He paused to swallow, and just then the sheriff caught a flicker of something blue-and-silver far down the steep slope toward the farm. She wasn’t really listening as her medical examiner explained about aspirated dirt… that he had only one way to explain how a man could have this much dirt in his lungs—

She didn’t need to hear it. She had been there.

“He was buried alive,” she interrupted.

She had surprised Kleekamp into silence.

“He was shot twice and buried alive,” she said, beginning to move. “He escaped his grave somehow, traveled on foot, then not on foot, and landed in that ditch.”

She wasn’t sure how the phone call ended. All she paid attention to now, descending toward the isolated farm, was the glint ahead of a blue-and-silver beer can.

CHAPTER 5

“Liar,” began the same caller’s voice the moment Grape Fanta picked up the phone.

“Corporate tool,” the caller added, a fiery lash to an old lefty such as Fanta.

Fanta said, “Well, now it sounds personal. You probably don’t realize that you and I are on the same side—”

The man talked over him.

“It always said on your masthead ‘We the People.’ I sent you a letter. You didn’t print it. I sent you another letter. I didn’t see that either. All I see is what’s for lunch at the nursing home. Beer and trucks for sale. Who hit a deer, and how much property damage, that’s the important thing. The deer are sick by the millions, Fanta, but you’re keeping your little scorecard on collisions with automobiles. Insurance. New bumpers. How much smaller can you think? Changes in latitude require changes in attitude, Fanta. That’s what my letters were about. Noon is our new midnight. We’ll be sub-equatorial before we wake up. You used to print the people’s letters. But profits over people, that’s your game now. Well, I’m the game changer.”

As the caller broke into a wheezy cough, Fanta used the opening to talk back.

“Listen, friend, I’ve gladly printed your letters. I agree with a lot of what you have to say. But what’s happened here at the newspaper is that it’s not even a newspaper anymore. You apparently haven’t heard that—”

The voice came back, nearly shouting over Fanta as if the man were deaf.

“The G8 summit is in two weeks, Fanta! You know what they’ll be talking about? How to drive down oil prices—”

“Actually it’s the G7 now,” Fanta put in. “Russia’s out.”

“Oil prices! Not the climate refugees, Fanta, not the billions of displaced people soon to be on the move. When I think of this—”

“Those are issues that I’ve always—”

“ ‘—a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of man—’ ”