Lloyd McNeil, a thoroughly honest Atlanta police officer, has just discovered he has a fast-growing tumor inside his skull his doctor likens to an “Evil Dead” tree. Lloyd is already experiencing “lightning bolts” in his field of vision. Episodes of nonsense have become more frequent: He cooks his baseball cap in a microwave; how did it even get in there?
Beyond the trauma of his impending doom — it’s only a matter of weeks, really — this divorced, “middle-aged legacy cop” knows that his small pension, bank account and life insurance policy won’t guarantee security for Bishop, his 13-year-old son. Lloyd needs a creative, that is to say, lucrative, exit for himself, and he needs to find one fast.
If only he could devise some way to get bumped off in the line of duty. Then, according to an International Brotherhood of Police formula, Bishop would receive a lump sum of $190,000 (two years of his father’s salary), plus an additional $6,000 a month for life.
But getting oneself killed turns out to be a more difficult proposition than Lloyd anticipates, which doesn’t stop him from racing ahead with his cockeyed plan. Thus, the premise of “Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride,” Will Leitch’s clever third work of fiction, a lighthearted variant on countdown noirs like the 1949 film, “D.O.A.”
As a law-abiding lawman, Lloyd knows that his scheme is a crime, so he tells nobody about the subterfuge except Dr. Lipsey, his wonderfully bent neurosurgeon. Lipsey understands the importance of discretion: When he’s not delivering bad news to his patients, he sculpts fat cones of coke, partying hard with Atlanta city councilmen, a Hawks player, even “a local TV weatherman.”
“Insurance fraud looks good on you,” notes Lipsey, drolly.
Lloyd’s father, Major Lawrence McNeil, who died 20 years ago, would have found Lipsey’s decadent lifestyle completely unacceptable. A legendary, no-nonsense police commander, his desk sign spelled things out with capitalized clarity: “NO DISORDER, DISCORD OR DISRUPTION WILL BE INDULGED.”
Unsurprisingly, Lloyd had a contentious relationship with his old man. They bonded just once, rebuilding a nearly ruined cop car that they named “Big Bertha.” (It will prove to be an indestructible tank.)
Major McNeil’s distinguished career in law enforcement was undone by a serial killer known as the Dumpster Diver, who scattered four women’s bodies in dumpsters around the chieftain’s jurisdiction, Zone 6, that includes Little Five Points, Cabbagetown and the Old Fourth Ward.
Taunted by his nemesis and hounded by the local press for his failure to solve the crimes, the despondent Major died at home, leaving behind the unsolved cold-case that the author coolly makes you forget about until the proper revelatory moment arrives two decades later.
As a police officer and a father, Lloyd doesn’t aspire to be like Major McNeil. “Dad was about force,” says Lloyd, who hates both guns and conflict. “A cop should soothe, should listen, should empathize and should then be able to restore order.”
He’s determined to a better relationship with his own son, Bishop. They share a love for soccer (Atlanta United), bad movies and bad food: The kid drinks soy sauce straight, “like a psychopath.” Lloyd marvels at his son’s awkwardness: “He still knows nothing, but now at some level he knows he knows nothing and thus assumes the pose of knowing everything.”
Increasingly frail, Lloyd comes close to confessing his situation to his son. Instead, he pens the “10 Gentle Edicts of Lloyd McNeil,” wry philosophical advisories to be read by Bishop after his father’s death like, “Don’t worry about what comes next,” and “Learn to drive a stick.” Dispersed throughout the book, these interludes of tenderness and charm (and seriousness) anchor “Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride,” but the author’s hand is too sure to allow things to become morose.
High-powered action vignettes propel the book’s middle section on Lloyd’s deadly larks around gentrified neighborhoods, intown streets and iconic landmarks familiar to most Atlanta readers.
He hurls himself into danger, walking straight into a violent domestic dispute, later challenging an active rooftop shooter on the GSU Urban Life Building. A dizzying, citywide car chase climaxes in a spectacular 75-foot drop-and-thud near the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, after which Big Bertha simply shudders and putts off home.
These failed attempts at his own annihilation, filmed by anonymous cellphone users, transform Lloyd into a social media star known as #happycop. While such heroics may flummox his colleagues, his antics — curtsying for the camera and muttering banalities like “Good to see you, fellow citizen!” — bring delight to a global audience.
An Athens novelist and editor, Will Leitch has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic and authored two nonfiction sports books. Presumably, he shares Lloyd’s view that Atlanta is, and should be, a beacon for diversity, equality and inclusion. As for the misperception outsiders have about the city as a dangerous place, Lloyd adds, “People are so desperate to be afraid of something that they just decide that whatever place they’re currently not in is a place that’s trying to kill them.”
With its disarmingly simple blend of comedy, thrill, wisdom and sentimentality, “Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride” unfolds as a complex storytelling achievement. Naturally, the reader is pulling for Lloyd’s miraculous recovery while simultaneously wishing him success in his “self-murder,” knowing that neither will likely be the outcome, and that some unexpected third way will present itself, and it just may.
But, if it’s understood that all is possibly lost, Will Leitch’s sprightly novel, with its upbeat message, is indeed that rare mineral we don’t have to invade Greenland to dig up: “When sickness comes, when sadness comes, when pain comes,” Lloyd writes to Bishop in one of his edicts, “accept them as what they are: a perversion of life, not an expression of it.”
FICTION
“Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride”
By Will Leitch
Harper Collins
304 pages, $27.99
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