“On the bubble,” Fanta told him.

The kid scratched himself.

“Between Anger and Despair,” Fanta clarified.

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

“With daily visits from Denial and Bargaining. Babette thinks she let me go, but I sued for age discrimination. Also, I’m a disabled veteran, so there are ADA and VEVRAA issues. She’s filed for a restraining order, so there are injunctions flying every which way right now.”

“Oh. Right. You’re the newspaper guy.”

“Was.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I was killed in Vietnam,” Fanta elaborated. “I just haven’t died yet.”

“Oh. Sure.”

A few seconds later, the kid tried bravely to reboot. “Well, I guess all the news these days is online anyway. Did you see the one about the dog that ate a golf ball?”

Rather than chew off an innocent head, Fanta schlepped over the bridge and into Sheriff Kick’s line of sight, where he hovered suggestively. Her nod meant that he could keep coming and have a look.

Faceup in the wild parsnip sprawled a young white man, thirtyish but heading into premature middle age, balding with a fringe of stiff black hair, robustly built yet wizened to hardly more than pale skin and knobby bones, wearing nothing besides saggy vintage underwear and one shin-high rubber boot, dry and cracked.

Lyndsey Luck cataloged facts into her notebook. “Black boot on his left foot. Ranger brand. That underwear looks too big. Tattoos on shoulders, forearms, hands, and neck. I count one, two gunshot wounds to the chest.”

Sheriff Kick corrected her rookie. “That’s his other left foot. And those are exit wounds.”

“Right foot, sorry. And exit wounds.”

“Perfect.”

Fanta studied the two small eruptions of gore: both ragged and mud-crusted, one through the lower right rib cage, the other through the opposite armpit. The rest of the dead man was flaked and clumped with dried dirt and pinkly stippled with what looked like a rash. Fanta noted a decidedly elsewhere look about the scene, as if this trauma had occurred in some faraway place and the victim had been dumped here among alien weeds. Sheriff Kick turned. The editor’s weak heart sped, his pig valve flapping.

“Grape, any idea who this is?”

He kept looking just in case: busted nose, self-inflicted tattoos, his one bare foot with toenails so long that they curled. But Fanta only recognized the boot. Ranger was a brand favored by the local Amish.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff. I’ve never seen him before.”

“Deputy, who is the truck driver?”

“Cody Jacob Wilkinson, age twenty-two, commercial license valid, driving record clean, residence on Ten Hollows Road in Town of Hefty.”

“Did he see anyone else on the road this morning?”

“Negative. But he said a Linda Larsen drove through here last evening and lost a twelve-pack of Busch Light off an open tailgate and couldn’t locate it. Mr. Wilkinson was on the lookout.”