Death of a Blue Movie Star

would be a straight loan at just eight percent interest. He’d said, “Prime is twelve but since you’re a friend …”
    She’d hugged him.
    “I’d go lower but the IRS imputes income if the interest isn’t market value.”
    What
ever
…
    Then, he explained, they’d do something called a joint venture, a phrase Rune had never heard before and that started her giggling. When she’d caught her breath he’d told her that he’d underwrite the cost of finding a distributor, then they’d split the profits. She’d get eighty percent, he’d get twenty. Was that okay with her?
    “More than okay. Hey, this sounds like real business. Adult, grown-up business.”
    “I’ll go let them know.”
    Then he’d gone into the house and left her on the wide beach, dozing, thinking about Sam Healy, then about her film, then dozing again, then trying
not
to think about Sam Healy. She heard the water crash and the gulls hover overhead, squawking. Rune fell asleep to that sound.
    An hour later she woke up, with the first sting.
    Rune looked at her arm.
    Oh, brother….
    I have dark hair and dark skin and I’ve got a half inch of sunscreen on me. There’s no way I should have a third-degree burn.
    But she felt the blisters forming on her back—a crawling, chill, damp sensation.
    She slowly sat up, dizzy, and threw a blanket over her shoulders. She walked toward the house.
    Maybe she could ask Warren to rub some Solarcaine on her, but she decided that one thing would lead to another…. Not that he wasn’t cute, not that she wouldn’t love to make Sam Healy a little jealous. But with Warren’s interest in her film she figured that no sex made the most sense. Keep it professional.
    Her back pricked with an infuriating itching and she danced over the hot concrete of the patio into the house.
    Warren was inside, looking into his gym bag.
    “I hope you’ve got Solarcaine in there,” she said. “Or Bactine. I’m lobster woman.”
    “I think I’ve got something to fix you right up.”
    She looked around. “Didn’t you have two bags?”
    “Yeah,” he said matter-of-factly. “I left one at your houseboat.”
    “Oh, too bad.”
    “No, I did it on purpose.” He rummaged, squinting into the bag.
    “You did, why?”
    “To keep the BOMB SQUAD busy.”
    And he took a red windbreaker from the bag, unwrapped it carefully and set a fist-sized wad of plastic explosive and detonator on the tacky driftwood table.

 
    CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
     

    She got as far as the glass door.
    Hathaway looked soft but he was tougher than coat-hanger wire. He latched onto her wrists and wouldn’t let go, then dragged her back into one of the wood-paneled bedrooms. Just like on the pier. He was the one who’d followed, he was the one who’d attacked her!
    He slapped her hard and she spiraled down to the ground. She couldn’t get her hands up for protection. Her head hit first. She lay for a moment, stunned, the pain radiating from her eyes back into her skull. She felt a punch of nausea.
    “Warren—”
    “Gabriel,” Hathaway said, as cheerfully as if he’d just picked her up at a church social. He stepped out of the bedroom to collect the bag and the explosive. As he walked back, sipping his iced tea, he said to her, “You can call me Gabriel.”
    Rune whispered, “The Sword of Jesus … There really is a Sword of Jesus….”
    “And we’re very upset that people think we were just the creation of some psychotic murderer. We have you to thank for that. You and that film of yours.”
    “What do you want? What are you going to do to me?”
    Hathaway began taking tools and wire and small boxes out of his canvas bag. “You have to understand I don’t feel we can eliminate sin and evil. There’ve always been whores, there’s always been sin. But there have also been those who fight against it, even if they have to sacrifice their own life.” He looked at her carefully and when he spoke, the reasonable tone in his voice was somehow as terrifying as Tommy Savorne’s craziness had been. “We’re like advertising in a way. We get the message across. What people do with that message is up to them.”
    Rune said, “You weren’t a witness at all. The first bomb—you planted it.”
    “As I was leaving the theater, a man stopped me. He called me ‘brother.’ He had a kind face. I thought I could help him, I could get him to repent and accept Jesus. Even if we both died in the blast he’d be entering the Kingdom of God.