Hard news - Jeffery Deaver [64]
“Daddy had a head for mechanics but he never applied himself. I’m just the opposite. You pay me and I’ll sweat for you. I like the feel of working. My muscles get all nervous when I don’t work. But I have problems with calculating. My daddy was out of work many days running. My eldest brother signed up, marines, and I was coming up on sixteen so naturally I considered doing the same but started working instead.”
The careers of Randy Boggs: warehouse picker, then carny hawker, then ride operator, then sweeper at a Piggly Wiggly then selling hot dogs on the highway near Cape Kennedy (where he saw the Apollo moon launching and thought he might like to be a pilot), then a stock boy, then fisherman, then janitor, then cook.
Then thief.
“I was to Clearwater once with Boonie, that was my brother, what I called him and a friend from the service. And we went to this drive-in and they were talking about the money they were making and how Boonie was going to buy himself a Bulltaco motorcycle, the kind with the low handlebars, and here I was—oh, heavens—I was nineteen and my brother had to pay my way into the theater? I was pretty embarrassed by that. So that night they went to a, well, you know, whorehouse—which wasn’t all that easy to find in Clearwater—and they let me keep the car for a couple hours. What I did, I was feeling so bad about being busted flat, I drove back to the drive-in, which was just closing up, and I did this distraction—set fire to some brush near the screen—and when everybody ran out to see what was going on I ran into the booth and was going to grab the money. Only what happened was there was no money. It’d been packed up and taken somewhere already, probably the night deposit at the bank. I run out, right into one of the owners. I’m a thin man now and I was a thin boy then and he saw what was happening and laid me right out.
“… You know what they got me for? I have to laugh now. They couldn’t arrest me for stealing and they couldn’t arrest me for burglary. They arrested me for arson. For burning a plant that wasn’t more’n a weed. You believe that?”
The tapes went on and on and on, endlessly.
The format of the Current Events stories made Rune’s job tough. Piper Sutton insisted that she herself be on camera for a good portion of each segment. Most of the story would be the interviews Rune was now editing. But every three minutes or so there would be a cut back to Sutton, who would continue with the story, reading off a TelePrompTer. Then, back to more tapes—the crime scene, atmosphere footage, interviews. The Bennett Frost revelation. Coordinating everything—the voice-over and the dialogue on the tape segments, and Piper Sutton’s script—was overwhelming.
(“And,” Lee Maisel had warned her, “if you put a mixed metaphor or string of sibilants into her mouth, not even God can help you.”)
But so what if it was tough? Rune was ecstatic. Here she was—three in the morning, Courtney (and a stuffed bear) dozing near her feet—editing tape into what was going to be a sensational news story on the number-one-rated prime-time newsmagazine on network television. Best of all, the story would get seen by ten million people, who unless they made a snack or john run immediately after the Fade Out would also see her name.
And, she considered for a moment, the best part of all: She’d be responsible for getting an innocent man released from prison—a man whose muscles got nervous when he couldn’t move.
Prometheus, about to be unbound.