Wallace Crendell Atherton (a.k.a. Spike) was a former prisoner that befriended Jimmy Bond and aided The Lone Gunmen during their search for Douglas Pfeiffer.
Biography[]
Friend of Bond and Assistant[]
Jimmy Bond made a quick friend in Spike when he and John Fitzgerald Byers infiltrated Death Row to free an innocent man. They thought that man would be Douglas Pfeiffer but it turned out to be Spike.
Spike watches his pet roach killed by Lowry through the hand mirror.
Immediately after being delivered to their new cells, Byers and Bond saw a cockroach wandering near the cells. Spike called to the creature, trying to draw his pet, Jiminy, back to him, but instead the cold Lowry killed it with his lit cigarette.
After Yves Adele Harlow smuggles in a comm device for Jimmy Bond, it is nearly lost to a guard, but Spike distracts the guard long enough for Jimmy to hide it. Bond had just been told that Pfeiffer is guilty but there is an innocent man that Pfeiffer framed for the murder of a mechanic named Michael Culey in Death Row. When the guard tells off Spike for snarling at him, he uses Spikes real name: Atherton. Wallace Crendell Atherton, the framed man.
Escape and Freedom[]
Having learned of the man's innocence, Jimmy Bond asks Spike/Wallace what he would do if he was freed and receives a three part answer: One, shake the hands of those who freed him. Two, never squander a second of his precious life again. And three, found a place dedicated to the care of the lowliest of all creatures: cockroaches.
In the end, Pfeiffer turned on his lawyer and exonerated Spike/Wallace Crendell Atherton in the process. Spike excitedly shakes the hands of his five rescuers at his new "Roach Rescue Clinic," founded with the multimillion-dollar settlement from the state for his false imprisonment.