Hard News

wrist turned sideways in the shadow’s huge hand. The glass fell to the concrete floor and broke.
    “Bless you,” the shadow said in a slow, reverent voice. “You know not what you do.” Then the voice snapped, “Now get the fuck outta here. Try this again and you be dead.”
    Ascipio and the third of the trio helped the wounded attacker to his feet. They hurried down the corridor.
    The huge shadow, whose name was Severn Washington, fifteen to twenty-five for a murder committed before he had accepted Allah into his heart, helped Boggs to his feet. The thin man closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Then together they silently started to the library. Boggs, hands shaking desperately, glanced into the guard station, inside of which the guards nodded and smiled as the body on the operating table on the TV screen was miraculously revived and the previews for next week’s show came on.
    FOUR HOURS LATER RANDY BOGGS SAT ON HIS BUNK, LIS -tening to his cellmate, Wilker, James, eight years for receiving, second felony offense.
    “Hear they moved on you, man, that Ascipio, man, he one mean fucker. What he want to do that for? I can’t figure it, not like you have anything on him, man.”
    Wilker, James kept talking, like he always did, on and on and goddamn on but Randy Boggs wasn’t listening. He sat hunched over a
People
magazine on his bunk. He wasn’t reading the periodical, though. He was using it as a lap desk, on top of which was a piece of cheap, wide-lined writing paper.
    “You gotta understand me, man,” Wilker, James said. “I’m not saying anything about the Hispanic race. I mean, you know, the problem is they just don’t see things the way normal people do. I mean, like, life isn’t …”
    Boggs ignored the man’s crazy rambling and finally touched pen to paper. In the upper left-hand corner of the paper he wrote, “Harrison Men’s Correctional Facility.” He wrote the date. Then he wrote:
    Dear to who it may concern:

You have to help me. Please
.
     
    After this careful beginning Randy Boggs paused, thought for a long moment and started to write once more.

    chapter 2    
     
    RUNE WATCHED THE TAPE ONCE AND THEN A SECOND time. And then once more.
    She sat in a deserted corner of the Network’s newsroom, a huge open space, twenty feet high, three thousand square feet, divided up by movable partitions, head-high and covered with gray cloth. The on-camera sets were bright and immaculate; the rest of the walls and floors were scuffed and chipped and streaked with old dirt. To get from one side of the studio to the other, you had to dance over a million wires and around monitors and cameras and computers and desks. A huge control booth, like the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise
, looked out over the room. A dozen people stood in clusters around desks or monitors. Others carried sheets of paper and blue cardboard cups of coffee and videocassettes. Some sat at computers, typing or editing news stories.
    Everyone wore casual clothing but no one behaved casually.
    Rune was hunched over the Sony 3/4-inch tape player and small color TV that served as a monitor.
    A tinny voice came out of the small speaker.
“I told them back then just what I’m telling you now: I didn’t do it.”
    The man on the screen was a gaunt thirty-something, with high cheekbones and sideburns. His hair was slicked back and crowned with a Kewpie-doll curl above his forehead. His face was very pale. When Rune had first cued up the tape and started it running, ten minutes before, she’d thought, This dude is a total nerd.
    He wore a tight gray jumpsuit, which under other circumstances—say on West Broadway in SoHo—
might
have been chic. Except that the name of the designer on the label wasn’t Giorgio Armani or Calvin Klein but the New York State Department of Correctional Services.
    Rune paused the tape and looked at the letter once again, read the man’s unsteady handwriting. Turned back to the TV screen and heard the interviewer ask him,
“You’ll be up for parole, when?”
    “Parole? Maybe a few years. But hell…”
The thin man looked at the camera quickly, then away.
“A man’s innocent, he shouldn’t be out on parole, he should just be out.”
    Rune watched the rest of the tape, listened to him tell about how bad life in prison was, how nobody in the warden’s office or the court would listen to him, how incompetent his lawyer had been. She was surprised, though, that he didn’t sound bitter.