There’s a wooden shack of a store along California Highway 74 that sells a robin’s egg blue T-shirt with the logo: I SURVIVED THE ORTEGA HIGHWAY.

Let me tell you about someone who never earned that shirt.

I didn’t murder the person who never earned that T-shirt. It was an accident. A horrible accident.

I never knew that man. I never saw his face.

I don’t know if he made his mark on the world as a serial killer or a saint.

Maybe he scrounged for his meals in the dumpster behind the local Mickey D’s and sold hype on the side to junkies from Sonora to San Diego. Maybe he ran a family of four as a sitcom-worthy patriarch, a punctual, pleasant human being who’d become the head accountant at Dewey, Cheatem and Howe.

I’ll never know.

Let me tell you what I do know about him. What happened that horrible day.

‘A Road Painted in Scarlet’ includes preview chapters of the urban fantasy novel by Michael Angel, 'The Detective & The Unicorn'.