“What was Ricky doing down here?” Keyes said.
“Probably taking a dump,” Garcia said.
“Come on, Al, this is Traffic. Why wouldn’t he be upstairs in Homicide?”
“ ‘Cause I kicked his sleazy ass out when I caught him trying to tape-record me. Had one of those little James Bond jobs tucked in his vest.”
Mulcahy frowned. “I’m sorry about that, Sergeant. That’s strictly against newsroom policy.”
“Fucking A.”
“When you saw him last,” Keyes said, “did he have a package?”
“Nope,” Garcia said. “But here’s my theory, Brian. After I chase him out of here, he goes home, finds this hinky package in the mailbox, freaks out, and comes racing back to show me. On the way upstairs he stops in the John and bang!”
“How’d he get the box past the security desk in the lobby?” asked Mulcahy. A damn good question, Keyes thought.
But Garcia just chuckled. “You could waltz a Pershing missile by those bozos downstairs and they’d never look twice.”
At first Keyes didn’t want to believe that Bloodworth himself had been the target, or that Skip Wiley might have ordered his execution. It was something Wiley had threatened for years around the newsroom, but then so had almost every other reporter. Bloodworth was always on somebody’s shit list.
Yet Keyes couldn’t deny that the bombing made perfect sense, considering what Bloodworth had written about Las Noches, and considering what had happened to Wiley’s Christmas column. Keyes felt guilty about his role in the Bahamas scheme; Cab Mulcahy felt much worse. Across the rubble the two men exchanged anguished glances and shared the same chilling thought: Skip wasn’t kidding about a bloodbath. Imagine a bomb like this, in a crowd …
If this was Wiley’s way of warning Keyes and Mulcahy to keep their silence, it worked.
With a gloved hand, one of the bomb-squad guys displayed a twisted scrap of tin which still bore a red-and-white soup label. “Minestrone,” he announced. “This baby was sharpened with a diamond file.”
“Cute,” Mulcahy said, pocketing the notebook. “Come on, Brian, let’s go see Ricky.”
Within minutes of the explosion, the emergency room of Flagler Memorial had been occupied by a clamorous army of journalists, each resolved to make Richard L. Bloodworth a hero of the Fourth Estate. News-wise, it would have been a better story (and certainly less work) if Ricky had been killed outright, but near-martyrdom was better than nothing.
The mere fact that the Nights of December had bombed a news reporter guaranteed international headlines, and the event was sure to draw the Big Boys from New York—the networks, the Times and Sixty Minutes, all of whom would do anything to get out of Manhattan in the winter. The locals realized that now was the time to score the big interview, before Diane Sawyer strolled into town and scooped them all.
Two policemen escorted Brian Keyes and Cab Mulcahy through the mob and hustled them into a laundry elevator. Five minutes later they stood at the door of Bloodworth’s private tenth-floor room.
The hospital’s official press release had listed Ricky in satisfactory condition, but in no sense of the word did he seem satisfactory. He looked like he’d stuck his head into a bonfire—burnt ears curled up like fortune cookies, hairless eyelids swollen tight, the seared nose and cheeks stained burgundy with surgical antiseptic. He looked like a barbecued mole.
Cab Mulcahy quaked at the sight of his wounded reporter. Like a stricken father, he stood at the side of the bed, lightly touching Bloodworth’s arm through the sheets.
Bloodworth made a singsong noise and Keyes edged closer. It was hard to tell through the bruised slits, but Ricky’s eyes seemed to be open.
“Grunt if you can hear me,” Keyes said.
Bloodworth made no sound.
“Brian, he’s deaf, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Keyes made an “okay” signal with his thumb and forefinger. Bloodworth smiled feebly.
“Good boy,” Mulcahy said. “You’re going to be just fine. We’ll take care of everything.”
Bloodworth raised his right hand to return the gesture, a poignant if somewhat palsied effort. Keyes noticed that each of Ricky’s fingers was bandaged to the second joint; in fact, the fingers seemed oddly stubbed. Keyes lifted the sheet and checked Bloodworth’s left hand—same thing. Al Garcia wasn’t kidding: Jesus Bernal’s bomb had sheared all Ricky’s fingertips. Not even the thumbs had been spared. Evidently he had been holding the box at the moment of explosion.