Death of a Blue Movie Star (40 page)

Ten minutes.

The canvas bag was at the gap by the gangplank.

Sam Healy took a deep breath. Looked at the containment vehicle.

The longest ten feet
…

“How you doing, buddy?” the ops coordinator asked through the radio headset.

“Never been better,” Healy replied.

“You got all the time in the world.”

Breathing. In, out. In, out.

He bent over the canvas bag and carefully closed the top. He couldn’t keep it level holding it by the strap so he’d have to grip the base with both hands and pick it up.

He backed down the gangplank, then went down on one knee.

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

Steadiest hands in the business, someone had once said about Healy. Well, he needed that skill now. Fucking rocker switches.

He bent forward.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” came the staticky voice in the radio.

Healy froze, looked back.

The ops coordinator, Rubin and the other men from the squad were gesturing into the river, waving madly. Healy looked where their attention was focused. Shit! A
speedboat, doing thirty knots, was racing along, close to the shore, churning up a huge wake. The boater and his passenger—a blonde in sunglasses—saw the
BOMB SQUAD
crew’s gesturing and waved back, smiling.

In ten seconds the huge wake would hit the boat, jostle it and set off the rocker switch.

“Sam, get the fuck outa there. Just run.”

But Healy was frozen, staring at the registration number of the speedboat. The last two numbers were a one and a five.

Fifteen.

Oh, Christ.

“Run!”

But he knew it would be pointless. You can’t run in a bomb suit. And besides, the whole dock would vanish in the fiery hurricane of burning propane.

The wake was twenty feet away.

He bent, picked up the bag with both hands, and started down the gangplank.

Ten feet from the houseboat.

Halfway down the gangplank.

Five feet.

“Go, Sam!”

Two steps and he’d be on the pier.

But he didn’t make it.

Just as he was about to step onto the wood of the pier the wake hit the houseboat. And it hit so violently that when the boat rocked, the gangplank unhooked and fell two feet to the pier. Healy was caught off balance and pitched forward, still clutching the bomb.

“Sam!”

He twisted to the side, to get his body between the bag and the propane barge, thinking: I’m dead but maybe the suit’ll stop the shrapnel.

With a thud he landed on the pier. Eyes closed, waiting to die, wondering how much pain he’d feel.

It was a moment before he realized that nothing had happened. And a moment after that before he realized he could vaguely hear music.

He sat up, glanced at the sandbags, behind which the squad stood immobilized with shock.

Healy unzipped the bag and looked inside. The rocker switch had closed the circuit. What it had set off, though, wasn’t the detonator but apparently a small radio. He pulled the helmet off the bomb suit.

“Sam, what’re you doing?”

He ignored them.

Yeah, it was definitely music. Some kind of easy listening. He stared at it, unable to move, feeling completely weak. More static. Then he could hear the disc jockey. “This is WJES, your home for the sweetest sounds of Christian music….”

He looked at the explosive. Pulled off the glove and dug some out with his fingernail. Smelled it. He’d have recognized that smell anywhere—though not from his bomb disposal training. From Adam. The explosive was Play-Doh.

Rune didn’t waste any time trying to break through the walls. She dropped to her knees and retrieved what she’d seen under the bed when he’d first dragged her into the room.

A telephone.

When Hathaway had seen her ease forward on the bed, it wasn’t because she was about to leap. It was because she’d seen an old, black rotary dial phone on the floor. With her feet she pushed it back into the shadows under the bed.

She now pulled it out and lifted the receiver. Silence.

No!

It wasn’t working. Then her eyes followed the cord.
Hathaway, or somebody, had ripped the wire from the wall.

She dropped down to the floor and, with her teeth, chewed off the insulation, revealing four small wires inside: white, yellow, blue, green.

For five minutes she stripped the four tiny wires down to their thin copper cores. Against the wall was a telephone input box with four holes in it. Rune began shoving the wires into the holes in different order. She was huddled, cramped on the floor, the receiver shoved under her chin.

Finally, with the last possible combination, she got a dial tone.

The timer on the bomb showed twelve minutes.

She pressed 911.

And what the hell good is that going to do? Did they even
have
a fire department on Fire Island? And how could she even tell them where she was?

Shit!

She depressed the button and dialed Healy’s home number.

No answer. She started to slam it down, then caught herself and cautiously pressed the button again—feeling as if she had only a few dial tones left and didn’t want to waste them. This time she called the operator and told her in a breathy voice that it was an emergency and asked for the 6th Precinct in Manhattan. She was astonished. In five seconds, she was connected.

“It’s an emergency. I need to speak to Sam Healy, Bomb Squad.”

Static, someone near the switchboard telling a Polish joke, more static.

“Patch it through,” Rune heard. More static. The punch line of the joke.

Static.

Oh, please …

Then, Healy’s voice.

The operator was saying, “Central to Two-five-five. I’ve got a landline patch for you. Emergency, she says. You available?”

“I’m in the field. Who is it, what does she want?”

“Sam!” she shouted.

But he didn’t hear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Tell him Rune,” she shouted to the dispatcher. “Hurry!”

A moment later the condition of the line improved, though it was still filled with static.

“Sam.” She was crying. “He’s got me in a room with a bomb. The Sword of Jesus bomber.”

“Where are you?”

“A house on Fire Island. Fair Harbor, I think. He’s put a bomb here.”

Seven minutes
.

“Where’s the guy who set it?”

“He left. It’s that Warren Hathaway … the witness in the first bombing. He’s going back to Bay Shore on the ferry.”

“Okay, I’ll get a copter on its way. Describe the house.” She did. Healy broke the line for a terrifyingly long twenty seconds.

“Okay, what’ve we got?”

“A big handful of—what is it?—C-3. There’s a timer. It’s set to go off in about six minutes.”

“Christ, Rune, get the hell out—”

“He’s nailed me in.”

A pause for a moment. Was he sighing? When he spoke, his voice was soothing as a Valium. “Okay, we’re going to get through this just fine. Listen up. Okay?”

“What do I do?”

“Tell me about it.” Rune told him what Hathaway had said about the bomb. It seemed he whistled when she explained it, but that may have been just static.

Five minutes
.

“How big is the room?”

“Maybe twenty by fifteen.”

A pause.

“All right, here’s the deal. You get far enough away and cover yourself up with mattresses or cushions, you’ll probably live.”

“But he said it’ll make me deaf and blind.”

There was silence.

“Yeah,” he said. “It may.”

Four minutes, twenty seconds
.

“The thing is, you try to disarm it yourself, and it goes, it’ll kill you.”

“Sam, I’m going to do it. How? Tell me how.”

He was hesitating. Finally he said, “Don’t pull the detonator out of the explosive. There’s a pressure switch in it. You’ll have to bypass the shunt and cut the battery cord. You need enough electricity to keep the galvanometer fooled into thinking the cord isn’t cut.”

“I don’t know what that means!”

“Listen carefully. Look at the bomb. There’ll be a little box near the battery.”

“It’s gray. I see it.”

“With two metal posts on it.”

“Right.”

Healy said, “You have to run a piece of wire that’s very narrow gauge—”

“What’s
gauge?
” She was crying.

“Sorry … I mean, it’s got to be real thin. Run a piece from one lead of that box to the main terminal connecting the battery to the cable. See what I’m saying?”

“Right.”

“Then you cut the wires to the timer.”

Three minutes, thirty
.

“Okay,” she said.

“Find a piece of wire, strip the insulation off, and wrap one strand—not all of them, just one strand—around the terminal of the gray box and then the other around the terminal on the timer. Then cut the other wires from the timer.”

“Okay, I’ll do it.” She stared at the plastic components. Picturing it.

Healy said, “Remember, you can’t override the rocker switch. So don’t move the bomb itself.”

Through her tears she said, “They’re called IEDs, Sam. Not bombs.”

“The helicopter’s on its way. There’ll be county police meeting the ferry in Bay Shore. And we’ll send one out to Fair Harbor.”

“Oh, Sam. Should I just hide under the mattress?”

He paused. The static rose up like a storm between them. Then he said, “‘Believe in what isn’t as if it were until it becomes.’”

Two minutes
.

“I’ll see you soon, Sam.” Rune yanked the wires from the phone. Then, with her teeth, stripped the insulation off one of them—the white wire—and wound one strand around the two terminals, the way Healy had told her.

Ninety seconds
.

Now cut through the battery cables. She bent to the bomb, smelled the oily scent of the explosive, just inches
from her face, and took one of the black wires in her teeth. She began chewing. Tears fell on the plastic.

It was thicker than she thought.

Fifty seconds
.

A tooth chipped and she felt an electric jolt of pain and surprise. Her breath hissed inward.

Forty
.

Thirty
…

The wire snapped.

No time for the other one. Had he said to do both of them? She thought he had. Shit. She backed away from the bomb, pulled the mattress and springs off the bed and lay down on the floor in the corner the way Hathaway had told her. Blind and deaf …

Thirty twenty-nine twenty-eight twenty-seven
…

She prayed—to a God she hoped was a lot different from the one the Sword of Jesus claimed as theirs.

Fourteen thirteen twelve eleven
…

Rune tucked her head against her chest.