I heard his story as a young boy growing up in South Alabama. The names were different, except for Murder Creek, which despite its name, is a good place to canoe.

Long before he got killed, Lemuel Pitsimons was a dangerous man. Not that he was a mean man by any accounts. He was not. But Lemuel was a man not to be taken lightly if you got on his wrong side. And if the stories are to be believed, 12 people did just that before he was buried down near Murder Creek in 1953.

The creek got its name honestly. In 1788 a group of men traveling to Pensacola for passports before heading to the Spanish province of Louisiana were slaughtered in the thick woods near the crooked water north of where it flows into the larger Conecuh. It has been called Murder Creek ever since.

Lemuel’s contradictory reputation was not easy to decipher. He grew up fishing under the narrow bridges and swimming in the chocolate water that moves smoothly through the rural hills. A lot of boys did. Neighbors saw Lemuel there almost every day, even when he should have been in school. After he died, old women from the church said he probably ingested too much of the cursed water for his own good. A lot of boys did. Such a thing is impossible unless you believe in curses instead of genetic meanness. If Lemuel had any of the latter, he kept it hidden. His killing was fair and on the level and usually in self-defense or in the defense of others. That is how the law saw it. And they might be right. But people talk.

“Some people need killing,” he once told a judge after stabbing three men who tried to rob a widow behind a grocery store. “If not, they’ll hurt more people.”

His father, Samuel, was a backwoods, crude, lawless man capable of giving Murder Creek its name without historical precedence. It was said he killed nine men and two wives before Lemuel killed him in, of course, self-defense, on a Saturday night after Samuel came home drunk from a Klan meeting and started beating 12 year-old Lemuel. The old man just needed killing.

Some people are born into rough circumstances. Luck, however, played a miniscule part in the things that happened to Lemuel, even if people did say he was unlucky. Lemuel made his bad luck by looking for trouble with a determination usually reserved for people trying to survive a terrible situation like cancer or kidnapping or imprisonment. At one time or another, Lemuel dealt with all of those things. Not any of them killed him however. Cynese Willburn did him that favor. If she had not done it, she would have been number 13. That is what she told people at the trial anyway. Ironically, she killed him in self-defense with his own gun, a little snub-nosed Cuban pistol.

Killers often seem like decent people thrown into bad times. For each killing, though, Lemuel offered a good reason and no court ever disagreed. While he spent time in jail and even prison, not a single person would have called him a murderer. Some even called him a hero. On his way home from jail one night, he saved 4 young girls from drowning in Murder Creek after a hard rain when their car swerved into the flooded water. Both parents drowned, their bodies found a week later at the mouth of the Conecuh River, bullet holes in their heads. Questions were asked. No answers were given. Lemuel had no motive. The police had no case. The four little girls were alive because of him. It was complicated and made more so when a rumor started that the parents owed Lemuel money. If they did, he never got paid.

Lemuel helped people down on their luck more than a few times. He built pews at a church for free and painted houses all over south Alabama. He fixed roofs for poor families and fed hobos off the rains coming up from Mobile. All the while, however, no matter how many good deeds he did, deep inside, something chewed at him; something he never talked about; something no one understood until 48 years after his funeral.

Vampires only exist in stories and nightmares. Yet there were people who said Lemuel was one. Ghosts live in horror tales, unless you lived near a store where five people died at the hands of a man described as “tall, lanky, big eyes and pale as limestone.” As usual, Lemuel fit the description.

“Either Lemuel is a murderer or people around him are unlucky as hell,” said Harker Jernigen, a man who would know. He was as close to Lemuel as anyone alive, until fishermen found his body a week after saying those words to his wife. She never blamed Lemuel. Others did. There was no proof.

Over the years, Lemuel went to a lot of funerals. And caused most of them according to Revered Garner Ward. Even when he smiled and laughed and appeared as gentle as a speckled puppy, people feared him. What they did not know was how much Lemuel feared himself.

Things are seldom as clear as we want them to be. Life is messy. Mistakes happen. People get hurt. People die. We seldom forgive those we fear, even if they are innocent. Our fear is enough to convict them. Our blame is enough to make them guilty. And sometimes we are those people.

On her death bed in 2001 an 82 year-old Cynese Willborn confessed that she did not kill Lemuel on the banks of Murder Creek in 1953. “He shot hisself,” she said. “He asked me to say I did it in self-defense. Said everyone would believe it.”

They did.

“Why?” asked her granddaughter. “Why did he kill himself?”

“Maybe some people just need killing,” said the old woman, “or they’ll hurt more people.”

I am standing under a Magnolia tree (or bay tree as my grandmother called it) in humidity so thick I can taste it. Its trunk – thicker than a 50-gallon drum – pushes up into twisted, low branches holding hand-sized leaves that slap away some of the heat above me. Our old house used to stand over to my left, the tool shed to my right, and the chicken house behind me. A small pile of bricks mark the filled-in well like a neglected grave. Cicadas scratch loudly and birds call Bob White’s name exactly the way they did in my first memories of this place. And my first memories are of this place.

It wasn’t much of a farm, even back in the 1960’s when my grandfather had to hang up the big plow and get a job with the county clearing brush beside the road. Nine-hour shifts turned into 15-hour days when you added the corn, peanuts, soybeans, peas, a few desperate hogs and a pen full of scraggly chickens. Once he hit 17 years old, my father married my mother and finally left to get a real job in town as a butcher at the Piggly Wiggly. Cutting up hogs on a hundred cold days makes a boy pretty handy with a knife. Yet even in hot or cold weather, flush or lean times, this place was home. And still is to a large degree.

Yellow River oozes past the back forty, its muddy banks and chocolate water thick with cottonmouths and bullfrogs on its way down to Blackwater Bay and Pensacola. Loblolly pines shade the possums, deer and a panther or two. Unless you are a high school football fan or a vacationer on your way to the Panhandle beaches of Florida, you’ll never see this part of LA (Lower Alabama). It is not exactly a tourist destination. But I am no tourist here.

I grew up in these fields, dancing with fire ants, chasing rabbits and running from rattlers. My grandfather tried to instill in me a healthy fear of snakes, but seeing the old man catch them by their tails and snap off their heads in a whipping motion made me want to play Indiana Jones with every one I saw slithering around the mucky bottoms near Five Runs Creek over near Babbie. The head-snapping part always eluded me, however, so after a few tries I gave it up. Probably why I’m still alive.

I tasted homemade ice cream for the first time and drank well water and learned to drive a John Deere at about the exact spot where that picture was taken at the top of this page. The first fried chicken, and biscuits, and butter beans and watermelon went down my throat here too. The ground under that St. Augustine grass holds hundreds of old .22 shells from when I was a kid learning how to drill a can from 100 yards. That same grass was watered by gallons of sweat from a hundred years of my family. Eventually I came to the same conclusion they all did: I could not make a living here either. Farming is romantic until you have to do it to survive.

That one photo up there contains so much of my life that I see something different every time I look at it. The best Christmases of my childhood happened here. Thanksgivings too. Learning how to hold a bottle rocket by the stick until the last minute when the fuse meets the powder happened here. Every person I know in my family sat under these trees at one time or another. Every one of those people are gone. My grandfather and grandmother died just to the left. My father fell there towards the end of his life when his brain and legs could not see eye to eye. Chickens whose necks I had rung tried to outrun a frying pan somewhere near the middle of that photo. Probably a thousand bushels of pecans have fallen over to the right up there. It looks like an empty field, but I see 50 years of family and friends inside that square.

If you live in a city – and I have for most of my life since leaving the farm – you may not appreciate the fecund smell of fresh-turned earth under a coming storm. This far out in the country the sound of creatures roaming the trees can hardly be called silence. It is affirmation that you are not the most important thing in the world; you are just part of something more important. At times, you may be the least important thing you hear.

The longer a person stands far away from the daily bullshit we treasure, the less that person needs it. The money in my pocket seems less valuable out here. The deadlines are not pressing anymore. Simplicity is not a word, but an attitude. I have felt this way in other places, but this is where I felt it first.

It only lasts for a few minutes before my cell phone rings. Things to do. Places to go.

Urgent voices talk as I drive away, leaving the good part of me behind under that big old bay tree.

Alabama summer harvest: Covington County tomatoes, Chilton County peaches and plums.

The tomatoes were fire red. The plums were speckled purple. Peaches have their own color: peach. I know that because I saw it at Lowe’s in the paint department.

Brown paper sacks bulging with all three jostled in our backseat after a long and circuitous route through almost every state in the Deep South. The tomatoes came from the patch of a former Ag teacher at my high school in Andalusia. The peaches and plums had been waiting for us up the road in Chilton County, Alabama. If you think Georgia peaches are the best, you are mistaken. The land around Clanton, Alabama grows the best peaches I have ever eaten, and while you may claim otherwise, my own mouth is the only measurement of taste I can attest to.

South Alabama tomatoes can be eaten like apples if you don’t mind juice running down your chin, and I don’t. But by leaning way over, I avoided messing up my shirt. With the peaches and plums, Susan nor I were so lucky.

By the time we made McFarland Blvd. in Tuscaloosa, we had peach-colored stains on the fronts of our shirts. I had plum juice on mine as well, which is why I prefer to wear ugly, multicolored shirts – to hide the barbecue and other such droppings. Susan’s shirt, despite being peach in color already, showed peach stains anyway. This just proves several peach colors grow across the spectrum.

A decade separated us from our last visit to the gentrified shade of our alma mater, the University of Alabama. It was a hard contrast to the absolute destruction of the recent tornado that scraped half the town down to stumps and PVC pipes protruding up from concrete foundations. Bent metal, thrown bricks, pocked walls, twisted cars, ripped wood and broken glass had been bulldozed into pyramids in an effort to clean up the horror. It was a study in contradictions; total mayhem passing just a few hundred feet from untouched beauty. The randomness of the violence left us speechless and we drove street after street saying very little.

Alberta City, a small town where we used to go to an IHOP 34 years ago, was gone. No buildings, no trees, an elementary school wiped clean from the ground as if it had never there. To the left or right, fenced-n rubble for as far as you can see.

The university was almost untouched. After walking around the old campus, visiting familiar haunts and admiring dozens of new buildings, we went to the one of the best restaurants in our memory – only to find the Waysider closed for the day, but undamaged. Catch them in the morning and be prepared to wait for the best biscuits you will ever eat. Catch them at the wrong time and you end up at Waffle House down the road (which I refuse to complain about since I consider Waffle House to be as fine a dining establishment as there is in any town).

With good and bad memories of Tuscaloosa in our rearview mirror and an All American breakfast in our stomach (yes, we eat breakfast for dinner a lot), we drove toward Birmingham, past the Mercedes-Benz plant and Bessemer, looking at the Vulcan, the largest iron state in the world, perched on Red Mountain to our right. Night caught up with us near Trussville and we used our AAA card to whittle down a hotel room for the night. At the check in counter, the old woman looked at the stains on my shirt and said, “Looks like y’all must have come up through Chilton County.”

The dirt track hugs wooden bleachers angling up about 25 feet into the damp Shenandoah wind. A man in a camo gimme cap with a belly big enough to have swallowed a small child chugs by wearing a painted-on-tight t-shirt, confederate tats embroidering his hairy forearms. Gasoline fumes laced with cigarette smoke and the aroma of deep-fried grease float in the muddy breeze between the trucks parked in the grass lot. A pretty woman walks by with a Bible verse on her shirt while another woman, less pretty, curses at a man on her cell phone. Two-toned blondes in skin-tight jeans snuggle wiry thin boys next to a concession stand that is big enough for a decent wrestling match. I could tell this was going to be fun from county fair smell and the sound of rubber churning mud on the far side of the weathered grandstands.

Walking into the crowd, I look around at Jim, my doctor and friend long before that. “I’ll give you $20 to yell, ‘I love Barack Obama?’”

“I’m not taking that bet. Besides, I don’t have my medical kit with me,” he says with a straight face. He is not kidding.

Rain pounds the red clay track into a reflective ooze slicker than owl manure squishing under the tires of warped, colorful cars built by hand from pipes and fiberglass and a desire to win some spending money.

Nothing says Saturday night like wet bleachers plastering your ass to the seat of your pants while people around you yell at flimsy, dirt-plastered cars barreling around a slippery oval. The rain stops. Racecars rumble onto the slush single file. Everyone secretly waits for the wreck that eventually comes.

It takes 15 minutes. A Navy blue Mustang switches ends, grinding and sandwiching between two other Mustangs. It seems that every car on the track is a Mustang. I grin. Jim grins. The first wreck, albeit small, has occurred. Everyone feels like they got some of what they came for.

Above us, frantic bugs boil in hypnotic patterns around the lights causing Jim and me to divert our gaze from the speckled brown racing.

“Try to follow one,” says Jim, watching the bugs arc and loop in big, goofy circles.

I do for a while, before looking over at a grizzly gentleman spitting a slurry of Red Man and corn chips over the rail. It barely misses a pregnant woman eating a hotdog. You cannot purchase this kind of entertainment in New York City or Los Angeles. But it happens every Saturday night in small towns across the South.

“That guy looks just like…” A crunching sound to our left pinches off my sentence. What I see pushes the spitter from importance.

People stand and scream and point left. A bulbous man burps and yells, “Brrlook!” all in one raucous motion. Up in the tight curve of slanting earth a purple and white car collides with a lime green car spilling curled sheets of what was once purple and lime green cars onto the track. A red and blue racer swerves to miss the chunks and hits the guardrail like a paper airplane unfolding, sending wobbly slices of thin fuselage across the ground in a manner resembling tossed potato chips. The orange light glows from the tower, pissed-off drivers get out of their wrecks, and a hurried cleanup commences. The surviving cars roam and jerk back and forth around the track, anxious for the green light.

I inhale a haze of rusty air thrown up by spinning tires. Puffs from a cigarette brush my face, burning my eyes. Beside me, smoke plumes between the puckered lips of a woman chomping a mound of chili cheese nachos loaded with raw onions. Uncorking my earplugs, I look over at Jim. He looks like a man visiting either a zoo or a strip joint for the first time.

“I’m liking this,” he says.

“It’s the most fun I’ve had since I was a kid in Montgomery, Alabama,” I say. “Wish my dad was here to see this.” He loved to watch cars drive in circles.

Jim and I stand frozen between city and country, lost in a time warp that feels like 1966. For me, the aroma of blue collar summer nights mix with fading memories of Red Farmer trading paint with one of the Allison’s while two men beat each other with cowboy boots not 5 feet away. This was my youth revisiting for just a moment. I cannot speak of what Jim’s thoughts held. But he looked hypnotized by the proceedings.

“Worth every one of those ten dollars,” says Jim. He turns, looks up at the crowd and leans in nervously. “Let’s get the hell out of here before these boys get all raced up out there in the parking lot.”

We walk away and into the misty night, our ears ringing, our noses filled with wet dirt, our inner rednecks smiling. Well, at least mine.

(to be continued somewhere down the road)

I’ll get this out of the way right up front: I grew up in LA (meaning Lower Alabama). So when I speak of rednecks, it is not with disdain, but affection. I have changed a lot over the years since I used to try to out-redneck the next redneck, but right under the surface, my neck is still a little red. So it was with great anticipation that I accepted Jim’s offer to go to a dirt track Saturday night.

Jim is my doctor. He was a friend of mind long before I knew he was a physician. I picked up on his profession when our boys were playing little league baseball 15 years ago. People kept calling him “Doc.” After several games of me bitching about the lousy coaching I finally asked him if “Doc” was a nickname.

“No,” he said in his dry smiling manner. “I’m really a doctor.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I could probably use one.” And so our long friendship began, even though it is a little tough to go eat with a man who has to check your prostate every year. I suppose it comes with the territory when one of your best friends is also your doctor.

Jim used to be the team doctor for the Florida Gators football team. Being an Alabama alumnus, I long ago forgave him this athletic indiscretion. He is also a bit of an adventurer as he loves to camp out in thunderstorms, ride 90 miles a day on his bike and swim in arctic waters. To say he may be more eccentric than me is saying a lot. But that’s what I’m saying.

Human anthropology is one of Jim’s many offbeat hobbies. Studying people and their behavior feeds his endless curiosity and he goes far and wide to feed his affliction. Dirt track racing, naturally, is something he enjoys. Under a threatening cloud, we drove the hour and a half west on I-64 from Richmond past Charlottesville and over Afton Mountain into the Shenandoah Valley. We had thirty minutes to kill before the race so we went looking for some food. We found BBQ instead.

One of our shared pastimes is eating at out of the way dive joints that serve food neither of us, at our age, should be eating. But hell, he’s a doctor, so if I go down he can either help me or pronounce me dead. I’d as soon die in a BBQ joint with Jim than alone in my office writing a script. With my medical training, however, if he goes down while choking on a chicken wing, he’s screwed. For me CPR consists of calling 911 to report the location of the victim.

Before even getting to his pork sandwich, Jim got stuck in the restroom – literally. He was yelling, twisting the flopping, rusty knob and pounding on the malfunctioning door. I thought the commotion was a fight in the kitchen over a rib or some baked beans. A woman at the cash register finally had to rescue him. After my pork sandwich, the same thing happened to me. The adventure had begun.

While we drove towards the track and flossed chunks of pork from our teeth, tablespoon-sized drops of rain fell from the pewter clouds slowly roaming in from the west. In the distance the sound of grinding gears and screaming pistons bounced off the bottom of the roiling sky.

(to be continued)

If you haven’t heard the story, last week a former Texas state trooper, Harvey Updyke, under the guise of being an Alabama fan, admitted to poisoning two 130 year-old oaks at Toomer’s Corner, a legendary celebration point next to the Auburn campus. The trees will likely die.

Toilet paper always hangs from the branches of those two big old trees after Auburn gets a big win, like the one against Alabama this past season. We yell “Roll Tide!” and they just cuss real loud (“War Damn Eagle”) and roll trees. Traditions are like that. In a “Dumb Asses Gone Wild” moment, however, this particular Toomer’s Corner’s celebration seems to have pissed off “Al from Daleville,” according to his own admission, when he called Paul Finebaum’s popular Birmingham radio program and said this:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm8AqL9FV-o

I’ll be damned. I’m not sure which is worse, killing two ancient and respected trees or being stupid enough to admit to it on the radio. The man was a Texas state trooper for a while, so perhaps that explains some of it. Needless to say, “Al” was picked up and faces one to ten years in a prison, where, no doubt, he will run crossways with some of those Auburn graduates he arrested for speeding on their way to Canada back in the day.

See, that’s sort of an inside Auburn joke right there. Alabama fans tell jokes like that. In case the punch line was lost on you, only Auburn graduates would drive through Texas to get to Canada. You tell jokes like that because Auburn fans put a Cam Newton jersey on Bear Bryant’s statue on the Tuscaloosa campus this past season. See, this Auburn/Alabama hatred can be both subtle and obvious all at once. But with this ridiculously bone-headed tree-killing incident, it has taken a national turn. Hey y’all, our underwear is showing to everyone on this one.

“This is just the beginning of hostilities,” said an Auburn friend I talked with on Friday. “We might just have to break into y’all’s library and leave a book.”

I’ve seen Auburn fans bolt a toilet to the roof of an Alabama student’s car and paint these words on the side: “Roll Tide Roll! Around the bowl and down the hole! Roll Tide Roll!” It can get worse than that. Stories circulate about people being shot, knifed, beat up and fired over their loyalties to one team or the other. Houses, cars and boats have been defaced, burned, stolen, and repainted in a rival’s colors. This is not Harvard and Princeton we are talking about here, people. Those rivals steal each other’s Porsches. This is a diehard situation that makes Lee Corso sweat bullets when he pulls on the Elephant or Tiger mascot head on GameDay visits to the respective campuses. It’s a dangerous job, being a fan of Auburn or Alabama. Always has been.

I have many friends and family who went to both schools. In the years since I left the University of Alabama, my feelings have mellowed from the days when a loss to Auburn would give a boy the “loser’s flu” for a couple of days. When I read about this oak poisoning incident at Auburn, however, I felt pretty bad as well. Then again, I remember the Alabama fan hating her Auburn neighbor so bad, she seduced the neighbor’s husband – a Notre Dame fan.

Let me tell you something about Alabama: if you want to get even with your Auburn neighbor so bad you’ll sleep with a Notre Dame fan, you just might poison a whole forest.

South Alabama, between Mobile and Dothan and north of Pensacola, is a rural place filled with deer, rabbits, alligators, foxes, squirrels, bobcats, panthers and even an off-course bear or two. There are no reindeer. Not officially. This fact never stopped my uncle from hunting them.

“This year I’m gonna get me one of them reindeers,” he would say.

My cousins and I would cry. We only saw reindeer as cute characters with weird names hooked up to Santa’s sleigh. It never occurred to us that anyone would hunt one. But when the weather turned cold, my uncle would start in with boasts of “baggin ol’ Rudolph.” I knew he would not stop there. He’d take out Dasher, Dancer, Donder, Blitzen – the whole song-full. It scared the hell out of us.

Every time he would go off at 3 A.M., toting that 12-gauge, we just knew he would come back dragging one of our beloved reindeer. He never did.

Years later, I realized that he was just messing with us kids. He never intended to kill Rudolph or any other reindeer. But he got a twisted kick out of our worrying about it.

When he was an old man, invalid and dying, he pulled me aside and whispered, “You know there ain’t no reindeers down here, don’t you?”

I nodded that I did know.

“They’re all out in Los Angeles,” he said. “makin’ TV shows.” Through the pain of cancer, he grudged a smile.

On his dying day, he was still messing with us kids.

Merry Christmas

She went to the University of Alabama. So did I.

She wrote for the Rammer Jammer campus humor publication. Been there, done that. Almost kicked out of school for it.

She addressed racism and unabashedly wrote about it often. Ditto.

She won a Pulitzer Prize writing about the most famous trial since Jesus was questioned by Pontius Pilate. Using Monroeville as the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, she wrote the great American novel. Not happening here.

A Pulitzer will never sit next to my iMac. But I have done one thing in Monroeville that I’m pretty sure Ms. Lee has never done: drive a Coca-Cola truck, loading Coke machines until my back hurt in the unsubtle humidity of a town that was no different than my own. I did not exactly stir up the same interest from the locals, to be sure, unless you were thirsty, in which case they were pretty glad to see me.

Those fifty miles between Monroeville and Andalusia have now turned into fifty years. In July, “To Kill A Mockingbird” will have been an American classic for half a century, almost my entire life.

Despite black character references that offend some, her sentences helped shape my Southern attitudes as a child because the bigger story is about intolerance and prejudice in the South I knew all too well. According to Wikipedia, British librarians recently ranked it above the Bible as a book “everyone should read before they die.” You will not find it on your Kindle, however.

Dear Jeff Bezos, if you are reading this (and I doubt it), please put “To Kill A Mockingbird” in Kindle format.

All these years later, I do not know how Harper Lee will celebrate this occasion since she has never been a public person and is hardly inclined to talk about herself, preferring instead, to make her presence known by quietly helping others. Perhaps she would like for us to be farther along in race relations in this country in 2010. I cannot say.

Her language came to mind last week as I listened to two men in a café discussing President Obama in terms that would have fit nicely into a conversation about Tom Robinson in the book’s 1936 setting.

Like it or not, her characters are as real today as ever. Scout is still out there, in a small Alabama town, using her powerful words. What we need these days, however, is another Atticus Finch.

Mikal Ritko traveled alone. Things had gotten out of hand. Bren was abducted and killed by Fussell Duware. Ritko should have killed him years earlier.

Gus had jumped the hospital and fled with Jimmy. They likely drove west toward a story that would end badly for someone, maybe even them.

Agent James was dead in the door of the ER in Andalusia. Duware was good at his job and willing to do anything to get the job done. Anything.

In this case, dressing like a woman and shooting Agent James in the unpleasant daylight. It piled up in his head, ugly and unorganized.

Lemuel Zapata was still alive, probably. He had a talent for it. His son, Zeke, however, had not been so fortunate. Duware was culling.

Zeke lay cooked in cooling wreckage under a pecan tree towards Mississippi. Zapata had lost Bren and Zeke to the same piece of business.

Fussell Duware was still working, a murderer with intentions to kill everyone involved in his perceived slight. Ritko was on that list.

Jolene was out in Texas or Louisiana somewhere, probably killing people who deserved it. Ritko’s office called so much he tossed his phone.

He did not need it anymore. Silence would serve him better than the complication of communication. He stripped his life part by part.

Ritko had been trained to become invisible. Thousands of government dollars went into educating him on the skill of vanishing.

Going off the grid is not an easy thing. There must be a body. There must be a dead end. I.D.s, service weapon, badge, everything.

Fire was good; hard to run a trace on charcoal. CSI was sophisticated, but not like on TV. Cooked bones and a badge would work down here.

He made sure everything that could I.D. him was in the wreck. The men who died, like so many others, deserved it. Perhaps Ritko as well.

He was no longer Mikal Ritko. He was no one when he hot wired the farmer’s truck next to the carport and drove to the end of the highway.

Ritko’s life had been a geometric equation of people, events and evidence. He worked the calculations until he found his result. Not now.

The ordeal before him was blood and loose ends. For the first time in his life, after all of the violent things he had done, he was afraid.

He was not afraid of dying. He expected that. Felt it was overdue. He was afraid of failing. Dying was easy. Failing was unacceptable.

Ritko owed Jimmy Gantt. Jimmy had saved his life once – by not killing him when he had the change. Ironic mercy is enough sometimes.

So he owed the man for that one. More importantly, Jimmy had given Ritko the inside track on cases that made his career in the service.

Ritko came from a poor family. His parents spoke no English. Ritko’s job from childhood on was to succeed. He had done his job – and more.

He had done the worst jobs available because the odds of glory and promotion were quicker. Of course, the odds of failure were inherent.

Ritko did not fail often. And when he did, he was good enough to cover it up. Now he was covering up his entire life by going off the grid.

“No one expects a dead person to do anything,” Jimmy had told him years ago. “So dead people can do everything.”

He was officially dead as society measures life. He was neatly cinched up, freed of the daily mendacity that defines human existence.

For the first time in years, he felt alive. The trees were greener. The leaves had textures he had never noticed. Water tasted better.

Breathing was enjoyable. He had never noticed it before. His lungs felt sweet with each intake. The smell of freedom made him smile.