What is your absolute truth?

Making sure you learn the right lessons when something doesn't work

There is an absolute truth in this world

You don’t experience life

You experience the life you focus on

If you are constantly searching for bad things that are happening

You will find them

If you are like me and on the hunt for the good in the world

It will pop up everywhere

And you can be a mix of both

Like me in traffic

Paying attention to what I’m doing and how the auto world is rolling around me

I call it being viligent

But…

I’m looking for bad drivers AND they are easy to find

Often too easy

Kids with their eyes on phones instead of the road

Drunks and distracted and just plain dumb folks doing dumb things while driving two ton death machines

And we know they are death machines because the number one killer of people at the beginning of their adult lives is cars

So I’m watching

And in watching, I find.

I’d like you to experience this:

Instead of hunting through individual books or juggling multiple purchases, I put 20 books together in one place.

One click.

One purchase.

Everything shows up in your library right away.

That’s the main reason I created this collection.

At $20 for all 20 books, it works out to just $1 per book.

I know that sounds almost too good to be true, but that’s the price I’m offering right now to the people already on my lists.

This isn’t the complete series (I’m still writing more), but it is a strong collection of 20 titles gathered in one convenient spot.

No need to track down each book separately or worry about missing anything important.

I’m only making this available at this price to readers who are already here with me.

It feels like the right way to say thank you for sticking around and reading the stories.

If you’ve been enjoying the free samples and want the full experience without the hassle of buying everything piece by piece, this is the simplest way to do it.

You can grab the whole collection here:

FROM MESSING AROUND:

The truck came past slip 12 every morning at six-ten.

Not six, not six-fifteen. Six-ten, give or take two minutes depending on whether the tide had left debris on the marina access road that Earl Croom had to steer around or whether the pelicans had taken up their morning position on the dock pilings in a configuration that required the truck to slow. The truck was a 1991 Ford F-700 dump in a color that had started as white and arrived, through thirty-one years of county road and salt air and the specific chemistry of hauling other people’s waste, at a shade somewhere between old bone and resignation. The passenger door had been replaced at some point in the Clinton administration with a door from a different truck, a different color entirely, a faded red that had never been painted over. Earl said it kept him humble.

The wave came with the truck.

Left hand out the window, three fingers extended, the same wave every morning — not a hello wave, not the wave of a man surprised to see you, but the wave of a man on a route who has seen you before and will see you again and considers the seeing of you a small but genuine component of his day. Gumbo Malone had been on the receiving end of that wave for fourteen months, ever since he’d arrived at Cedar Key City Marina in a truck that started on the second try and a life that had run out of road. He’d come to recognize the sound of the F-700 before he could see it — a specific mechanical conversation between the engine and the transmission that the truck conducted with itself every morning, loud enough to hear from the stern of the Severance Package if the wind was right and you were already up.

Most mornings he was already up.

He’d been up Tuesday. He’d heard the truck come down the access road and he’d lifted his coffee and Earl’s hand had come out of the window and that was the last time.

On Wednesday morning the truck didn’t come.

Gumbo noticed the absence the way you notice a sound stopping — not immediately, not with alarm, but with the low-grade awareness of something missing from the sequence of a morning that had a sequence. He was on the stern with the composition book open and the coffee going and the marina doing its early business, and by six-thirty he’d written the date at the top of the page twice because he kept losing his place.

He went inside and came back with a second cup and sat with it.

By seven the absence had become a fact.

He went to the marina office.

Dee Ann was at the window of the converted bait shop — the sliding glass pushed back the way she kept it from seven until six, the smell of Cuban sandwiches and live shrimp coming through the screen door behind her. She had the marina log open and a pen in her hand and she looked up when she heard his footsteps on the dock planking.

“Earl Croom,” he said.

Dee Ann set the pen down. That was the whole of her answer, the pen going down and her hands going flat on the counter, and in sixty-three years of accumulated competence and institutional memory she had developed the ability to communicate significant information through very small adjustments in posture.

“When,” Gumbo said.

“Found him around seven yesterday morning. County road, north of the junction, near the landfill gate.” She looked at the log. “Burl Stutts worked it. I heard it from the fuel dock operator at the commercial marina, who heard it from one of the shrimpers who runs that road at dawn.” She looked at Gumbo. “They’re calling it robbery.”

He looked at the marina access road where the F-700 came past every morning at six-ten.

“Earl Croom,” he said again, not as a question.

“Yes,” Dee Ann said.

He knew Earl the way you know people in a town of seven hundred — not well, not through any deliberate effort, but through the accumulated weight of repeated proximity. Earl Croom was sixty-one years old and had been running Croom Sanitation since 1993, when he’d bought the route contract from a man named Petersen who was moving to Ocala and wanted out. The truck had come with the contract, already used, already the color of resignation. Earl had kept the truck because Earl kept things that worked, and the truck worked in the way things work when someone maintains them with attention and time rather than money.

Cedar Key’s residential garbage went into Earl’s truck twice a week. The commercial route — restaurants, the marina, the bait shops, the hardware store, the bed-and-breakfasts that had been proliferating on the island over the past decade like something the island had no say in — ran three times a week in the warmer months and twice in winter. There was also the debris work, the informal arrangements for construction waste and renovation cleanup that Earl negotiated privately with whoever was building or rebuilding anything on the island, which was always someone.

He knew what you threw away.

Gumbo had thought about this in an abstract way when he first noticed Earl — the man on the route sees everything, handles everything, knows the consumption patterns and the waste streams and the private material history of every household and business in his territory. A man like that in a town like this had a specific kind of knowledge. The granular knowledge of daily life, the kind that accumulates over thirty years and never makes headlines but tells you more about a place than any census or survey.

Earl had also known Gumbo’s garbage, which in Gumbo’s case was: Yuengling bottles at a rate that Gumbo considered moderate and which Earl may have had opinions about, evidence of a man who cooked on a boat and ate at the Island Room in roughly equal measure, back issues of the Tampa Bay Times that Gumbo read three days late and then stacked by the companionway until the stack reached the point of aesthetic concern, and whatever the current case had generated in terms of printed documents and takeout containers from the Seabreeze Grille.

Not personal friends. But known to each other. Acknowledged. The wave every morning.

That counted for something.

He drove north on SR-24 and then onto the county road at nine o’clock, the F-150 moving through the interior scrub with the windows down, the morning still cool enough in the shade of the pine flats that the air coming through felt like an argument for staying out here rather than going back to the island. The county road ran flat and straight through a landscape that gave nothing away — cabbage palms, saw palmetto, the occasional cattle fence, the blue of the sky very large above the low vegetation.

Mile marker 14 was a green post on the east shoulder that the county replaced every few years when the mowers took it down. The current post was new, the paint bright, standing in the grass with the conviction of something recently installed.

He pulled off on the shoulder and got out.

The road here was straight in both directions. Four hundred yards north to a bend where the tree line thickened. Four hundred yards south to the junction where the county road met the access track that led to the Levy County Class I landfill gate. The landfill gate was visible from where he stood — a chain-link panel on a rolling track, a small guardhouse beside it, the guardhouse dark and empty at this hour. Beyond the gate the access road ran back through a screen of planted cypress to the actual facility, invisible from the county road, the whole operation conducted at a deliberate remove from the public consciousness.

The shoulder at mile marker 14 was hard-packed shell and dirt, the same material that county roads in this part of Florida used for shoulders when the budget ran out before the asphalt did. No debris on the surface except the permanent debris of a road shoulder — dead grass, the dried husks of palmetto fronds, a sun-bleached aluminum can that had been there long enough to look organic.

No indication of where Earl’s truck had stopped. No chalk marks, no crime scene tape, nothing to show that two days ago a man had died here. Burl Stutts’s team had come and gone and left the shoulder looking the way shoulders look.

Gumbo walked north from the marker, watching the shoulder.

Sixty yards north, just before the shoulder’s surface changed from packed shell to bare dirt at a drainage culvert crossing, he stopped.

The culvert ran under the road in the standard county configuration — a corrugated metal pipe, three feet in diameter, set into the shoulder at road grade. The dirt at the culvert apron — the flat area where the shoulder dropped away to meet the pipe’s entrance — held the impressions of a vehicle that had pulled off the road and sat with its right wheels on the apron. Wide stance, heavy vehicle. Not a passenger car.

He crouched and looked at the impressions without touching them. The dirt at the apron was softer than the packed shell of the main shoulder, softer because it sat in the culvert’s shade and held moisture, and the tires had pressed into it with enough weight to leave a clear record. He took out his phone and photographed the impressions from four angles, then stood and photographed the sight lines — south to mile marker 14, south to the landfill gate, south to the point where an approaching truck on the county road would first come into view of the culvert position.

Two hundred feet, maybe two-ten.

A vehicle parked at the culvert apron would be invisible to northbound traffic on the county road until that traffic was two hundred feet away.

At five-forty in the morning, before full light, in a dump truck running its established route, two hundred feet was not a lot of time to react to something blocking the road.

He was back at the truck when his phone buzzed. A text from Renata: Marco made ropa vieja for staff meal. Come when you’re done with whatever you’re doing.

He looked at the text and looked at the landfill gate a quarter-mile south.

He typed back: Hour, maybe two.

He put the phone in his shirt pocket — today’s shirt was yellow with a pattern of blue marlins, a shirt he’d bought at a bait shop in Steinhatchee because it was there and he needed a shirt — and got back in the truck and drove south to the landfill gate.

The guardhouse was a prefabricated structure about the size of a generous bathroom, with a sliding window on the road side and a space heater visible through the glass, the space heater running despite the morning temperature because whoever occupied the guardhouse had decided comfort was not seasonal. The man at the window was fiftyish, broad through the chest, with the outdoor tan of someone who spent significant time outside a guardhouse and the indoor pallor of someone who spent significant time inside one, the two tones existing simultaneously in a way that suggested the guardhouse work was recent.

The sign on the gate said LEVY COUNTY SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT FACILITY — AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY — MERIDIAN ENVIRONMENTAL HOLDINGS LLC, OPERATOR.

“Help you,” the man said. Not a question.

“I’m looking for whoever runs the scale house,” Gumbo said. He had the PI card out, the laminated edge turned toward the window, the corner peeling back in the morning humidity the way it always did. “Gumbo Malone. I’m a licensed investigator working a matter related to a death on the county road Tuesday morning.”

The man looked at the card. At the peeling corner. At Gumbo’s shirt. “You mean Earl.”

“You knew him.”

“Earl had a tipping account here. Construction debris loads, mostly. He came through the scale house three, four times a week.” He slid the window wider. “Name’s Clete. I run the scale house.” He looked at the county road behind Gumbo. “Burl Stutts was here Tuesday. Didn’t ask me much.”

“What would you have told him if he’d asked more.”

Clete looked at the guardhouse interior for a moment. At the space heater, at the logbook on the shelf beside the window, at something Gumbo couldn’t see. He looked back at Gumbo.

“I’d have told him Earl called me Monday night,” Clete said. “Around nine. Asked if the night crew had been running loads.”

“Had they.”

“They had.” Clete put both hands on the window ledge. “I’d also have told Stutts that Meridian’s been running night operations three times a week for the past year and a half, and that Earl had noticed, and that Earl had opinions about what was going in on those night runs.” He stopped. “Earl drove past this gate every morning at five-forty on his way to start his route. He’d been watching what came in here at night. He told me he was keeping notes.”

Gumbo looked at the gate, the chain-link panel, the access road running back through the cypress screen.

“Notes about what,” he said.

Clete looked at the logbook.

“About the trucks,” he said. “The night trucks don’t run Cedar Key plates. They run Georgia tags, mostly. And they’re not standard MSW vehicles — they’re not garbage trucks. They’re tanker configurations. The kind you use for —” He stopped. Looked at the logbook again. “The kind you use for liquid waste.”

Gumbo looked at the access road going back into the cypress.

“Clete,” he said. “Has anyone from Meridian talked to you since Tuesday.”

Clete looked at him for a long moment. The space heater behind him clicked and ran.

“Their operations manager called me Wednesday morning,” he said. “Told me to refer any questions about facility operations to the company’s communications office in Atlanta.” He held Gumbo’s look. “First time in four years anyone from Meridian has called me directly about anything.”

Gumbo wrote the operations manager and the Atlanta reference in the composition book and capped the pen and looked at the guardhouse and at Clete’s hands on the window ledge and at the cypress screen beyond the gate hiding whatever was back there from whatever was out here.

“I’m going to need your direct number,” Gumbo said.

Clete reached under the logbook shelf and came out with a business card — the county’s card, the Levy County seal, Clete’s full name printed under the title Scale House Supervisor. He handed it through the window.

“Earl was a good man,” Clete said. “Brought me a Cuban sandwich from the marina bait shop every Friday. Said the woman who ran the marina made the best press in Levy County.” He looked at the card in Gumbo’s hand. “Nobody robs a man at mile marker 14 at five-forty in the morning for his wallet. There’s no foot traffic on that road. There’s no reason to be on that road at that hour unless you know the road.” He looked at the gate. “Unless you know exactly who comes down it and when.”

The space heater clicked off.

Clete slid the window closed and went back to his logbook.

Gumbo stood at the gate with the business card and the composition book and looked at the access road going back through the cypress toward the forty acres of engineered fill rising above the flat marsh, the grassed-over green of it visible above the tree line from here, a small manufactured hill in a landscape that had no hills, patient and large and apparently full of things that needed to be somewhere nobody would think to look.

He wrote the date at the bottom of the page and signed it.

Then he stood at the gate a moment longer than he needed to stand there, because sometimes the standing was part of the thinking, and then he got in the truck and headed back toward the island, the composition book on the passenger seat and Clete’s card tucked inside the front cover and the sound of Earl Croom’s truck in his head the way sounds stay in your head when they’ve been part of your mornings long enough to become infrastructure.

The Pelican’s Perch opened at eleven.

He was on a barstool at eleven-oh-four.

Gary Timms came down from the end of the bar where he’d been setting up the rail with the focused efficiency of a man who had opened this bar at eleven o’clock for fifteen years and had the pre-service routine timed to the minute. He looked at Gumbo. He looked at the composition book on the bar. He looked at the marlin shirt.

He poured a Yuengling and set it down without being asked.

“Earl,” Gary said.

“Burl Stutts called it robbery,” Gumbo said.

Gary looked at the bar top. “Burl Stutts would call a hurricane a light breeze if the paperwork was simpler.”

The bar at eleven in the morning had the quality of a room that was clearing its throat before the day’s real conversation started. Two ceiling fans. The mounted tarpon over the back bar. The jalousie windows open to the waterfront, the smell of the gulf and the fried fish from the place two doors down coming through in equal measure. An old couple at the far table with coffee they’d brought from somewhere else, which Gary tolerated because they’d been doing it for eleven years.

“He came in here,” Gumbo said. “Earl.”

“Every Friday afternoon. Three o’clock, sometimes three-thirty depending on the route.” Gary wiped the bar in the automatic way. “Bud Light in a bottle. He never ordered food. He sat at the bar and watched the water and drank one beer in about forty minutes and left.” He looked toward the jalousie windows. “Last Friday he stayed an hour and twenty minutes and drank two.”

“He say anything.”

“He said the usual things. Route stuff, weather. Complained about a new development on the north end putting out construction debris on the wrong days, making him double back.” Gary looked at the bar. “Then he said something I’ve been thinking about since Wednesday morning.”

Gumbo waited.

“He said somebody should look at what goes into the landfill at night.” Gary kept wiping the bar, the motion continued past the point of necessity. “I asked him what he meant. He said the trucks that came in after midnight weren’t hauling household garbage. He said he’d know the difference.” Gary stopped wiping. “I asked him if he’d talked to anybody official about it. He said he was working on it.” Gary looked at Gumbo. “That was last Friday. He was dead by Tuesday morning.”

Gumbo picked up the Yuengling.

Down the bar, the door opened and three people came in together, the lunch crowd starting to materialize. Gary moved toward them with the unhurried competence of fifteen years.

Gumbo sat with the beer and the composition book and the sound of a truck he wouldn’t hear tomorrow morning or any morning after that, and he thought about a man who drove past a landfill gate every day at five-forty and kept notes about what he saw, and what it cost a man to keep notes about the wrong thing in a county where the wrong thing was apparently quite profitable.

He opened the composition book.

At the top of a fresh page he wrote: Croom, Earl — active.

Below that he drew a line.

Below the line he wrote four things in a column: Landfill. Night trucks. Georgia plates. Tanker configuration.

He looked at the four things.

Then he wrote a fifth: Who knew Earl’s route well enough to be at mile marker 14 at five-forty on a Tuesday.

He looked at that question for a long time while the bar filled up around him and Gary poured and the gulf did its flat blue thing through the jalousie windows and the ceiling fans moved the warm air in their patient circles.

He did not have an answer yet.

He had the question, which was the beginning of having an answer, and in Gumbo Malone’s experience the question was always the part that cost the most to find.