Death of a Blue Movie Star

Rune scratched his stomach. “They sniff out explosives?”
    “Labradors’ve got the best noses in the business. We’ve used computerized nitrate vapor detectors. But the dogs work faster. They can sniff out plastic, dynamite, TNT, Tovex, Semtex.”
    “Computers don’t pee, though,” one cop offered.
    “Or lick their balls in public,” another one said.
    Healy sat down at a tiny desk.
    One detective said to him, “How’d you rate, missing the abortion clinic detail?”
    “Lucky, I guess.” Healy turned to Rune. “You want some coffee?”
    “Sure.”
    Healy walked into the locker room. Three officers sat at a fiberboard table eating Chinese food. He rinsed out a china mug and poured coffee.
    Rune stood at the bulletin board, looking at color snapshots of explosions. She pointed to a photo of a red truck that looked like a huge basket. “What’s that?”
    “The Pike-La Guardia truck. We don’t use it much anymore. It was built in the forties. Got its name because it was built when a guy named Pike was CO. of the BOMB SQUAD and La Guardia was mayor. See that mesh there? That’s cable left over from the Triborough Bridge. They used to put IEDs in there and take them to the disposal grounds. If it went off the mesh stopped the shrapnel. Still a lot of flame escaped, though. Now we use a total-containment vehicle.”
    Rune said, “A TCV, right?”
    Healy nodded.
    Rune picked up a thick plastic tube about a foot long filled with a blue gelatin printed with the words DuPont. She squeezed it. Grinned. “This is kinda kinky, Sam.”
    He glanced at it. “You’re holding enough Tovex to turn a pretty good-size boulder into gravel.”
    She set it down carefully.
    “If it were live … That’s just for training. So’s everything else in here.”
    “That too?” She pointed to an artillery shell about two and a half feet long.
    “Well, it’s not live. But we picked that up a year or so ago. What happened was a woman calls 911 and says she got hit by a bullet. So Emergency Services shows up and they go into the apartment. They find her on the floor. They ask, ‘Where’s the shooter, where’s the gun?’ She says, ‘There’s no gun—just the bullet.’ She points to the shell. Then says, ‘I opened the closet door and it fell out.’ It broke her toe. Her husband collected artillery shells and—”
    A voice shouted, “Sam.”
    He stepped into the main room. A heavy, square-jawed man with trim blond hair was leaning out of the commander’s office. He glanced at Rune briefly, then looked at Healy. “Sam, ESU just got a Ten-thirty-three at a porn theater in Times Square. Somebody found a box, looked inside. Saw a timer in there and maybe a wad of something might be plastic. Seventh Avenue, near Forty-ninth. Rubin, you go with him.”
    No more bombings, he’d said? But before she could comment to him Healy and another cop, a thin man of about forty-five who looked like he belonged more in an insurance office circa 1950 than in the Bomb Squad, were racing to the locker room. They opened their lockers and pulled out battered canvas bags, then ran for the door. Healy snagged his attaché case as he disappeared into the corridor.
    “Hey …,” Rune was saying. Healy didn’t even glance back.
    Where does he get off? Rune thought, speeding into the dark green corridor. Downstairs, the men disappeared into the station house. An officer in a blue turtleneck stopped her, wouldn’t let her follow. By the time she went outside, their blue-and-white van was disappearing down Eleventh Street, the roof lights playing crack the whip. The vehicle gave a bubble of electronic siren, then sailed north on Hudson Street.
    She ran to the corner, waving for cabs that failed to materialize.

     
    Sam Healy had the procedure down. That was one talent he had: the ability to memorize. He’d look at a list or circuit schematic once or twice and that would be it—it was in the mental vault.
    Which was a good thing. Because there was a lot to remember when you were a BOMB SQUAD cop. He wondered if that had anything to do with why he’d chosen bomb detail in the first place. It was different from being a beat cop or an ESU cop. In Emergency Services you had to make fast decisions. They improvised.
    Healy preferred to plan every detail out, then work step by step. Slowly.
    The van clattered north. Hudson became Eighth Avenue and they passed Fourteenth Street.
    The procedure: Set up a frozen zone for a thousand feet