“Let’s have Medical check out Officer Shutt and let the chaplain go home. We can take their statements tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I think that’s a good idea,” Patterson said as if Stone had asked him.

Before anyone could say anything else, the colonel’s phone rang and the medical personnel arrived to collect Shutt.

I helped him to his feet, assured him everything was going to be okay, and followed him and the nurses out of the office.

Just before I closed the door, I heard Patterson tell Stone that the deceased inmate in the trash bag was Ike Johnson.

I then walked over to the training building and took a long, hot shower and scrubbed his blood off my body.

2

I was half undressed when my doorbell rang.

I guess if I were more optimistic, I would say that I was half dressed—and that the glass of seltzer water without a coaster on my dresser was half full.

My dresser, like every other piece of furniture that I scrambled to get after the divorce, was not worth the trouble of a coaster. It had been a gift. Actually its previous owners did not know that it was a gift—all they knew was that they threw it out.

I was surprised when I heard the doorbell, not only because I was half undressed, but also because I had placed my order for pizza less than fifteen minutes before. It had always taken Sal’s at least twenty-five minutes to deliver out here.

Since coming home to North Florida after my life in Atlanta had disintegrated, I’d made my home in a dilapidated old trailer on the edge of Potter County.

Quickly pulling my pants back up, I whisked by my gem of a dresser, pausing only long enough to secure the two folded bills on its corner.

The trailer had been repossessed, and its previous owners were obviously not a gentle breed. It was situated on a thatch grass prairie on what was supposed to be Phase II of an expanding mobile home community called the Prairie Palm. Presently, Phase II was a community of one, due in large part to Phase I, which resembled a trailer junkyard more than a place where people actually lived.

The park got its name from the lone sabal palm, Florida’s state tree, standing in the center of the sixty-acre plot—something that seemed an appropriate metaphor for my isolated existence here.

As I walked down the extremely narrow hall of my not-so-mobile home, passing over the pale yellow linoleum curling up so that it no longer reached the thin blond paneling of either wall, I remembered the plush two-story brick home Susan and I had shared in North Atlanta. It was nice. Very nice. But this impoverished place and the fringe existence I was now living here felt more like home.