Hard News (Rune 3)

Rune nodded.

"Magazine," Maisel continued, "as in pictures. I'll want lots of visuals--tape of the original crime scene, old footage, new interviews."

Rune sat forward. "Oh, yeah, and how about claustrophobic prison scenes? You know, small green rooms and bars? Maybe the rooms where they hose down prisoners? Before-and-after pictures of Boggs--to see how thin and pale he's gotten."

"Good. I like that." Maisel looked at a slip of paper. "Piper said you're with the local station. I'll have you assigned to me."

"You mean I'll be on staff? Of Current Events?" Her pulse picked up exponentially.

"Temporarily."

"That's fantastic."

"Maybe. And maybe not," Maisel said. "Let's see how you feel about it after you've interviewed a hundred people and been up all night--"

"I stay up late all the time."

"Editing tape?"

Rune conceded, "Dancing usually."

Maisel said, "Dancing." He seemed amused. He said, "Okay, here's the situation. Normally we assign a staff producer but, for some reason, Piper wants you to work directly with me. Nobody else. I don't have anybody to spare for camera work so you're on your own there. But you know how the hardware works--"

"I'm saving up to buy my own Betacam."

"Wonderful," he said with a bored sigh, then selected a pipe and took a leather pouch of tobacco from his desk.

A secretary's spun-haired head appeared. She said that Maisel's eleven o'clock appointment had arrived. His phone started ringing. His attention was elsewhere now. "One thing," he said to Rune.

"What?"

"I'll support you a hundred percent if you stick to the rules, wherever the story takes you. But you fuck with the facts, you try to create a story when there isn't one there, you speculate, you lie to me, Piper or the audience, and I'll cut you loose in a second and you'll never work in journalism in this city again. Got that?"

"Yes sir."

"So. Get to work."

Rune blinked. "That's it? I thought you were going to, like, tell me what to do or something."

As he turned to the phone Maisel said abruptly, "Okay, I'll tell you what to do: You think there's a story out there? Well, go get it."

"THIS AIN' YOU."

"Sure it is. Only what I did with my hair was I used henna and this kind of purple stuff then I'd use mousse to get it spiky...."

The security guard at the New York State Department of Correctional Services' Manhattan office looked at Rune's laminated press pass from the Network, dangling a chrome chain tail. It showed a picture of her with a wood-peckery, glossy hairdo and wearing round, tinted John Lennon glasses.

"This ain' you."

"No, really." She dug the glasses out of her purse and put them on then grabbed her hair and pulled it straight up. "See?"

The guard looked back and forth for a moment from the ID to the person, then nodded and handed the pass back to her. "You want my opinion, keep that stuff outta yo hair. That ain' healthy for nobody"

Rune put the chain necklace over her head. She walked into the main office, looking at the bulletin boards, the government-issue desks, the battered water fountains. It seemed like

a place where people in charge of prisons should work: claustrophobic, colorless, quiet.

She thought about poor Randy Boggs, serving three years in his tiny cell.