Free Impossible Things by Connie Willis Page B

face. “If they come back, you tell them that you gave me a ride to the vet’s.” I went back to the developer. The longshot film was done. “Eject,” I said, and the developer spit it into my hand. I fed it into the recycler.
    “McCombe! Where the hell are you?” Ramirez’s voice exploded into the room, and I jumped and started for the door, but she wasn’t there. The phone was flashing. “McCombe! This is important!”
    Ramirez was on the phone and using some override I didn’t even know existed. I went over and pushed it back to access. The lights went out. “I’m here,” I said.
    “You won’t believe what just happened!” She sounded outraged. “A couple of terrorist types from the Society just stormed in here and confiscated the stuff you sent me!”
    All I’d sent her was the vidcam footage and the shots from the eisenstadt, and there shouldn’t have been anything on those. Jake had already washed the bumper. “What stuff?” I said.
    “The prints from the eisenstadt!” she said, still shouting. “Which I didn’t have a chance to look at when they came in because I was too busy trying to work a trade on your governor’s conference, not to mention trying to track you down! I had hardcopies made and sent the originals straight down to composing with your vidcam footage. I finally got to them half an hour ago, and while I’m sorting through them, this Society creep just grabs them away from me. No warrants, no ‘would you mind?’—nothing. Right out of my hand. Like a bunch of—”
    “Jackals,” I said. “You’re sure it wasn’t the vidcam footage?” There wasn’t anything in the eisenstadt shotsexcept Mrs. Ambler and Taco, and even Hunter couldn’t have put that together, could he?
    “Of course I’m sure,” Ramirez said, her voice bouncing off the walls. “It was one of the prints from the eisenstadt. I never even saw the vidcam stuff. I sent it straight to composing. I told you.”
    I went over to the developer and fed the cartridge in. The first dozen shots were nothing, stuff the eisenstadt had taken from the backseat of the car. “Start with frame ten,” I said. “Positives. One two three order. Five seconds.”
    “What did you say?” Ramirez demanded.
    “I said, did they say what they were looking for?”
    “Are you kidding? I wasn’t even there as far as they were concerned. They split up the pile and started through them on
my
desk.”
    The yucca at the foot of the hill. More yucca. My forearm as I set the eisenstadt down on the counter. My back.
    “Whatever it was they were looking for, they found it,” Ramirez said.
    I glanced at Katie. She met my gaze steadily, unafraid. She had never been afraid, not even when I told her she had killed all the dogs, not even when I showed up on her doorstep after fifteen years.
    “The one in the uniform showed it to the other one,” Ramirez was saying, “and said, ‘You were wrong about the woman doing it. Look at this.’ ”
    “Did you get a look at the picture?”
    Still life of cups and spoons. Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back.
    “I tried. It was a truck of some kind.”
    “A truck? Are you sure? Not a Winnebago?”
    “A truck. What the hell is going on over there?”
    I didn’t answer. Jake’s back. Open shower door. Still life with Sanka. Mrs. Ambler remembering Taco.
    “What woman are they talking about?” Ramirez said. “The one you wanted the lifeline on?”
    “No,” I said. The picture of Mrs. Ambler was the last one on the cartridge. The developer went back to the beginning. Bottom half of the Hitori. Open car door. Prickly pear. “Did they say anything else?”
    “The one in uniform pointed to something on the hardcopy and said, ‘See. There’s his number on the side. Can you make it out?’ ”
    Blurred palm trees and the expressway. The tanker hitting the jackal.
    “Stop,” I said. The image froze.
    “What?” Ramirez said.
    It was a great action shot, the back wheels passing