Death of a Blue Movie Star

them near the nails to lift their heads and then caught them in the claw. With a loud, haunted-house creak the nails began coming out.
    With the first nail: He heard the girl’s voice in a panic, asking who was there.
    The second nail: She was screaming for help. How silly and desperate they were sometimes. Women. Whoring women.
    The third nail: Silence.
    He paused. Listening. He heard nothing.
    Hathaway pulled the rest out. The door opened.
    Rune stood inside the room, in front of the table, looking at him defiantly. Her hair was stuck to her face with sweat, her eyes were squinting. She drew the back of her hand across her mouth and swallowed. In her other hand was a leg wrenched from a table or chair.
    He laughed at it, then frowned, looking past her at the bomb. He studied it with professional curiosity. She’d bypassed the shunt.
    He was frowning. “You did that? How did you know—?”
    She held up the club.
    Hathaway said, “You whore. You think that’s going to stop me?”
    He stepped forward toward her. He got only six inches before he tripped over the taut strands of telephone wire Rune had strung across the bottom of the doorway.
    Hathaway fell heavily. He caught himself but his wrist bone snapped with a loud crack as it struck the floor. He shouted in pain and struggled to his feet. As he did Rune brought the club down on his shoulders as she ran past him through the doorway. It hit hard and he fell forward on his bad hand with a cry.
    Hathaway was trying again to stand, supported by one knee and one foot planted on the floor, reaching into his pocket with his good hand for the box cutter. Staring at her as if she were the Devil come to earth. He started to his feet.

     
    Rune waited for just a moment, then flung the leg of the table past Hathaway.
    After that, the images were just a blur:
    Rune’s diving fall as she threw herself to the floor against the baseboard in the living room.
    Hathaway’s awkward, panicked attempt to grab the leg before it hit its intended target.
    Then—when he failed to stop it—the cascading flash and ball of flame as the leg struck the bomb and the rocker switch set off the C-3.
    Then the whole earth joined in the blur. Sand, splinters, chunks of Sheetrock, smoke, metal—all tossed in a cyclone of motion.
    Hathaway had been right about the walls. The outer one held; it was the interior walls that shattered and whistled around Rune like debris in a hurricane. The floor dropped six inches. There was no fire, though the smoke was as irritating as he’d promised. She lay curled up in a ball until her throat tightened and the coughing became too violent, then she rose to her feet—without looking into the bedroom—and staggered outside.
    Deafened, eyes streaming, she dropped to her knees and crawled slowly to the beach, coughing and spitting out the bitter chemical smoke.
    Fire Island was empty on weekdays; there was no one even to be enticed by the bang. The beach here was completely deserted.
    Rune dropped to the sand and rolled onto her back, hoping that the surf would rise closer and closer and touch her feet. She kept urging it on, and didn’t know why she felt an obsession for the touch of the water. Maybe it was primal therapeutics; maybe she needed to feel the motion of something that seemed to be alive.
    At the first brush of the cold water Rune opened her eyes and scanned the horizon.
    A helicopter!
    She saw it coming in low, then another.
    Then a dozen more! All cruising directly toward her, coming in for an urgent rescue. Then she was laughing, a deep laugh she couldn’t hear but which ran through her whole body, as the helicopters turned miraculously into fat seagulls that didn’t pay her the least attention as they cruised down for their ungainly landings on the firm sand.

 
    CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
     

    Rune spent the next couple weeks by herself. That was the way she wanted it. She saw Sam Healy a few times but she thought it was best to keep things a little casual.
    And professional. There’d been some follow-up. Rune had told the police that she’d heard Hathaway on the phone not long before he’d locked her in the bedroom. He might have been talking to the others in the Sword of Jesus. The New York State Police traced the call and started an investigation of their own. Three days after Gabriel was blown to pieces three senior members of the Sword of Jesus were arrested.
    There was also the matter of Arthur Tucker. When Rune arrived back at her