Streaming sweat and cursing everything Rickreiner—“Happy Valley Shopper, my flat ass”—“Barry Rickreiner for Sheriff over my road-killed body”—Fanta jaywalked across Main Street to Farmstead Home and Agricultural Supply, where he shoved himself through the door. His weary pig-valve heart felt strange, unusually thumpy. Was it the heat, or the dead body, or the wounded look on the face of his favorite sheriff? Was it his Agent Orange exposure, or the carditis inflicted by the Lyme spirochetes upon his heart muscle? It was hard to say exactly which specific pains afflicted Fanta as he wallowed up to the agricultural desk. Perhaps all of them. His vision tunneled. His veins throbbed. His joints bucked and squealed like train couplings.

“What can I do you for, Grape?”

His short-term memory had been dissolving under stress. He had to think for a moment.

“One crowbar, please,” he wheezed eventually at his old pal Ron Bellweather.

“The biggest, nastiest crowbar you can sell me.”

CHAPTER 3

A blue body bag lay zipped on the examining table. The latest Bad Axe County coroner, the multitalented Dr. Blaine Kleekamp, both the sheriff’s family medicine doc and a wildlife veterinarian, shut off the water and turned from the sink, snapping on rubber gloves.

“How’s your little boy?”

Her stomach seemed to flop—which one?—and she glanced away.

School had been out for exactly 64 days—yes, she was counting—and Opie had been gone at Rainbow Kids Camp for the last 23 of those days—and the precise divisor for either of those numerators was the number of times, either 17 or 12, that Taylor had been in a time-out since. In any case, the outcome of the calculation equaled parental worry. Or could it be possible, she thought just now, that the correct numerator was the 117 days since Barry Rickreiner had filed the paperwork to run for Bad Axe County Sheriff, when the first KICK HER OUT and BARRY HER signs had appeared? Was that when Taylor’s troubles had begun?

From the basement window of Strangspleen Funeral Home, the county’s make-do morgue, she watched the tires of the ambulance retreat, leaving her a view of the backside of Farmers’ Direct-Buy, the original of Babette Rickreiner’s franchise properties, inherited from her late husband. In the Rickreiner tradition of predatory enterprise, Farmers’ Direct-Buy dangled a lose-lose deal by which sinking farmers could acquire suicidal levels of debt while spending borrowed money elsewhere and defunding the local economy. The sight of BARRY HER’s cash source made the sheriff remember that Dr. Kleekamp had declared himself a Heidi Kick supporter. Since Oppo claimed to work for the county, Oppo could be Kleekamp, she thought. She might trust him if he was.

Watching her through safety goggles and over a germ mask, the doctor asked, “Is his wound healing up OK?”

So he meant Dylan. One week ago, Taylor, for reasons unknown, had chopped Dylan on the arm with a hoe to the tune of eighteen stitches.