Jeffery Deaver

Rune had walked past the movie theater and was three blocks away when the bomb went off.

No way was it construction-site dynamite — she knew that from living for several years in urban-renewing Manhattan. The noise was way loud — a huge, painful bang like a falling boiler. The turbulent black smoke and distant screams left no doubt.

Then sirens, shouts, running crowds. She looked but couldn’t see much from where she stood.
Rune started toward it but then stopped, glanced at a watch — of the three on her wrist, it was the only one that worked. She was already late getting back to the studio — was due a half hour ago. Thinking: Hell, if I’m going to get yelled at anyway why not come back with a good story to take the sting out of it.

Yes, no?

Go for it. She walked south to see the carnage.

The blast itself wasn’t all that big. It didn’t crater the floor and the only windows it took out were the theater’s and the plate glass in the bar one address up. No, it was the fire was the nasty part. Wads of flaming upholstery had apparently arced like those tracer bullets in war movies and had ignited wallpaper and carpeting and patrons’ hair and all the recesses of the theater the owner’d probably been meaning to get up to code for ten years but just hadn’t. By the time Rune got there the flames had done their job and the Velvet Venus Theater (XXX Only, The Best Projection In Town) was no more.

Eighth Avenue was in chaos, closed off completely between Forty-second and Forty-sixth Streets. Diminutive Rune, thin and just over five feet, easily worked her way to the front of the spectators. The homeless people and hookers and three-card Monte players and kids were having a great time watching the slick choreography of the men and women from the dozen or so fire trucks on the scene. When the roof of the theater went and sparks cascaded over the street the crowd exhaled approval as if they were watching the Macy’s fireworks over the East River.

The NYFD crews were good and after twenty minutes the fires were “knocked down,” as she heard one fireman say, and the dramatic stuff was over. The theater, a bar, a deli and peep show had been destroyed.

Then the crowd’s murmuring disappeared and everyone watched in solemn quiet when the medics brought out the bodies. Or what was left of them.

Rune felt her heart slamming as the thick green bags were wheeled or carried past. Even the Emergency Medical Service guys, who she guessed were pretty used to this sort of thing, looked edgy and green at the gills. Their lips were squeezed tight and their eyes were fixed ahead of them.

She eased closer to where one of the medics was talking to a fireman. And though the young man tried to sound cool, slinging out the words with a grin, his voice was shaky. “Four dead, but two are mystery stiffs — not even enough left for a dental.”

She swallowed; nausea and an urge to cry were balanced within her for a moment.

The queasiness returned when she realized something else: Three or four tons of smoldering concrete and plaster now rested on the same sidewalk squares where she’d been strolling just minutes before. Walking and skipping like a schoolgirl, careful to miss the cracks to save her mother’s back, glancing at the movie poster and admiring the long blonde hair of the star of Lusty Cousins.

The very spot! A few minutes earlier and . . .

“What happened?” Rune asked a pock-faced young woman in a tight red T-shirt. Her voice cracked and she had to repeat the question.

“A bomb, a gas line.” The woman shrugged. “Maybe propane. I don’t know.”

Rune nodded slowly.

The cops were hostile and bored. Authoritative voices droned, “Move along, come on, everybody. Move along.”

Rune stayed put.

“Excuse me, miss.” A man’s polite voice was speaking to her. Rune turned and saw a cowboy. “Can I get by?” He’d walked out of the burnt-out theater and was heading for a cluster of officers in the middle of the street.

He was about six two. Wearing blue jeans, a work shirt and a soldier’s vest stiff with plates of armor. Boots. He had thinning hair, swept back, and a mustache. His face was reserved and somber. He wore battered canvas gloves. Rune glanced at his badge, pinned to his thick, stained belt, and stepped aside.

He ducked under the yellow police tape and walked into the street. She edged after him. He stopped at a blue-and-white station wagon stenciled with BOMB SQUAD and leaned on the hood. Rune, slipping into eavesdropping range, heard:

“What’ve we got?” a fat man in a brown suit asked Cowboy.

“Plastic, looks like. A half ki.” He looked up from under salt-and-pepper brows. “I can’t figure it. No I.R.A. targets here. The bar was Greek.” He nodded. “And the Syndicate only blows things up after hours. Anyway, their M.O. is, if you want to scare folks, they miss protection payments, you use Tovex from a construction site or maybe a concussion grenade. Something that makes a big noise. But military plastic? Sitting right next to the gas line? I don’t get it.”

“We got something here.” A patrolman came up and handed Cowboy a plastic envelope. Inside was a scorched piece of paper. “We’re going fishing for latents so if you could be careful, sir.”

Cowboy nodded and read.

Rune tried to get a glimpse of it. Saw careful handwriting. And dark stains. She wondered if they were blood.

Cowboy glanced up. “Are you someone?”

“My mother thinks so.” She tried a fast smile. He didn’t respond, studied her critically. Maybe trying to decide if she was a witness. Or the bomber. She decided not to be cute. “I just wondered what it said.”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I’m a reporter. I’m just curious what happened.”

Brown Suit offered, “Why don’t you be curious someplace else.”

Which ticked her off and she was about to tell him that as a taxpayer — which she wasn’t — she paid his salary but just then Brown Suit finished reading the note and tapped Cowboy’s arm. “What’s this Sword?”

Forgetting about Rune, Cowboy said, “Never heard of them but they want credit, they can have it till somebody better shows up.” Then he noticed something, stepped forward, away from the station wagon. Brown Suit was looking elsewhere and Rune glanced at the message on the burned paper.

The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, which fell on the earth; and a third of the earth was burnt up…
-A Warning from the Sword of Jesus

Cowboy returned a moment later.  A young priest was behind him.

“Here it is, Father.”  Cowboy handed him the plastic envelope.  The man touched his ear above his roman collar as he read, nodding, his thin lips pressed together.  Solemn, as if he were at a funeral.  Which, Rune figured, he just about was.

The priest said, “It’s from the Revelation to John.  Chapter eight, verse . . . seven, or six maybe.  I’m not—”

Cowboy asked, “What’s that about, ‘Revelation’? Like getting inspiration?”

The priest gave a polite, noncommittal laugh before he realized the cop wasn’t joking.  “What it’s about is the end of the world.  The Apocalypse.”

Which is when Brown Suit noticed Rune, looking through the crook of Cowboy’s arm.  “Hey, you, move along.”

Cowboy turned, but didn’t say anything.

“I’ve got a right to know what’s going on.  I walked by there just a minute ago.  I could’ve been killed.”

“Yeah,” said Brown Suit. “But you weren’t. So count your blessings. Look, I’m getting tired of telling you to get out of here.”

“Good. ‘Cause I’m getting tired of hearing it.”  Rune grinned.

Cowboy reined in a smile.

“Now.” Brown Suit stepped forward.

“Okay, okay.” Rune walked away.

But slowly — just to show they weren’t going to bully her too much. Her leisurely departure let her overhear something the young priest was saying to Cowboy and Brown Suit.

“I hate to tell you this but if that note has to do with the bombing it’s not such good news.”

“Why not?” Cowboy asked.

“That verse? It’s about the first angel. In the whole passage there are seven angels altogether.”

“So?” asked Brown Suit.

“I guess that means you’ve got six more to go until God wipes the slate clean.”

* * *

 

“Highly original and very entertaining.”
– Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

“The author creates a great sense of atmosphere, enhanced with vivid imagery and well-defined characters.”
– Rendezvous

“Deaver writes compellingly about New York’s sordid side…”
– Publishers Weekly

They moved on him just after dinner.

He didn’t know for sure how many. All he thought was: Please, don’t let them have a knife. He didn’t want to get cut. Swing the baseball bat, swing the pipe, drop the cinder block on his hands . . . but not a knife please.

He was walking down the corridor from the prison dining hall to the library, the gray corridor that had a smell he’d never been able to place. Sour, rotten . . .  And behind him: the footsteps growing closer.

The thin man, who’d eaten none of the fried meat and bread and green beans ladled on his tray, walked more quickly.

He was sixty feet from a guard station and none of the Department of Corrections officers at the far end of the corridor were looking his way.

Footsteps. Whispering.

Oh, Lord, the thin man thought. I can take one out maybe. I’m strong and I can move fast. But if there are two there’s no way . . . .

He glanced back.

Three men were close behind him.

Not a knife. Please . . . .

He started to run.

“Where you goin’, boy?” the Latino voice called as they broke into a trot after him.

Ascipio. It was Ascipio. And that meant he was going to die.

“Yo, Boggs, ain’ no use. Ain’ no use at all, you runnin’.”

Randy Boggs said nothing. He kept running. Foot after foot, head down. Now only forty feet from the guard station.

I can make it. I’ll be there just in time. I can sprint if I have to.

Please let them have a club or their fists.

But no knife.

No sliced flesh.

Of course word’d get out immediately in general pop how Boggs had run to the guards.

And then everybody, even the guards themselves, would wail on him every chance they got. Because if your nerve breaks there’s no hope for you Inside. It means you’re going to die and it’s just a question of how long it takes for the rest of the inmates to strip away your body from your cowardly soul.

“Shit, man,” another voice called, breathing hard from the effort of running. “Get him.”

“You got the glass?” one of them called to another.

It was a whisper but Boggs heard it. Glass. Ascipio’s friend would mean a glass knife, which was the most popular weapon in prison because you could wrap it in tape, hide it in you, pass through the metal detector and be shit out into your hand and none of the guards would ever know.

“Give it up, man. We gonna cut you one way or th’other. Give us you blood. . . .”

Boggs, thin but not in really good shape, ran like a track start but he realized that he wasn’t going to make it. The guards were in station seven — a room separating the communal facilities from the cells. The windows were an inch and a half thick and someone could stand directly in front of the window and scrap and pound with his bleeding bare hands on the glass and if the guards inside didn’t happen to look up at the slashed prisoner he’d never hear a thing and continue to enjoy his New York Post and pizza slice and coffee. He’d never know a man was bleeding to death two feet behind him.

Boggs saw the guards inside the fortress. They were concentrating on an important episode of St. Elsewhere on a small TV.

Boggs sprinted as fast as he could, calling, “Help me, help me!”

Go, go, go!

Okay, he’d turn, he’d face Ascipio and his buddies. Butt his long head into the closest one. Break his nose, try to grab the knife. Maybe the guards would notice by them.

A commercial on the TV. The guards were pointing at it and laughing. A big basketball player was saying something. Boggs raced directly toward him.

Wondering: Why were they doing this? Why? Just because he was white? Because he wasn’t a body builder? Because he hadn’t picked up a whittled broomstick along with the ten other inmates and stepped up to kill Rano the snitch?

Ten feet to the guard station . . . .

A hand grabbed his collar.

“No!” Randy Boggs cried.

And he felt himself start to tumble to the concrete floor under the tackle.

He saw: the characters on the hospital show on TV looking gravely at a body on the operating room.

He saw: the gray concrete rising up to slam him in the head.

He saw: A sparkle of the glass in the hand of a young Latino man. Ascipio whispered, “Do it.”
The young man stepped forward with the glass knife.

But then Boggs saw another motion. A shadow coming out of a deeper shadow. A huge shadow.
A hand reached down and gripped the wrist of the man holding the knife.

Snick.

The attacker screamed as his wrist turned sideways in the shadow’s huge hand. The glass fell to the concrete floor and broke.

“Bless you,” the shadow said in a slow, thick voice. “You know not what you do.” Then the voice snapped, “Now get the fuck outa here. Try this again and you be dead.”

Ascipio and the third in the trio helped the wounded attacker to his feet. They hurried down the corridor.

The huge shadow, known as Severn Washington, fifteen to twenty-five for a murder committed before he accepted Allah into his heart, helped Boggs to his feet. The thin man closed his eyes and breathed deeply, leaning against the guard station. Inside of which the DOC guards nodded and smiled as the body on the operating room on the TV screen  was miraculously revived and the previews of next week’s show came on.

* * *

“He [Deaver] writes with clarity, compassion and intelligence, and with a decidedly human and contemporary slant.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Provides an excellent feel for the TV news industry. The plot twists are truly surprising. Totally recommended.”
– The Drood Review of Mystery

“Deaver will immobilize you with his deviousness!”
– Rocky Mountain News

“Rune is a breath of fresh air.”
– Booklist

“Peerless entertainment.”
– Kirkus Reviews

“I heard this scary story about you one time,” Marty said, “and I didn’t know whether it was true or not.”

Pellam didn’t look over. He was driving the Winnebego Chieftain 43 back into town. They’d just found an old farmhouse a mile up the road and had offered the astonished owner thirteen hundred dollars to shoot two scenes on his front porch, provided he didn’t mind if a combine replaced his rusting orange Nissan in the driveway for a couple of days. For that kind of money, the farmer said, he’d eat the car if that was what they wanted.

Pellam had told him that wouldn’t be necessary.

“You used to do stunt work?” Marty asked. His voice was high and Midwest-inflected.

“Some stunts, yeah. Just for a year or so.”

“About this film you did?”

“Uh.” Pellam pulled off his black 1950s Hugh Hefner sunglasses. The autumn day had dawned bright as blue ice. A half hour ago it had turned dark and now the early afternoon seemed like a winter dusk.

“It was a Spielberg film,” Marty said.

“Never worked for Spielberg.”

Marty considered. “No? Well, I heard it was a Spielberg film. Anyway, there was this scene where the guy, the star, you know, was supposed to drive a motorcycle over this bridge and these bombs or something were blowing up behind him and he was driving like a son of a bitch, just ahead of these shells. Only then one hits under him and he goes flying through the air just as the bridge collapses…Okay? And they were supposed to rig a dummy because the stunt supervisor wouldn’t let any of his guys do it but you just got on the bike and told the second unit director to roll the cameras. And you just, like, did it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Marty looked at Pellam. He waited. He laughed. “What do you mean, ‘uh-huh’? Did you do it?”

“Yeah, I remember that one.”

Marty rolled his eyes and looked out the window at a distant speck of bird. “He remembers it…”
He looked back at Pellam. “And I heard that the thing was you didn’t get blown clear but you had to hang on to this cable while the bridge collapsed.”

“Uh-huh.”

Marty kept waiting. It was no fun telling war stories to people who should be telling them to you. “Well?”

“That’s pretty much what happened.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“Sure was.”

“Why’d you do it?”

Pellam reached down and picked up a Molson bottle wedged between his scuffed brown Nokona boots. He glanced around the red and yellow autumn countryside for New York state troopers then lifted the bottle and drained it. “I don’t know. I did crazy things then. Stupid of me. The unit director fired me.”

“But they used the footage?”

“Had to. They’d run out of bridges.”

Pellam floored the worn accelerator pedal to take a grade. The engine didn’t respond well. They heard the tapping of whatever taps in an old engine when it struggles to push a heavy camper uphill.

Marty was twenty-nine, skinny, and had a small gold hoop in his left ear. His face was round and smooth and he had eyelids connected directly to his heart; they opened wide whenever his pulse picked up. Pellam was older. He was thin too, though more sinewy than skinny, and dark complected. He had a scrawny, salt-and-pepper beard that he’d started last week and he was already tired of. The lids over his gray-green eyes never lifted very far. Both men wore denim — blue jeans and jackets. Marty wore a black T-shirt. Pellam, a blue work shirt. In clothes like these, with his pointy-toed boots, Pellam looked a lot like a cowboy and if anyone — a woman anyway — would comment on it, he’d tell her that he was related to Wild Bill Hickok. This was true though it was true in some complicated way he’d distorted so often that he couldn’t now remember exactly where the gunfighter had figured into his ancestry.

Marty said, “I’d like to do stunt work.”

“I don’t think so,” Pellam told him.

“No, it’d be fun.”

“No, it’d be painful.”

After a few minutes Pellam said, “So we got a cemetery, we got a town square, two barns and a farmhouse. We got a ton of roads. What else do we need?”

Marty flipped through a large notebook. “One big, big, big field, I’m talking sonuvabitch big, a funeral home, a Victorian house overlooking a yard big enough for a wedding, a hardware store, a mess of interiors…Goddamn, I ain’t gonna get to Manhattan for two weeks. I’m tired of cows, Pellam. I’m so damned tired of cows.”

Pellam asked, “You ever tip cows?”

“I’m from the Midwest. Everybody there tips cows.”

“I’ve never done it. I’d like to, though.”

“Pellam, you never tipped a cow?”

“Nope.”

Marty shook his head with what seemed like genuine dismay. “Man…”

It had been three days since they’d pulled off the Interstate here in Cleary, New York. The Winnebego had clocked two hundred miles, roaming through knobby pine hills and tired farms and small, simple pastel cubes of houses decorated with pickups in the driveway, cars on blocks, and stiff laundry pinned and drying on long lines.

Three days, driving through mist and fog and yellow storms of September leaves and plenty of outright rain.

Marty looked out the window. He didn’t speak for five minutes. Pellam, thinking: Silence is platinum.

Marty said, “Know what this reminds me of?”

The boy had a mind that ranged like a hungry crow; Pellam couldn’t even guess.

“I was an assistant on Echoes of War,” he continued.

This was a sixty-three-million-dollar Vietnam War movie that Pellam had no desire to scout for, now had no desire to see in the theaters, and knew he wouldn’t rent when it came to Tower Video in L.A.

Marty said, “For some reason they didn’t shoot in Asia?”

“That’s a question?”

“No. I’m telling you.”

Pellam said, “It sounded like you were asking me.”

“No. They decided not to shoot in Asia.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not important. They just didn’t.”

“Got it,” Pellam said.

“They shot it in England, in Cornwall.” Marty’s head swung sideways, the grin spreading into his big, oval face. Pellam liked enthusiasm. But enthusiasm went with people that talked a lot. You can’t have everything. “Man, did you know they have palm trees in England? I couldn’t believe it. Palm trees… Anyway, the set designer made this totally incredible Army base, mortar holes and everything. And we’d get up at five a.m. to shoot and I’d get this weird feeling. I mean, I knew I was in England, and I knew it was just a movie. But all the actors were in costume — uniforms — sleeping in foxholes and eating rations. That’s what the director wanted. I tell you, man, standing around, I felt totally… queasy.” He considered if this was the right word. He decided it was and repeated it. “Queasy. That’s what I feel like now.”

He fell silent.

Pellam had worked on several war movies but at this moment, none of those came to mind. What he was thinking of now was rosettes of broken glass on the side window of the camper, a day after they’d arrived in the area here. Winnebego makes strong windows and it had taken a real good throw to get the bottle through the glass. The note inside had read: “Goodbye.” The camper’d been subjected to all kinds of creative destruction over the years but nothing so ambiguously disturbing. Pellam noticed the vandals had had the foresight not to pitch the message through the windshield; they wanted to make sure the Winnebego would have an unobstructed view when it drove out of town.

He also noticed the missile had been a bottle, not a rock, and could as easily have held gasoline as a carefully lettered note.

That’s what John Pellam was thinking of now. Not stunts, not war movies, not ominous dawns in tropical England.

“Getting cold,” Marty said.

Pellam reached for the heater on the dash and turned it up two notches. They smelled the wet, rubbery scent of the warm air filling the cab.

On the floor Pellam’s boot crunched several pieces of shattered window glass. He kicked them aside.

Goodbye…

 

“Shallow Graves is a real pleasure — tough-minded, intelligent, and very well written. Bravo!”
– Lawrence Block, author of “Everybody Dies”