Deputy Luck aimed a stolid nod at the bend in the road across from the milk truck, where the ditch bristled with wild parsnip.

“He? Or she?”

“The deceased is an adult male,” reported the deputy in her just-out-of-school manner. “Caucasian, between twenty and forty years of age.”

“I just seen a glimpse,” the driver jumped in to explain. Fanta looked at an eager kid with a peach-fuzz beard and thirty pounds of extra fat. “I was keeping my eye out for some lost beer. I just picked up milk at Lars Hansen’s, and he told me his wife drove back from town on this road yesterday with the tailgate open. A twelve-pack of Busch Light got slung out the back, and they couldn’t ever find it.”

Light beer, Fanta mused. Though presumed locally to be harmless, light beer figured in an absurdly high percentage of Bad Axe calamities, one way or another. Nothing light about a dozen Miller Lites in the bloodstream, and he knew the sheriff would agree. He looked to see if she was done inside her Charger. Not yet.

“I thought that twelver might have slung out on the corner, and I just barely seen something, so I backed up to look.”

Deputy Luck, brown-eyed and apple-cheeked, stocky and earnest, a Green Bay girl whose go-to expression seemed to be, Oh, cheese, had been toiling with a short pen over a small notebook. “And your zip code?” she asked, continuing her interview of the driver.

He gave her the digits. The rookie wrote them down carefully and then double-checked. Fanta experienced another pang for Sheriff Kick. His zip code? Oh, cheese. A month ago, Lyndsey Luck had been the sheriff’s fifth choice to replace David Morales. The Police and Fire Commission had felt jilted when first Olaf Yttri and then Morales—both outstanding chief deputies—had left the Bad Axe for greener pastures. After Morales departed in late June for a police job in Santa Fe, the commission’s solution had been to overrule the sheriff during the hiring process and prioritize inexperience, because the important thing was that the new hire have nowhere better to go. The PFC had then tried to make it up to Heidi Kick by selecting a woman. Hence twenty-two-year-old Lyndsey Luck, still just a girl, honestly, whom Fanta had once seen, in the midst of an arrest, ask a very drunk and potentially violent man to spell “Bob.”

She asked the driver, “How often do you drive this road?”

“Back and forth every day, seven days a week.”

“So, would you say fourteen times per week?”

“Uh… yeah. Yeah! Good call.”