Maisel called over the loudspeaker, "You got a ten-second countdown and a five-second cheat...."
Sutton, in full makeup, under the hot lights, gave him a fast nod and sat down in the black leather chair behind the desk bearing the Current Events logo. A technician clipped the lavaliere mike onto her lapel and inserted the small earphone into her left ear, the one hidden under the flop of hair (where it was less visible and no one would absently think she was wearing a hearing aid).
Maisel called, "All right, this is it."
She gave another nod and fixed her eyes on the TelePrompTer that a floor producer pointed at.
In the control booth Lee Maisel shut off the loud speaker and began talking into the microphone that would carry his words to Sutton's and the rest of the crew's earphones. He glanced at the big clock on the control room wall and began counting down. "Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one ... Graphics up now ... Theme running...."
Exactly four seconds later, he said, "Graphics dissolve, camera one fade in ... Theme down ... Okay, Piper, you're ... on."
chapter 22
PIPER SUTTON'S EYES LOCKED DIRECTLY INTO THOSE OF ten million people. She gave a sincere smile and said in the low comforting voice that so many people had come to trust more than that of their own spouses, parents, children and friends, "Good evening. Welcome to Current Events for Tuesday, April twentieth. I'm Piper Sutton...."
The program began.
Exactly fifty-six minutes later, the credits rolling at a breakneck pace, viewers around the country stood or stretched, arguing about some of the stories or critiquing Piper Sutton's fashion selection of the week or wondering which sitcom to turn to now, all unaware that they'd just seen TV history.
Morrie Weinberg oversaw the passing of the scepter back to the computer and the fifty-million-dollar system began sending the spurious art of television advertising into American households.
As soon as the studio mikes were shut off, the newsroom applauded. Sutton was far too diplomatic to ignore it and she gave a brief smile and offered a bow--not a curtsy--to her audience.
Maisel left the booth and walked straight up to her, hugging her and kissing her on the cheek.
Both Dan Semple and Jim Eustice had been watching from the control booth. They now joined her. Eustice shook her hand formally and complimented her then left with Maisel. Semple kissed Sutton quickly and the two of them walked into the corridor.
Not a single one of them glanced at Rune, who sat in her desk chair and stared at the monitor where her program would have run.
THE NEXT MORNING, COURTNEY WOKE HER UP BY CLIMBing into bed.
"Can we go to the zoo?"
Rune had collected the girl just after the program was over the night before. They'd gone home, had tuna sandwiches for dinner and Raisin Bran for dessert. They both went to bed at ten.
Rune rolled over and sat up. "The what?"
"The zoo."
"First, coffee, then we'll think about the zoo."
"I want some juice. Coffee's icky."
Rune was feeling better now that she'd gotten some sleep. The horror of last night had faded. True, the tapes had been stolen but there were some upsides to what'd happened. For one thing, it was clear proof that somebody else had killed Hopper. Randy obviously hadn't stolen the tapes; the real killer must have. Also, there was now another dimension to the story: Somebody's breaking into a major television network studio and stealing a news program--that was a story in itself.
Anyway, it turned out that the damage wasn't as bad as she'd thought. All that was missing was the master tape and the dupes and the tape of Bennett Frost. Bradford, bless his heart, had managed to find copies of almost everything else. The program could be remixed from that material although she'd have to retape Bennett Frost.
What worried her most was that Randy was still in danger. But then she wondered if maybe the story didn't have to run to get his release process started. True, the impact wouldn't be so neat--her story actually getting him released. But what had her goal been anyway? To get him out.
No, Current Events could easily redo the story after he was released. That might be a nice touch. She'd add footage of him wandering around New York, a free man. Maybe reuniting with his brother or sisters.
In the galley, Rune poured cranberry juice for Courtney and made her some instant oatmeal.
"I want to go to the 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.
r /> 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 Hispanic brothers in the area beside the library where they'd just dragged Washington's body. "... we move on Boggs, put the bar in his hand and knife in the nigger's. Looks like the nigger wanted to fuck Boggs and Boggs moved on him, and then the nigger did Boggs."
"I know, man," the second man said. "Hey, I'm not saying nothing."
"You don't look happy, man, but it had to be that way."
"Yeah. It's just, man, they know it's us."
"Fuck," Ascipio spat out. "What they know ain't what they can prove."
"After the first time, man. They know it's us. He coulda talked."
"Motherfucker didn't talk. He coulda said who it was did him. He didn't say nothing." Ascipio laughed.
"Yeah."
A third man loped back to them. "Boggs--he's in there by hisself."
Ascipio laughed again.
RANDY BOGGS LIKED THE LIBRARY.
Reading was one of those things you don't think anything of until you actually did it. When he was Outside there were some things he'd do for the peace of it. Like sitting with a quart of beer for the evening, listening to cicadas and owls and the surf of leaves and the click of branches. That was something he could do practically forever. Which seemed like doing nothing but was actually one of the most important ways a man could spend time.
That was how he now looked at reading.
Most of the books here were pretty bad. Somebody-- a school, he guessed--had donated a lot of textbooks. Sociology and psychology and statistics and economics. Boring as dry toast. If that was what people learned in college no wonder nobody seemed to have any smarts.
And some of the novels were a bit much. The older ones--and the library here seemed to have mostly 1920s and '30s books--were pretty dense. Man, he couldn't make heads or tails out of them. He had to slug his way through, just like the way he'd clean a floor: scrape, then sweep, then mop, then rinse. Inch by inch. Then he found some newer ones. Catch-22, which he thought was really okay. He grinned for five minutes straight after finishing that one. Then somebody mentioned Kurt Vonnegut and although there were none of his books in the prison library a guard he'd become friendly with gave him a copy of Cat's Cradle and a couple others as well. Whenever he saw the guard he'd wink and say, "So it goes." Boggs loved Paul Theroux's travel writing. He also tried John Cheever. He didn't like the short stories but the novel about prison really struck home. Sure, it was about prison but it was about something more than prison. That seemed to be the sign of a good book. To be about something but about something more too, even if you didn't know exactly what.
The book that girl reporter had given him wasn't so good, he'd decided. The writing was old-fashioned and he had to read some sentences three, four times in order to figure out what was going on. But he kept at it and would pull it out occasionally and read some more. He wanted to finish it but the reason was so he could talk about it with Rune.
That got him thinking about that girl again and he wondered why her program hadn't run on Tuesday. Rune hadn't called to say anything about it. But then he wasn't sure what day she'd said. Maybe she'd meant a week from Tuesday. She'd probably said "next" Tuesday, instead of "this" Tuesday; Boggs always got confused with "next" and "this."
Damn, that girl was something else. Here, he'd spent months and months trying to figure out how to get out of prison, thinking of escaping, thinking of getting sick, thinking of appealing, and then here she comes and does it for him and it doesn't cost him anything in grief or money.
He--
And that was when he heard the noise and felt the first hum of fear.
The prison itself was old but the library was a newer addition, away from the cell blocks. It looked and smelled like a suburban school. There was only one door in and out. He looked around. The library was completely deserted. And he understood that the Word had gone around. No other prisoners, no guards. No clerk behind the desk. He'd been reading away and hadn't noticed everybody else leaving.
Oh, hell ... Boggs heard the slow footsteps of several men coming up the corridor toward that one door.
He knew Severn Washington was outside and he knew too that the big black man was as loyal as a friend could be in prison.
But that was a big qualifier. In prison.
Inside, anybody can be bought.
And, when it comes right down to it, anybody can be killed.
Boggs still had no idea why Ascipio wanted to move on him. But it was clear he was marked. No doubt in his mind. And right now, hearing footsteps come closer to the door, he knew--not a premonition or anything like that-- he knew something was going down.
He stood up instinctively. The possibilities for weapons were: a book or a chair.
Well, now, neither of them's much help at all.
Oh, he didn't want the knife again. That terrible feeling of the glass blade. Terrible ...
He looked at the chair. He couldn't pull it apart. And when he tried to lift it, a searing pain from the first knifing swept through his back and side.
He tried again and managed to get the chair off the ground, holding it in both hands.
Then part of his mind said, Why bother?
They'd burst in, they'd circle around him, they'd take him. He'd die. What could he do? Swing a chair at them? Knock one of them off balance while the others easily stepped behind him?
So Randall Boggs, failed son of a failed father, simply sat down in the chair, in front of a fiberboard table in a shoddy prison library, and began thinking for some reason, suddenly and obsessively, about Atlanta and the Sunday dinner menu of his childhood.
From his pocket he took out the book the reporter girl had given him and put his hands on it as if it were a Bible then he thought that was funny because probably to the old-time people, the old Greeks or Romans, or whatever, this myth book probably was a bible.
Prometheus got freed.
But it didn't seem like this was going to be a replay of that story. Not here, not now.
The footsteps stopped and he heard mumbled voices.
Randy Boggs swallowed and tried to remember a prayer. He couldn't so he just swallowed again and tried not to think about the pain.
The door swung open.
"Hey, Boggs."
He blinked, staring.
"Boggs, come on. Haul ass."
He stood up and walked toward the guard. He opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out, which was just as well because he didn't know what to say anyway.
"Let's move it along, Boggs."
"What's up?"
The guard had drowsy eyes and a voice to match. "The warden wants to see you. Hustle it."
*
"YOU GOT YOURSELF A PRETTY LITTLE GIRL," FRED MEGler said to Randy Boggs.
The lawyer was trooping around the office. He couldn't sit still and was on some kind of energy trip.
Randy Boggs was sitting forward in a chair in Megler's office, his hands pressed tightly together as if they'd been manacled. He wore blue jeans and a blue denim work shirt, clothing he'd worn when he'd entered the prison three years before. Rune, sitting nearby, smelled mothballs.
"Little girl, yessir." Boggs was nodding a lot, agreeing w
ith what everybody said. But at the little girl part he looked questioningly at Rune, who launched Courtney toward him. Boggs's hands reached out and she gave him a shy hug.
"Daddy," she said and looked at Rune to see if she'd gotten the line right. Rune nodded at her, smiling, then said to Boggs, "Mr. Megler didn't know that you had a little girl. That was one of the reasons he was so nice to help you even though the program hasn't run yet."
"Yeah," Boggs said, squinting to see if that helped him understand things any better. It didn't seem to. "Sure appreciate it."
Megler paced. His polyester tie with the Bic repair job flopped up and down on the baggy shirt where his belly would have been if he weighed forty pounds more. His hair jutted out behind his thin skull as if he were facing into a gale. He said, "So, here's the deal: The young lady here found some pretty good evidence that would've gotten you out but it seems some asshole ..." He looked at Courtney but she was playing with daddy's shoelaces and missed the word. "... some person got into the studio and stole it. That was strike one. Then--"
"Oh, you should've seen it!" Rune interrupted. "It was a really great story, Randy. It would've gotten you out in a minute. I did the fades just perfect. The sound was mixed like a symphony. And I had a really, really super shot of your mother--"
"Mom? You did?" He grinned. "What kind of stuff'd she say?"
"Didn't make a lot of sense, I have to tell you. But she looked real motherish."
"Yeah, that's one thing she does good."
Megler said, "You guys mind?" Courtney pointed her tiny index finger at him like a pistol and fired. It was a game she'd decided they should play. He smiled grudgingly at her and shot back. She clutched her chest and fell to the floor. Megler seemed to hope she'd play dead for a long time.
Rune preempted the lawyer. "You know who did it? You know who the killer was?"
"Uhm. If I knew that ..." Boggs shrugged.
"It was the guy who picked you up who did it. Jimmy."
Boggs was shaking his head. "I don't know about that."
"Wait, wait, wait," Rune's legs bounced in the chair. "I'll tell you why I know in a minute. But, see, everything got stolen by Jimmy--he somehow found out about the story. I kind of told a reporter about it and there was this newspaper story so I think he read it and came to town to stop the program...."