Death of a Blue Movie Star (Rune 2)

Another cut, shorter. He looked at it carefully. He'd made a cross.

"They like this," he explained. "The customers. They like little details like this."

He lifted the knife to her throat.

"I want to make love to you. I want to make love to--"

The first shot was low and wide. It took out a lamp.

Tommy was spinning, looking around, confused panic in his eyes.

The second was closer. It snapped past his head, like a bee, and vanished through the window, somewhere into the dark plain of the Hudson.

The third and fourth caught him in the shoulder and head, and he just dropped, collapsing, slumping from the waist, like a huge bag of grain dumped off a truck.

Sam Healy, breathing hard, his service Smith & Wesson still pointed at the man's head, walked up slowly. His gun hand was shaking. His face was pale.

"Oh, Sam," Rune said, sobbing. "Sam."

"You all right?"

Tommy had fallen against Rune, his head resting on her foot. She was trying to pull away. She said, panicky, through her tears, "Get him away! Get him off me. Please, get him off!"

Healy kicked him over, made sure he was dead, then began undoing the bell wire. "God, I'm a lousy shot." He was trying to joke but she could hear the quaver in his voice.

When Rune was free, she fell against his chest.

He kept repeating, "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay."

"He was going to kill me. He was going to tape it. What he did to Nicole, he was going to do that to me."

Healy was speaking into a Motorola walkie-talkie. "Two-five-five to Central."

"Go ahead, Two-five-five."

"I have a DCDS on houseboat in the Hudson River at Christopher. Send Homicide, an EMS bus, and a tour doctor from the ME's office."

"Roger, Two-five-five. Just the DCDS? You have injuries too?"

Healy turned to Rune, and asked, "You all right? You need a medic?"

But she was staring at Tommy's body and didn't hear a word he said.

It was very domestic.

That was the eerie part.

Rune had wakened at seven-thirty. She'd been having a nightmare but it wasn't about Tommy or Shelly. Just some kind of forgetting-to-study nightmare. She had those a lot. But she relaxed at once, seeing Sam asleep next to her. She'd watched him breathing slowly, the slight motion of his chest, then climbed out of bed and walked into the house.

Pure burbs, pure domestic.

She made coffee and toast and looked at all the beer bottles and cheese slices and junk food in the refrigerator. Why did he refrigerate Fritos?

No, this whole thing didn't seem right. She ate junk food, sure, but he was a man. And a policeman. It seemed that he ought to eat something more substantial than beer and corn chips. In the freezer were TV dinners, three stacks, each different. He must work his way from right to left, she figured, so he wouldn't have the same thing twice in a row.

She walked around an ugly yellow kitchen, with huge daisies pasted on the refrigerator and pink Rubbermaid things all over the place--wastebaskets, drying racks, paper-towel holders, dish drains. Pictures of Adam were everywhere.

Rune studied it all, as she made coffee and burned bread into toast.