Hard News

child, a cute boy of about five or six. He was asking questions— where does the Hudson River go, what kind of fish are in it—and together the mother and father were making up silly answers for the boy. All three of them were laughing hard. Rune felt an urge to join in but she resisted, realizing that she was an outsider. When they had passed she walked up the gangplank and inside the houseboat. She dropped her bag by the door and stood listening, her head cocked sideways. A car horn, a helicopter, a backfire. All the sounds were distant. None of what she heard was coming from inside the houseboat, nothing except her own heartbeat and the creak of boards beneath her feet.
    She reached for the lamp but slowly lowered her hand and instead felt her way to the couch and lay down on it, staring up at the ceiling, at the psychedelic swirls of lights reflecting off the turbulent surface of the Hudson. She lay that way for a long time.
    AN HOUR LATER RUNE WAS SITTING IN AN OVERHEATED subway car as it stammered along the tracks. She did an inventory of the tools of the trade in her bag—a claw hammer, a canister of military tear gas, two screwdrivers (Phillips head and straight), masking tape and rubber gloves. Her other accessories included a large bucket, a string mop and a plastic container of Windex.
    She was thinking about the law too and wondered if the crime was less if it wasn’t breaking
and
entering. If you just entered and didn’t break.
    It was the kind of question that Sam could’ve answered real fast but of course he was the last person in the world she would ask that particular question.
    She imagined, though, that it was a distinction somebody’d thought of already and just because you didn’t jimmy any locks or crack any plate glass the punishment wasn’t going to be a hell of a lot less severe. Maybe the judge would sentence her to one year instead of three.
    Or ten instead of twenty.
    The longer term probably. It wasn’t going to help her case that it was government property she had her eyes on.
    The building was only a few doors from the subway stop. She climbed out and paused. A cop walked past, his walkie-talkie sputtering with a hiss. She pressed her face against a lamp post, which was covered with layers and layers of paint, and wondered what color it had been in earlier years. Maybe some gang members from the Gophers or Hudson Dusters had paused under this very same post a hundred years ago, scoping out a heist.
    The street was empty and she strolled casually into the old government-issue building and up to the night guard, cover story and faked credentials all prepared.
    In twenty minutes she was out, having exchanged the mop and pail for the bulky manila folder that rested in her bag.
    She paused at a phone stand and pretended to make a call while she flipped through the file. She found the address she was looking for and walked quickly back to the subway. After a ten-minute wait she got on board an old Number Four train heading toward Brooklyn.
    Rune liked the outer boroughs, Brooklyn especially. She thought of it as caught in a time warp, a place where the Dodgers were always playing and muscular boys in T-shirts sipped egg creams and flirted with tough girls who snapped gum and answered them back in sexy, lazy drawls. Big immigrant families crammed into narrow shotgun tenements argued and made up and laughed and hugged with hearts full of love and loyalty.
    The neighborhood that she now slipped into, along with the crowd exiting the subway, was quiet and residential. She paused, getting her bearings.
    She had to walk only three blocks before she found the row house. Red brick with yellow trim, two-story, a narrow moat of anemic lawn. Bursts of red covered the front of the building: Geraniums grew everywhere—they escaped from flowerpots, from terra-cotta statues in the shape of donkeys and fat Mexican peasants, from green plastic window boxes, from milk containers. They bothered her, the flowers. Someone who’d appreciate flowers like this was probably a very nice person. This meant Rune would feel pretty guilty about what she was about to do.
    Which didn’t stop her, however, from walking onto the front porch, dropping a paper bag on the concrete stoop and setting fire to it.
    She rang the doorbell and ran into the alley behind the house and listened to the voices.
    “Oh, hell … What? … Those punks again … That’s it! This time I call the cops…. Don’t call the fire