Hard news - Jeffery Deaver [63]
“But that could take months. He’s got to get out now. His life’s in danger.”
“Look, I’ve got to walk back to that hellhole in twenty minutes and stand next to a man who—it is alleged—machine-gunned three rival gang members while he told Po-lack jokes to one of his mistresses. I have to stand there and listen to the judge explain to him that he’s going to spend at least fifteen years in a ten-by-twenty cell. When he came to me he said, ‘Fred, I hear good things ‘boutchu. You get me off. You do that? You get me off.’”
He laughed and slapped his chest. “Hey, I didn’t get him off. He’s not happy and he and his friends are killers. What I’m saying is, Boggs’s in danger, I’m in danger. Think about it. You’re in danger too. You’re the one saying the cops, the prosecutor and your own Network’re a bunch of dickheads. Life is dangerous. What can I say?”
Megler looked at his watch. “Time to do my bit to beautify America and get some more garbage off the street.”
“I’ve got an offer,” Rune said.
The lawyer looked over his shoulder. “Make it fast. You don’t keep drug lords waiting.”
She said, “You know how many people watch Current Events?”
“No and I don’t know the average annual rainfall in the Amazon either. Do I care?” He started up the stairs.
“Depends on whether or not you want ten million people to see your name and face and hear what kind of incredible work you do.”
Fred Megler stopped.
Rune repeated, “Ten million.”
Megler glanced at the courthouse door. He muttered something to himself and walked back down the steps.
ME, OKAY. I WAS BORN IN ATLANTA, AND WE LIVED THERE for ten years before our daddy decided he was going to the land of greater opportunity which was the way he put it, and I can still remember him saying that….”
From inside a thirteen-inch Japanese television monitor, the color unbalanced, too heavy in red, Randy Boggs was telling his life story.
“Greater opportunity. I was scared because I thought we were going to die—because I got ‘land of greater opportunity’ confused with ‘Promised Land,’ which I remembered from Day of the Ascension Baptist Church meant heaven. At the time I was close to eleven and religious. Okay, I got myself into some pretty fair scrapes at school. Somebody, some older kid’d cuss, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and I’d get madder ‘n a damp cat and make him say he was sorry and what happened was I got the hell beat out of me more times’n I can recall or care to.”
Editing videotape was a hundred times easier than film. It was an electronic, not mechanical, process and Rune thought that this represented some incredible advancement in civilization—going from things that you could see how they worked to things that you couldn’t see what made them tick. She liked this because it was similar to magic, which she believed in, the only difference being that with magic you didn’t need batteries. The ease of editing, though, didn’t solve her problem: that she had so much good tape. Thousands and thousands of feet. This particular footage was from the first time she’d interviewed Boggs and it was all so pithy that she had no idea what to cut.
“… Anyway, it wasn’t heaven we ended up in but Miami and some opportunity that turned out to be … Man, that was just like Daddy. This was right after Batista and the place was lousy with Cubans. For years I didn’t like, you know, Spanish people. But that was stupid ‘cause a few years ago I went down to Central America—the only time I was ever out of the country—and I loved it. Anyway I was talking about before, when I was a kid, and I saw these wealthy Cubans who were no longer wealthy, and that’s the saddest kind of man there is. You can see that loss in his walk, and