Photo Finish

by Terry Ambrose

  “Ha, ha. It landed on me. Thank God. This thing cost me almost two grand.”

  “Two—jeez, what’s it do, serve lunch while you shoot?” I chuckled, another good one, McKenna.

  She just held onto her side and stared at me. Finally, she said, “So what do you do on computers? E-mail? Surf the net?”

  “A little of this, a little of that. I was a skip tracer for a bank.”

  “Oh. One of those.”

  It surprised me that she knew what a skip tracer did, most people had no clue. “I was the guy who found the tough ones. Before we had computers, anyway. Once computers came along, the job changed.”

  “Got too technical?”

  “In the old days, it was a rush. Like solving a puzzle. The harder the puzzle, the better it felt. Computers made it a production line. I learned to query databases instead of questioning people. Management wanted more work with fewer workers. Then, I got outsourced.”

  “Honey, you don’t look like the kind of guy who got off on his work.”

  I shrugged. “I am—was. In the old days. Now, I’m sort of a techie.”

  “Me, I’m a people person.”

  “And a photographer.”

  “That too.”

  “And a twin.”

  She grimaced.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  She shook her head. “My sister needs a kidney transplant. She’s stuck with a loser husband, two kids and no insurance.”

  “So that’s why you were willing to go to a closed park to get photos? And now you’ve got people wanting to kill you.”

  “My concern is getting more money for my sister’s operation. If I don’t do it, she’ll die.”

  I didn’t want to break the mood, but I realized that it had been hours since I’d been to the bathroom. “Hey, I gotta go.”

  “Sure, go back home, get some rest.”

  “No, I’ve gotta GO.”

  Harris nodded, then smiled. “You know where it’s at, right?”

  While in the bathroom, I splashed some water on my face to help the sobering-up process. I stood, staring at my image in the mirror. “You moron, she’s a Darwin Award candidate.” Maybe I was half-drunk, but Harris seemed to deserve one of those little awards that are given to those who help “improve the species . . . by accidentally removing themselves from it.” Personally, I prefer one of their other sayings, “chlorinating the gene pool.”

  I splashed more water into my eyes, then dried my face. “Get a grip,” I told myself. “And a hug.”

  By the time I got back, file names from the media card had filled Harris’s screen and she scrutinized the list. She clicked on a name towards the end. Her screen began to reveal the photo of a waterfall crashing to the canyon floor below. We waited while the photo grew, line by line. I glanced around the room. She had flash attachments, tripods, lenses, camera bags, and other assorted paraphernalia scattered everywhere.

  “Shoot, wrong one.” Harris drummed her fingers as she waited for the download to finish.

  “Wow. That’s quite a shot.” Forget the Darwin Award, Harris was a damn good photographer.

  On the screen, water tumbled past the camera. The rushing blur at the top of the picture gradually became more clear until it plunged into a pool surrounded by rocks at the bottom. It looked as though you were rafting the falls. Though I knew Alexander was right, that it was only eighty feet to the bottom, I stood, mesmerized by the perception of plunging ten times that distance to the canyon floor. “If you’d have used a webcam, you’d have full motion video.”

  “And it would look like a low-res postage stamp. These photos are ten meg each. Unless you’re doing posters, the quality is as good as film and immensely more flexible. I can use photo editing software to manipulate the photo, crop, and adjust colors.”

  I hadn’t thought about photographers adjusting the colors on their photos before. If Harris had a few more shots like this one and a couple more answers like that, she’d move from the Darwin Award candidate category into the Wonder Woman category. Unless, of course, she died. In which case, I was going online and reluctantly making a nomination. “Is that how they get those bright-red sunset shots?”

  “Sometimes. They might also use a special lens or combination of lenses. This one’s pretty good, but I’ve got a couple that are better. This was the last one before the plane showed up.”

  Harris closed the window with the waterfall and clicked another file name. This time, the screen began to paint an image of the sky—a pale-blue canvas with fluffy white clouds and a miniature image of a plane. Harris grabbed her head and leaned forward. She rested her forehead on the desk and groaned, “It’s too small!”

  Well, I’ll be. The whole story was true. I moved in closer to the photo, trying to make out the details. There was the little plane with an ant in the middle of a miniature doorway and forever suspended in midair below the plane was another ant. But, this ant had two arms, two legs, and definitely no parachute. I said, “How come you didn’t just zoom in?”

  “Goddammit, McKenna, I had on a wide-angle lens to shoot scenery and didn’t have time to get back to my camera bag and change lenses!”

  Wow, she’d gone from Wonder Woman to the Wicked Witch in two heartbeats—and I’d missed the costume change. Crap. I’d try something out of my comfort zone—sympathy “I’d be crabby too if I got caught with the wrong lens on my $2,000 camera.”

  She glared at me, then began to laugh.

  My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to hear that sound again.

  Her nose wrinkled and she nodded. “You think you’re so funny. All right, funny man, can you make out the number on that plane?”

  I winked at her. “I can do better than that, I’ll bet I can find out who owns the damn thing.”

  Chapter 4

  No sooner had the words popped out of my mouth than I realized I’d done it again. Something about this woman just brought out my inner sucker. I don’t want to demean the act of volunteering for a worthy cause; there are plenty of those. But, I hadn’t volunteered to help the homeless, guard a stranded monk seal, or anything else like that. I’d volunteered to find a couple of guys with guns. How was I going to explain to her that I hadn’t meant to volunteer—without revealing myself a lost cause?

  But Harris smiled. She laughed. She thought I was Mr. Wonderful. I was buried up to my neck in a mating ritual as old as Mauna Kea. The only way out was to live up to my stupid boasting and hope I didn’t fail. My problem was that I had no idea how to find the owner of a frigging airplane. Sure, I’d been a crack skip tracer, but this was a plane, not a person. Now, I felt like a crack moron for getting Harris’s hopes up.

  The admiration in her eyes drove me on; her glee at my stupidity told me that backing down wasn’t an option. I had to take a guess at how to pull this off without landing myself in the dictionary as the definitive cross-reference for terms like dumb, stupid, moron and, oh yeah, sucker. I pointed at the screen. “Every plane’s got an ID number, right?”

  “I’ve never thought about it, hon.”

  She’d called me “Honey” from our first meeting, which is probably what she called everyone. I considered asking, but had no desire for truth. “Neither have I, but they fly in and out of airports all the time. Those guys in the towers must have some way to identify them other than, ‘Hey, you in the blue plane.’”

  “Like a car’s license plate, huh?”

  To my relief, Harris turned back to the screen and enlarged the image. She leaned toward the screen; I followed suit. I peered over her shoulder.

  She said, “Hold your breath.”

  She didn’t have a girly-girl smell, but for someone who’d traipsed around the mountains all day and dodged bad-guy bullets, she smelled pretty good, especially if you contrasted that against my fresh-from-the-bottom-of-the-wine-bottle fragrance. I spotted a series of numbers on the tail and pointed. “There!”

  “Okay, okay. I’m a little slow.”


  She zoomed in again, and there it was—a blur of little colored squares that were completely illegible. “Crap. Back it out a bit.”

  As she moved the mouse, she said, “Man, talk about impatient.”

  Actually, right now I was about as happy as a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder. She was the cutest damn pirate I’d ever seen, and I could easily be trained to say, “McKenna want a cracker.” I studied the lines of her face, the bruise forming on her cheek. I could do this all night—or at least until I had to go to the bathroom again. I glanced at the clock on her desk. Five of one. I was usually in bed three hours ago. “Take your time.”

  Harris tried again and again; zoom in, then out. Too fuzzy, too small. She finally said, “Goddammit, enough of this crap.” She stood and crossed the room, then rummaged through one of her camera bags. She gripped her forehead as she stood, pain masking her features. “Shooting pains. I think I’m tired.” In her other hand, she held a large magnifying glass. She took a couple of deep breaths, then came back and examined the computer screen from just inches away. She moved the magnifying glass and her head in and out. She said, “It’s still blurry, but this gives me just enough control—I think it’s M7Z434.”

  She dropped the magnifying glass onto the desktop and slumped back in her chair. I was afraid that she might fall asleep right where she was and that scared me because I didn’t know what I should do. Get her a blanket? Nibble on her ear like a good parrot? “It’s time for you to get some rest,” I said. I placed my hand on her shoulder and felt a surge of heat when she reached up and stroked the back of my hand with her fingers. Another shooting pain interrupted our tender moment.

  Once Harris was settled in bed, I went in and checked on her. She’d let her hair down and had on a big, floppy San Francisco Giants tee shirt.

  I pointed at the shirt. “Traitor.”

  She glanced down, then back to me. “A present from my sister.” The bruise below her eye had darkened and taken on an angry purple hue in the harsh light of the bedroom lamp. She continued, “You look tired, too.”

  I gulped. I couldn’t tell whether that was an invitation or an observation, so I said, “I’m going to camp out on your couch. Just in case those pains get worse.”

  She nodded. “Hold me for a minute.”

  I sat on the side of the bed and let her put her arms around my waist, while I stroked her bare arm. I turned off the light with my free hand, then waited. When her breathing became slow and regular, I tucked her in, then crept from the room. I left the door open a crack just in case she called out.

  It was almost two by the time I found a blanket and parked myself on the couch. I’d lost half a night’s sleep, but I was still wired. And exhausted. Bad combination. Somewhere between sleep and consciousness I heard Harris moan, a dim reminder of a promise I’d made earlier in the evening. Tomorrow, I had a plane’s owner to find.

  Chapter 5

  The little glow-in-the-dark clock on Harris’s desk read 4:14 AM when the rain woke me. It came in like a typical Hawaiian shower; fast, hard, and short-lived—just enough to jar me from a fitful sleep. I kept having the same dream, which never quite finished. In the dream, I stood on the beach at Waikiki. An old man, bent and crooked with age and wisdom, skin bronzed from years in the sun, stood before me. He’d asked a simple question. I’d given him an answer, then he’d made a ridiculous statement about me running away.

  So here I lay, wondering why his criticism bothered me so much. Each time the dream had occurred I’d climbed the ladder to consciousness before I knew what to say. Each time, I struggled back to sleep as failure gnawed at me. Then, the cycle repeated. This time, though, the wind rustled through the palms. Leaves and branches on broadleaved plants banged together in a symphony that the heavy, moist air echoed. Lono, the Hawaiian god of rain and wind, was back in town. You could hear Lono’s murmur, rain splattering pavement. That escalated into a low hum. Roofs and plants amplified the intensity as Lono’s passion approached. You could almost do a countdown. Two blocks away. Then one. Even the unpracticed ear could tell that the show was about to begin as pandemonium erupted in the night.

  I watched the little red numbers on the clock advance another minute while I considered the old man in the dream. He’d had shoulder-length gray hair, had only worn a pair of swim trunks and had held a surfboard under one arm. We’d been on the water’s edge at Waikiki. I had the “Do Not Disturb” sign around my neck, but he ignored it. Wavelets splashed across his toes as I said, “Who the hell are you, Duke Kahanamoku?”

  He seemed amused, but obviously wasn’t the father of modern surfing as he asked his question again. “Why you not want help find these bad men?”

  “I don’t want something to happen to my—friends.” Now I had friends? Plural? Me?

  The old man gently ran his hand over the board’s smooth surface. “You stop running, maybe what you looking for find you.” Before I could give him a piece of my mind for intruding in my life and my dreams, he turned toward the ocean. “Good surf today.” And he was off.

  I listened to Lono churn the early morning air and tried to conjure up a retort to the old man’s statement. As a professional skip tracer, I’d never shied away from finding someone before. Never worried about how my finding them might change their lives. I’d even crossed the ethics line a few times when all roads dead-ended. But, times were different now, more rigid. More defined. Creativity like mine had become a liability. With the advent of computer programs and massive databases that tracked virtually every minute detail of our lives, finding people had become routine if you knew which databases to use and had the access. I no longer had that access, but how hard could it be to track down the owner of a plane? Was I afraid to do it? Was that why the dream kept coming back?

  Maybe I was afraid. Of what? That I might fail and look like a fool in front of Harris or that Alexander had called it correctly and these men would stop at nothing to keep their secret? I stared overhead at the green smoke detector light, then at the three-foot halo it cast onto the floor. I needed a plan.

  Plan A: follow through on my promise to Harris, then call the cops. If we gave them the photo and the contact information for the owner, they should bag the bad guy in no time. That would let me fulfill my promise, let her get the recognition she deserved, and keep her and Alexander safe. The mention of his name reminded me that Plan A would fail because Alexander could never admit that he’d been in that park. Okay, Plan B: make the report anonymous and still get the photo to the cops somehow. The good news was that Plan B would make everyone happy; the bad news was that I was wide awake and operating on two hours sleep.

  I moved to a dining table chair and listened to the rainwater gurgle down the gutters. Raindrops smacked the palm fronds like sticks on concrete. About thirty minutes later, Lono stopped the show. It wasn’t long before the sprinklers kicked in, adding their constant hiss to the morning’s routine.

  It was 5:05 AM when the sprinklers shut off. I did another quick check on Harris; her breathing sounded slow and regular. Peaceful. I tiptoed out the door and closed it behind me, but accidentally bumped into her desk. The soft whir of her computer broke the silence; light from the screen illuminated the room. Like me, Harris didn’t shut down her machine, she just put it to sleep. Time to start on Plan B.

  Now past my wine-induced, stupid-me state, I realized that the idea of unraveling the whole falling-body mystery intrigued me. Finding the owner before Legs awoke would show that I hadn’t lost my touch. Uh oh. I’d better stop calling her that. Maybe she found it demeaning. I probably wouldn’t want someone calling me “Stud” or “Studley” or “Stud-muffin.” Not that anyone had ever called me by one of those nicknames—so how would I know?

  I sat on the edge of the chair in front of Harris’s computer and congratulated myself on my newfound politically correct attitude and the fact that I was making progress on beginning to put my past mistakes behind me.

  I double clicked Harris’s browser icon an
d did an Internet search for “aircraft registration inquiry.” That gave me a list of sites for Canada, Asia and more. I revised my search and added “US” to the beginning of the search phrase. Presto! The Federal Aviation Administration was at the top of the list. I clicked the link for “FAA—Aircraft Certification: Registration Inquiry.”

  That led me to the FAA web site, where visitors could search for a registration number. This wasn’t rocket science. It had taken me less than two minutes to find the FAA’s site and click the link to do a search. When the page finished loading, I stared at it, groaning. Ten options to choose from. Fortunately, only the first one made sense. The instructions said that the FAA used N as the first character of the registration number. I studied the number we’d gotten from the plane for a few seconds—duh, the M was really an N.

  A click on the link gave me a page with one blank text field. Could they make this any easier? I clicked in the text box and got a message that said, “The N-Number of the aircraft of which you wish to inquire. N is implicit.” How nice.

  Tap, tap, tap, numbers in the field, making sure I left off the N so the FAA wouldn’t secretly log me as an idiot for not following directions. The message that appeared on the screen read, “Alphabetic characters cannot follow numeric characters.”

  It wasn’t even light yet, so I had to think about that one. Oh. I whispered at the screen, “Why didn’t you just say, ‘Numbers Only?’” Bureaucrats. If the Z in the number wasn’t a Z, it was probably a 2. I tried that and instantly got registration details for Laura P. Daggett in Cincinnati, Ohio. What would her plane be doing here on Oahu? That couldn’t be right. So we’d been wrong about the number. No problem there, either. I had the database and the access. And some time.

  I looked at the N-Number again. We’d thought that the third and fifth characters had been fours, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were nines.

  This time, I replaced each “4” with a “9.” Nothing. After trying a couple of different combinations, the details for a Cessna 206H registered to Robert M. Shapiro, Jr. appeared on the screen. Our pilot lived in an apartment on Kaiulani Ave. in Honolulu.