Wicked Prey

photographers, this war photographer, looked like you. Attitudinally, if you know what I mean. If you got some Levi’s and gym shoes and, like, a long-sleeved shirt and rolled the sleeves way up over your elbows, and messed up your hair, and put some convention credentials around your neck, and borrowed a camera bag from Dan Jackson and a couple of cameras—you could make it as a photographer.”
    Lucas shook his head. “Pretending that you’re a reporter tends to piss people off.”
    “Don’t. Wear your official ID,” Carol said. “Who looks at it? They just see the tags.”
    “I’ll think about it,” Lucas said.
    She shrugged. “Do what you want—but you could look like a photographer.”

    HE THOUGHT ABOUT Lily for a while, and the Cohn gang, and then he went on the Internet and looked at pictures of war photographers. Carol was right, he decided; he could be a photographer. Maybe. He called Jackson, said he was coming down for wardrobe and makeup.
    On the way out of the office, he told Carol to print the pictures of Justice Shafer, and of Brutus Cohn, when they came in. “Call Minneapolis and St. Paul and Bloomington and get a list of firearms dealers who might be dealing dirty. Big enough so that their names would be around: somebody that a bad guy could find if he blew into town.”
    “You want them rated by their dirt quotient,” she suggested.
    “Yeah. I’ll go chat with them. Give me something to do,” he said.
    * * *
    LUCAS HAD A small Nikon single-lens reflex digital camera, given to him for Christmas by Weather, along with a couple of zoom lenses. He used it to take pictures of the kids. When Jackson backed out of the equipment closet with two Nikon cameras, and an old Domke cloth camera bag and three lenses, he knew more or less how they worked.
    “What we’re gonna do,” Jackson said, peeling a strip of black gaffer tape off a roll, “is we’re gonna tape out the Nikon and the D2x logos, which some war guys do to reduce visibility, you know? Then, not many people will know that you’re shooting older cameras.”
    “I’m not going to be shooting them much,” Lucas said.
    “Gotta look like it, though,” Jackson said. “Do take a few shots, you might like it. The other thing is, make your shirt kinda military. Black, or olive green, with the sleeves rolled up. Military’s sort of photo-trendy.”
    “What do I do if somebody asks me who I’m with?” Lucas asked.
    “I just keep moving and say, ‘BCA,’ and they’ll nod like they know who it is,” Jackson said. “Sounds sort of like BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC.”
    “Maybe I oughta wear white socks,” Lucas suggested.
    “Maybe you oughta take it seriously,” Jackson said. “You could get your ass kicked, if somebody took you the wrong way.”
    “Lots of cops around . . .”
    Jackson looked up. “You know, one way you’d be safe is, wear a police uniform. Nobody’ll fuck with you. Nobody’ll talk to you, either, other than to say hello.”
    “This is better,” Lucas said, peering through the camera’s viewfinder. “I’m looking pretty good here.”
    “Your hair is way too combed,” Jackson said. “You gotta get some Brylcreem or something, get some hair spiked up. Wear jeans. And you gotta scuff them up—you’re way too neat. Way too neat. You gotta look like you slept in the jeans. Every time I see you in jeans . . . What do you do? Do you dry-clean your jeans?”
    “No, I don’t dry-clean my jeans,” Lucas said.
    “Then you iron them,” Jackson said.
    “The housekeeper irons them, sometimes,” Lucas admitted.
    “ Irons your jeans?” He was appalled.
    “Hey . . .”
    “Sorry . . .”
    “You’re sorta getting into this,” Lucas said.
    “Well, you know, it’s interesting,” Jackson said. “Carol was right: you do sorta look like a conflict photographer. So: let me show you how to handle the camera. It’s like shooting on the range, very similar to a gun . . .”
    Del called during the lecture, from the Middle East sandwich shop, and talking around a gyro, said, “They got a phone on the counter here, no long distance company, so they let anybody use it. They got no idea who called you, but they say they remembered one guy yelling into it, and Carol told me the guy who left the message was yelling, but this yelling guy was in a wheelchair.”
    “That’s a relief,” Lucas said. He hung up and asked Jackson, “You got any lighter lenses? This lens is big as my dick.”
    “You