Reel Sharpe

by Jenna Baker

We decided it would be best to take one car, so everyone loaded into the SUV with Mac behind the wheel. Reid sat up front with Mac while Foxy, Manny, and I squeezed together in the middle row. The back seat was loaded up with equipment, and space was limited. As the female, I got stuck in the middle seat. Foxy was taking up a seat and a half and Manny was taking up a full seat, so that left me sitting on one ass cheek and having trouble breathing.

  I shifted around in my seat, trying to find a comfortable angle.

  “Hands to yourself, Sharpe. I told you I’m married,” Foxy said.

  “My lap is available if you’d prefer,” Manny said.

  I rolled my eyes and shifted again in my seat. “Move over!” I barked at Foxy.

  Ten minutes later I was sitting on Manny’s lap. I wasn’t terribly comfortable in this position either, but it beat the alternative. I had texted my sister that the spray tan had turned my skin orange and now my phone was blowing up with incoming calls. I was on the line with Ginny but my mother kept trying to beep in.

  “You’re ruining everything! If you had just gradually tanned like I did, this would have never happened!” Ginny whined over the phone.

  “Don’t blame this on me! You’re the genius who dyed me this color in the first place!”

  The guys in the car were trying to tune me out, but as I got louder and louder, they had trouble ignoring me.

  “Ginny, hold on, Mom keeps calling – hold on!” I clicked over to my mother. “Mom, I don’t even want to hear it from you.”

  “I’m spending ten thousand dollars on a photographer and you look like a giant peach!” my mother began.

  “Then tell the photographer to shoot in black and white.”

  My phone beeped. I saw that Ginny had hung up and was now redialing me. “Mom, look I’ve got to go, okay? I’m working, don’t keep calling me.” I clicked over to my sister. “Ginny, I took a shower and got a lot of it off, okay? Just relax. Go sleep with Bob and make him cry or something.”

  That last comment got me a couple of strange looks from the guys.

  “How dare you bring that up!” Ginny fumed. “I told you that in confidence.”

  “Well, I didn’t tell anyone, even if it is ridiculous! Look, I’ve gotta go.” I hung up the phone. “Ahh!” I cried out. “Never get married, guys – you turn into a crazy person.”

  “What’s this about doing a dude until he cries?” Manny wanted to know.

  I silenced him with a glare and turned my focus to Mac. “Are we there yet?”

  “Getting close,” Reid said. “It’s been hard to navigate with all the chatter going on in here.”

  Outside, the land around us was brown and burned. There were a series of hills and small brushes scattered around, and it was looking more and more like the desert. Mac was staring intently at the terrain. “Are those tire tracks there?” Mac asked, pointing.

  “Yeah, turn here,” Reid said to Mac.

  Mac turned the car and we drove off the road into a grassy embankment. Mac stopped the car, and we all got out and looked around. I didn’t have a good sense of direction and couldn’t be sure this was the same spot we were in the night before, but it certainly looked similar. Reid paced back and forth, looking around.

  “Yeah, I think this is the spot. Sharpe, what do you think?”

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  Mac pulled my PD-150 out of the back seat and played the tape from the night before. He paused it on an image and surveyed the scene. He squinted, then started walking towards the road, looking back and forth like a search dog.

  “What’s he doing?” Reid asked me.

  “He’s just being Mac,” I answered.

  Mac disappeared for a while, then I heard him call out, “I got it!”

  We all walked onto the street and saw that Mac was about five hundred feet down the road. He was shifting his gaze between the camera and the street to ensure he was correct. We all headed down the road to join him.

  “Sharpe, you stood here, right?” Mac said, angling himself on the right side of the road.

  I knew he lived for this stuff, so I tried to show more enthusiasm than I actually felt. “Yeah – wow, Mac!”

  Reid walked over to Mac and looked around. I was worried that Reid was going to get his feathers ruffled, but he didn’t. “Nice job, man. Yeah, this is the spot.”

  Reid looked to the left and saw the clearing that Kitt had driven his car through. We all followed him off the road and across the dirt. I indicated to Mac that he should get some footage of this stuff, so he powered on and started rolling. Manny pulled out his boom mic and started recording audio as well.

  “Maybe you could take us through this as you look, okay, Reid?” I asked. “Just tell us what you’re looking for.”

  Reid rolled his eyes but nodded. He turned and we all followed. He spoke as he walked. “The perp drove through these bushes here. You can see the tire tracks on the ground,” Reid began.

  Mac panned down to capture the tracks.

  “If we follow the tracks they will lead us to the exact pick-up point,” Reid said.

  We followed the tracks for another couple hundred feet and then they stopped. There was a lot of upturned dirt where Kitt likely turned his car around.

  “They must have met him right here,” Reid said, looking around. “There’s lots of brush cover out here. It would be easy to hide at night.”

  Mac panned across the desert and the various boulders and bushes that studded the barren surface. Reid walked a little further and was able to find some cigarette butts behind a large tree.

  “This tree is probably the pick-up point. Easy landmark,” Reid said.

  We grabbed a couple more shots of the tire tracks and cigarette butts, then headed back to the street.

  “Where do you want to set up?” Foxy asked Reid.

  “I’m thinking we can get a vehicle hidden off-road pretty easily out here. We should probably pick a point up the road.”

  Foxy and Reid walked up the street to find a good spot while Mac picked up a few cutaways. “I’m gonna rig that tree with a night vision camera,” Mac told me.

  “Nice,” I told him. “Just make sure it’s hidden.”

  “Come on, this is me you’re talking to,” Mac said.

  He walked over to the car to unload his equipment. “Sharpe?” he called out. “We’ve got movement on Kitt.”

  I ran over to the car to get a better look. Mac pulled out his computer and tried to get a signal on the GPS to track Kitt’s exact location.

  “He’s not getting on the freeway, he’s taking side streets,” Mac said. He pointed at the blinking dot on the computer screen. “He’s stopping here. I think there’s a fast food joint on that corner.”

  We stared at that blinking dot for the next few minutes. It wasn’t going anywhere but we would be ready if it did. Reid and Foxy returned after selecting the perfect hiding spot, and we filled them in on the progress. The blinking dot finally started moving again, but it was only to return back home.

  “I guess he was just hungry,” Foxy said.

  “Yeah, but at least we know it works,” Mac said.

  Mac spent the next hour rigging the tree with a night vision camera and talking to Manny and the cops about how the events of the night would go down. Mac wanted to make sure not to miss a bit of the action and had every scenario worked out. My cell phone would ring every once in a while with my mother or sister calling, but I didn’t bother to pick up. I just sat back and let Mac and the cops run my show.