Jeffery Deaver - Hard News

"Kind of thought a hundred thousand'd be a bigger pile."

"You got it in nickels and dahms, it'd be pretty sizable then."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Y'all want an escort? Lahk a guahd or anything?"

"No, ma'am."

Boggs loaded the money in his paper bag and left. Then he wandered around downtown Atlanta for an hour. He was astonished at the changes. It was clean and landscaped. He laughed at the number of streets with "Peachtree" in them – laughed because he remembered his daddy saying most people thought that referred to peaches when in fact the name came from "pitch tree," like tar. He passed the street named Boulevard and laughed again.

This was a town where it seemed you could laugh at something like that and nobody would think you were crazy – as long as you eventually stopped laughing and went about your business. Boggs went into a luggage store and bought an expensive black-nylon backpack because he'd always wanted one, something made for long-distance carrying. He slipped the money and his change of shirt into the bag, which put him in mind of clothes.

He passed a fancy men's store but felt intimidated by the weird, headless mannequins. He walked on until he found an old-time store, where the fabrics were mostly polyester and the colors mostly brown and beige. He bought a tan off-the-rack suit and a yellow shirt, two pairs of black-and-red argyle socks and a striped tie. He though this might be too formal for a lot of places so he also bought a pair of double-knit brown slacks and two blue short-sleeve sport shirts. He thought about wearing the new clothes and having the clerk bag his jeans and work shirt. But they'd think that was odd and they might remember him.

Which probably wouldn't matter at all. So-what if they remembered him? He hadn't done anything illegal here. And so-what if they thought he was odd? If he'd been a rich Buckhead businessman who'd decided on a whim to buy some clothes and wear them home nobody'd think twice.

But he wasn't a businessman. He was a former convict. Who wasn't supposed to leave New York. And so he paid fast and left.

He walked into a Hyatt and strolled past the fountains. Boggs had always loved hotels. They were places of adventure, where nothing was permanent, where you could always leave and go elsewhere if you weren't happy. He liked the meeting rooms, where every day there was a new group of people, learning things for their jobs or maybe learning a new skill, like real estate investing or how to become Mary Kay pink-Buick saleswomen.

Every guest in a hotel stayed there because they were traveling.

And a traveling person, Randy Boggs knew, was a happy person.

He went into the washroom on one of the banquet room levels and, in a spotless stall, changed into his suit. He realized then that he was still wearing his beat-up loafers with the 1943 steel penny in the slit on the top. That afternoon he'd get some new shoes. Something fancy. Maybe alligator skin or snakeskin. He looked at himself in the mirror and decided he needed more color; he was pretty pale. And he didn't like his hair – very few men wore it slicked back the way he did nowadays. They wore it bushier and drier. So, after lunch: a haircut too.

He walked out of the John and into the coffee shop. He was seated and the waitress brought him an iced tea without his saying a word. He'd forgotten about this Southern custom. He ordered his second steak since he'd been Outside – a sandwich on garlic bread – and this one, along with the Michelob that went with it, was much better than the first. Boggs considered this his first real meal of freedom.

By three he'd bought new shoes and a new hairstyle and was thinking of taking the MARTA train out to the airport. But he liked the hotel so much he decided to stay the night.

He checked in, and asked for a room close to the ground.

"Yessir. Not a problem, sir."

He tried out the room and the bed and felt comforted by the closeness of the walls. He realized only then that he was uncomfortable in the spaciousness of Atlanta. With their tall, dark canyons of buildings, the streets of New York had made him feel less vulnerable. In Atlanta, he felt exposed. He took a nap in the darkened room and then went out for dinner. He saw an airline ticket office and went inside.

He walked up to the United counter. He asked the pretty ticket agent what was nice.

"Nice?"

"A nice place to go."

"Uh-"

"Outside of the country."

"Paris'd be beautiful. April in Paris, you know."

Randy Boggs shook his head. "Don't speak the language. Might be a problem."

"Interested in a vacation? We have a vacation service. Lots of good packages."

"Actually I was thinking 'bout moving." He saw a poster. Silver sand, exquisite blue water crashing onto it. "What's the Caribbean like?"

"I love it. I was to St Martin last year. Me and my girlfriends had us a fine time."

Man, that sand looked nice. He liked the idea. But then he frowned. "You know, my passport expired. Do you need a passport to go to any of those places?"

"Some countries you do. Some all you need is a birth certificate."

"How would I tell?"

"Maybe what you could do is buy a guidebook. There's a bookstore up the street. You make a right at the corner and it's right there."

"Now there's an idea."

"You might want to think about Hawaii. They got beaches there that've just as nice as the Islands."

"Hawaii." Boggs nodded. That was a good thought. He could just buy a ticket and go and sit on the beach for as long as he wanted.

"Find out what those tickets cost, wouldya?"

As she typed information into her computer he hesitated for a moment then quickly asked, "You be interested in having dinner with me?"

She blushed and consulted her computer terminal. Immediately he wanted to retract his words. He'd stepped over some line, something that people on the Outside – people who stay in Hyatt hotels

and buy airline tickets – instinctively knew not to do.

She looked up shyly. "The thing is, I sort of have a boyfriend."

"Sure, yeah." He was as red as a schoolboy's back in August. "I'm sorry."

She seemed started at his apology. Then she smiled. "Hey, nothing's harmed. Nobody ever died from being asked out." As she looked back to her terminal Randy Boggs thought, This being out in the real world… it's going to take a little time to get used to.

Sam Healy, sitting on his couch, looked over his lawn as he hung up from the phone call that had delivered the terrible news and told himself to stand up but his legs didn't respond. He stayed where he was and watched Courtney playing with a set of plastic blocks. He took a deep breath. When Healy was a kid blocks were made of varnished hardwood and they came in a heavy corrugated cardboard box. The ones the little girl was making a castle out of were made of something like Styrofoam. They came in a big clear plastic jar.

Castles. What else would Rune's child build?

Magic castles.

Sam Healy stared at the colored squares and circles and columns, wondering not so much about the toys of his childhood as about the human capacity for violence.

People'd think a Bomb Squad detective would have a pretty tough skin when it came to things like shootings. Hell, especially in the NYPD, the constabulary for a city with close to two thousand homicides a year. But, Healy'd be fast to tell them, it wasn't so. One thing about bombs: You dealt with mechanics, not with people. Mostly the work was render-safe procedures or postblast investigations and by the time you got called in the victims were long gone and the next of kin notified by somebody else.

But he wasn't on the job now and he could no longer avoid what he had to do.

He stood up and heard a pop in his shoulder – a familiar reminder of a black-powder pipe bomb he'd gotten a little intimate with a couple of years back. He paused, glancing at the little girl again, and walked to the TV. Some old Western was playing. Bad color, bad acting. He shut off the set.