"It might end up in one of your movies, huh?"

"You can't ever tell," he replied, and smiled.

On one wall were framed still shots from Cisco's films, and on a side wall photographs that were all milestones in Megan's career: a ragged ditch strewn with the bodies of civilians in Guatemala, African children whose emaciated faces were crawling with blowflies, French Legionnaires pinned down behind sandbags while mortar rounds geysered dirt above their heads.

But, oddly, the color photograph that had launched her career and had made Life magazine was located at the bottom corner of the collection. It had been shot in the opening of a storm drain that bled into the Mississippi just as an enormous black man, in New Orleans City Prison denims strung with sewage, had burst out of the darkness into the fresh air, his hands raised toward the sun, as though he were trying to pay tribute to its energy and power. But a round from a sharpshooter's rifle had torn through his throat, exiting in a bloody mist, twisting his mouth open like that of a man experiencing orgasm.

A second framed photograph showed five uniformed cops looking down at the body, which seemed shrunken and without personality in death. A smiling crew-cropped man in civilian clothes was staring directly at the camera in the foreground, a red apple with a white hunk bitten out of it cupped in his palm.

"What are you thinking about?" Cisco asked.

"Seems like an inconspicuous place to put these," I said.

"The guy paid some hard dues. For Megan and me, both," he said.

"Both?"

"I was her assistant on that shot, inside the pipe when those cops decided he'd make good dog food. Look, you think Hollywood's the only meat market out there? The cops got citations. The black guy got to rape a sixteen-year-old white girl before he went out. I get to hang his picture on the wall of a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar house. The only person who didn't get a trade-off was the high school girl."