Burn by Paul Slatter

Author:Paul Slatter [Slatter, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TNCS Books Inc
Published: 2017-01-31T22:00:00+00:00

******

Mazzi Hegan sat in the boardroom and flipped through the stills he’d gotten of Dan in the toilet. Pissed off, Sebastian paced up and down behind him. He didn’t know what on earth was going on. No one had gotten back to him to tell him anything. The only information he’d received was secondhand from the girl in reception saying that Dan was seriously ill and being taken by ambulance to the hospital. Luckily, he’d managed to pass that on to Chendrill as soon as he’d answered his ruddy phone, and then, all worried, he’d walked into the boardroom and found Mazzi in there, his feet propped up on a table, eating cheese and drinking wine while looking at the stills of Dan struggling in the toilet of the yacht he’d just spent five thousand dollars to hire for the day.

Mazzi Hegan listened to his partner—who knew more about advertising and design than anyone he’d ever known—unload and waited until he’d finished. Then, looking up at him, he said, “Yeah, but have you seen these shots? They’re bloody good, though.”

They were. Sebastian couldn’t deny it. This guy was good. Nothing he produced ever looked staged. It always had such a raw element to it, something he’d only seen coming from frontline war photographers.

Mazzi Hegan looked at Sebastian with a smile and said, “Who needs a yacht when you can get shots like this?”

Sebastian leaned in to look at the crystal clear shot of Dan struggling in the toilet with his pants around his knees. The look of terror on his face was accentuated by the sharp movie light crashing through the window and exploding in his hair.

“You don’t get gold like that up on deck.”

“Why’s he look so worried?” Sebastian asked.

“He’s got crabs.”

Sebastian screwed up his face and said, “Eh?”

Mazzi looked up and said, “It’s okay—I called an ambulance.”

And he had—he had as soon as he had heard the stress in Dan’s voice, but not before he’d acted on instinct, getting the door open and aggressively shooting until he’d gotten what he needed. That’s what this advertising campaign was all about. It was about fear and desperation, not yachts and backgrounds and wind in your hair. It was about being raw and scared and frustrated and dirty.

Sebastian took a seat and called for his dog, who was rummaging around the floor looking for scraps. “Don’t you think an ambulance was a little overboard?” he asked.

Mazzi looked up from his computer. “He said he had crabs. What was I supposed to do?”

Sebastian closed his eyes and frowned. He’d caught them when he was a student working on a farm in Bavaria after a lederhosen night in the small town at the bottom of the mountain—and all he’d done was take himself through the sheep dip. “Come on, it’s hardly an emergency,” he said.

“For you, sitting here, it’s not! I mean, what did you expect me to do? I haven’t got a car, you know. You’ve commandeered it. How was I to know how infested he was?”

Sebastian looked at him.

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