Hard news - Jeffery Deaver [104]
She didn’t answer.
“I coulda just left. I’m thinking of going to Hawaii after everything gets settled in court, you know. I coulda just got my money and kept going there.”
“Hawaii?” she asked as if he’d said, “Mars.”
He nodded. “Buy me a store of some kind. On the weekends I could sit on the beach and drink those drinks that look like pineapples. With umbrellas in them. You could come visit. You like them drinks?”
She didn’t answer.
“I wanta give you some money.”
Rune said, “Me? Why?”
“It was on account of me that your house got burned down. How’s ten thousand?”
“I don’t want your money.”
“Maybe fifteen?”
“No, forget it.”
“Maybe your little girl—”
“She’s not my little girl,” Rune snapped.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Boggs said, “I’m just trying to tell you I’m sorry.”
Rune said, “I wanted to help you. That was why I did the story in the first place. Everybody told me not to. Everybody told me to forget about you, that you’d killed a man and that you deserved to be in jail.”
Boggs said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d consider taking the money.”
“Give it to Courtney’s mother, Claire. She needs it more than me.”
“I’ll give her some, sure. But I’ll give you some too. How’s that?”
Rune slapped the top of the police car. She shook her head then laughed. Boggs was looking around, smiling too, though he didn’t know what was funny. She said, “Hell, Randy, no wonder you never made any money— you give it all away.”
“Haven’t held on to it too good. That much is true.”
She turned to him and said, “I need to do my story again. I’ll have to interview you. Will you talk to me? And this time give me the whole story?”
“If I do that will you forgive me?”
She said, “I really don’t know.”
“Could we go drink beer some time?”
“I don’t go out with felons.”
“I’ve done some things that’re criminal, I admit that, but I’m not sure I’m a felon exactly.”
The detective returned and said to Rune, “Need to get some statements from you both now.” He was in his politely firm civil-servant mode.
“Sure,” she answered.
He took Boggs aside first and, for the moment, Rune was alone, surrounded by a pool of dull colors on the wet street—reflections from the streetlights, from apartment windows, from the emergency cars. She felt a huge desire to get home, to go back to her houseboat and to Courtney. But, of course, the boat was gone: And the little girl was with her grandmother.
Rune looked at the scene in front of her.
The news crews—at last joined by one from the Network—were busy taping their three-minute segments on the shooting. But they were virtually the only ones left on the street. Like the explosion of the shotgun that killed Jack Nestor the incident had erupted fast and then vanished immediately, pulled into the huge gears of the city and ground up into nothing. But for TV audiences throughout the metro area the events would live on in future newscasts until they were preempted by other stories, which would in turn be replaced by still more after that.
Rune sat down on a doorstep to wait for the detective, and to watch the young reporters, holding their microphones and gazing sincerely into the eyes of their loyal viewers as they tried once again to explain the inexplicable.
chapter 34
WRESTLE WITH IT, FIGHT IT.
Standing in front of Claire’s hospital bed, Rune wore a white sleeveless T-shirt and black miniskirt. Beside her was Courtney—who was no longer New Wave preschool. No more black and Day-Glo and studs. She was in her new Laura Ashley cornflower-blue dress and lopsided hair ribbon (it had taken Rune ten minutes to get the red satin to impersonate a bow).
A sharp, sweet smell was in the air. Rune didn’t know whether it was disinfectant or medicine or the smell of illness and death. She didn’t like it; she hated hospitals.
“Where’s your mom?” Rune asked Claire.
“At her hotel,” the girl said. “She was with me all night. That’s something about mothers, huh? Abuse ‘em all you want and they keep coming back for more.”
Courtney clumsily set a paper bag on the bed. “I got this for