“Mostly small arms, though one guy preferred the Uzi. Whenever I traveled with him, I didn’t have to worry about a bodyguard.”
I made a show of giving him the once-over and nodded a tentative approval. Honestly? Most of my employers were too cheap to hire a driver. And if I needed a translator, I had to pay him out of my per diem. But the boy and I were bonding; he didn’t need to know that.
“You’re a light weight but I’ll bet you could keep somebody occupied long enough for me to get into the truck and call for back up, right?” I gave him a friendly shot to the arm. “You study martial arts or anything?”
His eyes jumped sideways. He rubbed his shoulder where I hit him. “Uh, no.”
“We’ll have to stay out of trouble then, won’t we?” I flashed my best buddy smile.
Given something else to think about, his driving mellowed considerably. I pried my hand from the grab bar and dug around behind the seat for my camera bag.
The light was beautiful. I wanted to shoot a few prints to play with later. I always carry a couple of bodies in my camera bag, both digital and print. Old school.
Approaching the entrance to the highway, we stopped at an intersection that presented exactly the same kind of reality shift you get on a Hollywood backlot. Behind us lay a long procession of strip malls-to the right sat a Walmart, to the left a Home Depot. Beyond the shadow of the highway overpass lay fields of feathery yellow grass on one side of the road and a farmhouse with an honest-to-god rusty red barn on the other. I felt as if I was looking through a time machine at the view of before and after.
“What are they growing over there?”
“Where?” Ainsley made a quick check out the window. “What?”
“The yellow stuff over there. In the field.”
“Are you kidding?” He checked my face. “That’s hay.”
“Oh.” I tried to explain. “I never saw it growing. All together like that. It’s pretty.”
I made myself busy testing my equipment in the silence that followed. There was half a roll left in the camera. It didn’t take long to check my lenses, so I dug out my notebook to brainstorm a few story ideas. No storms came to me; all was dry. Very dry.
“Done much location work?” I asked after a few more miles of silence.
“A little cable stuff. Uncle Rich, uh, you know-Gatt-he helped me get some freelance work last summer, so I could get my union card. The station hired me about three months ago.” He did some very elaborate mirror checking, his face turned away.
Not a shock to me. The entertainment industry is just as incestuous as it’s ever been-theater, vaudeville, movies, television-it ran in families like eye color and a tendency toward mental illness. Shakespeare had probably had two uncles and a chorus of cousins on the payroll. As long as the boy did his job, it didn’t matter to me.
We traveled straight west on the interstate, and then a relatively short hop south through stubbled farmland. Once we hit the exit, Ainsley got behind a state police cruiser with its lights flashing and ended up following him the rest of the way. It surprised me PD was still en route.
A crowd of assorted rescue vehicles appeared beyond a rise. Everybody’s lights were flashing like a cheap Christmas display. Police and a few bureaucrats were milling around the edge of a grassy field. Fire department was there, as well. They’d driven a ladder truck as close as the pavement could get them to the base of a huge spreading oak. Farther away, the fenced field, the white barn and simple farmhouse made a perfect country backdrop.
“Pull over, College.” I rolled down my window, switched to my longest range telephoto lens and shot the rest of my print film as the van rolled to a stop. I prefer to shoot both print and digital when I have both cameras handy. I trained on print. Digital cameras try to do the thinking for me. It’s annoying. “You ever worked with police on a shoot before?”
“No.”
With my finger on the camera’s trigger, I rattled off some basics. “When we get out of the truck, go ahead and pull a camera box, but stay behind me. Wear your credentials on your shirt. Keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Don’t try to set up the camera until I say it’s a go-got it?”
“Got it.” He didn’t sound happy about it. “Can you see any better with that lens?”
The tree must have blocked his view from the driver’s seat. It’s hard to miss a body with a crowd of public servants standing around gaping. The FD couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty minutes ahead of us to the scene. I caught the shot of the dead man being lowered into the arms of a firefighter.
“Hanging.” My voice had gone flat. The working voice. The voice I use to face the world. My lousy luck was running true. I hate suicides.
“What?” Ainsley asked, that long, slow midwest version of huh?
“The dead guy was swinging from that big oak tree. Look at all these guys. Half the public servants of the county must be out here. Fire, EMT, sheriff-” I dropped the camera to peek over at my college boy. “Did you just say ‘Eeeuuu’?”
His pretty face was crunched up, one part uh oh, and two parts yuck.
There’s something else I forget. In these Great United States, plenty of people get all the way to full grown without ever seeing death any closer than roadkill from the car window.
“Maybe you better wait in the truck.”
“No way.” He worked to smooth out his expression. “I’m fine.”
I looked into those clear blue eyes and felt myself caught between two minds. Part of me wanted to toughen him up-get him out there and force him to meet reality. Part of me didn’t want to be the one that popped his corpse-cherry. I’d seen enough of the world to know innocence had a value that was always underrated.
“It’s your choice. No problem if you want to wait.” I made my voice as neutral as possible while rewinding and reloading. The film can got stuffed deep in my front pocket, out of sight. Old habit-I always hide exposed film. I switched to digital to give me electronic options-easy translation to the web and satellite feed.
“I want to go with you.” Ainsley nodded as he spoke, convincing himself.
He didn’t use the high-volt smile this time and I liked him better for it.
“Come on then. Follow me.”
We hopped a fence and strolled across the field. Broken rows of corn bristled all around us. The unfortunate oak was perched on the far side of a small rise. As my sight line improved, the corn stretched toward the horizon, creating the illusion of perspective. Except for the dead guy, it was a pretty view.
With the fire truck unable to get close enough to the tree, the guys had carried a regular extension ladder over to lean against the limb where the rope was tied. The fireman I’d photographed remained at ground zero hunched over the body. The fireman at the top of the ladder was busy slicing through the last of the rope with a small hacksaw. From his higher vantage point, he was the first to see Ainsley and me approach the edge of the action. The man on the ladder shouted to the men below. The guys beside the body stood up and stared.
I’m not sure why, but I suddenly felt protective of my camera and my college boy. I shifted the strap to hide the lens in the crook of my arm.
“Stick close, kid. These guys aren’t too happy to see us.”
12:53:22 p.m.
Shit. Shit. Shit. What was Maddy O’Hara doing here?
There was a shit smell coming from everywhere: the farm downwind, the body on the ground and the men jockeying around it for a look.
“Watch it!”
“On three. Up!”
It took four men to lift the body and set it on top of the bag. The head lolled toward the shoulder at a nasty angle. The guy had known his knots; knew just where to place it so the fall would snap his neck.
“Camera Press over there,” somebody whispered.