Hard News

zoo.”
    “Okay, honey, we’ll try. But there’s something I have to do first. We’re going to go visit somebody. A man.”
    “Who is he? Is he a nice man?”
    “Not really,” Rune said and looked up Fred Megler’s address in her book.
    “ POKER,” MEGLER SAID. “I THOUGHT THERE WAS THAT show running last night. What happened? I missed poker to stay home. I really hate to miss poker.” He lifted up a series of soda cans, looking for one that was full.
    “It got stolen.”
    “Stolen? Somebody stole a TV show?”
    “The tape. It got lifted.
    “No shit?” Then he winced and glanced at Courtney.
    “Shit,” the little girl said.
    Rune said, “I’m going to do the story over again. But I was thinking maybe you could start the—the what do you call it? To get Randy out?”
    “The motion papers.”
    “Right. I thought you could get Mr. Frost to go into court and …” She paused.
    Megler’s face was blank for a moment. “You didn’t hear?”
    “Hear what?”
    “The accident?” His voice, thin as his body, rose, sounding as if everybody in the city were supposed to know.
    Oh, no. Rune closed her eyes. “What happened?”
    “Frost slipped in the bathtub. He drowned.”
    “What? Oh, God … When did it happen?”
    “A couple days ago.” Megler found a nearly full can of Diet Pepsi. His face brightened at the discovery. “Sure is a good thing you made that tape of him. Otherwise we’d be up …” He glanced at Courtney. “… you know which creek without a paddle.”

    chapter 23    
     
    ALLAH TELLS US :
    Those who do good will find the best reward in heaven, and more. Neither dust nor ignominy touch their faces. Such are the rightful owners of the Garden, and they will abide therein
.
    Late Thursday morning, Severn Washington was waiting for Randy Boggs to come out of the library. He sat on a concrete step and read the Koran. He frequently did this. Like praying five times a day and ritual washing and forsaking liquor and pork, reading the holy book gave him great personal satisfaction. He kept it with him at all times.
    The typeface of the copy he owned was dense. Under the repeated touch of his huge, nubby fingers the delicate onionskin paper of the small volume had become even more translucent than when it was new. He liked that. He had an image of Allah reaching down and making the book more and more invisible every time Washington read it. Eventually it would become transparent, would become just a spirit—vanished and gone to heaven.
    And then Washington would follow and his sins—all of them (the liquor store shooting in particular)—would be forgiven; his new life would begin.
    Washington didn’t want to go too fast, however. There were certain aspects of his present life that he’d come to enjoy. Even here, in Harrison. Prison life wasn’t much different from that in his prior residence. Instead of a brick project, he had a stone cell block to live in (a building that wasn’t graffitied and didn’t smell of shit). Instead of his common-law wife’s bland macaroni and chicken and potatoes, he had the Department of Corrections’s bland macaroni and hamburger and potatoes. Instead of hanging out on the street and doing occasional construction work, he hung out in the yard and worked in the machine shop. Instead of getting dissed and threatened by dealers and gangs, who had MAC-10s, he got dissed and theatened by the Aryan Brotherhood, who had clubs and shivs.
    On the whole, it was
better
inside. Maybe you didn’t get paychecks but you didn’t
need
paychecks like when you were doing straight time.
    He had friends, like Randy Boggs.
    He had his Koran.
    No, couldn’t complain. He looked down at his holy book once more.
    …
If Allah afflict thee with some hurt, there is none who can remove it save Him; if He desireth good for thee, there is none who can repel His bounty. He—
    The sentiment in that passage was the last thought Severn Washington ever had.
    And the last sound he ever heard was the hiss of the steel barbell pole that swung into the back of his head.
    He didn’t even live long enough to hear the delicate flutter of his Koran as it pitched from his convulsing fingers and lay open on dirt, the book which it turned out wasn’t going to precede Washington into heaven after all.
    THE CONVERSATION WAS HUSHED.
    “Whatever you thinking, man, fuck it,” said Juan Ascipio. “We had to do the nigger. I told you …” He was talking rapidly to one of his