Hard News

them. They came back to kill me.” Her eyes were red and miserable. “I—” Her hands closed on her mouth. “I never thought Claire’d come back.” Rune’s gaze settled on Courtney.
    Healy held her then said, “I’ll call it in to the detectives. About Boggs and Nestor. For a shooting they’ll do a citywide search.”
    “Please,” she whispered, “please, please …”
    “Claire’s mother’s on her way. She’s flying down from Boston.”
    “I’ve got to go see her.”
    “Come on, I’ll drive you there.”
    “ I’M SO SORRY,” RUNE SAID.
    The woman must’ve been in her early fifties. She didn’t know how to respond to the grief and did the only thing she could think of—put her arm around Rune’s shoulders and told her that they all had to be brave.
    Claire’s mother was heavy, wearing a concealing blue-satin dress. Her hair was a mix of pure black strands and pure white, which made it look disorganized even though it was sprayed perfectly into place. She held what Rune thought was a crushed bouquet but what turned out to be a thin white handkerchief, the kind Rune’s grandmother called a hankie.
    Rune looked at the bed. It was hard to see Claire. The lights were very dim, as if the doctors were afraid that too much brightness would give her life a chance to get away. Rune leaned forward. Claire’s left shoulder and arm were in a huge cast, and the left side of her face was a mass of bandages. There were tubes in her nose and several others led from a dressing on her neck into jars on the floor. A monitor above her head gave its alarming messages about heartbeats or pulses or breaths or who knew what. The lines were erratic. Rune wished the monitor faced the other way.
    Mrs. Weisman kept her eyes on her daughter and said, “Where’s Courtney? Claire said she was staying with you.”
    “I left her with the nurse outside. I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to see Claire like this.”
    There was the dense silence of two people who have nothing in common except grief.
    After a few minutes Rune asked, “Do you have a place to stay?”
    The woman wasn’t listening. She stared at Claire then a moment later asked Rune, “Do you have any children?”
    “Other than Courtney, no.”
    Mrs. Weisman turned her head toward Rune at this answer. “Did you tell her anything? Courtney, I mean. About what happened.”
    “I said her mommy was sick and she was going to see her grandmother. She’s okay. But she should get some sleep pretty soon.”
    Mrs. Weisman said, “I’ll keep her with me.”
    Rune hesitated. “Sure.”
    “Does she have her things with her?”
    The clothes
I
bought, she’s got. The toys
I
gave her. Rune said, “Claire didn’t leave her with much.”
    Mrs. Weisman didn’t respond.
    Rune said, “I’ve got some things to do. Could you call me if she wakes up?” She wrote Sam Healy’s name, address and phone number on the back of a restaurant receipt she’d found in her purse. “I’m staying here for a while.”
    She nodded and Rune wondered if she was hearing the words.
    “Who’d do such a thing?” Mrs. Weisman asked vacantly. “A robber? Claire didn’t look like the kind of girl who’d have a lot of money. Do you think it was like what you hear about in California? You know, where they shoot people on the highway just for the fun of it?” She shook her head as if the answer didn’t make any difference.
    “I don’t know,” Rune said. Her mother would find out soon enough what happened. No sense in long explanations now.
    But there
was
something Rune wanted to add. She wanted so badly to turn to this poor woman and tell her exactly what she was thinking right now. Which was that she didn’t give a shit about the news story anymore, she didn’t give a shit about the Lance Hopper murder. She cared about one thing, and that only: finding the two of them—Randy Boggs and his fat friend, Jack.
    She’d get into the Network somehow—Bradford would help her—and steal her tapes and notes, get all the details on where Randy’d lived over the past ten years, where he liked to go, what he hoped to do in the future. Somewhere in that material would probably be a clue as to where he was running to right now. She’d find him and Jack and make sure they
both
went to Harrison prison.
    But then, when it occurred to her that Claire might die and her mother would take Courtney back to Boston, she thought she might not turn them over to the police at