Page 97 of (My Accidental) Killer Summer
He stretches, all elbows. “Man, you gotta be more specific. I’m basically the HOA of cameras in that neighborhood.”
“Frog,” I say. “Front yard frog cam. Motion activated.”
He laughs. “Oh. Mrs. Purvis. Yeah, her son bought the kit on discount. She calls him Norman. Says Norman watches the ‘riffraff.’ Which is everyone.”
I pull a folded twenty from my pocket and lay it next to the register. He raises an eyebrow. I lay another. Then two more. My wallet is lighter. My conscience is heavier. “I need a clipcorrupted,” I tell him. “Tuesday morning sometime between six-thirty and seven-fifteen. Same angle.”
He looks at the money like it’s a test he’s already passed. “You a client now?”
“Tonight,” I say. “After, you forget you saw me.”
Santos drums his fingers once, then sighs and shuffles through a bin of stickers and zip ties until he finds a dog-eared card with the system ID. “They never change the defaults,” he says, typing, the screen reflecting in his glasses. “I tell ’em to. They think ‘admin/admin’ is an identity.”
His cursor floats through a cluttered interface. He clicks a calendar. “It’ll take a second. I gotta start a few hours before. Just the way it’s catalogued.”
I nod and watch over his shoulder as he flips through tiled grids of low-res images —a raccoon at two-oh-four, a yellow pickup at two-thirty-eight, a pair of figures at two-forty-two.
“Wait!” I stop him. “Go back.”
He scrolls back.
“Stop. That right there what’s happening there?”
He pulls up the images in succession. First, Doug parking his truck at that same crazy half-assed angle we found it at. Second, two figures that could be anyone, but are most definitelynotthe two women I am thinking about.
“What the?—”
We watch as the two figures, one short and one tall, fumble carrying the plastic wrapped body we later found in Doug’s truck to said truck and stashing it in the back.
Okay, that needs to go as well. Or my whole plan with Doug goes to shit.
I have a moment of indecision. I give the word, these two guy, whoever the fuck they are, go free.
“Throw in that one too, I’ll never bug you again.”
“Right there?” Santos asks.
I nod.
“How you want it?”
“Flare,” I say. “Lens flare. Lens artifact, corrupted partition. Make it look like bad luck and cheap hardware.”
He nods like I’ve ordered off-menu before. He drags a filter, drops a bloom on the night like a comet, then toggles the clip into a jitter of pixels that makes even my memory doubt itself for half a second.
“Now the morning,” I say.
He scrolls. My car, too far to read a plate. The truck, banana yellow bright even in grayscale. Two women pause beside it. One leans to look. The other keeps watch in that casual way people do when they know they shouldn’t be there. Norman the Front Yard Frog Cam stares with all the weight of suburban surveillance.
“That one I need gone.”
Santos glances up at me. “You sure?” he asks, so soft I could pretend he didn’t.
“No,” I say. “Do it anyway.”
He does. The image ghosts. A digital hiccup eats the middle fifteen seconds and spits back a “signal lost, reconnecting” banner that will outlive us all.
He sits back, palms flat on the counter, like we just buried something. Maybe we did.
