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 2

Admitting to myself it is far less safe than texting and driving, I walk through my situation on my drive home. With two action blockbusters under her belt—yes, one directed by Tarantino—Vivian Matisse’s star is blinding bright. About one month ago, according to Jimmy, because I don’t keep up with these things, one of the tabloids broke a story about her dating Ernesto Carmillo. The story was pretty solid, or so everyone claimed.

Soon all the tabloids joined in the fray. Problem—or “opportunity” as Jimmy tells it—no one has a single image of Vivian and Ernesto within ten feet of each other. Oh, they have attended the same parties and functions, and rumor has it that they’ve discretely “retired upstairs” on occasion, but everything is hush-hush, run like an airtight covert operation.

That creates buzz, and the buzz builds pent-up demand in the face of zero supply. Which equals big bucks for the sharpshooter that snatches the first image of them together.

Now I’m that guy, the one with the shot that will lay the golden jackpot. And I have a lot more than one shot, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Speculation on the street says that Vivian doesn’t want that image out there for fear of what it will do to her career. Part of me wonders how much water that logical sieve holds. These days celebrities only benefit from controversy. Acting out won’t hurt you so long as it lands you on the front page and turns your Twitter feed nuclear hot. Collateral damage? Bring in a PR expert, do your stint in rehab, throw in some community service and cap it off with a confessional though not necessarily apologetic interview with your favorite network personality, and voila! Laugh all the way to the popularity bank.

But no amount of antiseptic spinning will help Vivian if my shots hit the light of day. From what one hears about the way he runs his enterprise, Ernesto doesn’t strike me like the type who will appreciate the exposure either.

I stop at a local mall, make my way to a cellphone store, and to my relief they have what I want: two prepaid phones, a.k.a., burners. I walk out five minutes later with them. One will go to Jimmy. The other one I’ll use right now, right here from my truck.

I’ve decided to narrow the field more than Jimmy suggested, so I start with prospect #3’s phone number. I compose a text message:

“Have Vivian-Ernesto shots, up close and personal.”

I pause before typing the rest.

“Content highly sensitive, requires strict confidentiality.”

I review the message. Short. Attention-getting, I convince myself, perhaps even to the point of salivation. Tweetable, even.

I press send. I breathe in deep, exhale slowly. I do that again. It doesn’t help calm my nerves.

I access the sent message, press forward, remove the extraneous “FWD:” header and type in the phone number of prospect #2. Off it goes.

The phone dings with an incoming text as I turn the key in the ignition. Number #3 is saying, “Interested. Let’s see those shots. Say When/Where.”

As tempting as it is to set up a meeting, I heed Jimmy’s advice to “keep them anticipating” and don’t respond. A minute later, while I’m pulling onto the road, prospect #2 replies in like manner. Alright, I tell myself. I have two poles bending, each with big trout on hook. Now I have to figure out how and when to pull them in without breaking the line.

First I have to take care of some logistics. I drive to my bank and spend over an hour signing up for a safe deposit box. Into it go the portable hard drive containing a full set of copies of the raw digital files depicting Vivian and Ernesto’s latest adventure—eighty-seven shots in all. I walk out of the bank jingling the safe deposit box’s key against the loose change in my pocket.

A few blocks away, I arrive at my storage unit. Once inside, I bury the laptop I used to process the photos inside a box of outdoor, hiking equipment, and bury that box under and behind a pile of eleven other boxes. I’m about to walk out when my eye catches a large DIY metal gun safe a friend and I welded a few years back. An almost irresistible urge to open it sweeps over me. I don’t.

Instead I stand there and peer through the dark metal with nothing but my imagination. Inside I see a couple of stashes of currency I hope I don’t have to use. Next to it I see two 9 mm hand guns, a Beretta and a Taurus, and next to them a disassembled Barret .50 caliber sniper rifle.

The storage unit’s rolling door hits the concrete with a loud clank when I yank it closed. The angry gesture doesn’t banish the images I want to imprison behind that door. As I walk back to my truck, I search for something else to think about and land on the memory of my single mother neighbor planting three flats of colored flowers in her front yard, egging me on to do likewise, and me finally conceding I would get to it. That was, what? Six weeks ago? The ideal season for wasting my money to plant such fleeting vegetation has probably long gone, but the prospect of doing a little gardening gives me an idea.

I take the long way home to stop at a local Home Depot where I pick up two flats containing a mix of sickly yellow and purple pansies. On the way to the cash register, I grab a tube of caulking.

The drive home takes me fifteen minutes in heavy early evening traffic. By the time I arrive I know I’ll have to hurry my gardening unless I want to do it with a flashlight, which will look very odd. Inside the garage, I rush to place my camera’s memory card inside an old film canister. I allow myself a moment’s pause to smile at the irony of that, the equivalent of over two rolls of 36 frames in the form factor of something no bigger than a postage stamp, for the foreseeable future living inside a quaint anachronism.

That cleverness aside, I snap on the canister’s lid and lay a tight bead of caulking along the seam between it and the cylindrical surface. I smooth the caulking with my finger to ensure a good, solid seal. Satisfied with my work, I go searching for a small hand shovel. Since I’m such a great garage organizer, it takes me nearly five minutes to locate it, which I do just as I’m deliberating whether to do the digging by hand or with a large kitchen spoon.

My neighbor, a round and short Guatemalan woman comes out to encourage me as I’m finishing the third plant, with twenty-one more of these to do. She stands on her side of the shared driveway, arms on her hips.

“So,” she starts off. “You finally planting?”

“Yeah. Better late than never.”

“Si, very late. Better water a lot.”

“Planning on it.”

She takes that in, nods a couple of times, then points at my handy work with an upraised chin. “Works better if you line ‘em up first, in rows.”

I look down at what I’m doing, basically digging wherever before I stick a small plant in. I almost say something stupid, like rows are monotonous and the haphazard arrangement leads to a more pleasing, natural look. Then I realize that rows will help me remember where I stashed the canister.

“Thanks,” I say.

She comes over, walking in her small, dingy, not-so-fuzzy-anymore slippers. Taking out the plants from the flat, she lines them up one by one, makes a couple of adjustments. “There,” she says. “The first three you can leave, OK?”

“Thanks.”

She nods, then stands there. I look up at her, sensing as every photographer is inclined to do, the last strands of available light ebbing away. I’m thinking about the canister, sitting atop my work bench in the garage, left there so the caulking dries.

My dear Guatemalan neighbor isn’t moving.

“Water them,” she says finally. “A lot. Again tomorrow morning.” One more nod, a big one this time for punctuation, and she walks off, not so much because she’s done with me but because one of her kids is screaming inside her house.

I more or less follow her arrangement until I’m about halfway through the planting, then get up to stretch my back as I walk toward the garage. Such hard work, I hope my little acting job is telling the world, and I need a beer before I can conclude this exhausting bit of urban agriculture.

A cold one comes out of the refrigerator, I pop off its cap to hear the inviting hiss, take a swig, and smooth as silk—again, or so I hope—I snag the canister. The caulking, I feel, is mostly dry, and that’s good enough for my purposes.

Back row, plant number 11—snake eyes, I tell myself as a memory aid—gets a deeper hole. The canister goes in first. Then the plant. I pat down the soil around it with special attention before I move on to the rest, which I plant fairly quickly once I develop a rhythm and perfect my technique as I go.

I stand up, stretch my back again, take another swig from my beer, followed by a longer one. A feeling of satisfaction comes over me. Though I’m not much for manual labor I will stipulate this much: a small job like this, or even a bigger one does bring the satisfaction of seeing what you’ve accomplished, something you can’t say when working on longer term, office-dweller projects where your thing might be a small piece that doesn’t get integrated into the whole until years later, resulting in something you never really get to see or experience. I guess that’s why I like photography, too, I acknowledge now looking down at my anemic pansies. I can visualize it in my mind, then see it and experience it nearly at once.

I clean up in the garage, head inside the house and remember I need to water in the morning—don’t want to do it until the caulking sets. That’s when my cellphone rings.

“Hey, Lucia, what gives?”

“You forgot, didn’t you?”

I know I should recall what she’s talking about, but I’m drawing a blank. In light of what I’ve been through today, I totally deserve a free pass, but Lucia isn’t much for grace and has no clue, anyway.

“You were supposed to call me, Roger. At four.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“For me to pick up the framed pieces? Remember? For tomorrow’s opening?”

I close my eyes. “Tomorrow’s Friday.”

“Every week.”

“The show. I’ve been crazy busy today. Totally spaced—”

“You’re crazy busy all the time. And the rest of us aren’t.” She stops and mumbles something, which I imagine as a gurgled repetition of prior admonishments. Though she doesn’t say it now, I still hear her saying, “you gotta get busy with the right stuff, the things that advance your brand,” like she did two or three conversations ago.

“You can come over—” I stop myself short. “Or I can bring it by, if you’d like.”

“Option #2 sounds like the only one. I’m at the gallery until nine.” She hangs up.

I look at the clock on the kitchen wall. It’s six thirty. And I have to drive all the way across town to Santa Monica.

I peek in the refrigerator and find nothing edible but a jar of pickles and an almost empty tub of hummus. With a pat on the stomach I tell myself I need to lose some weight anyway, and I head back out to the garage. There I pack 10 of my framed photographs into the back cab of my truck, secure them so they don’t slide or bang around, and out I go into lovely L.A. evening traffic, headed right into the mouth of the lion as it were.

It takes me nearly ninety minutes to reach Santa Monica. I walk into the art gallery with two of my frames and find Lucia on a stool, surrounded by wrapped art pieces.

“Hey,” I say by way of greeting as I scan the bare, white walls and the undecorated blank easels Lucia will use to hang posters and smaller pieces. I want to joke about how terrible the place looks, but I figure I shouldn’t since I almost forgot about the show. “Good to see you,” I add.

Lucia ignores me for a couple of seconds. She’s leaning forward, concentrating on a news feed she’s watching on her tablet. It’s not like Lucia to slack off like this, and I wonder what has captured her attention.

“Did you hear about this?” she asks me without looking over.

“What’s that?”

“Ivan Rosen, the movie producer. They think he’s missing, foul play, they’re saying. Found his Masserati abandoned on a Topanga Canyon dirt trail.”

I lean in to look over her shoulder and see a picture of Ivan Rosen. I stop breathing for a second, but I can’t be sure. It could be him, but I never got a good look. I tell Lucia I have more to bring and go back to the truck.

There, I pull out my tablet and my smartphone. On my smartphone I Google up Ivan Rosen and bring up his headshot. On my tablet I review the photos I shot earlier that day. When I think I have a good one, I zoom in.

Yeah, that’s him. A little wetter and way less happy, but it’s him in the photos, no doubt.

I do a little more Googling on Rosen and come across a gossip blog. It conveys a lot of rambling that boils down to this: Rosen produced the first movie Vivian Matisse acted in, and he also threw the party where she and Ernesto Carmillo first met.

A knocking on the driver side window wakes me up from my stunned stupor. “Hey,” Lucia is saying. “Are you unloading, or what?”

I nod and climb out of the cab. Together we team up to take some of the larger pieces, until we’ve carried everything into the gallery. As I’m about to leave, Lucia grabs me by the arm.

“Hey, that’s rude,” she says. “Leaving without saying a word.” She looks up at me with a frown. “You okay? You’re looking a little pale.”

I do my best to shrug it off. “Haven’t had dinner. Or lunch, for that matter. And I’m tired with a big T.”

Her frown switches into her I-don’t-buy-your-act scowl. “Anything I can help with?”

“Nah. Nothing some grub, a shower and a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

She nods and relaxes her expression. “I need you here tomorrow, all of you, Roger.”

“Sure. You got it.”

“I need you alert, peppy, ready to talk to prospective buyers, and sell, sell, sell. So yeah, get some grub, a long night’s sleep and as many showers as you can squeeze in.”

We say our goodbyes, and I walk out, feeling my smartphone and prepaid cell buzzing and dinging in my pockets. I check out the prepaid first. Numbers 2 and 3 are re-expressing their interest and pressing their desire for a meet. I’m good to go on that now that the originals and copies are safeguarded.

I have a voicemail on my smartphone. “Roger,” a breathy-raspy voice male voice says. “Give us a jingle, will ya. It’s kind’a urgent.”

I dial the number, and the same voice answers with, “Yo, Roger. Nicko here. You remember me, Jimmy’s cash flow buddy?”

“Yeah.”

“We just talked to him, and he persuaded us we don’t need to visit him at the hospital. Which is great, because we don’t want to add flowers to his bill, know what I mean?”

“What do you want?”

“The bill, paid, or at least the minimum interest.”

“How is that my thing?”

“Jimmy says you’re good for it.”

I close my eyes. “He does, does he?”

“Oh, yeah. He does.”

“Maybe if he weren’t in a hospital bed he could pay it himself.”

“But that’s not how it is, is it?”

I grit my teeth and strain to retain my composure. “Maybe whoever put him there should have thought about how a broken leg affected his earn and pay potential.”

“But that’s not how it is, is it?” he asks again.

That leaves me wondering how much Jimmy told him about our tenuous, potential payday. “What do you propose?” I ask.

“As we discussed that other time, we could always use a guy with your skill set. Lots of cash flow in that line of work. You would make up Jimmy’s marker in no time, and then it’s all gravy from there on.”

I grit my teeth again, recalling the conversation one year before at one of Jimmy’s I-can’t-afford-it-but-I’ll-throw-it-anyway parties. Nicko pulled me aside and broached the subject of my skill set, namely my army sniper training and experience, which Jimmy, of course, had told him all about.

I thought I’d put an end to that silliness back then, but have to repeat myself now with, “That ain’t happening.”

“We do have a minimum paying option.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five Gs.”

“Not minimum enough. Installment plan?”

“Ten G every two days, but at double the interest. Twenty-five points.”

“Way better than any investment I could get in Wall Street,” I snicker.

“Main street beats that other street every time.”

“I can bring 10K in two days.”

“Nah, tomorrow morning, 9 AM sharp.”

I’m about to push for better terms when I come upon a solution. “Alright, let’s meet at Jimmy’s hospital, in the parking lot.” I pause, then add. “That way I can kill two birds with one stone, make payment and pay Jimmy a visit before I go to work.”

“I like that. Make payment and pay a visit. In the right order, too.”

“Call me when you get there, and I’ll meet you at your car,” I say and hang up before he has a chance to offer an alternative arrangement.

I look down at the prepaid phone before I text two responses with two respective meeting times and locations. Then I head back to Norwalk, and my storage unit, and the black metal DIY safe I have hoped to never open again.

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

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