Death of a Blue Movie Star

by Jeffery Deaver

  Steadiest hands in the business, someone had once said about Healy. Well, he needed that skill now. Fucking rocker switches.

  He bent forward.

  "Oh, Jesus Christ," came the staticky voice in the radio.

  Healy froze, looked back.

  The ops coordinator, Rubin and the other men from the squad were gesturing into the river, waving madly. Healy looked where their attention was focused. Shit! A speedboat, doing thirty knots, was racing along, close to the shore, churning up a huge wake. The boater and his passenger--a blonde in sunglasses--saw the BOMB SQUAD crew's gesturing and waved back, smiling.

  In ten seconds the huge wake would hit the boat, jostle it and set off the rocker switch.

  "Sam, get the fuck outa there. Just run."

  But Healy was frozen, staring at the registration number of the speedboat. The last two numbers were a one and a five.

  Fifteen.

  Oh, Christ.

  "Run!"

  But he knew it would be pointless. You can't run in a bomb suit. And besides, the whole dock would vanish in the fiery hurricane of burning propane.

  The wake was twenty feet away.

  He bent, picked up the bag with both hands, and started down the gangplank.

  Ten feet from the houseboat.

  Halfway down the gangplank.

  Five feet.

  "Go, Sam!"

  Two steps and he'd be on the pier.

  But he didn't make it.

  Just as he was about to step onto the wood of the pier the wake hit the houseboat. And it hit so violently that when the boat rocked, the gangplank unhooked and fell two feet to the pier. Healy was caught off balance and pitched forward, still clutching the bomb.

  "Sam!"

  He twisted to the side, to get his body between the bag and the propane barge, thinking: I'm dead but maybe the suit'll stop the shrapnel.

  With a thud he landed on the pier. Eyes closed, waiting to die, wondering how much pain he'd feel.

  It was a moment before he realized that nothing had happened. And a moment after that before he realized he could vaguely hear music.

  He sat up, glanced at the sandbags, behind which the squad stood immobilized with shock.

  Healy unzipped the bag and looked inside. The rocker switch had closed the circuit. What it had set off, though, wasn't the detonator but apparently a small radio. He pulled the helmet off the bomb suit.

  "Sam, what're you doing?"

  He ignored them.

  Yeah, it was definitely music. Some kind of easy listening. He stared at it, unable to move, feeling completely weak. More static. Then he could hear the disc jockey. "This is WJES, your home for the sweetest sounds of Christian music...."

  He looked at the explosive. Pulled off the glove and dug some out with his fingernail. Smelled it. He'd have recognized that smell anywhere--though not from his bomb disposal training. From Adam. The explosive was Play-Doh.

  Rune didn't waste any time trying to break through the walls. She dropped to her knees and retrieved what she'd seen under the bed when he'd first dragged her into the room.

  A telephone.

  When Hathaway had seen her ease forward on the bed, it wasn't because she was about to leap. It was because she'd seen an old, black rotary dial phone on the floor. With her feet she pushed it back into the shadows under the bed.

  She now pulled it out and lifted the receiver. Silence.

  No!

  It wasn't working. Then her eyes followed the cord. Hathaway, or somebody, had ripped the wire from the wall.

  She dropped down to the floor and, with her teeth, chewed off the insulation, revealing four small wires inside: white, yellow, blue, green.

  For five minutes she stripped the four tiny wires down to their thin copper cores. Against the wall was a telephone input box with four holes in it. Rune began shoving the wires into the holes in different order. She was huddled, cramped on the floor, the receiver shoved under her chin.

  Finally, with the last possible combination, she got a dial tone.

  The timer on the bomb showed twelve minutes.

  She pressed 911.

  And what the hell good is that going to do? Did they even have a fire department on Fire Island? And how could she even tell them where she was?

  Shit!

  She depressed the button and dialed Healy's home number.

  No answer. She started to slam it down, then caught herself and cautiously pressed the button again--feeling as if she had only a few dial tones left and didn't want to waste them. This time she called the operator and told her in a breathy voice that it was an emergency and asked for the 6th Precinct in Manhattan. She was astonished. In five seconds, she was connected.

  "It's an emergency. I need to speak to Sam Healy, Bomb Squad."

  Static, someone near the switchboard telling a Polish joke, more static.

  "Patch it through," Rune heard. More static. The punch line of the joke.

  Static.

  Oh, please ...

  Then, Healy's voice.

  The operator was saying, "Central to Two-five-five. I've got a landline patch for you. Emergency, she says. You available?"

  "I'm in the field. Who is it, what does she want?"

  "Sam!" she shouted.

  But he didn't hear.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  "Tell him Rune," she shouted to the dispatcher. "Hurry!"

  A moment later the condition of the line improved, though it was still filled with static.

  "Sam." She was crying. "He's got me in a room with a bomb. The Sword of Jesus bomber."

  "Where are you?"

  "A house on Fire Island. Fair Harbor, I think. He's put a bomb here."

  Seven minutes.

  "Where's the guy who set it?"

  "He left. It's that Warren Hathaway ... the witness in the first bombing. He's going back to Bay Shore on the ferry."

  "Okay, I'll get a copter on its way. Describe the house." She did. Healy broke the line for a terrifyingly long twenty seconds.

  "Okay, what've we got?"

  "A big handful of--what is it?--C-3. There's a timer. It's set to go off in about six minutes."

  "Christ, Rune, get the hell out--"

  "He's nailed me in."

  A pause for a moment. Was he sighing? When he spoke, his voice was soothing as a Valium. "Okay, we're going to get through this just fine. Listen up. Okay?"

  "What do I do?"

  "Tell me about it." Rune told him what Hathaway had said about the bomb. It seemed he whistled when she explained it, but that may have been just static.

  Five minutes.

  "How big is the room?"

  "Maybe twenty by fifteen."

  A pause.

  "All right, here's the deal. You get far enough away and cover yourself up with mattresses or cushions, you'll probably live."

  "But he said it'll make me deaf and blind."

  There was silence.

  "Yeah," he said. "It may."

  Four minutes, twenty seconds.

  "The thing is, you try to disarm it yourself, and it goes, it'll kill you."

  "Sam, I'm going to do it. How? Tell me how."

  He was hesitating. Finally he said, "Don't pull the detonator out of the explosive. There's a pressure switch in it. You'll have to bypass the shunt and cut the battery cord. You need enough electricity to keep the galvanometer fooled into thinking the cord isn't cut."

  "I don't know what that means!"

  "Listen carefully. Look at the bomb. There'll be a little box near the battery."

  "It's gray. I see it."

  "With two metal posts on it."

  "Right."

  Healy said, "You have to run a piece of wire that's very narrow gauge--"

  "What's gauge?" She was crying.

  "Sorry ... I mean, it's got to be real thin. Run a piece from one lead of that box to the main terminal connecting the battery to the cable. See what I'm saying?"

  "Right."

/>   "Then you cut the wires to the timer."

  Three minutes, thirty.

  "Okay," she said.

  "Find a piece of wire, strip the insulation off, and wrap one strand--not all of them, just one strand--around the terminal of the gray box and then the other around the terminal on the timer. Then cut the other wires from the timer."

  "Okay, I'll do it." She stared at the plastic components. Picturing it.

  Healy said, "Remember, you can't override the rocker switch. So don't move the bomb itself."

  Through her tears she said, "They're called IEDs, Sam. Not bombs."

  "The helicopter's on its way. There'll be county police meeting the ferry in Bay Shore. And we'll send one out to Fair Harbor."

  "Oh, Sam. Should I just hide under the mattress?"

  He paused. The static rose up like a storm between them. Then he said, "'Believe in what isn't as if it were until it becomes.'"

  Two minutes.

  "I'll see you soon, Sam." Rune yanked the wires from the phone. Then, with her teeth, stripped the insulation off one of them--the white wire--and wound one strand around the two terminals, the way Healy had told her.

  Ninety seconds.

  Now cut through the battery cables. She bent to the bomb, smelled the oily scent of the explosive, just inches from her face, and took one of the black wires in her teeth. She began chewing. Tears fell on the plastic.

  It was thicker than she thought.

  Fifty seconds.

  A tooth chipped and she felt an electric jolt of pain and surprise. Her breath hissed inward.

  Forty.

  Thirty...

  The wire snapped.

  No time for the other one. Had he said to do both of them? She thought he had. Shit. She backed away from the bomb, pulled the mattress and springs off the bed and lay down on the floor in the corner the way Hathaway had told her. Blind and deaf ...

  Thirty twenty-nine twenty-eight twenty-seven...

  She prayed--to a God she hoped was a lot different from the one the Sword of Jesus claimed as theirs.

  Fourteen thirteen twelve eleven...

  Rune tucked her head against her chest.

  Warren Hathaway was proud of his precision. When not building bombs he was in fact a bookkeeper--though not a CPA--and he enjoyed the sensuality of the act of filling in the numbers on the pale green paper with a fountain pen or a fine-tipped marker--one that did not leave indentations on the sheet. He enjoyed the exactness and detail.

  He also enjoyed watching big explosions.

  So when the windows of the beach house did not disintegrate in a volley of shards and the sandy earth did not jerk beneath him from the huge jolt of the bomb he felt his stomach twist in horror. He didn't swear--the thought never would have entered his mind. What he did was pick up the hammer and walk the hundred yards back into the house.

  The trials of Job ...

  He knew he'd set the system properly. There was no doubt that he knew his equipment. The cap was buried in just the right thickness of plastic. The C-3 was in good condition. The battery was charged.

  The little whore had ruined his handiwork.

  He walked inside and then slammed the hammer down on the wooden boards barring the door. He struck them near the nails to lift their heads and then caught them in the claw. With a loud, haunted-house creak the nails began coming out.

  With the first nail: He heard the girl's voice in a panic, asking who was there.

  The second nail: She was screaming for help. How silly and desperate they were sometimes. Women. Whoring women.

  The third nail: Silence.

  He paused. Listening. He heard nothing.

  Hathaway pulled the rest out. The door opened.

  Rune stood inside the room, in front of the table, looking at him defiantly. Her hair was stuck to her face with sweat, her eyes were squinting. She drew the back of her hand across her mouth and swallowed. In her other hand was a leg wrenched from a table or chair.

  He laughed at it, then frowned, looking past her at the bomb. He studied it with professional curiosity. She'd bypassed the shunt.

  He was frowning. "You did that? How did you know--?"

  She held up the club.

  Hathaway said, "You whore. You think that's going to stop me?"

  He stepped forward toward her. He got only six inches before he tripped over the taut strands of telephone wire Rune had strung across the bottom of the doorway.

  Hathaway fell heavily. He caught himself but his wrist bone snapped with a loud crack as it struck the floor. He shouted in pain and struggled to his feet. As he did Rune brought the club down on his shoulders as she ran past him through the doorway. It hit hard and he fell forward on his bad hand with a cry.

  Hathaway was trying again to stand, supported by one knee and one foot planted on the floor, reaching into his pocket with his good hand for the box cutter. Staring at her as if she were the Devil come to earth. He started to his feet.

  Rune waited for just a moment, then flung the leg of the table past Hathaway.

  After that, the images were just a blur:

  Rune's diving fall as she threw herself to the floor against the baseboard in the living room.

  Hathaway's awkward, panicked attempt to grab the leg before it hit its intended target.

  Then--when he failed to stop it--the cascading flash and ball of flame as the leg struck the bomb and the rocker switch set off the C-3.

  Then the whole earth joined in the blur. Sand, splinters, chunks of Sheetrock, smoke, metal--all tossed in a cyclone of motion.

  Hathaway had been right about the walls. The outer one held; it was the interior walls that shattered and whistled around Rune like debris in a hurricane. The floor dropped six inches. There was no fire, though the smoke was as irritating as he'd promised. She lay curled up in a ball until her throat tightened and the coughing became too violent, then she rose to her feet--without looking into the bedroom--and staggered outside.

  Deafened, eyes streaming, she dropped to her knees and crawled slowly to the beach, coughing and spitting out the bitter chemical smoke.

  Fire Island was empty on weekdays; there was no one even to be enticed by the bang. The beach here was completely deserted.

  Rune dropped to the sand and rolled onto her back, hoping that the surf would rise closer and closer and touch her feet. She kept urging it on, and didn't know why she felt an obsession for the touch of the water. Maybe it was primal therapeutics; maybe she needed to feel the motion of something that seemed to be alive.

  At the first brush of the cold water Rune opened her eyes and scanned the horizon.

  A helicopter!

  She saw it coming in low, then another.

  Then a dozen more! All cruising directly toward her, coming in for an urgent rescue. Then she was laughing, a deep laugh she couldn't hear but which ran through her whole body, as the helicopters turned miraculously into fat seagulls that didn't pay her the least attention as they cruised down for their ungainly landings on the firm sand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Rune spent the next couple weeks by herself. That was the way she wanted it. She saw Sam Healy a few times but she thought it was best to keep things a little casual.

  And professional. There'd been some follow-up. Rune had told the police that she'd heard Hathaway on the phone not long before he'd locked her in the bedroom. He might have been talking to the others in the Sword of Jesus. The New York State Police traced the call and started an investigation of their own. Three days after Gabriel was blown to pieces three senior members of the Sword of Jesus were arrested.

  There was also the matter of Arthur Tucker. When Rune arrived back at her houseboat from Fire Island she saw that it had been broken into. Nothing was missing, she thought at first, until she noticed that the script she had lifted from Arthur Tucker's office was gone.

  She'd called him, threatened to call the police and tell them that he'd stolen a dead woman's plays. The crotchety old man h
ad told her, "Call away. It's got your fingerprints on it and I've already got a police report filed about a break-in a week ago--just after you came to interview me. And I'm not very happy that you told half the world I was a suspect in the case. That's slander."

  Their compromise was that neither would press charges and that if he made any money from the plays, he'd donate a quarter of it to the New York AIDS Coalition.

  Then something odd happened.

  Larry--the Larry who was half of L&R--had appeared at the door of her houseboat.

  "No bloody phone. What good are you?"

  "Larry, I've had my abuse for the week."

  "It's a bleedin' 'ouseboat."

  "Want a drink?"

  "Can't stay. I came by to tell you, 'e's an arse, Mr. House O' Leather, what can I tell you?"

  "I still lost you the account, Larry. You can't give me my job back."

  He snorted an Australian laugh. "Well, luv, that wasn't ever gonna 'appen. But truth is, there's this guy called me, 'e's got some ins at PBS and seems there's this series on new documentary filmmakers they're looking to do...."

  "Larry!"

  "All right, I recommended you. And they got a budget. Not much. Ten thousand per film. But you can't bring it in under that you got no business being a film maker."

  He wrote down the name. She got her arms most of the way around him and hugged him hard. "I love you."

  "You fuck it up, I don't know you. Oh, and don't tell Bob. What 'e does is 'e 'as this little doll and it's got your name on it and every night 'e sticks pins--"

  "That's a load of codswallop, Larry."

  "Rune, that's Brit, not Aussie. Work on your foreign languages some, right?"

  Five minutes after he'd left Rune was on the phone. The distributor had been pretty aloof and said, real noncommittally, to submit a proposal and they'd make their decision on funding.

  "Proposal? I've got rough footage in the can."

  "You do?" He sounded more impressed than a film person ought to. "Everybody else has these one-page treatments."

  Two days later, when she called, he told her he'd sold Epitaph for a Blue Movie Star to PBS. It was slotted for September, on a program about young film makers. A check for all her postproduction work would be sent shortly.

  Sam Healy emerged again and began spending more and more nights on the houseboat. He complained about the rocking motion for a while, though that was mostly for effect; Rune figured something inside of him felt it was better for the woman to move into his homestead, rather than the other way around.

  He saw Cheryl some, too. He told Rune about it--Honesty, goddamn honesty--but it seemed that their get-togethers were to discuss the sort of nitty-gritty details appropriate for people on the verge of divorce. Nonetheless, dear Cheryl still hadn't filed papers and once or twice when Rune stayed over at his place he took calls late at night and talked for thirty, forty minutes. She couldn't hear what he said but she sensed that it wasn't Police Central he was talking to.