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I’m heading for Dayton,” Mark replied, trying to inject a friendly tone in hopes of dispelling the man’s distrust in him. “I’m going home to my parents’ place for Christmas. Mom always has a big spread laid out: turkey, candied yams, the works.”
    “How about you, son?” the salesman asked over his shoulder.
    Clifford Lee had been softly singing a medley of Dwight Yoakam songs. He looked up and grinned sheepishly. “I’m off to Nashville, Tennessee, to be a big country star. I grew up on country and western music. Me and my pa, we’d listen to the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. I got to singing and picking on the guitar here and the folks said ‘Why, you’re as good as any of ’em, Clifford Lee! You oughta head on up to Music City and try your luck.’ So that’s what I aim to do.”
    During the farmboy’s longwinded explanation, Mark noticed his hand squeeze past the guitar strings and disappear into the hole of the Fender’s hourglass body. He grinned. Surely Clifford Lee didn’t have a secret stash hidden inside his guitar. Mark had been around enough potheads to know a few who hid their grass in strange places, including musical instruments. But, no, Clifford Lee Gates was no more a smoker of marijuana than Jesse Jackson was the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
    Still, the thought of a good smoke, straight or otherwise, brought out that craving for nicotine in Mark Casey. Since Rudman seemed to be a smoker himself, Mark absently reached into an inside pocket of his olive drab coat for a pack of Marlboros, figuring the guy wouldn’t mind if he indulged. Suddenly, the big Lincoln Continental was whipping back and forth across the double lanes of the northbound stretch of I-53, shooting onto the paved shoulder on the far side and braking to such a sharp and screeching halt that the bearded hitchhiker would have butted his head against the windshield if his seatbelt hadn’t been buckled.
    A breathless silence hung within the car for a long moment. The pattering of steady rainfall on the roof was the only sound to be heard. Then Mark turned and regarded the pale-faced businessman. “What the hell did you do that for?” he yelled. “Are you trying to kill us or something?”
    A.J. Rudman swallowed dryly, his right hand still pressed against his gastric woes. “What were you doing?“ he croaked back. “What were you reaching for…inside your coat?”
    “My smokes, man, that’s all!” Mark pulled the cigarettes from his pocket and slammed them down on the dashboard. He stared at the businessman incredulously. “You thought I was going for a knife, didn’t you? You thought that I was the freaking Roadside Butcher! That I was gonna pull a big knife outta my coat and carve your sonofabitching head clean off. That’s exactly what you thought, wasn’t it?” He snorted and shook his head in disgust. “Well, I ain’t the damned Butcher…you got that? I may look like some drug-crazed devil worshiper to you, but I’m just a regular guy trying to get from point A to B and, believe it or not, I’m just as jumpy as you are where that butchering crazy is concerned.”
    “Well, I thought…” began Rudman in embarrassment. “It’s just that you reached into your pocket without any warning and…”
    “Yeah…yeah, I know, man. Just a big misunderstanding. Why don’t you just loosen up and put us back on the road again, okay?”
    The salesman nodded. He was about to shift back into drive, when Clifford Lee chuckled from the backseat. “Shucks, Mr. Rudman, ol’ Mark ain’t the killer. Shoot fire, he’s one of the nicest fellas I’ve ever met,” he said with a grin. “Heck, naw, he ain’t the Roadside Butcher. But, you want to know something kinda funny? I am!” And, with that, the farmboy reached around the padded headrest and laid a pearl-handled straight razor against A.J. Rudman’s flabby throat.
    “What are you doing, man?” Mark asked. He looked at the goofy Georgian