Enough is enough.
She stood up and stretched; a series of pops from her joints momentarily replaced the buzzing. She left Bradford in charge of logging in the recent tapes she'd shot and headed outside. Rune walked through the complicated maze of corridors and into the spring evening. She removed the chrome chain necklace of her ID from around her neck and slipped it in her leopard-skin bag.
Outside a harried woman employee of the Network stood on the sidewalk. Her husband – a young professional – walked up to her with their two young children in tow. It had apparently been his turn to pick up the kids tonight.
The mother gave them perfunctory hugs and then started making weekend plans with her husband. Their daughter, a redhead about Courtney's age, tugged on her mother's Norma Kamali skirt. "Mommy…"
"Just aminute" the woman said sternly. "I'm speaking to your father." The little girl looked sullenly off.
Rune gave the kid a smile but she didn't respond. The family walked off.
Man, I'm beat, she thought.
But as she walked she felt the cool, electric-scented city night air waking her up and she saw from the clock on the MONY tower that it was early, only eightp.m. Early? Rune remembered when quitting time had been five. She continued down Broadway, past the pastel carnival of Lincoln Center – pausing, listening for music but not hearing any. Then she continued south, deciding to walk home, a couple miles, to get the blood back in her legs. Thinking of what she needed to do for the story. Getting her hands on the police report of the Hopper case was the number one item.
Then she'd have to talk to all the witnesses. Get Megler on tape. Maybe interview the judge. Find some jurors. She wondered if there was an old priest who knew Boggs. A Spencer Tracy sort of guy.
Ah, well, now, sure I'd be knowing the boy Randy and I'll tell you, he helped out in soup kitchens and took care of his mother and left half his allowance in the collection plate every Sunday when he was an altar boy…
A lot to do.
She walked through Hell's Kitchen. Her head swiveled as she went down Ninth Avenue. Disappointed. The developers were doing a number on the area. Boxy high-rises and slick restaurants and co-ops. What she liked best about the neighborhood was that it had been the home of the Gophers, one of the toughest of the nineteenth-century gangs in New York. Rune had been reading about old gangs lately. Before she got waylaid by the Boggs story, she'd been planning a documentary on them. The featured thugs were going to be the Gophers and their sister gang, the Battle Row Ladies' Social and Athletic Club (also known as the Lady Gophers). Not a single producer had been very interested in the subject. The Mafia and Colombians and Jamaicans with machine guns were still the current superstars of crime, according to the media; and there wasn't much demand for stories about people like One-Lung Curran and Sadie the Goat and Stumpy Malarky.
Her feet were aching by the time she got to her neighborhood. She stopped outside the houseboat, looked at the dark windows for a moment. Behind her another family walked past, a mother and father and their child, a cute boy of about five or six. He was asking questions – where does the Hudson River go, what kind of fish are in it – and together the mother and father were making up silly answers for the boy. All three of them were laughing hard. Rune felt an urge to join in but she resisted, realizing that she was an outsider, When they had passed she walked up the gangplank and inside the houseboat. She dropped her bag by the door and stood listening, her head cocked sideways.
A car horn, a helicopter, a backfire. All the sounds were distant. None of what she heard was coming from inside the houseboat, nothing except her own heartbeat and the creak of boards beneath her feet.
She reached for the lamp but slowly lowered her hand and instead felt her way to the couch and lay down on it, staring up at the ceiling, at the psychedelic swirls of lights reflecting off the turbulent surface of the Hudson. She lay that way for a long time.
An hour later Rune was sitting in an overheated subway car as it stammered along the tracks. She did an inventory of the tools of the trade in her bag – a claw hammer, a canister of military tear gas, two screwdrivers (Phillips head and straight), masking tape and rubber gloves. Her other accessories included a large bucket, a string mop and a plastic container of Windex.
She was thinking about the law too and wondered if the crime was less if it wasn't breakingand entering. If you just entered and didn't break.
It was the kind of question that Sam could've answered real fast, but of course he was the last person in the world she would ask that particular question.
She imagined, though, that it was a distinction somebody'd thought of already, and just because you didn't jimmy any locks or crack any plate glass, the punishment wasn't going to be a hell of a lot less severe. Maybe the judge would sentence her to one year instead of three.
Or ten instead of twenty.
The longer term probably. It wasn't going to help her case that it was government property she had her eyes on.
The building was only a few doors from the subway stop. She climbed out and paused. A cop walked past, his walkie-talkie sputtering with a hiss. She pressed her face against a lamp post, which was covered with layers and layers of paint, and wondered what color it had been in earlier years. Maybe some gang members from the Gophers or Hudson Dusters had paused under this very same post a hundred years ago, scoping out a job.
The street was empty and she strolled casually into the old government-issue building and up to
the night guard, cover story and faked credentials all prepared.
In twenty minutes she was out, having exchanged the mop and pail for the bulky manila folder that rested in her bag.
She paused at a phone stand and pretended to make a call while she flipped through the file. She found the address she was looking for and walked quickly back to the subway. After a ten-minute wait, she got on board an old Number Four train heading toward Brooklyn.
Rune liked the outer boroughs, Brooklyn especially. She thought of it as caught in a time warp, a place where the Dodgers were always playing and muscular boys in T-shirts sipped egg creams and flirted with tough girls who snapped gum and answered them back in sexy, lazy drawls. Big immigrant families crammed into narrow shotgun tenements argued and made up and laughed and hugged with hearts full of love and loyalty.
The neighborhood that she now slipped into, along with the crowd exiting the subway, was quiet and residential. She paused, getting her bearings.
She had to walk only three blocks before she found the row house. Red brick with yellow trim, two-story, a narrow moat of anemic lawn. Bursts of red covered the front of the building: Geraniums, sprouting everywhere – they escaped from flowerpots, from terra-cotta statues in the shape of donkeys and fat Mexican peasants, from green plastic window boxes, from milk containers. They bothered her, the flowers. Someone who'd appreciate flowers like this was probably a very nice person. This meant Rune would feel pretty guilty about what she was about to do.
Which didn't stop her, however, from walking onto the front porch, dropping a paper bag on the concrete stoop and setting fire to it.
She rang the doorbell and ran into the alley behind the house and listened to the voices.
"Oh, hell… What?… The boys again… That's it! This time I call the cops… Don't call the fire department. It's just…"
Rune raced up the back stairs and through the open kitchen door. She saw a man leaping forward fiercely and stomping on the burning bag, sparks flying, smoke pouring out. A chubby woman held a long-spouted watering can, dousing his feet. Then Rune was past them, unnoticed, taking the carpeted stairs two at a time. Upstairs she found herself in a small hallway.
First room, nobody.
Second, nobody.
Third, chaos. Six children were staring out the window at the excitement below them, squealing and dancing around.