Jeffery Deaver - Hard News

She climbed carefully down the stairs, sideways, crablike, then walked up to Rune, who was tied into the butterfly chair. She looked at the cords, at Rune's red face. She heard hoarse, wordless sounds coming from behind the scarf.

"You're funny, Rune," Courtney said then went into the galley.

The refrigerator was pretty easy to open and she found a cardboard carton of apple juice on the second shelf. The problem was that she couldn't figure out how to open it. She looked at Rune, who was staring into the kitchen and still making those funny noises, and held up the carton in both hands then she turned it upside down to look for the spout.

The carton, which, it turned out, had been open after all, emptied itself onto the floor in a sticky surf. "Oh-oh." She looked at Rune guiltily, then set the empty container on top of the stove and went back to the refrigerator.

No more juice. A lot of coldpizza, which she was tired of, but there were dozens of Twinkies, which she loved. She started working on one and then wandered around the small kitchen to see what she could find to play with.

Not a lot. There was, however, a large filleting knife on the counter that intrigued her. She picked it up and pretended it was a sword, like in one of Rune's books, stabbing the refrigerator a few times.

Rune, watching this, was making more noise, and started jiggling around, rocking and swaying back and forth.

The girl then looked into drawers and opened up some pretty-much-unused cookbooks, looking for pictures of ducks, dragons or princesses. The books contained only photos of soups and casseroles and cakes and after five minutes she gave up on them and started playing with the knobs on the stove. They were old and heavy, glistening chrome and trimmed with red paint. Courtney reached up and turned one all the way to the right. Way above her head was apop. She couldn't see the top of the stove and she didn't know what the sound came from but she liked it. Pop.

She turned the second knob. Pop.

Rune's voice was louder now though the little girl still couldn't understand a word of it.

With the thirdpop she got tired of the stove game. That was because something else happened. There was suddenly a red glare from above her head, a hissing sputter, then flames.

Courtney stepped back and watched the juice carton burn. The flaming wax shot off the side of the carton like miniature fireworks. One piece of burning cardboard fell onto the table and set a week-oldNew York Post on fire. A cookbook(A Hundred Glorious Jell-O Desserts) went next.

Courtney loved the flames and watched them creep slowly along the table. They reminded her of something… A movie about a baby animal? A deer? A big fire in a forest? She squinted and tried to remember but soon lost the association and stood back to watch.

She thought it was great when the flames quickly peeled away the Breeds-of-Dog contact paper Rune had painstakingly mounted on the walls with rubber cement.

Then they spread up to the ceiling and the back wall of the houseboat.

When the fire became too hot Courtney moved back a little farther but she was in no hurry to leave. This was wonderful. She remembered another movie. She thought for a minute. Yeah, it was like the scene where Wizardoz was yelling at Dorothy and her little dog. All the smoke and flames… Everybody falling on the floor while the big face puffed and shouted… But this was better than that. This was better than Peter Rabbit. It was even better than Saturday morning TV.

The tourists, coincidentally were from Ohio, Rune's home state.

They were a middle-aged couple, driving a Winne-bago from Cleveland to Maine because the wife had always wanted to see the Maine coast and because they both loved lobster. The itinerary would take them through New York, up to Newport, then on to Boston, Salem and finally into Kennebunkport, which had been featured inParade magazine a year before.

But they'd made an unplanned stop in Manhattan and that was to report a serious fire on the Hudson River.

Cruising up from the Holland Tunnel, they noticed a column of black smoke off to their left, coming, it seemed, right out of the river. They slowed, like almost everybody else was doing, and saw an old houseboat burning furiously. Traffic was at a crawl and they eased forward, listening for the sirens. The husband looked around to find a place to pull off to get out of the way of the fire trucks when they arrived.

But none did.

They waited four, five minutes. Six.

She asked, "You'd think somebody'd've called by now, wouldn't you, dear?"

"You'd think."

They were astonished because easily a hundred cars had gone by, but it seemed that nobody had bothered to call 911. Maybe figuring somebody else had. Or not figuring anything at all, just watching the houseboat burn.

The husband, an ex-Marine and head of his local Chamber of Commerce, a man with no aversion to getting involved, drove the Winnebago up over the curb onto the sidewalk. He braked to a fast halt in front of the pier where the flames roared. He took the big JC Penney triple-class fire extinguisher from the rack beside his seat and rushed outside.

The wife ran to a pay phone while he kicked in the front door of the houseboat. The smoke wasn't too bad inside; the hole in the rear ceiling of the houseboat acted like a chimney and was sucking most of it out. He stopped cold in the doorway, blinking in surprise at what he saw: two girls. One, a young girl, was laughing like Nero as she watched the back half of the houseboat turn into charcoal. The other, a girl wearing a yellow miniskirt, two sleeveless men's T-shirts and low boots dotted with chrome studs, was tied in a chair! Who'd do such a thing? He'd read about Greenwich Village but this seemed too sick even for a Sodom like that.

He pulled the pin of the fire extinguisher and emptied the contents at the advancing line of flames, but it had no effect on the fire. He carried the little girl outside to his wife and then returned to the inferno, opening his Case pocketknife as he ran. He cut the wires holding the older girl. He had to help her walk outside; her legs had fallen asleep.

Inside the couple's Winnebago the little girl saw the older one's tears and decided it was time to start crying herself. Three minutes later the fire department arrived. They had the fire out in twenty. The police and fire department investigators knocked on the door. The girls stood up and went outside and the couple followed.

A huge black cloud hung over the pier. The air smelled of sour wood and burnt rubber – from the tires that had dangled off the side of the boat to cushion it against the pier. The vessel hadn't sunk but much of the structure on the deck had been destroyed.

One of the detectives asked the older girl, "Could you tell me what happened?"

She paced in a tight circle. "That goddamn son of a bitch he tricked me he lied to me I'm going to find

him and have his ass thrown back in jail so goddamn fast… Shit. Hell. Shit!"

"Shit," Courtney said, and the husband and wife looked at each other.

The police asked questions for almost a half hour. The girl was telling a story about a man who was convicted wrongly of murder then got released, only now it was clear he'd done it after all and there was a big fat man named Jack – no last name – and Jack had a gun and wanted to kill them and he was involved in the first killing. The couple lost a lot of the details -just like the cops must have too – but they didn't really need to hear any more. They had enough of the facts for a good traveling story, which they'd tell to friends and to themselves and to anybody they happened to meet on the way to Maine and which unlike a lot of the stories they'd told didn't need much embellishment at all. Finally a tall, balding man in a plaid shirt and blue jeans and with a badge on his belt arrived and the girl fell into his arms, though she wasn't sobbing anymore or hysterical. Then she pushed him away and went into one of her tirades again.