The Burning Season

When Junior Odum turned from his mother's grave, I stepped out of the shadow of the gnarled old cemetery oak and stood where he could plainly see me. The low-hanging full moon cast bluish highlights up and down the barrel of the .45 automatic I held leveled on the bail-jumper.

"It's a hell of a ways from Hatchaloo County back to Rockford," he told me. "We're at one end of the state, it's at the other, and Illinois is one long damn stretch of real estate. You got near four hundred miles to haul me. And if I've a mind to, I guarantee I can make that a pain-in-the-ass, fight-you-every-inch-of-the-way trip you'll wish you'd never started.

"Or … you do a job of work for me while you're down here. It's somethin' I can't very well take care of myself on account of bein' a fugitive and all, and somethin' your snooper skills should make you better suited for anyway. You do that, then I go back peaceful as a lamb. Hell, I'll even drive the car, you can stick your feet out the window and nap in the back seat if you want."


Don't ask me to explain it. I'm a born-again skeptic who's laughed in the face of a-hell-of-a-lot-slicker pitches than that one, but this time for some reason my reaction was different. Something about the tall young man with his knocked-around, Howdy Doody features and his earnest, pale eyes reached me. Maybe it was helped along by the uneasiness I felt over having waylaid him at his mother's graveside in the first place. Or maybe the rural setting had stirred my boyhood memories deeply enough to unearth some still-innocent, still-naive part of me that hadn't yet been soured on mankind. Or maybe I just read too damn many Robin Hood stories when I was a kid.

Like I said, don't ask me to explain it because I can't.

All I know is that fifteen minutes later, after I'd heard the rest of what he had to say, I walked away from that cemetery without Junior Odum in my custody. I went one way, Odum went another. I'd agreed to spend forty-eight hours on Junior's "job of work." At the end of that time—whether I was successful or not—he'd given his word to return peaceably with me.

That's right, his word.

They were without question the most bizarre circumstances under which I had ever taken on a client.