Hard News (Rune 3)

"You out of the infirmary?"

"Kicked my butt out yesterday. No pain to speak of, unless I stretch. I read that story. In the book you give me. I like it. Don't think I look much like him, though, and if I ever stole fire from the gods I sure don't know a fence who'd handle it...." He paused and she laughed, like she knew she was supposed to, figuring he'd probably spent a good amount of time thinking up the joke. Which he had.

"Guess what?" she asked.

"Don't know."

"I found a new witness."

"New witness?"

"Sure did."

"Well, my, tell me about it."

She did, from start to finish, all about Bennett Frost, and Randy Boggs didn't utter a single word the entire time she was speaking. In fact, not a single syllable or grunt or even a breath.

When she was through there was silence for a long moment.

"Well," she said, "you're not saying anything."

"I'm grinning, though, I'll tell you that. Damn, I can't believe it. You done yourself something, miss."

"What's going to happen now is I'm going to try to get the program on the air next week. Megler said that if he gets his name and picture on the story he'll do the motion for a new trial for free."

"Mr. Megler said that?"

"It hurt him to. I could see the pain but he said he would. He said if the judge buys it, and grants the motion, you could be out right away."

"The judge might not grant it, though, I suppose."

"Fred said that having the program on Current Events would really help. The judge'd be like more inclined to release you, especially if he was up for reelection."

"Well, damn. Goddamn. What do I do now?"

"You just take care of yourself for the next week. Don't go getting knifed anymore."

"No, ma'am ... One thing ... What you did ...?"

Silence.

"I guess I'm trying to say thank you."

"I guess you just did."

After they hung up, Randy Boggs, the grin still on his face, left the administration building to go find Severn Washington and tell him the news.

AS BOGGS LEFT THE BUILDING, ANOTHER PRISONER, A short Colombian, followed, then overtook him. Prisoners like this were what used to be called trusties in the prisons of the forties and fifties and were now generally known as pricks or assholes or scum. He'd just had a short conversation with the guard he worked for, the guard who randomly monitored prisoners' phone conversations. The prisoner smiled at Boggs, said, "Buenas dias," and walked ahead, not hearing what Boggs said in reply. He didn't particularly care what the response was. He was in a hurry. He wanted to get to Juan Ascipio as soon as he could.

chapter 21

RUNE DECIDED SHE'D FOUND A GREAT NEW DRUG, ONE that was completely legal and cheap. It was called "awake," and you didn't even take it. All you did was not sleep for thirty hours straight and it sent you right on the most excellent psychedelic trip you could imagine.

Gremlins climbed out of the Sony, dragons swooped down from Redhead lights and trolls had abandoned bridges and were fox-trotting on the misty dance floor of her desk. Weird amoeba were floating everywhere.

It was six P.M. on Tuesday and the reason for the hallucinations--and sleeplessness--was a small plastic cassette containing a one-inch videotape master of a news story to be shown in a few hours on that night's Current Events program. The story was called, "Easy Justice." The voice-overs were mixed, the leads and countdown added, the "live" portions of Piper Sutton's commentary inserted.

The tape, which ran the exact time allocated for the segment, rested somewhere in the bowels of the Network's computer system, which acted like a brilliant, never-sleeping stage manager, and would start the segment rolling exactly on time, at 8:04:36 P.M. The system would then automatically broadcast the Randy Boggs story for its precise length of eleven minutes, fourteen seconds, which was the Network's version of a quarter hour--a bit shorter than in Edward R. Murrow's time, but back then each additional minute of advertising didn't mean another half-million dollars in revenue the way it did today.