Hard News

a poster. Silver sand, exquisite blue water crashing onto it. “What’s the Caribbean like?”
    “I love it. I was to St. Martin last year. Me and my girlfriends had us a fine time.”
    Man, that sand looked nice. He liked the idea. But then he frowned. “You know, my passport expired. Do you need a passport to go to any of those places?”
    “Some countries you do. Some all you need is a birth certificate.”
    “How would I tell?”
    “Maybe what you could do is buy a guidebook. There’s a bookstore up the street. You make a right at the corner and it’s right there.”
    “Now there’s an idea.”
    “You might want to think about Hawaii. They got beaches there that’re just as nice as the Islands.”
    “Hawaii.” Boggs nodded. That was a good thought. He could just buy a ticket and go and sit on the beach for as long as he wanted.
    “Find out what those tickets cost, wouldya?”
    As she typed information into her computer he hesitated for a moment then quickly asked, “You be interested in having dinner with me?”
    She blushed and consulted her computer terminal. Immediately he wanted to retract his words. He’d stepped over some line, something that people on the Outside— people who stay in Hyatt hotels and buy airline tickets— instinctively knew not to do.
    She looked up shyly. “The thing is, I sort of have a boyfriend.”
    “Sure, yeah.” He was as red as a schoolboy’s back in August. “I’m sorry.”
    She seemed startled by his apology. Then she smiled. “Hey, nothing’s harmed. Nobody ever died from being asked out.” As she looked back to her terminal Randy Boggs thought, This being out in the real world … it’s going to take a little time to get used to.
    SAM HEALY, SITTING ON HIS COUCH, LOOKED OVER HIS lawn as he hung up from the phone call that had delivered the terrible news. He told himself to stand up but his legs didn’t respond. He stayed where he was and watched Courtney playing with a set of plastic blocks. He took a deep breath. When Healy was a kid blocks were made of varnished hardwood and they came in a heavy corrugated cardboard box. The ones the little girl was making a castle out of were made of something like Styrofoam. They came in a big clear plastic jar.
    Castles. What else would Rune’s child build?
    Magic castles.
    Sam Healy stared at the colored squares and circles and columns, wondering not so much about the toys of his childhood as about the human capacity for violence.
    People’d think a Bomb Squad detective would have a pretty tough skin when it came to things like shootings. Hell, especially in the NYPD, the constabulary for a city with close to two thousand homicides a year. But, Healy’d be fast to tell them, it wasn’t so. One thing about bombs: You dealt with mechanics, not with people. Mostly the work was render-safe procedures or postblast investigations and by the time you got called in the victims were long gone and the next of kin notified by somebody else.
    But he wasn’t on the job now and he could no longer avoid what he had to do.
    He stood up and heard a pop in his shoulder—a familiar reminder of a black-powder pipe bomb he’d gotten a little intimate with a couple of years back. He paused, glancing at the little girl again, and walked to the TV. Some old Western was playing. Bad color, bad acting. He shut off the set.
    “Hey, that dude was about to draw on three bad guys. Sam, you’re a cop.
You
should watch this stuff. It’s like continuing education for you.”
    He sat down on the ratty green couch and took Rune’s hand.
    She said, “Oh-oh, what’s this? The-wife’s-coming-back-to-roost speech? I can deal with it, Sam.”
    He glanced into the living room to check on Courtney. After he saw she was contentedly playing he kept his eyes turned away as he said, “I got a call from the ops coordinator at the Sixth Precinct. It seems there was a shooting on the pier where your boat was docked.”
    “Shooting?”
    “A girl about your age. Shot twice. Her name was Claire Weisman.”
    “Claire came back?” Rune asked in a whisper. “Oh, my God, no. Is she dead?” Rune’s eyes were on Courtney.
    “Critical condition. St. Vincent’s.”
    “Oh, God.” Rune was crying softly. Then, her voice fading, she said, “Somebody thought it was me, didn’t they?”
    “There are no suspects.”
    She said, “You know who did it, don’t you?”
    “Boggs and the other guy, the fat one. Jack Nestor.”
    “It has to be