Then Rune saw Jack break free and scramble away. He had the gun in his hand. Randy leapt back into the street, scrambling beneath a car for cover. Jack fired two fast shots at him then turned to run just as three blue-and-white police cars squealed around the corner. The officers poured out, shouting like madmen for Jack to stop, to drop the gun. He fired at their cars twice and turned to run but he slipped and went down on one knee.
"Drop the weapon," a metallic voice came over the loudspeaker.
Jack leapt to the side and lifted the gun again.
The big sparking explosion of a shotgun was like a thunderclap. Jack tumbled backwards. He tried to get up, muttering some distorted words. Something about "pictures," Rune thought. The fatman lay back. His body convulsed once. Then he was still.
Ten squad cars, with lights flashing, were parked in front of the Network building. Several EMS ambulances were here too and, for some reason, so were two fire trucks. Already the crowd of spectators was large. Rune noted with a laugh to herself that the three news crews on hand to capture the story on tape were all from the competition; no one at the Network seemed to have heard about the incident.
Rune was standing next to Randy Boggs, who leaned against a squad car. His hand and chin were bandaged. Jack had missed when he'd fired those two shots at him but he'd cut himself in several places during the fight. (He seemed most upset because the ugly tan suit he wore was torn and greasy.)
Bradford Simpson, however, had been hit by Jack's bullet but only in the leg. He'd be all right.
Lee Maisel was in custody.
"How did you get here?" Rune asked, shaking her head in confusion.
"I went to your houseboat – saw what'd happened there. I'm plenty sorry about that. Did Jack do it?"
"Indirectly." She didn't mention the actual arsonist was three years old.
Boggs continued. "I just came to the TV station here to see if maybe the guard or somebody could tell me where you were. I saw you and Jack coming out of the back door. Didn't know what was going on but I figured it wasn't good. And that I better do something about it. So I pretended to be a – you know, homeless man so I could get in close."
A detective came up to her and said, "Could you give us a few more details, miss?"
Rune answered, "Can we be alone for a couple minutes? Just him and me? Then I'll tell you everything."
The detective nodded. He walked over to the medical attendants, who were putting Jack's body on a gurney.
"I thought you'd taken off," Rune told Boggs angrily.
He stared at the ground, not able to return her gaze. "I just went down to Atlanta for a day or two to get my money and then I was coming back. I was going to do that all along -I have some business to take care of here."
"Business?" she asked skeptically.
"I'm giving some of my money to the family of this friend of mine from Harrison. He got himself killed
'cause he was my friend. Anyway, Icouldn't leave -remember, Mr Megler said I had to stay in New York until the case was officially over?"
"When has obeying the law ever meant anything to you?" Rune snapped. "Why didn't you tell me about you and Jack?"
"Was a new suit," he said, studying at his torn sleeve. Then he looked up, focused on the flipping lights atop a squad car. "Was the deal I made with him."
"Him?" Rune asked in disbelief. "That son of a bitch?"
"Way I was brought up is you don't snitch."
"He used you!"
"Know that now. Didn't then. Didn't until just a few days ago."
"Didn't you think it was kind of funny that he took you along on this credit card thing then coincidentally somebody gets killed?"
"Not at the time I didn't think so. And then, when maybe I started to think itwas a little off he give me all that money. I needed a nest egg. A hundred thousand dollars – where'd I ever get money like that otherwise? Nowhere I know of."
Rune's head swam with painful emotions. Wanted to slap him, to scream, to grab his thin collar and shake him.
Randy Boggs said, "I'm sorry."
She didn't answer.
"I coulda just left. I'm thinking of going to Hawaii after everything gets settled in court, you know. I coulda just got my money and kept going there."
" Hawaii?" she asked as if he'd said "Mars."
He nodded. "Buy me a store of some kind. On the weekends I could sit on the beach and drink those drinks that look like pineapples. With umbrellas in them. You could come visit. You like them drinks?"
She didn't answer.
"I wanta give you some money."
Rune said, "Me? Why?"
"It was on account of me that your house got burned down. How's ten thousand?"
"I don't want your money."
"Maybe fifteen?"
"No, forget it."
"Maybe your little girl-"
"She'snot my little girl," Rune snapped.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Boggs said, "I'm just trying to tell you I'm sorry."
Rune said, "I wanted to help you. That was why I did the story in the first place. Everybody told me not to. Everybody told me to forget about you, that you'd killed a man and that you deserved to be in jail."
Boggs said, "I'd appreciate it if you'd consider taking the money."
"Give it to Courtney's mother, Claire. She needs it more than me."
"I'll give her some, sure. But I'll give you some too. How's that?"
Rune slapped the top of the police car. She shook her head then laughed. Boggs was looking around, smiling too, though he didn't know what was funny. She said, "Hell, Randy, no wonder you never made any money – you give it all away."
"Haven't held on to it too good. That much is true."
She turned to him and said, "I need to do my story again. I'll have to interview you. Will you talk to me? And this time give me thewhole story?"
"If I do that will you forgive me?"
She said, "I really don't know."
"Could we go drink beer some time?"
"I don't go out with felons."
"I've done some things that'recriminal, I admit that, but I'm not sure I'm a felon exactly."
The detective returned and said to Rune, "Need to get some statements from you both now." He was in his politely firm civil-servant mode.
"Sure," she answered.
He took Boggs aside first and, for the moment, Rune was alone, surrounded by a pool of dull colors on the wet street – reflections from the streetlights, from apartment windows, from the emergency cars. She felt a huge desire to get home, to go back to her houseboat and to Courtney. But, of course, the boat was gone: And the little girl was with her grandmother.
Rune looked at the scene in front of her.
The news crews – at last joined by one from the Network – were busy taping their three-minute segments on the shooting. But they were virtually the only ones left on the street. Like the explosion of the shotgun that killed Jack Nestor the incident had erupted fast and then vanished immediately, pulled into the huge gears of the city and ground up into nothing. But for TV audiences throughout the metro area the events would live on in future newscasts until they were preempted by other stories, which would in turn be replaced by still more after that.
Rune sat down on a doorstep to wait for the detective, and to watch the young reporters, holding their microphones and gazing sincerely into the eyes of their loyal viewers as they tried once again to explain the inexplicable.
34
Wrestle with it, fight it. Standing in front of Claire's hospital bed, Rune wore a white sleeveless
T-shirt and black miniskirt. Beside her was Courtney – who was no longer New Wave preschool. No more black and Day-Glo and studs. She was in her new Laura Ashley cornflower-blue dress and lopsided hair ribbon (it had taken Rune ten minutes to get the navy-blue satin to impersonate a bow).