He liked all the way back to Motown. Had to appreciate the Berry Gordy shit when you came from Detroit. The Four Tops, Supremes, Stevie Wonder. That's what he was listening to now. On his iPod, 'cause there wasn't a CD player in the truck and the radio was for shit and the speakers were even worse. So it was Stevie and Talking Book. A classic. Some major phones clamped on his ears, the little touchy white dial thing fingered all the way to the right, as loud as it'd go. Drivin' along at eighty-six miles per, "Superstition" blasting into his brain.

Teddy Angel was a happy man.

And he was happy right up until the very moment he died, when he was reaching for the second bottle of Jack and the truck started to skid on the wet, slick road. He tried to grab the wheel with his left hand, never letting go of the bottle with his right-tried to turn himself out of the spin-but his reflexes were slowed by the alcohol and his hand slipped, banging into the dashboard, and the truck rumbled over the divider. It just missed a Caddy coming from the other direction; then it rammed into a shiny green Taurus that couldn't get out of the way; and then it jumped off the shoulder, toppling, turning over twice, the second turn breaking Teddy's neck.

The truck was on its side, the wheels still spinning, when the police arrived, maybe ten minutes after the accident. A couple of state troopers. One of them, Wade Turner, was thirty-eight years old, had seen plenty of accidents, been next to his share of dead bodies. His partner, though, Morgan Lanier, was only twenty-four, and this was his first.

The Caddy had never stopped, the driver didn't even slow down and think about it-just tore the hell out of there to wherever he was headed-but the Taurus was damaged, and sat sideways on the road, half in the right lane, half on the narrow shoulder. Turner went to check on the driver, a woman in her late twenties who had used her cell to call in the accident.