Jeffery Deaver - Hard News

Maisel didn't agree or disagree. He said, "You're a good cameraman and you're learning a lot with the Hopper story. But producing involves a lot more than that." He shrugged. "But I asked Piper to fill the spot. It's her call. If she wants you in the job it's yours." He looked across the room. More antique maps. She wondered what country he was focusing on.

"I'm pretty tempted," she said.

"Wonder why," he said wryly. "Couldn't be more than ten, fifteen thousand reporters in the country that'd kill to have that assignment." Maisel stretched his feet out straight then curled one up under himself. He was wearing bright yellow socks.

"But," he said, "you're worried about the Boggs story."

She nodded."That's the problem."

"How's it coming?"

"Slow. I don't really have any leads. Nothing solid."

"But you still think he's innocent?"

"Yeah, I guess I do. The story'd still get done. Piper said she'd assign someone local to finish it."

"Did she?"

"Yeah, she promised me."

Maisel nodded.

After a moment Rune said, "She doesn't want me to do this story, does she?"

"She's afraid."

"Afraid? Piper Sutton?"

"It's not as funny as it seems. Her job is her whole life. She's had three disastrous marriages. There's nothing else she can do professionally; nothing she wants to do. If this story goes south she and I, and Dan Semple to some extent, will take the flak. You know how fickle audiences are. Dan and I are worried about news. Piper is too but she's an anchor – she's also got public image to sweat."

"I can't imagine her being afraid of anything. I mean, I'm terrified of her."

"She's not going to have you rubbed out if you tell her you're going to stay and do the story."

"But she's my boss…"

Maisel laughed. "You're too young to know that bosses, like wives, aren't necessarily matched to us in heaven."

"Okay, but sheis Piper Sutton."

"That's a different issue and I don't envy you having to call her up and tell her that you're declining her offer. But, so what? You're an adult."

More or less Rune thought. She said, "I don't know what to do, Lee. What's your totally, totally honest opinion about my story?"

Maisel was considering. A gold clock began pinging off the hours to tenp.m. When it hit eight he said, "I'm not going to do you any favors by being delicate. The Boggs story? You take it way too personally. And that's unprofessional. I get the impression that you're on some kind of holy quest. You-"

"But he's innocent, and nobody else-"

"Rune," he said harshly. "You asked my opinion. Let me finish."

"Sorry."

"You're not looking at the whole picture. You've got to understand that journalism has a responsibility to be totally unbiased. You're not. With Boggs you're one of the most goddamn biased reporters I've ever worked with."

"True," she said.

"That makes for a noble person maybe but it's not journalism."

"That's sort of what Piper told me too."

"There's government corruption and incompetence everywhere, there're human rights violations in

America, Africa and China, there's homelessness, there's child abuse in day-care centers… There are so many important issues that media has to choose from and so few minutes to broadcast news or newspaper columns to talk about them in. What you've done is pick a very small story. It's not a bad story; it's just an insignificant one."

She looked off, scanning Maisel's wall absently. She wondered if she'd find an omen – an old map of England, maybe. She didn't.

A minute passed.

He said, "It's got to be your decision. I think the best advice I can give you is, sleep on it."

"You mean, stay up all night tossing and turning and stewing about it."

"That might work too."

The Twentieth Precinct, on the Upper West Side, was considered a plum by a lot of cops.

The Hispanic gangs had been squeezed north, the Black Panthers were nothing more than a bit of nostalgia, and no-man's-land – Central Park – had its very own precinct to take care of the muggings and drug dealers. What you had in the Twentieth mostly were domestic disputes, shopliftings, an occasional rape. The piles of auto glass, like tiny green-blue ice cubes, marked what was maybe the most common crime: stealing Blaupunkts or Panasonics from dashboards.

Two yuppies who'd scrunched Honda Accord or BMW fenders might get into a shoving match in front of Zabar's. An insider trader suicide or two occasionally. But things didn't get much worse than that.

There was a lot of traffic in and out of the low, 1960s decor brick-and-glass building. Community relations was a priority here and more people came through the doors of the Twentieth to attend meetings or just hang out with the cops than to report muggings.

So the desk sergeant – a beefy, moustachioed blond cop – didn't think twice about her, this young, mini-skirted mother, about twenty, who had a cute-as-a-button three-or four-year-old in tow on this warm afternoon. She walked right up to him and said she had a complaint about the quality of police protection in the neighborhood.

The cop didn't really care, of course. He liked concerned citizens about as much as he liked his hemorrhoids and he almost felt sorry for the petty street dealers and hangers-out and drunks who got pushed around by these wild-eyed, lecturing, upstanding, taxpaying citizens the women being the worst. But he'd studied community relations at the Police Academy and so now, though he couldn't bring himself to smile pleasantly at this short woman, he nodded as if he were interested in what she had to say.

"You guys aren't doing a good job patrolling. My little girl and I were out on the street, just taking a walk-"

"Yes, miss. Did someone hassle you?"

She gave him a glare for the interruption. "We were taking a walk and do you know what we found on the street?"

"Nade," the little girl said.

The cop infinitely preferred to talk to the little girl. He may have hated intense, short, concerned citizens but he loved kids. He leaned forward, grinning like a department-store Santa the first day on the job. "Honey, is that your name?"

"Nade."

"Uh-huh, that's a pretty name." Oh, she was so goddamn cute, he couldn't believe it. The way she was digging in her own little patent-leather purse, trying to look grown up. He didn't like the lime-green miniskirt she was wearing and he was thinking maybe the sunglasses around the girl's neck, on that yellow strap, might be dangerous. Her mother oughtn't to be dressing her in that crap. Little girls should be wearing that frilly stuff like his wife bought for their nieces.

The good-citizen mother said, "Show him what we found, baby."

The cop talked the singsongy language that adults think children respond to. "My brother's little girl has a purse like that. What do you have in there, honey? Your dolly?"

It wasn't. It was a U.S. Army-issue fragmentation hand grenade. "Nade," the girl said and held it out in both hands.

"Holy Mary," the cop gasped.

The mother said, "There. Look at that, just lying on the street. We-"

He hit the fire alarm and grabbed the phone, calling NYPD Central and reporting a 10-33 IED – an improvised explosive device – and a 10-59.

Then it occurred to him that the fire alarm wasn't such a good idea because the forty or fifty officers in the building could get out only one of three ways – a back exit, a side exit and the front door, and most were choosing the front door, not eight feet from a child with a pound of TNT in her hands.

What happened next was kind of a blur. A couple of detectives got the thing away from the girl and onto the floor in the far corner of the lobby. But then nobody knew exactly what to do. Six cops stood gawking at it. But the pin hadn't been pulled and they got to talking about whether there was a hole drilled in the bottom of the grenade and how if there was that meant it was a dummy like they sold at Army-Navy stores and in ads in the back ofField and Stream. But whoever had put the thing in the corner had left it so that you couldn't see the butt end and, since the Bomb Squad got paid extra money to do that sort of thing, they decided just to wait.