Hard News

right up.”
    Well, now she’d have plenty of time to do her documentary about old-time gangs. She wished she’d done that story in the first place.
They
wouldn’t have lied to her. Nope, Slops Connolly would no way have betrayed her. They were creeps and scum but, she bet, back then thugs were honorable.
    “Come on, honey,” Rune said, starting toward Mulberry Street. “I’ll show you where English Charley started the last big fight the Whyos were ever in. You want to see?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    Rune stopped suddenly and bent down and hugged the girl. Courtney hugged back, squeezing with just the right amount of strength that Rune needed just then. The little girl broke away and ran to the corner. A woman in a business suit, maybe a lawyer on break from court, crouched down and said to Courtney, “Aren’t you a cute one?” Rune joined them and the woman looked up and said, “She’s yours?”
    And as Rune started to say she was just looking after her Courtney said, “Uh-huh, this is my mommy.”
    •      •      •
     
    RANDY BOGGS LAUGHED OUT LOUD. THE MAN SITTING IN the seat next to him, on the Atlanta-bound Greyhound bus, glanced his way but must have been a seasoned traveler and didn’t say anything. He probably knew not to engage in conversation with people who laughed to themselves. Not on a bus, not in north Georgia.
    What Boggs was laughing at was the memory of Lynda’s astonished face as they walked out of the restaurant and he handed her fifty dollars, telling her to get on home and not go back in that bar if Tom Cruise himself was in there offering to take her to Bermuda. “Uh-huh,” she said suspiciously. “Why?”
    “Because,” Boggs answered and kissed her forehead.
    “You mean you don’t wannta?” Nodding toward the room.
    “I’d love to, ‘specially with a pretty thing like you but there’s someplace I gotta be.”
    He collected his bag and she gave him a drive to the Charlottesville bus station, which was a ways away but not so far that fifty dollars didn’t buy the trip. He thanked her and trotted off to wait at the terminal for the bus that would eventually get him to Atlanta.
    What had tipped him off had been the Men’s Colony comment—the California State Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo.
    Seemed pretty strange that Jack Nestor—knowing that Boggs was Inside and knowing intimately
why
Boggs was Inside—he had never before mentioned he’d served time himself. It’d be natural for him to tell Boggs what it was like. Maybe brag a little. Ex-cons always did that.
    But what was stranger still was that Nestor had been in the same prison, at the same time, as Juan Ascipio.
    Okay, it could have been a coincidence. But if Nestor wanted something to happen to Boggs in Harrison, Ascipio would have been a good choice to start that accident happening.
    The accident that killed Severn Washington and came close to killing Boggs.
    A lot of strange things happening. The Obispo thing. And the way the witness, Bennett Frost, had died. And then the tape of Rune’s story disappearing.
    Beneath his lazy smile and easy manner Randy Boggs was spitting mad. Here he’d done right by Nestor, never said a goddamn word at trial or the entire time he was Inside. Boggs was a stand-up guy. And look what happened: betrayed.
    The bus rocked around a turn fast and he felt less angry. Boggs smiled. It wasn’t as good as a car but it was still movement. Movement taking him away from Harrison and toward a pile of money.
    He laughed again and said to the man beside him. “I love buses, don’t you?”
    “Be all right, I guess.”
    “Be
damn
all right,” Boggs said.
    WHOA, A FIRE.
    Jack Nestor, back on Christopher Street, looked at the charred wreckage of the houseboat. He leaned against a brick building next to the highway and wondered what this meant. He thought about it some. Okay, if she’d been inside, still tied up, when it happened she’d be dead and, fuck it, he could leave. But it was also pretty likely that somebody would’ve seen the fire and come to help her before she got toasted.
    Or maybe she’d moved and some asshole just torched the place.
    A lot of questions, no answers.
    So Boggs the prick was gone. And now the girl was gone too.
    Damn. Jack Nestor lit a cigarette and leaned up against the brick, wondering what to do next.
    The answer, he decided, was to wait.
    He hadn’t slept well the night before. A lot of driving. The pictures again too. They’d wakened