Jeffery Deaver - Hard News

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.

They all turned to the doorway as Rune walked into the room and flipped the light switch on.

One of them cried, "Rune!"

"Hi, honey," she said to Courtney. The little girl ran toward her.

A chubby boy of about ten looked at her. "What'sis? Jailbreak?"

"Shh, don't tell anybody."

"Yeah, right, like I'm a snitch. Got a cigarette?"

Rune gave him five dollars. "Forget you-"

"-saw anything. Right. I know the drill."

Rune said to Courtney, "Come on, let's go home."

She pulled the girl's jacket off a hook and slipped it on her.

"Are we playing a game?" the little girl asked. "Yeah," Rune said, hustling her out into the corridor,

"it's called kidnapping."

The prison yard was segregated.

Just like the city, Randy Boggs thought, hanging out there at nine the next morning. Just like life. Blacks one side, whites the other, except on the basketball half-court.

The blacks were mostly young. A lot were do-rags or stockings over their hair or they had cornrows. They stood together. Strong, big, sleek.

Yo, homes, quit that noise.

Wassup?

Mah crib. I ever tell you 'bout mah crib?

Hells yeah.

The whites were older, crueler, humorless. They looked bad – it was the longer, unclean hair, the pale skin. They too stood together.

Black, white. Just like the city.

A lot of the men were exercising. There were weights here though the hierarchy didn't allow for democratic use among all prisoners. Still, there were always push-ups and sit-ups. Muscles develop in prison. But Boggs hadn't made a fetish of exercise. Doing that'd be an acknowledgment of where he was, and what he was. If he didn't stand in line for the thirty-pound dumbbells then maybe he was somewhere else. Maybe he wassomeone else.

"Amazing grace, how sweet thou art…"

An a cappella black gospel group was practicing in the yard. They were really good. Boggs, when he first heard them, wanted to cry. Now he just listened. The group wouldn't be together much longer. They'd walk in two months, four months and thirteen months respectively.

"I once was lost but now I'm found…"

The singers started a second verse and someone nearby yelled, "Yo, shut the fuck up."

He smelled fireplace wood smoke. He tried not to think of the last time he'd sat in front of a fireplace. Thought about that girl from New York. The little girl with the big camera.

He sat quietly. He smoked some though since he'd been in he'd lost his taste for smoking. He'd lost

his taste for a lot of things. He sat for five minutes thinking about the girl, about the story, about prison, about the sky before he realized that the prisoners he'd been sitting with were no longer next to him.

Boggs knew why they'd moved and he felt his skin crackle with fear.

Severn Washington was sick. Got the flu bad, was puking all night, and was in the infirmary. If Boggs knew it everybody knew it.

He looked around the yard and saw the man immediately. Juan Ascipio was back.

He wore a red headband and a fatigue jacket over his jumpsuit. Two other prisoners walked beside him. Boggs had no idea why Ascipio wanted to kill him. He was a newcomer, a dealer who'd been convicted of the assassination of two rivals. He wasn't a big man and he had a face that when it smiled might make children comfortable. A kind face, the sort you want to please. But the eyes, Boggs had noticed, were grinny-mean and chill.