What does an author do when he wants more folks to read one of his favorite stories? Well, this one gives it away… at least the first bits of it. Because I want you to read them. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be running a Decisive Moment promo. To give you a taste for this quirky, fast-paced story, I will post samples of the first few chapters as part of my usual #SaturdayScenes weekly sharing. Let me know what you think!

Chapter 1

With the clunk of a downshift and the revving up of its engine, I hear the Mercedes SUV climbing up the steep grade. I tell myself this is my last chance to pull out.

Ever since Jimmy, my paparazzo little brother, implored me to catch this photo op for him, I’ve itemized a long list of reasons why I shouldn’t. Only one thing keeps me here in the shadows: Jimmy lying on a hospital bed with a broken femur and an array of other injuries sustained at the hands of an irate celebrity. That’s what his paparazzi ways got him, one more reason for me to hate myself for doing this, and also the same reason why I’m doing it even if I pride myself for being a real photographer, a photojournalist that strives time after time to capture the decisive moment with my own brand of raw artistry.

I won’t pull out because I’m here for Jimmy, to bail him out one more time. To make some money so he can pay rent.

Still, I hate myself for it. I don’t chase ambulances. I don’t go looking for silly, talent-devoid girls driving around town with Chihuahuas on their laps and joints in their lips. I don’t invade people’s privacy. I don’t do the in-the-bush voyeur shtick. Above all, I don’t bootstrap my career and livelihood to this culture of superficial, flash-in-the-pan celebrity. Photography is about so much more than furtive snapshots of a rising Hollywood starlet and her bad boy toy du jour.

I recount all this and more as I poke Jimmy’s 600mm f2.8 bazooka of a lens through the thick chaparral. I look through the camera’s viewfinder and scan the flat rooftop of the mansion on the hilltop across the small canyon.

There, in preparation for the caravan’s arrival, the semi-automatic rifle wielding security detail stirs, as does the pack of paparazzi by the mansion’s main entrance. Like they did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that when I stood among them, my fellow photographers will be blocked out from any worthwhile shot when the SUV continues up the road to use a side entrance off a narrow dirt trail.

I on the other hand sit atop a killer perch with a wide field of view of the driveway where the SUV will pull in, the pool next to it, and a sliver of the back porch through which my subjects will enter the house. All I need is for a decisive moment to happen between the SUV and the house. A longing look. A hug or tender caress. A little kiss between my starlet and her bad boy lover. Maybe some pool-side action. Heck, I’ll take a peck on the cheek just to call this done and out.

The SUV goes past the front gate, trailed by a sedan I haven’t seen, and the two black BMW motorcycles I did see during my scouting. The sedan follows the SUV to the side entrance. As they did yesterday, the two motorcycles stop to prevent any enterprising photographers from going up the side trail. Not that it makes much difference, since all of them know better than to try, or else they would have trekked that way already. Paparazzi are ballsy except when the other guys can shoot back with lead.

The side gate opens and the SUV goes through. The sedan goes next. For the heck of it, I snap a couple of shots. Worthless shots. Throwaways. But I take them all the same, like I do in every shoot, letting my shutter finger warm up for what comes next.

Both vehicles come to a stop, the sedan behind the SUV. All doors open in sync. I snap a few more shots of bad boy coming out of the back of the SUV, of his business partners jumping out of the sedan, one of them reaching in to drag out a guy wearing a black suit and a matching sack over his head.

I see now that bad boy is holding a gun with a very long barrel, a silencer.

I also see his starlet girlfriend, Vivian Matisse, coming around the SUV. I snap a few more shots, no longer throwaways, of her coming toward him with long strides of her slim, muscular legs, her short blond hair whipping in the hot Southern California breeze. She stands next to him as he waves at his associates with the gun. They walk toward the pool behind the hooded guy in the black suit.

I click off a few more shots of the procession thinking to myself how in this heat that guy is crazy to be wearing a black suit. I toss aside this stray thought when they force him to his belly at pool side to shove his head under water. I take a few shots of that, and this goes on for a few minutes. I lose count at seven or eight dunks.

Bad boy loses patience with the apparent lack of progress, waves off his associates, and personally brings the guy to his knees to rip off the soaked black hood. I take one, then two shots of the two of them, face to face. I stop and listen.

There’s no shouting. I’m guessing bad boy’s keeping it all at a quiet snarl, the kind that scares you more than out of control shouting.

It works. His victim is nodding now. Then he drops his head in defeat.

Bad boy takes two steps back and levels the gun at him, first at his head, then lower. One of the other goons makes sure the black hood goes back on, tight this time.

Bad boy shoots him in one knee, then the other.

I catch it all in bursts of three to five shots.

The victim is writhing on the ground, blood smearing the pool deck. That’s when it happens.

Our dear starlet, with a Twitter following you wouldn’t believe, grabs the gun out of her bad boy’s hand takes two steps so that she’s now standing in the broad streaks of blood, and shoots the prisoner in the head. Once. Twice. Thrice. She then hands the gun back to her boyfriend.

She makes like she’s going for the house, but he grabs her forearm, turns her around and kisses her. Hard. Like he’s going to devour her right there.

“Did I catch all of that?” I whisper.

That’s when I realize my finger is pressed down on the shutter release. The camera has stopped shooting because the buffer is full. I take my eye off the view finder and see the green light flickering as each buffered shot is written to the memory card. The LCD screen displays each recorded image of the macabre slide show.

Yeah, I got all that.

I look through the view finder again. It’s cleanup time. Bad boy and starlet are no longer there. Three goons are lugging the body back to the sedan, while a fourth is grabbing a hose to spray the pool deck.

I don’t know why, because I should be getting out of here, but I grab a short burst of shots of all that.

I scan the mansion’s rooftop one more time. A clear, parabolic microphone dish is glistening in the sun, aimed right at me. And so is one of the armed men, with his semi-automatic rifle. I duck and scurry away from my hide, expecting the reports of gunshots followed by the shredding, splintering of the chaparral around me.

None of that happens. They wouldn’t dare, not with all my fellow photographers as witnesses. But they’re coming for me, my camera, and the shots it contains.

I hear the roar of motorcycle engines coming to life.

What comes next happens just as I planned it: a twist to detach the camera from the lens, a quick stash of the lens in its pouch, which goes in my backpack along with the uncapped camera body, and one minute’s jog down trail to my mountain bike. Then it’s another eleven minutes pedaling and careening down the trail to my pickup truck. I cut this down to nine and half while managing to keep my neck unbroken. I toss the bike on the back of the truck, throw the backpack into the cab, jump in, and I pull out of the trail onto the open road.

By my watch, that took me twelve minutes altogether, more or less, and it will take them fifteen to get here, maybe a little less if they drive a bit more unsafely than when I timed it. One minute’s all I need to disappear, and I have two more to spare.

Ten minutes later I’m driving onto the 405 freeway heading south, and no one’s tailing me.

Jimmy’s sitting up in the hospital bed, as much as his leg in traction will allow. He’s got a firm grip on my tablet, and he’s feeling no pain as he swipes back and forth to review the shot sequence. I let him go for a few minutes, as he tells me he knew all along this was “a money job,” mumbling here and there about how huge this is, with Vivian Matisse and her beau fatale Ernesto Carmillo “going Tarantino on that guy.”

Jimmy looks up at me to announce, “We’re gonna be rich.”

“I was thinking dead.”

“Nah, man. We go anonymous on this. No attribution, all cash.”

“Until they throw us in jail for obstruction of justice.”

Jimmy looks at me with that crazed look of his. “You’re not going all goodie-two-shoes on me, are you?”

“I gotta turn this in, Jimmy.”

He shakes a finger at me. “That’s when you turn up dead, Rogie. All dead, no cash.”

“I’m a witness to a murder, Jimmy. I gotta turn it in. And it’s Roger,” I add, already beating myself for letting his use of “Rogie” get to me. I try to shake that off by repeating, “I gotta turn it in.”

“OK, sure, but not to the police. Turn it in to the highest bidder, let them do their journalistic duty, same thing. Bad guys get caught with the evidence you photographed.”

I’m thinking of a million refutations to Jimmy’s naive line of reasoning. Like evidence needs chain of custody, and that chain starts with me, so the cops and the Feds—because you can bet they’ll jump into the fray—will lean on whoever publishes these photos until they give me up. Like whichever outfit we sell these shots to won’t adhere to journalistic confidentiality for more than half an hour. Like if I go in voluntarily, I’ll be more likely to get witness protection that has a chance to keep me from writhing in pain with two splattered knee caps before someone pumps three hot ones into my skull. I think about saying all that and more, but it won’t get through Jimmy. Besides, our voices are getting a little loud, and I don’t want half of the hospital to learn of our cursed windfall.

“You’re not getting soft-stooled on me, are you Roger?” Jimmy asks. “Come on, man. A guy like you with all your military experience, you’re not going to spaz out now, right?” He smiles and lowers his voice. “That sniper training came in handy, didn’t it?” He taps on the tablet’s screen. “You’re a hero, a real American hero, and you deserve every penny this will get ya.”

I yank the tablet out of his hands. “Don’t go there.” I stare him down. “Don’t.”

“Hey, man. Easy, OK? Look, I really need this. That’s why I gave you the tip, right? My medical bills are going to eat me alive.”

That stops me short. “Medical bills?”

“Yeah, man. Look at me.” He waves at his upraised, full leg cast. “They had to do do a full rebuild on this thing. Three days in the hospital and counting.”

“I thought you had a settlement coming.”

Jimmy is usually quick with his tongue, especially when it comes to inventing a story. This time he hesitates long enough to let me know that what comes next shares little common ground with truth.

“You know how it is. Lawyers. Paperwork. Insurance. It all takes time, and meanwhile I’m on the hook.”

I don’t curse, but come as close to it as I’ve come in some time. “This didn’t happen on a job, did it, Jimmy?”

“Yeah, man. That guy messed me up.”

“That guy wouldn’t be some long-shot stallion that didn’t come in first at Santa Anita and instead trampled your ass, would it?”

He looks down, and for a brief moment I don’t see a full grown loser. I see my little brother, seven years my junior, caught in his latest ill-advised mischief. And I have to bail him out. Again.

“How deep in are you?”

“Come on, man, I told—”

“Jimmy, please.”

“Seventy. Large.”

“Seven-zero, as in 70K?”

He looks up now, a sheepish grin threatening to break on his lips. “Yeah, man. But with this—”

“No one’s going to pay us 70K for these.”

The grin breaks through, then gives way to a twisted smile. “Oh, yeah, man. Sure they will. 100K easy.” His smile broadens. “I bet you can push it as high as a quarter mil. It’ll take a little work, but I’ll walk you through it.”

Over the next thirty minutes he does just that. By the time I’m aching to leave, I understand more than I ever dared to know about the business end of freelance paparazzi photography. On my tablet, I’ve jotted down the list of prospective buyers, from 1 to 7, number 1 being the most likely to reach into the deepest pockets, according to Jimmy. If I do this the way he suggests, I should start with number 4, then work my way up to number 1 to make them bid against each other. Numbers 5 through 7 are backups in case the top feeders don’t pan out.

“Always have an interested party in your back pocket when you talk to numbero uno or numero dos,” Jimmy advises. He also tells me to cut out any middle parties, go straight for the publishing organization.

All this and the rest sounds like it would work great if you had a sweaty nude sunbathing shot of some inaccessible cutie. But this number 1 through 7 stratagem has me thinking that’s a lot of people knowing and potentially talking to other people about some hapless paparazzo with photos of a murder by a Mexican cartel playboy and his Hollywood sweetheart.

On my way out, I check in at the front desk, expecting zero information but asking anyway in hopes I can learn what Jimmy’s hospital stay will cost him. Fortunately, though I expect some reluctance from hospital staff to give me billing information, for once Jimmy did something smart and cleared me to handle his private information.

To my relief, the young gal I meet gives me half-hearted resistance until with a smile she tells me “in general terms” that the operation on Jimmy’s leg ran just north of $15,500, while his daily hospital stay, including the steady drip of pain meds is running “roughly” around 12K per day. I account for the two additional days they expect to keep him, do some quick math, and I come up with a lot more than 70 large against Jimmy’s tally.

I’m feeling a little dizzy when I reach my pickup truck. I hold on to the tailgate to catch my breath. It helps, even if just a little. As angry as I am at Jimmy, and as much as I want to run the other way from this situation, I know I have to sell those photos and do so at a premium.

Let me know what you think. If you can’t wait until next week’s installment, you can always…

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