Richard Mills Allen’s résumé reads like a road atlas. He hauled wheelbarrows at a truck yard in Montana, flipped burgers in a small Kentucky diner, and deciphered foreign dialects for the Navy in Monterey. In Georgia he sifted classified chatter for the NSA; back home he pulled night shifts as a volunteer firefighter. He chased protest lines for a metropolitan daily, filled quiet airwaves on rural radio, ghost-wrote for political campaigns, worked discreetly in funeral homes, and produced live video feeds when distance kept people apart. Between jobs he thumbed rides across the West—Vegas...
