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crazy
…
    “He so nice,” Amanda continued, speaking softly. “So nice. When I have problems with the landlord, problems with INS, Mr. Kelly help me out. I only know him one month but he write letters for me. He real smart.” More tears. “What’m I gonna do?”
    Rune put her arm around the woman.
    “He help me with my rent. The INS, they took my check. My paycheck. I working but they took my check. I applied for the card, you know. I was trying to do it right, I no cheat nobody or anything. But they wouldn’t let me have any money…. But Mr. Kelly, he lend me money for the rent. What’m I gonna do now?”
    “They going to send you back home?”
    She shrugged.
    “Where’s that?” Rune asked. “Home?”
    “I
come
from the Dominican Republic,” Amanda said, then added defiantly, “but
this
is my home now. New York City is my home….” She looked back at the building. “Why they kill somebody like him? There’re so many bad people out there, so many people with bad hearts. Why they kill somebody like Robert?”
    There was no answer for that, of course.
    “I have to go,” Rune said.
    Amanda nodded, wiped her eyes with the shredding paper towel. “Thank you.”
    Rune asked, “For what?”
    “Waiting till they take him away. To say good-bye. That was good of you. That was very good.”

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Near quitting time, Tony came back to the store.
    “So where the hell were you this afternoon?”
    “I needed to clear my head,” Rune told him.
    Tony snickered. “That’d take more than one afternoon.”
    “Tony, no crap.
Por favor
.”
    He dropped his backpack in front of the counter and dodged around a cardboard cutout of Sylvester Stallone, who brandished a large cardboard gun. He checked the receipts. “You should’ve argued with the cop. Christ, that tape … it’s over a hundred bucks wholesale.”
    “I gave you the name of the cop to talk to, you want,” she shot back. “It’s not
my
job. You’re the manager.”
    “Yeah, well, at least you should’ve come back after. Frankie Greek was here by himself. He gets overloaded when he’s got to work by himself.”
    She said in a low voice, “He gets overloaded when he has to tie his shoes by himself.”
    Frankie, a scrawny aspiring rock star and high school dropout, had long, curly hair and reminded Rune of the poodle on the pink skirt she’d bought last week at Second-Hand Rose, a vintage clothing store on Broadway. He was in the back room at the moment.
    “Well, where
were
you?” Tony persisted.
    “Walking around,” Rune said. “I didn’t feel like coming back. I mean, he was dead. I saw him. Right in front of me.”
    “Whoa. You see the bullet holes and everything?”
    “Oh, Jesus Christ. Hang it up, okay?”
    “Are they like in the movies?”
    She turned away, kept wiping the counter with Windex. Tony and Frankie both smoked. It made the glass filthy.
    “Well, you shoulda called. I was worried.”
    “Worried? Like, I’m
sure
,” she said.
    “Just call next time.”
    Rune had a feel for it now. He was backing down. No trips to unemployment this week.
Them’s the breaks
… She felt like pushing so she pushed. “There won’t
be
a next time. I don’t do any more pickups, okay? That’s a rule.”
    “Hey, we’re all simpatico here, no? The Washington Square Video family.” Tony glanced at Frankie as the skinny young man came out of the back room.
    “Think I can fix that monitor,” Frankie said.
    “Yeah, well, that’s not your priority. Locking up’s your priority.”
    The large man slung his dirty red nylon backpack over his shoulder again and disappeared out the front door.
    Frankie said, “Like, I heard you talking to Tony.”
    “And?”
    “How come you didn’t make up something? About coming in late today? Like say your mother got sick or something?”
    Rune said, “Why would I lie to
Tony
? You only lie to people who have power over you…. So what happened with the Palladium?”
    Frankie was