I promise to just breathe deep.

 

 The report from the insurance company, it says her name is Sarah. Sarah Broome, she’s forty-nine years old. A senior baker in a commercial bakery for seventeen years, she used to throw a sack of flour up on one shoulder, heavy as a ten-year-old boy, she could balance the flour there while she ripped out the pull-string at the front edge and poured the flour, little by little, into a spinning mixer. According to her account, on her last day at work the floor was still wet from mopping the night before. The lighting wasn’t too good, neither. The weight of the flour tipped her over backward, bouncing her head on the rolled-steel edge of a table, resulting in memory loss, migraine headaches, and general weakness that left her unfit for any kind of labor.

 

 The CAT scans showed nothing. The MRIs, nothing. The X-rays, nothing. But Sarah Broome never went back to work.

 

 Sarah Broome, married three times. No kids. She gets a little Social Security. A little company settlement money every month. She gets twenty-five milligrams of OxyContin to treat the chronic pain that follows her spine from her brain and radiates down both arms. Some months, she’ll ask for Vicodins or Percodans.

 

 Not three months after her settlement, she moved here, to the middle of nowhere, with no neighbors.

 

 Right this minute, sitting here inside her shed, my right foot looks put on backward. The knee’s got to be broken, the nerves and tendons inside twisted halfway around. Everything below that knee, numb. It’s too dark to see, but where I sit smells cow-shitty. The slick feel of plastic must be bags of composted steer manure ready for her new garden plot. Leaning against the walls are a shovel, a hoe, a garden rake.

 

 Poor Sarah Broome, right this minute, she’s looking at her power tools. She’s sick with the idea of sinking a skill saw into me. Instead of sawdust, the spinning blade spraying a wet rooster-tail of blood and flesh and bone. Well, that’s if she has an extension cord long enough. She’s reading the labels on paint cans, slug bait, cleaning fluid, looking for the skull and crossed bones. The green frowny face of Mr. Yuck. She’s calling the local Poison Control hotline, asking how much barbecue lighter fluid a man would have to drink to die. When the poison expert asks why, then Sarah hangs up, fast.

 

 How I know this is . . . ten years ago I was running kegs of beer between a distributor and too many little bars and taverns. These were places too small to have a loading zone, so you double-parked. Or you parked in the suicide lane, between lanes of fast traffic cutting past you in both directions. I humped kegs. I stacked cases of bottled beer on a handcart and waited for a gap in traffic big enough to run through. Always behind schedule, until, by complete accident, a keg rolled off the rack and creamed me out flat on the pavement.

 

 After that, I got a place almost this nice. A rusted Winnebago motor home that wasn’t going anywhere, parked next to a one-hole shithouse, along a wide spot in a gravel road through the woods. I had a four-banger Ford Pinto with a manual transmission to get me into town. A pension for being totally disabled, and all the time in the world.

 

 The rest of my life, all I had to do is keep my car running. I stayed high on so much Vicodin that just taking a walk in the sun felt as good as any massage. As good as a massage with a hand job, even.

 

 Just watching the birds at the birdfeeder. The hummingbirds. Putting out peanuts, stoned and laughing as the squirrels fight the chipmunks, it’s a good enough life. The American dream of living without an alarm clock. Without having to punch a time clock or wear a damn hairnet. A dream life, where you don’t need to ask some asshole’s permission before you can go take a crap.

 

 No, until this afternoon, Sarah Broome had nothing to do but read paperback books from the library. Watch the hummingbirds. Pop those little white pills. A kind of dream vacation that’s never supposed to end.

 

 What sucks is, crippled or not, you’ve got to at least act crippled. You have to limp, or hold your head stiff on your neck to show you can’t turn it. Even with painkillers pulsing through you, this is the kind of play-acting that starts you feeling terrible. You fake any symptom long enough, and you’ll start to hurt for real. You limp around, and then your knee really does start to ache. You sit around and turn into a big fat hunchback.

 

 The American dream of leisure, it gets boring fast. Still, you’re paid to be a cripple. Sitting with your television. Laying in a hammock, watching the damn animals. If you don’t work, you don’t sleep. Day and night, you’re half awake, bored.

 

 Daytime television, you can tell who’s watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it’s clinics for drying out drunks. Or it’s law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it’s schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith.

 

 If you’re watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You’re a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot. After the first couple weeks, being a sloth sucks ass.

 

 You don’t have the money to travel, but it doesn’t cost anything to turn a shovelful of dirt. Work on your car. Plant a vegetable garden.

 

 One night, after it’s dark, a cloud of mosquitoes and deer flies are thick around my porch light. Me in my Winnebago with a mug of hot tea and some Vicodin in my bloodstream, I look up from my book to watch the bugs outside the windows. That’s when the sound comes. It’s a man’s voice, shouting from somewhere in the dark, back up in the woods.

 

 It’s somebody shouting for help. Please. Help. He’s slipped and hurt his back. Fallen out of a tree, he tells me.

 

 In the middle of the night, here he’s dressed in a brown suit with a mustard-yellow vest, wearing brown leather wingtip shoes, and he says he’s bird-watching. A pair of binoculars hang from a strap around his neck. That’s what they teach in correspondence school. If you’re caught by the suspect, say you’re a bird-watcher. I offer to carry his briefcase. Then we each put an arm around the other and run a slow, slow, three-legged race back toward the porch light of my motor home.

 

 Almost there, the man sees my old shithouse and asks, can we stop a minute. He really needs to drop a load, he says. I help him inside the door.

 

 Soon as the door’s shut and his belt buckle hits the wood floor, I pop open his briefcase. Inside is a lot of paper. And a video camera. The side of the camera pops open, and inside is a tape. When I pick it up, when I snap the camera shut, the tape starts to play by itself, and the little viewing screen lights up.

 

 On the screen, a little man takes a rear wheel and tire off a beat-up old Pinto.

 

 It’s me, rotating my tires. Me, knocking lug nuts loose and jockeying the wheels off and on my car.

 

 Nothing else. No bird-watching. After a little buzz of static, the screen shows a tiny version of me, shirtless and lifting a full tank of propane. I carry the tank to the front of the Winnebago, where I change it for an empty.

 

 If Sarah is anything like me, right this minute, she’s picking a bread knife out of a kitchen drawer. If she gives me a few Vicodins in a glass of water, maybe she could knock me out. Right now, she’s looking close-up, almost cross-eyed, at the serrated edge of the knife, at how sharp it is. It’s so easy to section a chicken, cutting a throat couldn’t be worse. She’s maybe put an old towel over my face, that way she could pretend I was just a loaf of bread. Just slicing bread, or a meatloaf, until she sawed through a vein, then the heart still pushing blood, the big surge after surge after surge of blood. Right this minute, she’s putting the knife back in the drawer.

 

 It could be she’s got an electric carving knife she got for a wedding present, half her lifetime ago, and she’s never used. It’s still in the fancy printed box with the little pamphlet about how to carve a turkey . . . bone a ham . . . slice a leg of lamb.

 

 Nothing about how to dismember a detective.

 

 What you have to consider is, maybe I wanted to get caught.

 

 Mean evil me, spying on poor Sarah Broome and her family of cats.

 

 What you have to consider is, maybeshewanted to get caught. We all need a doctor to yank us out of our perfect womb. We piss and moan, but we appreciate God kicking us out of Eden. We love our trials. Adore our enemies.

 

 In case Sarah Broome is close by, I yell, “Please, don’t beat yourself up over this . . .”

 

 There’s no lock to keep somebody inside a shithouse, so I wrapped a rope around the whole thing, three times, tight, and tied a triple granny knot. Inside, the man was grunting, dropping his mess into the hole he sat on. Slapping the mosquitoes and deer flies that swarmed up from the dark, he was too busy to hear me tie the knot and take his briefcase into my motor home for a little look.

 

 In the detective’s briefcase, there’s a computer-printout spreadsheet of names next to disabilities next to an address for each one. Here’s guys with carpal-tunnel syndrome. Guys with nonspecific soft-tissue damage to their lower backs. Chronic pain in their cervical vertebrae. Listed here is the disability provider, the insurance company. Here’s the painkillers prescribed in each case.

 

 And on that spreadsheet, there I am: Eugene Denton.

 

 Inside the briefcase, a rubber band wraps a thick stack of business cards, all of them saying: Lewis Lee Orleans, Private Investigator. And a phone number.

 

 When I dial the phone number, a cell phone inside the briefcase begins to ring.

 

 Outside, Lewis Lee Orleans is hollering for me to help open the shithouse door.

 

 If it would help Sarah Broome feel better about killing me, I’d tell her how the detective, he cried. His sobs muffled behind both hands, he told me he had a wife at home and three kids. Little kids. But he didn’t wear a wedding ring, and inside his wallet were no pictures.

 

 People say they can feel getting looked at. Being watched has the same feeling as ants crawling up your pant leg. Not me. That afternoon, I rotated my tires, checked the wear on my brake pads. Changed my oil, going from winter 10-10 weight to summer 10-40 weight. Here on the little video screen, here was me with a full case of motor oil, dragging it out from under the motor home and lugging it under one arm. Totally disabled me, the poor delivery driver who swore in court I couldn’t lift my arms high enough to brush my teeth. A crippled invalid who deserved to be put out to pasture for the rest of my natural life. Here, shirtless on camera, the sweat from my armpit soaking a dark-brown shadow on the case of oil, I could pass for a circus strongman.

 

 Living outdoors in good weather, not eating much, sleeping long nights, this tanned little muscle man could be me when I was nineteen years old.

 

 This was the best life I’d ever known, and the man trapped in my shithouse was about to wreck it all.

 

 Most big disability cases, they’re always in appeal. The workers’-comp insurance folks, they want years to trail their man. To get just five minutes of good clear video that shows him lift a rototiller into the back of his pickup truck. They play that tape in court, and it’s: Case closed. Disability denied. The plaintiff, one minute he’s set for life, a good-enough chunk of cash every month, medical benefits covered, plus all the Vicodins and Percocets, all the OxyContin he needs to stay sweet the rest of his days. The defense team plays that tape in court—the rototiller going into his truck bed—and he’s got nothing.

 

 He’s forty-five or fifty years old, and he’s accused of insurance fraud. No chance he’s getting anything but minimum wage the rest of his life. No benefits. No free time until he’s sixty-something years old and qualifies for relief.

 

 Right this minute, to Sarah Broome even life in prison for murder looks good compared to falling behind in her property taxes, losing her car, and pushing a shopping cart on the street.

 

 When I was in her shoes, all I had on hand was a case of four bug bombs. The Winnebago where I lived had a wasp nest underneath. The directions on each bug bomb said to shake well and then break the tip off a little nozzle on top. The bomb would spray out poison smoke until it was empty.

 

 The label said it would kill anything.

 

 The poor detective. I climbed up a ladder and dropped all four of those bombs down the shitter vent pipe. After that, I clapped a hand over the pipe to stop any leaking out. Me up there, Adolf fucking Hitler, dropping poison gas and listening to my detective cough and beg for air. Just the sound of him gagging up wet puke, then the glop of it hitting the wood floor in chunks, just the sound alone almost made me hurl. The sulfur smell of bug spray and the puke smell. Those bug bombers kept hissing until white whiffs curled out from every little crack and nail hole. Gasoline-smelling smoke puffed from each side of the shithouse as the detective threw himself at the walls, then the door, trying to break out. Beating his arms to bruised pulp inside the shoulder pads of his good brown suit. Wearing himself out.

 

 Sitting here, my leg aching from the waist down, waiting for Sarah Broome to play problem solver, there’s so much I want to tell her. How the insecticide only made the detective and me both sick. How it felt, hitting somebody in the side of his head with a lug wrench. How, the first dozen times you hit, it only makes a mess. Even swinging with both hands, you’re pounding hair and blood, not really breaking much bone. How the blood gets the lug wrench so slippery you can’t hold it, and you’ve got to go find something clean to finish the job.

 

 If I wasn’t disabled before killing that Mr. Lewis Lee Orleans, I was after. Killing somebody is hard work. Hard, messy work. Hard, messy, noisy work, with him bellowing loud, his words making no more sense than a cow on the killing floor.

 

 How I figure is, even if I didn’t kill my Mr. Nosy Detective, the long cold night would have. The deer flies and shock from his broken leg would have. Dead is dead, and this way neither of us had to suffer. Not much.

 

 Even if I never got caught, killing the detective spoiled my taste for being crippled. Now I knew people were watching, I’d seen the spreadsheet, another detective would come spying on me someday.

 

 So, if you can’t beat them, join them.

 

 On television, the next commercial for a correspondence school, I called them up. They teach you how to stake out a suspect. How to dig through a garbage can for evidence. In six weeks, I had a paper to say I was a private investigator. After that, I had my own spreadsheet of deadbeats to go spy on. To make my own whistle-blowing little “stalk-umentaries,” I call them.

 

 You get out by getting smart and turning in your fellow cripples. Most cases, you don’t even have to appear in court. Just turn in your expense report for the motel, the rental car, the restaurant meals, and you get your check in the mail. Plus the commission.

 

 Leading up to right now. I’ve been following Ms. Broome for five days of nothing. When you’re shooting a stalk-umentary, you’re pretty much married to your subject. To the post office to pick up her mail. To the library for another book. To the grocery store. Even if she sits in the trailer all day, the curtains shut, watching television, then I’d be parked down the gravel road, slouched down low, stretched across the front seat of my rented car so I could lean back on a pillow propped against the inside of the passenger door. So I could keep an eye out. Even if nothing’s going to happen.