Jeffery Deaver - Death of a Blue Movie Star

Tommy turned on the camera and focused it at Rune.

The sweat from the heat of the lights ran down from his eye sockets and he made no attempt to wipe it away.

Rune was sobbing.

He caressed the knife. "I want to make love to you."

He stepped forward and rested the blade on Rune's forearm.

He pressed it in and cut a short stroke.

She screamed again.

Another cut, shorter. He looked at it carefully. He'd made a cross.

"They like this," he explained. "The customers. They like little details like this."

He lifted the knife to her throat.

"I want to make love to you. I want to make love to-"

The first shot was low and wide. It took out a lamp.

Tommy was spinning, looking around, confused panic in his eyes.

The second was closer. It snapped past his head, like a bee, and vanished through the window, somewhere into the dark plain of the Hudson.

The third and fourth caught him in the shoulder and head, and he just dropped, collapsing, slumping from the waist, like a huge bag of grain dumped off a truck.

Sam Healy, breathing hard, his service Smith & Wesson still pointed at the man's head, walked up slowly. His gun hand was shaking. His face was pale.

"Oh, Sam," Rune said, sobbing. "Sam."

"You all right?"

Tommy had fallen against Rune, his head resting on her foot. She was trying to pull away. She said, panicky, through her tears, "Get him away! Get him off me. Please, get him off!"

Healy kicked him over, made sure he was dead, then began undoing the bell wire. "God, I'm a lousy shot." He was trying to joke but she could hear the quaver in his voice.

When Rune was free, she fell against his chest.

He kept repeating, "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay."

"He was going to kill me. He was going to tape it. What he did to Nicole, he was going to do that to me."

Healy was speaking into a Motorola walkie-talkie. "Two-five-five to Central."

"Go ahead, Two-five-five."

"I have a DCDS on houseboat in the Hudson River at Christopher. Send Homicide, an EMS bus, and a tour doctor from the ME's office."

"Roger, Two-five-five. Just the DCDS? You have injuries too?"

Healy turned to Rune, and asked, "You all right? You need a medic?"

But she was staring at Tommy's body and didn't hear a word he said.

It was very domestic.

That was the eerie part.

Rune had wakened at seven-thirty. She'd been having a nightmare but it wasn't about Tommy or Shelly. Just some kind of forgetting-to-study nightmare. She had those a lot. But she relaxed at once, seeing Sam asleep next to her. She'd watched him breathing slowly, the slight motion of his chest, then climbed out of bed and walked into the house.

Pure burbs, pure domestic.

She made coffee and toast and looked at all the beer bottles and cheese slices and junk food in the refrigerator. Why did he refrigerate Fritos?

No, this whole thing didn't seem right. She ate junk food, sure, but he was a man. And a policeman. It seemed that he ought to eat something more substantial than beer and corn chips. In the freezer were TV dinners, three stacks, each different. He must work his way from right to left, she figured, so he wouldn't have the same thing twice in a row.

She walked around an ugly yellow kitchen, with huge daisies pasted on the refrigerator and pink Rubbermaid things all over the place-wastebaskets, drying racks, paper-towel holders, dish drains. Pictures of Adam were everywhere.

Rune studied it all, as she made coffee and burned bread into toast.

Was this what it was like to be a wife?

Probably what it was like to be a Cheryl.

Rune wandered through the one-story house as she sipped coffee from a white mug that had cartoons of cows on it.

One bedroom was a study. There were odd gaps in the room where furniture should have been. Cheryl had done okay, it seemed; from the looks of what was left she'd taken the good stuff.

In the white shag-ragged living room she looked at the bookcases. Popular paperbacks, textbooks from school, interior design. Explosive Ordnance Disposal -Chemical Weapons… The Claymore Mine: Operations and Tactics.

The last one was pretty battered. It was also water-stained and she wondered if he'd been reading it in the bathtub.

ImprovisedDetonation Techniques was right next to Masteringthe Art of French Cooking.

Sam Healy might be an easy person to fall in love with, and have fun with, but Rune could see it'd be tough to be married to him.

She walked back into the kitchen and sat at the table, which was covered with diseased Formica, and stared out into the backyard.

Nicole…

Nicole, suckered in by the glitz and bucks and hot lights. The coke. God, that teased hair, the glossy makeup, the dangerous fingernails, the aerobic thighs… A sweet simple girl, who had no business doing what she did.

Shelly and Nicole.

The Lusty Cousins…

Well, they were both gone now.

It seemed awful to Rune, to stumble into your death like that. It'd be better to face death head-on, to meet it, even insult it or challenge it some, rather than have it grab you by surprise…

For a moment, Rune regretted the whole business-her film, Shelly, Nicole.

These porn films-it was a shitty little business and she hated it. Not a good attitude, dear, you want to make documentaries but, goddamn it, that's how she felt.

Images from last night returned. Tommy's face, Nicole's-worse, the red-stained sheet. The network of blood on Tommy's hands. The heat of the lights, the steady, terrifying eye of the camera lens aiming at her as Tommy walked forward, the sound of the bullet hitting his head. She felt her hand shaking and a terrible spiraling churn begin deep inside her.

No, no, no…

Sam Healy's sleepy voice called from the other room and broke the spell. "Rune, it's early. Come back to bed."

"Time to get up. I made breakfast." She was about to add, Like a good wife, but figured why give Cheryl a plug? "We do the final cut of that House O' Leather job today. The one I told you about? I've got to be at work in an hour."

"Rune," Healy called again, "come here. There's something I want to show you."

"I burned toast just for you."

"Rune."

She hesitated, then stepped into the bathroom and brushed her hair, then sprayed on perfume. Rune knew a lot about men in the morning.

She didn't intend her life to be violent. She certainly didn't intend to die violently. But Shelly Lowe was an addict-addicted to the power that the films she made brought her, addicted to that raw urge that perhaps all artists feel to expose herself, in every sense, to her audiences.

And just like for all addicts, Shelly ran the risk that that power would overwhelm her.

She understood that risk, and she didn't back away from it. She met it and she lost. Caught between art and lust, between beauty and sex, Shelly Lowe died.

Carved into her simple grave in a small cemetery in Long Island, New York, is the single line: "She lived only for her art," which seems a fitting epitaph for this blue movie star.

FADE OUT To:

CREDITS…

"What do you think?" Rune asked Sam Healy.

"You wrote that?"

Rune nodded. "It took me a hundred tries. Is it too, you know, flowery?"

Healy said, "I think it's beautiful." He put his arm around her. "Is it ready to go?"

"Not hardly." Rune laughed. "I've got to find a professional announcer to do the voice-over, then spend about three weeks editing it all together and cutting about ten hours of tape down to twenty-eight minutes. Shooting was the fun part. Now the work begins… Hey, Sam, I was thinking. Anybody ever done a documentary about the Bomb Squad?"

He kissed her neck. "Why don't you call in sick today. We can talk about it."