Shallow Graves (33 page)

But Sam at least was enjoying himself, even if he would have preferred a space wars flick or something with machine-gunning robots over some stupid love story called
To Sleep in a Shallow Grave.
Mostly, it was the huge, complicated camera that he loved.

“Wow,” he’d say to Pellam. “It’s like a spaceship.” And Pellam got the okay from the director of photography to put him in the operator’s seat for a few minutes.

Alan Lefkowitz ducked out of his honey wagon and trooped toward the director. He was wearing his play clothes, his on-set clothes—chinos and a red-and-white striped shirt (Pellam told Meg, “That’s what the refs would wear if Hollywood had its own hockey team”). The producer said, “Hey, Johnny.” To Pellam he lifted his hand, which held an invisible glass of a very expensive single-malt scotch, and raised his eyebrows.

Pellam said, “Can’t. I’ve got plans.”

“Around
here
?” Lefkowitz joked, gazing longingly at Meg’s jeans-clad butt, and began waving papers at the director again.

“So,” Pellam said, “what’s happening in Cleary?”

She laughed and didn’t answer. “Let’s go for a walk. That’d be okay?”

“They’ve got the telephoto on. We walk that way, toward the forest, we won’t be in view. You feeling okay?”

“Hell, yes.”

She took the cane and got up without his help. They walked past the crowd of locals, which had grown by the dozens with each day of shooting; small-town life had skidded to a stop for the duration of the principal photography. The spectators were enthralled with everything—even the squirrel attack—and they stood silent and frozen as if their fidgeting motion might knock the magic camera to the ground.

Meg and Pellam walked a short distance down the road, Meg glancing back every few minutes to keep Sam in view. She said, “The doctor told me if I’d see a physical therapist and get some exercise the limp would go away in a month.”

“And?”

“I see all these young professional gals on TV, running and doing aerobics and lifting weights . . . it all looks so silly. I’ll wait till it goes away by itself.”

“How’s the brokerage business?”

“Sold a house last week. Got a couple of maybe-but-let-me-ask-my-wife. Nobody said it’s easy.”

“How’s he doing?” Pellam’s head swivelled back toward Sam.

“We keep talking about it. I don’t want to, but I think it’s for the best. That’s what the therapist says. Get it out, get everything out. Maybe it’s best for me too. Sam’ll say, ‘Tell me again about Daddy.’ And we have our talk and he understands or he says he does. I don’t, of course.”

“What do you hear from him? Keith?”

“Trial’s next month.”

Pellam nodded. “They’re going after your house?”

“It’s a possibility. My lawyer says there’s a chance we’ll lose it. But that also means there’s a chance we won’t.”

He felt her eyes turn toward him. A pause then she said, “I’m seeing my friend again.”

“Ambler?”

“He was real good after I got hurt.”

“He seems like a nice guy.”

“I didn’t really want to at first. I mean—”

“You don’t have to explain,” Pellam said.

She looked at the horizon. “I know I don’t.” She smiled. “Pellam, you think . . .” Her voice faded.

He had. A great deal.

And concluded that the answer was pretty clear and they both knew it. He didn’t answer or look at her and she didn’t repeat the question.

They came to a sign on the edge of the road, facing away from the shooting.

Welcome to Simmons.

In the Beautiful Catskills.

Population 6300.

“What was it when you grew up here?” Meg asked. “The population, I mean.”

“Oh, I don’t remember. I think maybe the same as Cleary.”

“How come they’re shooting here?”

“It’s a dirty little town. That’s what I needed for the story.”

“They liked your screenplay after all, huh?”

“Most of it. Of course, the director’s ignoring my camera directions.”

“Why don’t you tell him?”

“Writers don’t tell directors where to put the camera. Except euphemistically and only after they get paid.”

“Why didn’t you set the movie in Cleary?”

“We’ve got a better cemetery here.” He nodded back toward the “minister.” “For the shooting scene. And the funeral. When Janice confronts Shep.”

“Better cemetery than Cleary’s? I’m insulted.”

Pellam looked at her hair, now cut short (revealing a good dusting of freckles on the back of her neck), the country-girl jeans, a blue Saks work shirt, brown suede boots.

“Tonight,” he said, “let’s have dinner at the inn, okay? Just the two of us?”

“She won’t mind?” Meg nodded up the road, toward Pellam’s childhood home, three miles away. Meaning Pellam’s mother.

“She’s seen more of me in the past week than she has in the past five years. She’ll be glad to get rid of me. She doesn’t cotton to men who drink whiskey. We’ll loan her Sam for the evening.”

A film crew assistant, a young woman in jeans and a brushed-denim jacket, a fringe of curly hair crowning her forehead, patrolled the road like an Israeli soldier. A huge walkie-talkie bounced on her hip.

He asked Meg, “When are you going back to Cleary?”

“Tomorrow. We can only stay the night. I don’t want to keep Sam away from home too long. It’s better, I think.”

Meg was looking down at the long grass. In the coming dusk the day was taking on a sepia atmosphere. Very still. Quiet.

He motioned her to follow and walked slowly into the graveyard. He pointed to a grave, ten years old.

Meg looked at it. “Your father’s name was Benjamin?”

“After Benjamin Franklin, he said.”

Meg said, “I’m surprised he didn’t name you William.”

“William?”

“After Wild Bill, your ancestor.”

Pellam gave an exaggerated sigh. “His name was James, not William. James Butler Hickok.”

“Oh, right. You told me.”

They heard the assistant director call through the bullhorn, “Quiet, everybody, quiet down!”

Pellam and Meg paused and watched the scene begin again. The actor moving slowly through the tombstones, ready to eulogize.

Meg said, “So you’re a writer now?”

“Nope. Still unemployed. Lefkowitz’s gotta give me a writer’s credit but that’s only because of the Guild. I’m just here in case they need to doctor it. I’m still canned. I’m guilty of the worst crime in Hollywood. Aggravating a producer’s ulcer.”

“So write more scripts.”

Pellam laughed and looked at his watch. “When the mood takes me. I’ve got a free-lance scouting job in Utah.”

They heard the rise and fall of the actors’ voices.

Then the director’s staticky shout in the bullhorn. “Cut, cut! Somebody . . . you, yes
you
! Get that effing squirrel out of here. I don’t believe it, I do not
believe
it.”

They returned to the camper and sat down in the
lawn chairs—slowly. Meg, because of the gunshot. Pellam, because of the popped shoulder.

“Any chance you’d get back east?” she asked.

“Lots of movies to be made.”

Meg said, “If you do, why don’t you come upstate for a visit? Sam’d like it.”

Pellam stretched his legs out in front of him, the sharp tips of his stained Noconas pointed up toward the gray sky.

“Suppose it’s a possibility,” he said, and they watched the crew fan out into the cemetery to adjust the grass, pluck up leaves, fix makeup, straighten cuffs, chase a squirrel toward the trees. Everyone serious, everyone rushed, trying to get one more take in the can before the November darkness fell.

JOHN PELLAM’S COMMENT
about fire, embers, and smoke comes from one of his favorite authors, Reynolds Price, whom he was not, under the circumstances, inclined to attribute at the moment.

EDGE

J
EFFERY
D
EAVER

Available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster

Turn the page for a preview of
Edge
. . . .

The Rules of Play

THE MAN WHO
wanted to kill the young woman sitting beside me was three-quarters of a mile behind us, as we drove through a pastoral setting of tobacco and cotton fields this humid morning.

A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a sliver of car, moving at a comfortable pace with the traffic, piloted by a man who by all appearances seemed hardly different from any one of a hundred drivers on this recently resurfaced divided highway.

“Officer Fallow?” Alissa began. Then, as I’d been urging her for the past week: “Abe?”

“Yes.”

“Is he still there?” She’d seen my gaze.

“Yes. And so’s our tail,” I added for reassurance. My protégé was behind the killer, two or three car lengths. He was not the only person from our organization on the job.

“Okay,” Alissa whispered. The woman, in her midthirties, was a whistle-blower against a government contractor that did a lot of work for the army. The company was adamant that it had done nothing wrong and claimed it welcomed an investigation.
But there’d been an attempt on Alissa’s life a week ago and—since I’d been in the army with one of the senior commanders at Bragg—Defense had called me in to guard her. As head of the organization I don’t do much fieldwork any longer but I was glad to get out, to tell the truth. My typical day was ten hours at my desk in our Alexandria office. And in the past month it had been closer to twelve or fourteen, as we coordinated the protection of five high-level organized crime informants, before handing them over to Witness Protection for their face-lifts.

It was good to be back in the saddle, if only for a week or so.

I hit a speed dial button, calling my protégé.

“It’s Abe,” I said into my hands-free. “Where is he now?”

“Make it a half mile. Moving up slowly.”

The hitter, whose identity we didn’t know, was in a nondescript Hyundai sedan, gray.

I was behind an eighteen-foot truck,
CAROLINA POULTRY PROCESSING COMPANY
painted on the side. It was empty and being driven by one of our transport people. In front of that was a car identical to the one I was driving.

“We’ve got two miles till the swap,” I said.

Four voices acknowledged this over four very encrypted com devices.

I disconnected.

Without looking at her, I said to Alissa, “It’s going to be fine.”

“I just . . .” she said in a whisper. “I don’t know.” She fell silent and stared into the side-view mirror
as if the man who wanted to kill her were right behind us.

“It’s all going just like we planned.”

When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is as much bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process.

But keeping people safe, keeping people alive, is a business like any other. I frequently told this to my protégé and the others in the office, probably irritating them to no end with both the repetition and the stodgy tone. But I kept on saying it because you can’t forget, ever. It’s a business, with rigid procedures that we study the way surgeons learn to slice flesh precisely and pilots learn to keep tons of metal safely aloft. These techniques have been honed over the years and they worked.

Business . . .

Of course, it was also true that the hitter who was behind us at the moment, intent on killing the woman next to me, treated
his
job as a business too. I knew this sure as steel. He was just as serious as I was, had studied procedures as diligently as I had, was smart, IQ-wise and streetwise, and he had advantages over me: His rules were unencumbered by
my
constraints—the Constitution and the laws promulgated thereunder.

Still, I believe there is an advantage in being in the right. In all my years of doing this work I’d never lost a principal. And I wasn’t going to lose Alissa.

A business . . . which meant remaining calm as a surgeon, calm as a pilot.

Alissa was not calm, of course. She was breathing hard, worrying her cuff as she stared at a sprawling magnolia tree we were passing, an outrider of a chestnut forest, bordering a huge cotton field, the tufts bursting. She was uneasily spinning a thin diamond bracelet—a treat to herself on a recent birthday. She now glanced at the jewelry and then her palms, which were sweating, and placed her hands on her navy blue skirt. Under my care, Alissa had worn dark clothing exclusively. It was camouflage but not because she was the target of a professional killer; it was about her weight, which she’d wrestled with since adolescence. I knew this because we’d shared meals and I’d seen the battle up close. She’d also talked quite a bit about her struggle with weight. Some principals don’t need or want camaraderie. Others, like Alissa, need us to be friends. I don’t do well in that role but I try and can generally pull it off.

We passed a sign. The exit was a mile and a half away.

A business requires simple, smart planning. You can’t be reactive in this line of work and though I hate the word “proactive” (as opposed to what, antiactive?), the concept is vital to what we do. In this instance, to deliver Alissa safe and sound to the prosecutor for her depositions, I needed to keep the hitter in play. Since my protégé had been following him for hours, we knew where he was and could have taken him at any moment. But if we’d done that, whoever had hired him would simply call somebody else to finish the job. I wanted to keep him on the road for the better part of the day—long enough for Alissa to get into the U.S. Attorney’s office and give him sufficient
information via deposition so that she would no longer be at risk. Once the testimony’s down, the hitter has no incentive to eliminate a witness.