Death of a Blue Movie Star (Rune 2)

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?"