Double Whammy

R. J. Decker had been born in Texas. His father had been an FBI man, and the family had lived in Dallas until December of 1963. Two weeks after Kennedy was shot, Decker's father was transferred to Miami and assigned to a crack squad whose task was to ensure that no pals of Fidel Castro took a shot at LBJ. It was a tense and exciting time, but it passed. Decker's father eventually wound up in a typically stupefying FBI desk job, got fat, and died of clogged arteries at age forty-nine. One of Decker's older brothers grew up to be a cop in Minneapolis. The other sold Porsches to cocaine dealers in San Francisco.

A good athlete and a fair student in college, R. J. Decker surprised all his classmates by becoming a professional photographer. Cameras were his private passion; he was fascinated with the art of freezing time in the eye. He never told anyone but it was the Zapruder film that had done it. When Lifemagazine had come out with those grainy movie pictures of the assassination, R. J. Decker was only eight years old. Still he was transfixed by the frames of the wounded president and his wife. The pink of her dress, the black blur of the Lincoln—horrific images, yet magnetic. The boy never imagined such a moment could be captured and kept for history. Soon afterward he got his first camera.

For Decker, photography was more than just a hobby, it was a way of looking at the world. He had been cursed with a short temper and a cynical outlook, so the darkroom became a soothing place, and the ceremony of making pictures a gentle therapy.

Much to his frustration, the studio-photography business proved unbearably dull and profitable. Decker did weddings, bar mitzvahs, portraits, and commercial jobs, mostly magazine advertisements. He was once paid nine thousand dollars to take the perfect picture of a bottle of Midol. The ad showed up in all the big women's magazines, and Decker clipped several copies to send to his friends, as a joke on himself.

And, of course, there were the fashion layouts with professional models. The first year Decker fell in love seventeen times. The second year he let the Hasselblad do the falling in love. His pictures were very good, he was making large sums of money, and he was bored out of his skull.

One afternoon on Miami Beach, while Decker was on a commercial shoot for a new tequila-scented suntan oil, a young tourist suddenly tore off her clothes and jumped into the Atlantic and tried to drown herself. The lifeguards reached her just in time, and Decker snapped a couple of frames as they carried her from the surf. The woman's blond hair was tangled across her cheeks, her eyes were puffy and half-closed, and her lips were grey. What really made the photograph was the face of one of the lifeguards who had rescued the young woman. He'd carefully wrapped his arms around her bare chest to shield her from the gawkers, and in his eyes Decker's lens had captured both panic and pity.

For the hell of it Decker gave the roll of film to a newspaper reporter who had followed the paramedics to the scene. The next day the Miami Sunpublished Decker's photograph on the front page, and paid him the grand sum of thirty dollars. The day after that, the managing editor offered him a full-time job and Decker said yes.

In some ways it was the best move he ever made. In some ways it was the worst. Decker only wished he would have lasted longer.

He thought of this as he drove into Harney County, starting a new case, working for a man he didn't like at all.

Harney was Dickie Lockhart's hometown, and the personal headquarters of his bass-fishing empire.

Upon arrival the first thing Decker did was to find Ott Pickney, which was easy. Ott was not a man on the move.

He wrote obituaries for the Harney Sentinel,which published two times a week, three during boar season. The leisurely pace of the small newspaper suited Ott Pickney perfectly because it left plenty of time for golf and gardening. Before moving to Central Florida, Pickney had worked for seventeen years at the Miami Sun,which is where Decker had met him. At first Decker had assumed from Ott's sluggish behavior that here was a once-solid reporter languishing in the twilight of his career; it soon became clear that Ott Pickney's career had begun in twilight and grown only dimmer. That he had lasted so long in Miami was the result of a dense newsroom bureaucracy that always seemed to find a place for him, no matter how useless he was. Ott was one of those newspaper characters who got passed from one department to another until, after so many years, he had become such a sad fixture that no editor wished to be remembered as the one who fired him. Consequently, Ott didn't get fired. He retired from the Sunat full pension and moved to Harney to write obits and grow prizewinning orchids.