Jeffery Deaver - Hard News

On the whole, it wasbetter inside. Maybe you didn't get paychecks but you didn'tneed paychecks like when you were doing straight time.

He had friends, like Randy Boggs.

He had his Koran.

No, couldn't complain. He looked down at his holy book once more.

… If Allah afflict thee with some hurt, there is none who can remove it save Him,' if He desireth good for thee, there is none who can repel His bounty. He-

The sentiment in that passage was the last thought Severn Washington ever had.

And the last sound he ever heard was the hiss of the steel barbell pole that swung into the back of his head.

He didn't even live long enough to hear the delicate flutter of his Koran as it pitched from his convulsing fingers and lay open on dirt, the book which it turned out wasn't going to precede Washington into heaven after all.

The conversation was hushed.

"Whatever you thinking, man, fuck it," said Juan Ascipio. "We had to do the nigger. I told you…" He was talking rapidly to one of his Hispanic brothers in the area beside the library where they'd just dragged Washington's body. "… we move on Boggs, put the bar in his hand and knife in the nigger's. Looks like the nigger wanted to fuck Boggs and Boggs moved on him, and then the nigger did Boggs."

"I know, man," the second man said. "Hey, I'm not saying nothing."

"You don't look happy, man, but it had to be that way."

"Yeah. It's just, man, theyknow it's us."

"Fuck," Ascipio spat out. "What they know ain't what they can prove."

"After the first time, man. They know it's us. He coulda talked."

"Motherfucker didn't talk. He coulda said who it was did him. He didn't say nothing." Ascipio laughed.

"Yeah."

A third man loped back to them. "Boggs – he's in there by hisself."

Ascipio laughed again.

Randy Boggs liked the library.

Reading was one of those things you don't think anything of until you actually did it. When he was Outside there were some things he'd do for the peace of it. Like sitting with a quart of beer for the evening, listening to cicadas and owls and the surf of leaves and the click of branches. That was something he could do practically forever. Which seemed like doing nothing but was actually one of the most important ways a man could spend time.

That was how he now looked at reading.

Most of the books here were pretty bad. Somebody – a school, he guessed – had donated a lot of textbooks. Sociology and psychology and statistics and economics. Boring as dry toast. If that was what people learned in college no wonder nobody seemed to have any smarts.

And some of the novels were a bit much. The older ones – and the library here seemed to have mostly 1920s and '30s books – were pretty dense. Man, he couldn't make heads or tails out of them. He had to slug his way through, just like the way he'd clean a floor: scrape, then sweep, then mop, then rinse. Inch by inch. Then he found some newer ones. Catch-22, which he thought was really okay. He grinned for five minutes straight after finishing that one. Then somebody mentioned Kurt Vonnegut and although there were none of his books in the prison library a guard he'd become friendly with gave him a copy ofCat's Cradle and a couple others as well. Whenever he saw the guard, he'd wink and say, "So it goes." Boggs loved Paul Theroux's travel writing. He also tried John Cheever. He didn't like the short stories but the novel about prison really struck home. Sure, it was about prison but it was about somethingmore than prison. That seemed to be the sign of a good book. To be about something but about something more too, even if you didn't know exactly what.

The book that girl reporter had given him wasn't so good, he'd decided. The writing was old-fashioned and he had to read some sentences three, four times in order to figure out what was going on. But he kept at it and would pull it out occasionally and read some more. He wanted to finish it but the reason was so he could talk about it with Rune.

That got him thinking about that girl again and he wondered why her program hadn't run on Tuesday. Rune hadn't called to say anything about it. But then he wasn't sure what day she'd said. Maybe she'd meant a week from Tuesday. She'd probably said "next" Tuesday, instead of "this" Tuesday; Boggs always got confused with "next" and "this."

Damn, that girl was something else. Here, he'd spent months and months trying to figure out how to get out of prison, thinking of escaping, thinking of getting sick, thinking of appealing, and then here she comes and does it for him and it doesn't cost him anything in grief or money.

He-

And that was when he heard the noise and felt the first hum of fear.

The prison itself was old but the library was a newer addition, away from the cell blocks. It looked and smelled like a suburban school. There was only one door in and out. He looked around. The library was completely deserted. And he understood that the Word had gone around. No other prisoners, no guards. No clerk behind the desk. He'd been reading away and hadn't noticed everybody else leaving.

Oh, hell… Boggs heard the slow footsteps of several men coming up the corridor toward that one door.

He knew Severn Washington was outside and he knew too that the big black man was as loyal as a friend could be in prison.

But that was a big qualifier. In prison.

Inside, anybody can be bought.

And, when it comes right down to it, anybody can be killed.

Boggs still had no idea why Ascipio wanted to move on him. But it was clear he was marked. No doubt in his mind. And right now, hearing footsteps come closer to the door, he knew – not a premonition or anything like; heknew – something was going down.

He stood up instinctively. The possibilities for weapons were: a book or a chair.

Well, now, neither of them's much help at all.

Oh, he didn't want the knife again. That terrible feeling of the glass blade. Terrible…

He looked at the chair. He couldn't pull it apart. And when he tried to lift it, a searing pain from the first knifing swept through his back and side.

He tried again and managed to get the chair off the ground, holding it in both hands.

Then part of his mind said, Why bother?

They'd burst in, they'd circle around him, they'd take him. He'd die. What could he do? Swing a chair at them? Knock one of them off balance while the others easily stepped behind him?

So Randall Boggs, failed son of a failed father, simply sat down in the chair, in front of a fiberboard table in a shoddy prison library, and began thinking for some reason, suddenly and obsessively, about Atlanta and the Sunday dinner menu of his childhood.

From his pocket he took out the book the reporter girl had given him and put his hands on it as if it were a Bible, then he thought that was funny because probably to the old-time people, the old Greeks or Romans, or whatever, this myth book probablywas a bible.

Prometheus got freed.

But it didn't seem like this was going to be a replay of that story. Not here, not now.

The footsteps stopped and he heard mumbled voices.

Randy Boggs swallowed and tried to remember a prayer. He couldn't so he just swallowed again and tried not to think about the pain.

The door swung open.

"Hey, Boggs."

He blinked, staring.

"Boggs, come on. Haul ass."

He stood up and walked toward the guard. He opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out, which was just as well because he didn't know what to say anyway.

"Let's move it along, Boggs."

"What's up?"

The guard had drowsy eyes and a voice to match. "The warden wants to see you. Hustle it."

"You got yourself a pretty little girl," Fred Megler said to Randy Boggs.

The lawyer was trooping around the office. He couldn't sit still and was on some kind of energy trip.