Hard News (Rune 3)

"Could've."

"There isn't a lot to go on, what you've told me."

"I understand that." He sighed. "I was just biding my time, waiting for parole. But there're people here I got on the bad side of somehow. I'm really worried they're going to move on me again."

"Move on you?"

"Kill me, you know. They tried once. I don't know why. But that's life here in prison. Don't need to be a reason."

Rune asked, "How bad do you want to get out?"

Boggs glanced at the camera. Rune stood up and looked through the viewfinder to frame him better. What she saw troubled her because she wasn't looking at animal eyes, or criminal's eyes, which would have been scary but expected; she saw gentleness and pain and--even harder to bear--a portion of him that was still a lonely, frightened young boy. He said, "I'll answer that by telling you what it's like in here. It's like your heart is tied 'round and 'round with clothesline. It's like every day is waking up the morning after a funeral. It's like you welcome fear because when you're afraid you can't think about being free. It's a sadness so bad you want to howl when you see a plane flying by going to a place you can imagine but can't ever get to, no matter how close it might be."

Randy Boggs stopped and cleared his throat. "Do what you can for me, miss. Please."

chapter 10

RUNE GAVE MOTHERHOOD HER BEST SHOT.

She really did.

Courtney was probably three-fourths toilet-trained. The remaining quarter was tough to cope with but Rune managed as best she could.

She bought healthy food for the girl.

She bathed her twice a day.

She also leapt right in to improve the little girl's wardrobe.

Claire, who had super-crucial taste in her own fashion, had bought the poor kid mostly sweats, blouses with bears or Disney cartoon characters on them and corduroy jeans (corduroy! In New York!). Rune took her straight down to SoHo, to a kids' store where Rune knew one of the salesclerks. She dropped some bucks on real clothes: A black Naugahyde miniskirt and a couple of black T-shirts. Yellow and lime-green tights. A wad of lacy tooling for her hair. Jewelry was risky--you never knew what kids would swallow--but Rune found an outrageous studded belt and black cowboy boots (which were slightly too big but she figured there was only one way the girl's feet were going to grow and why not buy something that would last more than a month). The finishing touch was a plastic leopard-skin jacket.

Rune paid the two hundred twenty-seven dollars but decided the results were worth it. She said, "All right, dude, you're looking crazy good."

"Crazy," Courtney said.

But it wasn't long before problems developed.

They'd left the store, bought some ice cream and gone window-shopping. Then Rune wondered if you could take three-year-olds dancing. There was a super late-night club just opening up down on Hudson in the old building where the famous Area had been years before, a totally historical place. She hadn't seen too many children there. None, in fact. But she wondered if you could sneak one in early, say, just after work, about six or seven. It seemed a shame to have a kid who looked like a miniature Madonna and not expose her to some real New York life.

"You want to go dancing?"

"I want to go to the zoo!" the girl said fiercely.

"Well, the zoo's closed now, honey. We can go in a day or so."

"I wanta see the animals."

"In a day or two."

"No!" Courtney started to scream and ran into Comme de Garcon, where she threw the ice cream into a rack of eight-hundred-dollar suits.

The day-care center didn't work out either.

Rune did the math and figured out that if she dropped Courtney off at eight and picked her up at seven--the hours Piper Sutton insisted that her crew work, at a minimum--and then got a night sitter twice a week, she would have one hundred and eight dollars a month left out of her paycheck.

So the little girl spent half the week at day care, half at the Network.

And when Piper Sutton called Rune one night at what was, for the rest of the world, quitting time and demanded an update on the Boggs story ("Now, Rune. Now now now!), Rune had to park the little girl with Bradford Simpson, who took up the task sportingly even though she could tell by the furtive phone call he made that he was breaking a date to help her out. It was clear that she'd soon run out of friends if she tried to conscript last-minute baby-sitters very often.