Shallow Graves

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 thelawn 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.

Author’s Note
    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
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J UNE 2004

    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