a Bomb Squad detective would have a pretty tough skin when it came to things like shootings. Hell, especially in the NYPD, the constabulary for a city with close to two thousand homicides a year. But, Healy'd be fast to tell them, it wasn't so. One thing about bombs: You dealt with mechanics, not with people. Mostly the work was render-safe procedures or postblast investigations and by the time you got called in the victims were long gone and the next of kin notified by somebody else.

But he wasn't on the job now and he could no longer avoid what he had to do.

He stood up and heard a pop in his shoulder – a familiar reminder of a black-powder pipe bomb he'd gotten a little intimate with a couple of years back. He paused, glancing at the little girl again, and walked to the TV. Some old Western was playing. Bad color, bad acting. He shut off the set.

"Hey, that dude was about to draw on three bad guys. Sam, you're a cop. You should watch this stuff. It's like continuing education for you."

He sat down on the ratty green couch and took Rune's hand.

She said, "Oh-oh, what's this? The-wife's-coming-back-to-roost speech? I can deal with it, Sam."

He glanced into the living room to check on Courtney. After he saw she was contentedly playing he kept his eyes turned away as he said, "I got a call from the ops coordinator at the Sixth Precinct. It seems there was a shooting on the pier where your boat was docked."

"Shooting?"

"A girl about your age. Shot twice. Her name was Claire Weisman."

"Claire came back?" Rune asked in a whisper. "Oh, my God, no. Is she dead?" Rune's eyes were on Courtney.

"Critical condition. St Vincent's.

"Oh, God." Rune was crying softly. Then, her voice fading, she said, "Somebody thought it was me, didn't they?"

"There are no suspects."

She said, "You know who did it, don't you?"

"Boggs and the other guy, the fat one. Jack."

"It has to be them. They came back to kill me." Her eyes were red and miserable. "I-" Her hands closed on her mouth. "I never thought Claire'd come back." Rune's gaze settled on Courtney.

Healy held her then said, "I'll call it in to the detectives. About Boggs and Jack. For a shooting they'll do a citywide search."

"Please," she whispered, "please, please…"

"Claire's mother's on her way. She's flying down from Boston."

"I've got to go see her."

"Come on, I'll drive you there."

"I'm so sorry," Rune said.

The woman must've been in her early fifties. She didn't know how to respond to the grief and did the only thing she could think of – put her arm around Rune's shoulders and told her that they all had to be brave.

Claire's mother was heavy, wearing a concealing long, blue-satin dress. Her hair was a mix of pure black strands and pure white, which made it look disorganized even though it was sprayed perfectly into place. She held what Rune thought was a crushed bouquet but what turned out to be a thin white handkerchief, the kind Rune's grandmother called a hankie.

Run looked at the bed. It was hard to see Claire. The lights were very dim, as if the doctors were afraid that too much brightness would give her life a chance to get away. Rune leaned forward. Claire's left shoulder and arm were in a huge cast, and the left side of her face was a mass of bandages. There were tubes in her nose and several others led from a dressing on her neck into jars on the floor. A monitor above her head gave its alarming messages about heartbeats or pulses or breaths or who knew what. The lines were erratic. Rune wished the monitor faced the other way.

Mrs Weisman kept her eyes on her daughter and sad, "Where's Courtney? Claire said she was staying with you."

"I left her with the nurse outside. I didn't think it was a good idea for her to see Claire like this."

There was the dense silence of two people who have nothing in common except grief.

After a few minutes Rune asked, "Do you have a place to stay?"

The woman wasn't listening. She stared at Claire then a moment later asked, "Do you have any children?"

"Other than Courtney, no."

Mrs Weisman turned her head toward Rune at this answer. "Did you tell her anything? Courtney, I mean. About what happened."

"I said her mommy was sick and she was going to see her grandmother. She's okay. But she should get some sleep pretty soon."

Mrs Weisman said, "I'll keep her with me."

Rune hesitated. "Sure."

"Does she have her things with her?"

The clothesI bought, she's got. The toysI gave her. Rune said, "Claire didn't leave her with much."

Mrs Weisman didn't answer.

Rune said, "I've got some things to do. Could you call me if she wakes up?" She wrote Sam Healy' s name, address and phone number on the back of a restaurant receipt she'd found in her purse. "I'm staying here for a while."

She nodded and Rune wondered if she was hearing the words.

"Who'd do such a thing?" Mrs Weisman asked vacantly. "A robber? Claire didn't look like the kind

of girl who'd have a lot of money. Do you think it was like what you hear about in California? You know, where they shoot people on the highway just for the fun of it?" She shook her head as if the answer didn't make any difference.

"I don't know," Rune said. Her mother would find out soon enough what happened. No sense in long explanations now.

But therewas something Rune wanted to add. She wanted so badly to turn to this poor woman and tell her exactly what she was thinking right now. Which was that she didn't give a shit about the news story anymore, she didn't give a shit about the Lance Hopper murder. She cared about one thing, and that only: finding the two of them – Randy Boggs and his fat friend, Jack.

She'd get into the Network somehow – Bradford would help her – and steal her tapes and notes, get all the details on where Randy'd lived over the past ten years, where he liked to go, what he hoped to do in the future. Somewhere in that material would probably be a clue as to where he was running to right now. She'd find him and Jack and make sure theyboth went to Harrison prison.

But then, when it occurred to her that Claire might die and her mother would take Courtney back to Boston, she thought she might not turn them over to the police at all.

She'd kill them herself.