On the street, the nearby honky-tonks and cathouses were in full swing early on a Friday night, and you could hear the saxophone music and the yells and loud talk of the GIs from Fort Benning and smell the cigarettes and vomit and urine. On Fourteenth Street, the neon cast a pinkish hue down the road and almost up on the steps of the Russell County Courthouse.

It was a hot night, as most summer nights in Alabama, but it hadn’t rained in weeks, and the asphalt and concrete seemed to absorb the sun and radiate with the heat, making the wind seem like a fan off a stove. His Rocket 88 waited in a slot in the narrow alley between the Elite and the Coulter Building. Patterson rounded the corner, his right hand in his right pocket reaching for the keys, the sounds of Phenix City like a carnival midway in the distance, when he saw the shadows, the shapes of the men, heading into the alley.

Patterson opened his car door, sat down in the driver’s seat, and pulled his leg in after him. The men called out to him in the darkness and he turned.

Three shots were heard cracking in echo through the little downtown.

Moments later, Albert L. Patterson walked from the alley, staggering and shuffling without a cane for the first time in more than thirty years, with a couple teens pointing at him from across the street, snickering and saying that man was drunk as hell.

And Patterson walked more, a struggling, dignified shuffle step and another, robotic and forced as a drunk trying to convince himself of being sober, his face blank and unseeing, with steps growing shorter and shorter, until he fell to his knees, out of juice, batteries drained, and then pitched forward on the heated concrete.

He fell to his face, shattering his glasses, a hot, wet stain spreading under him, and soon heard a boy’s question: “Who did this to you? Who shot you, Mr. Patterson?”

But instead of a helping hand, Patterson saw the branch of a pear tree and the buzzing of bees jumping from bloom to bloom. He tried to explain this to the voices he heard, but instead of words blood flowed from his mouth.