Death of a Blue Movie Star

around the theater and evacuate everybody as best you can. Easy in a Long Island strip mall; impossible in densely populated Manhattan. Then you get the robot, with its gripping claws and TV-camera eyes, to stroll up to the damn thing and take a look at it. Then you pick it up in the claws …
    The van rocked to a stop in the showroom of emergency vehicles on Seventh Avenue. They jumped out of the van.
    … and wheel it out nice and easy because the cable on the robot is only fifty feet long and you can get killed as fast by chunks of robot as you can by IED shrapnel. Then you go up the ramp and into the containment vehicle….
    And pray that the damn thing goes off in the vessel so you don’t have to go inside and pick it up when you get to Rodman’s Neck.
    But also pray that if it
does
go off in the vessel it doesn’t have such a high brisance and isn’t so big that it turns the containment truck into a huge hand grenade.
    And then you just pray….
    That’s
if
you can use the robot, of course. Assuming the bomb wasn’t in some place the bulky crawler, looking like a moon-lander car, couldn’t go.
    Under a theater seat, for instance.
    Which is, of course, where the bomb turned out to be, they learned as they deployed at the scene.
    Healy looked at his partner, Jim Rubin, and nodded. “I’ll do a hand entry. Let’s get the suit.”
    “I’ll do it, you want,” Rubin said.
    And he would have. Because that was the way they all were. If Healy’d said, “Yeah, you take this one,” Rubin would’ve done it. But Healy didn’t. The game didn’t quite work that way. It was who was there first, who took the call, who said “I’ll go” before anybody else. Any of them
would
go, it came down to it. But Healy’d claimed this one. He didn’t know why but he felt it was his. You just did that sometimes. For the same reason you sometimes didn’t say “I’ll go” quite as fast as somebody else.
    Tonight Healy felt about as invincible as anybody picking up a box that could destroy the average house could possible feel.
    “Sam!” Rune called as she climbed out of the cab. He looked at her only for an instant. She glanced at his eyes and fell silent. He understood that she was looking at someone she didn’t know at all.
    He whispered to Rubin, “Keep her the hell away. Cuff her, you have to, but I don’t want her close.”
    “Sam …” He glanced at her once more. She put the camera on the ground, which was a message, he thought. Telling him she wasn’t here for the movie or because of Shelly Lowe or for any reason other than that she was worried about him. But he still turned away from her.
    As Rubin drove the robot out of the van—they’d drive it as far as they could—Healy put on the heavy green bomb suit, thick with Kevlar panels and steel plates. He put the helmet on and started the circulator pump to get air into the helmet.
    Rubin stopped just inside the theater doors and drove the robot down the aisle the supervisor had marked with yellow plastic tape. He wore a headset and a microphone on the tip of a thin armature that ended in front of his mouth. His eyes were distorted behind thick goggles. Healy walked past him, then past the robot. He said into the helmet’s mike, “How you reading me, homes?”
    “Good, Sam. Lucky you got the hat—this place fucking stinks.”
    Healy walked farther into the theater, his feet shuffling aside empty crack vials and Kleenex wads and liquor bottles.
    “Talk to me, Sam, talk to me.”
    But Healy was counting on his fingers. The manager had said the bomb was in Aisle M. Was that the fifteenth letter of the alphabet? Man, he hoped not. Fifteen wasn’t a good number for him. Cheryl had left on the fifteenth of March. Wasn’t that the ides of March? His only car crash had been a rear-ender on the Merritt Parkway—Route 15.
    J, K, L, M
… Good.
M
was the
thirteenth
letter of the alphabet. He felt unreasonably cheered at this news.
    “Okay, I see it,” he said, smelling the stale air, sweating terribly already, feeling breathless. “Cardboard box, shoe box, lid off.”
    He knelt for stability—the suit was very heavy; if you fell over you sometimes couldn’t get up by yourself. He leaned over the box. Said into the radio, “I’m looking at C-3 or C-4, maybe six ounces, timer face up. If it’s accurate, we got ten leisurely minutes. Don’t see any rocker switches.”
    Rocker switches were the problem. Little switches that set off the bomb if