Sandy Kilpatrick got on the phone. He said, "I've got some very bad news, Mr. Decker."

Decker took a breath.

"It's about Ott," Kilpatrick said. His voice was a forced whisper, like a priest in the confessional.

"What happened?" Decker said.

"A terrible car accident early this morning," Kilpatrick said. "Out on the Gilchrist Highway. Ott must have gone to sleep at the wheel. His truck ran off the road and hit a big cypress."

"Oh Jesus," Decker said. They'd set up the wreck to cover the murder.

"It burned for two hours, started a mean brushfire," Kilpatrick said. "By the time it was over there wasn't much left. The remains are over at the morgue now, but ... well, they're hoping to get enough blood to find out if he'd been drinking. They're big on DUI stats around here."

Ott's body would be scorched to a cinder. No one would ever suspect it had been in the water, just as no one would guess what had really killed him. The cheapest trick in the book, but it would work in Harney. Decker could imagine them already repainting the death's-head billboard on Route 222: "drive safely. don't be fatality no. 5."

He didn't know what to say now. Conversations about the newly dead made him uncomfortable, but he didn't want to seem uncaring. "I didn't think Ott was a big drinker," he said lamely.

"Me neither," Kilpatrick said, "but I figured something was wrong when he didn't show up for the basketball game night before last. He was the team mascot, you know."

"Davey Dillo."

"Right." There was a pause on the end of the line; Kilpatrick pondering how to explain Ott's armadillo suit. "It's sort of an unwritten rule here at the newspaper," the editor said, "that everybody gives to the United Way. Just a few bucks out of each paycheck—you know, the company's big in civic charity."

"I understand," Decker said.

"Well, Ott refused to donate anything, said he didn't trust 'em. I'd never seen him so adamant."

"He always watched his pennies," Decker said. Ott Pickney was one of the cheapest men he'd ever met. While covering the Dade County courthouse he'd once missed the verdict in a sensational murder trial because he couldn't find a parking spot with a broken meter.

Sandy Kilpatrick went on: "Our publisher has a rigid policy about the United Way. When he heard Ott was holding back, he ordered me to fire him. To save Ott's job I came up with this compromise."

"Davey Dillo?"

"The school team needed a mascot."

"It sure doesn't sound like Ott," Decker said.

"He resisted at first, but he got to where he really enjoyed it. I heard him say so. He was dynamite on that skateboard, too, even in that bulky costume. Someone his age—the kids said he should have been a surfer."

"Sounds like quite a show," Decker said, trying to imagine it.

"He never missed a game, that's why I was worried the other night when he didn't show. Only thing I could figure is that he'd gone out Saturday night and tied one on. Maybe went up to Cocoa Beach, met a girl, and just decided to stay the weekend."

Ott sacked out with a beach bunny—the story probably was all over Harney by now. "Maybe that's it," Decker said. "He was probably on his way home when the accident happened." This was Ott's old pal from Miami, lying through his teeth. If Kilpatrick only knew the truth, Decker thought. He said, "Sandy, I'm so sorry. I can't believe he's dead." That part was almost true, and the regret was genuine.

"The service is tomorrow," Kilpatrick said. "Cremation seemed the best way to go, considering."

Decker said good-bye and hung up. Then he called a florist shop in Miami and asked them to wire an orchid to Ott Pickney's funeral. The best orchid they had.

Jim Tile was born in the town of Wilamette, Florida, a corrupt and barren flyspeck untouched by the alien notions of integration, fair housing, and equal rights. Jim Tile was one of the few blacks ever to have escaped his miserable neighborhood without benefit of a bus ride to Raiford or a football scholarship. He attributed his success to good steady parents who made him stay in school, and also to his awesome physical abilities. Most street kids thought punching was the cool way to fight, but Jim Tile preferred to wrestle because it was more personal. For this he took some grief from his pals until the first time the white kids jumped him and tried to push his face in some cowshit. There were three of them, and naturally they waited until Jim Tile was alone. They actually got him down for a moment, but the one who was supposed to lock Jim Tile's arms didn't get a good grip and that was that. One of the white kids ended up with a broken collarbone, another with both elbows hyperextended grotesquely, and the third had four broken ribs where Jim Tile had squeezed him in a leg scissors. And they all went to the hospital with cowshit on their noses.

After high school Jim Tile enrolled at Florida State University in Tallahassee, majored in criminal justice, was graduated, and joined the highway patrol. His friends and classmates told him that he was nuts, that a young black man with a 4.0 grade average and a college degree could write his own ticket with the DEA or Customs, maybe even the FBI. Jim Tile could have taken his pick. Besides, everybody knew about the highway patrol: it had the worst pay and the highest risks of any law-enforcement job in the state—not to mention its reputation as an enclave for hardcore rednecks who, while not excluding minority recruits, hardly welcomed them with champagne and tickertape parades.

In the 1970s the usual fate of black troopers was to get assigned to the lousiest roads in the reddest counties. This way they could spend most of their days writing tickets to foul-mouthed Klansmen farmers who insisted on driving their tractors down the middle of the highway in violation of about seventeen traffic statutes. Two or three years of this challenging work was enough to inspire most black troopers to look elsewhere for employment, but Jim Tile hung on. When other troopers asked him why, he replied that he intended someday to become commander of the entire highway patrol. His friends thought he was joking, but when word of Jim Tile's boldly stated ambition reached certain colonels and lieutenants in Tallahassee he was immediately reassigned to patrol the remote roadways of Harney County and faithfully protect its enlightened citizenry, most of whom insisted on addressing him as Boy or Son or Officer Zulu.

One day Trooper Jim Tile was told to accompany a little-known gubernatorial candidate on a campaign swing through Harney. The day began with breakfast at the pancake house and finished with a roast-hog barbecue on the shore of Lake Jesup. The candidate, Clinton Tyree, gave the identical slick speech no less than nine times, and out of utter boredom Jim Tile memorized it. By the end of the day he was unconsciously muttering the big applause lines just before they came out of the candidate's mouth. From the reactions—and penurious donations—of several fat-cat political contributors, it was obvious that they had gotten the idea that Clinton Tyree was letting a big black man tell him what to say.

At dusk, after all the reporters and politicos had polished offthe barbecue and gone home, Clinton Tyree took Jim Tile aside and said:

"I know you don't think much of my speech, but in November I'm going to be elected governor."

"I don't doubt it," Jim Tile had said, "but it's because of your teeth, not your ideals."

After Clinton Tyree won the election, one of the first things he did was order Trooper Jim Tile transferred from Harney County to the governor's special detail in Tallahassee. This unit was the equivalent of the state's Secret Service, one of the most prestigious assignments in the highway patrol. Never before had a black man been chosen as a bodyguard for a governor, and many of Tyree's cronies told him that he was setting a dangerous precedent. The governor only laughed. He told them that Jim Tile was the most prescient man he'd met during the whole campaign. An exit survey taken on election day by the pollster Pat Caddell revealed that what Florida voters had liked most about candidate Clinton Tyree was not his plainly spoken views on the death penalty or toxic dumps or corporate income taxes, but rather his handsome smile. In particular, his teeth.