“I never fired a shot. I just never stopped the car.”
A Detroit kid who could drive anything gets picked for a crew in 1974. One cold November morning in 1979, a plan goes wrong in six seconds. Thirty-one years later, through Jackson, Marion, Atlanta and the hills of Kentucky, an old man walks out a gate and sits down at a kitchen table to tell it straight.
Who drives the car, who pulls the trigger, and who does the time.
From a plant town on Eight Mile to the most locked-down prison in America, The Wheelman follows one man who told himself he was “only the driver.”
- A two-bedroom house south of Eight Mile Road, a father from the Ford Rouge plant, and a boy who can name every part of an engine.
- Woodward Avenue on a Friday night, other people’s fast cars, and the men who start calling him “our man.”
- A crew with a talker and a thinker — and a baby daughter he promises he’ll always drive home.
- One cold November morning in 1979, two shots, and a car that doesn’t stop.
- Jackson, Marion’s twenty-three-hour lockdown, and the 1987 Atlanta uprising seen from the wrong side of a wall.
- Twenty-two years of Sunday letters to a daughter who doesn’t write back — until she does.
- A gate in 2022, a city he no longer recognises, and a twenty-dollar kitchen table.
From the first page.
CHAPTER 1 · EIGHT MILE
I was born in the spring of 1953 in a two-bedroom house just south of Eight Mile Road, and the first sound I remember is my father’s lunch pail hitting the kitchen counter at four in the afternoon. He worked at the Rouge, the big Ford plant down in Dearborn, and he came home every day smelling of hot metal and cigarettes and something sweet I later found out was the paint shop.
My father was not a talker. He believed a man said what he had to say with his hands — a fixed fence, a patched roof, a car that started in January. When I was seven he put me on a milk crate in front of the engine of his ’52 Chevy and named every part of it for me, slow, once. Then he went inside. The next Saturday he asked me to name them back. I got every one, and he nodded, and that nod was the warmest thing that man ever gave me. I chased it for the rest of my life.
The book goes on from here for fourteen chapters.
A car doesn’t care who’s driving it. That was the first lie I believed.
They can lock the door. They can’t lock the road you keep in your head.
“Almost didn’t go” is not a defence. It’s just the loneliest sentence there is.
Thirty-one years, and the first thing I learned outside was that I didn’t know how to cross the street.
Five parts. Fourteen chapters.
Detroit
- Eight Mile
- The Car
- The Crew
The Job
- Thursday Mornings
- November
- Three Weeks
Inside
- Jackson
- Marion
- Atlanta, 1987
The Long Middle
- Letters
- Kentucky
- The Year Everything Stopped
Out
- The Gate
- The Kitchen Table
- Afterword
Franklin Mercer
On the channel, Franklin talks about the rules nobody writes down inside — what not to say, who not to trust, how a man gets through thirty-one years. The Wheelman is his story, told from his own kitchen table in Detroit.
A note on the book: The Wheelman is a novel. Franklin Mercer, his family and his crew are fictional. The prisons and the events in prison history — Jackson, the Marion lockdown, the 1987 Atlanta uprising — are real and used as background. It is not a guide to any crime.
Before you start reading.
Is this a true story?
No — it’s a novel, a memoir-style story told by a fictional narrator. The prisons and moments in prison history it passes through are real; the characters and the crime are not.
Is it a printed book?
No. It’s a PDF e-book you download straight after checkout and keep forever. It reads on a phone, tablet, e-reader or computer.
How long is it?
Fourteen chapters in five parts, plus an afterword — a short novel you can read in an evening or two.
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