Death of a Blue Movie Star

waiting to die, wondering how much pain he’d feel.
    It was a moment before he realized that nothing had happened. And a moment after that before he realized he could vaguely hear music.
    He sat up, glanced at the sandbags, behind which the squad stood immobilized with shock.
    Healy unzipped the bag and looked inside. The rocker switch had closed the circuit. What it had set off, though, wasn’t the detonator but apparently a small radio. He pulled the helmet off the bomb suit.
    “Sam, what’re you doing?”
    He ignored them.
    Yeah, it was definitely music. Some kind of easy listening. He stared at it, unable to move, feeling completely weak. More static. Then he could hear the disc jockey. “This is WJES, your home for the sweetest sounds of Christian music….”
    He looked at the explosive. Pulled off the glove and dug some out with his fingernail. Smelled it. He’d have recognized that smell anywhere—though not from his bomb disposal training. From Adam. The explosive was Play-Doh.

     
    Rune didn’t waste any time trying to break through the walls. She dropped to her knees and retrieved what she’d seen under the bed when he’d first dragged her into the room.
    A telephone.
    When Hathaway had seen her ease forward on the bed, it wasn’t because she was about to leap. It was because she’d seen an old, black rotary dial phone on the floor. With her feet she pushed it back into the shadows under the bed.
    She now pulled it out and lifted the receiver. Silence.
    No!
    It wasn’t working. Then her eyes followed the cord. Hathaway, or somebody, had ripped the wire from the wall.
    She dropped down to the floor and, with her teeth, chewed off the insulation, revealing four small wires inside: white, yellow, blue, green.
    For five minutes she stripped the four tiny wires down to their thin copper cores. Against the wall was a telephone input box with four holes in it. Rune began shoving the wires into the holes in different order. She was huddled, cramped on the floor, the receiver shoved under her chin.
    Finally, with the last possible combination, she got a dial tone.
    The timer on the bomb showed twelve minutes.
    She pressed 911.
    And what the hell good is that going to do? Did they even
have
a fire department on Fire Island? And how could she even tell them where she was?
    Shit!
    She depressed the button and dialed Healy’s home number.
    No answer. She started to slam it down, then caught herself and cautiously pressed the button again—feeling as if she had only a few dial tones left and didn’t want to waste them. This time she called the operator and told her in a breathy voice that it was an emergency and asked for the 6th Precinct in Manhattan. She was astonished. In five seconds, she was connected.
    “It’s an emergency. I need to speak to Sam Healy, Bomb Squad.”
    Static, someone near the switchboard telling a Polish joke, more static.
    “Patch it through,” Rune heard. More static. The punch line of the joke.
    Static.
    Oh, please …
    Then, Healy’s voice.
    The operator was saying, “Central to Two-five-five. I’ve got a landline patch for you. Emergency, she says. You available?”
    “I’m in the field. Who is it, what does she want?”
    “Sam!” she shouted.
    But he didn’t hear.

 
    CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
     

    “Tell him Rune,” she shouted to the dispatcher. “Hurry!”
    A moment later the condition of the line improved, though it was still filled with static.
    “Sam.” She was crying. “He’s got me in a room with a bomb. The Sword of Jesus bomber.”
    “Where are you?”
    “A house on Fire Island. Fair Harbor, I think. He’s put a bomb here.”
    Seven minutes
.
    “Where’s the guy who set it?”
    “He left. It’s that Warren Hathaway … the witness in the first bombing. He’s going back to Bay Shore on the ferry.”
    “Okay, I’ll get a copter on its way. Describe the house.” She did. Healy broke the line for a terrifyingly long twenty seconds.
    “Okay, what’ve we got?”
    “A big handful of—what is it?—C-3. There’s a timer. It’s set to go off in about six minutes.”
    “Christ, Rune, get the hell out—”
    “He’s nailed me in.”
    A pause for a moment. Was he sighing? When he spoke, his voice was soothing as a Valium. “Okay, we’re going to get through this just fine. Listen up. Okay?”
    “What do I do?”
    “Tell me about it.” Rune told him what Hathaway had said about the bomb. It seemed he whistled when she explained it, but