THE BIG MAN OF HEDLER
CHAPTER ONE
THE DAY HAD BEEN slow and without much stimulation, save for a fellow agent’s aging bologna sandwich settling on a mahoghany desk. The stench of sitting meat had crept to the adjacent desk of Agent Lon Raines, slithering through the towers of paper lining the edges of his work station and into his nose. Lon held up his collared shirt to the bridge of his nose and let out a groan of disgust. The whiffs were magnified by the hot, wet August air of Washington D.C.
In order to distract himself from the smell and heat, Lon pulled out a cigarette from the nearest right hand drawer and withdrew his lighter from his damp undershirt breast pocket. He lit the end and flicked the golden lighter’s top closed—that tink of the lighter sending his mind back to June of four years earlier.
It felt like a lifetime had passed.
****
JUNE 6. 1944.
A salty spray hitched along the chilly morning breeze and dipped into the inner sanctum of the Higgins landing craft, reminding the twenty-three year old Lon of his summers at Chincoteague Island with a different sweetheart every school year. The spits of the cold Atlantic were refreshing in those days, cooling off red cheeks billowing in the pursuit of new love. Now, the water clung to nervous sweat on his face, now flush with an indescribable fear. The two-hour ride on the Higgins boat was choppy, causing everyone with a stomach to suffer the indifference of the black ocean—a force of nature didn’t give a damn whether the Axis troops or Allies won the war, despite being filled with a million or so maritime German and British mines. The three dozen Higgins boats, each packed with thirty-some men, neared the shoreline, now showered with the sharp pops and shockwaves of mortar blasts.
It had taken two hours from their initial pickup at a recently renovated port on the coast of England. They were told to expect heavy resistance in the form of everything save a lightning bolt from God— mines on the beach and in the sea, bloodthirsty spider webs of barbed wire, high peaks, dozens of machine gun and artillery positions. Those two horrendous hours seemed to stretch on for eternity and yet, with every sharp quip from the commander near the steering hatch or blast of white from a whistling mortar hitting the surface, Lon would suddenly be ten minutes closer. His entire life flashed before him, but not his past—he saw a future, one that seemed to be swallowed up by reality with every repetitive thump-thump of the diesel engine that jittered in place, sweating brown grease and flicking it about the pale green floor lining. The mix of two dozen soldiers and higher-ranking officers ahead of him were silent, a few bowing their heads while many of them chewed wildly on tobacco, gum, or skin scratched off the inside of their mouth.
Close-call mortar strikes rippled across the unseen waves and buzzed through the walls of the armored boat, rattling some of Lon’s metal fillings. The coxswain, a sickly looking captain of thirty-five began to huff as he spun the wheel, avoided two artillery blasts and Lon’s stomach flipped—the boat swung a hard left, cutting through a wave that smacked into the hull and knocked him against the back. The coxswain continued to rotate the steering wheel fiercely, yelling out for Lon and the rest to take cover. Lon winced with his face scrunched, held his helmet tight with a free hand while the other gripped the bottom of the slippery bench. He did his best to cram down flat against his seat near the engine.
Seconds later, a BOOM! rattled into the boat and the coxswain was drenched by the plume of white that shot up the starboard side, shaking the downpour off along with his glasses. The drenched man straightened the Higgins’ approach to the shore and spat out a shrapnel-filled stream of sea water. His eyes became narrowed past the redness and he looked overhead, lurching his head up.
Lon copied the coxswain’s movements, straightening his back and peering over the steel wall to see a black hillside stretching the length of the beach. They were close. Too close to turn back now. As if that was ever an option. ‘Omaha Beach’ was the suicide mission. Not that the other boys would be lesser victims of fate on the other beachhead locations, especially Gold Beach. That hellhole was nothing but sheer cliffs with eager riflemen perched and munitions-filled bunkers full of MG-42 machine guns. They could turn humans into hamburger in the literal blink of an eye.
“Approach in one minute! Asses up, heads down, boys!”
That final minute on the Higgins zoomed by. The huddled and hyped soldiers, now nothing more than bobbing green mushroom tops in a floating metal box, moved in unison through rip-roars of a nearby Higgins catching fire on the water, the screams of torched men clanging against the walls. Lon made eye contact with the fearless coxswain for the last time, watching him pull the lever on the steel door at the bow. Lon ducked as the coxswain blew a wavering whistle with all the might of a steam engine.
The whistle was drowned out by the loud smack of the steel platform against the near-black shallow coast off the coast of Nazi-occupied France, a place the Allied leads had nicknamed Omaha Beach. A metallic rainstorm welcomed the Higgins’ bow, sending helmets and tuffs of green undershirts and hair around like cannonshots.
Lon’s rifle became useless instantly, a sniper round missing him by a hair and knocking into the metal barrel. He ducked and clung to the bloodied right side as the German hailstorm riddled through men like paper dolls. The bullets pierced through with wet smacks or no sound at all, knocking down man after man with some dropping like sacks of flour while others jolted up at odd angles before tumbling on top of the bewildered survivors or bodies. Lon pulled himself up from a heavy torso or leg draped across his back and watched three men huddle their way past the softening bullet spray and off the ramp.
The slaughter stack of U.S. army green fatigues chopped to mere fiber and slathered with gore, some moving and some frozen, struck Lon as akin to staring at a painting for too long. Everything became muddled, without a face or human feature to be found. And as he made his way off the Higgins, his blood-soaked waterlogged boots hardly touching the platform, the writhing beach was covered with featureless half-moving mounds like nests of rats burrowing through a pile of wet rags.
The journey up the shrapnel-dusted coastline was nothing but bullets, heat of fresh mortar craters, pings of Garand rifles, the malicious whistling of incoming shells, and a baffling amount of grime shooting down his throat. Countless gored sandbags and dozens of heavy metal crosses dotted the beach as defenses against Allied watercraft. In truth, there was no defense. Lon had half-considered a quick dig into the sand for some quick cover. As if the Nazi bunkermen would have been kind enough to allow him such an undertaking.
By the time a third wave had arrived, he and the surviving members of the 90th Infantry division had trudged through walls of German gunfire and a few lucky mortar misses. Pure luck had guided him across the 100-foot or so stretch of sloshy beach. No shelter. No miracle weapon to save the day. His job was to assist with providing as much manpower to the coast as possible and he damn well did his job. The remaining soldiers in his troop assisted the survivors of the first wave through the blown-through remnants of their initial assault. As they got closer to the white cliffsides darted with black-green shrubs and protruding dark gray Nazi bunkers spitting out death, the beach became chunked with fine pebbles and eventually tuffs of seagrass amongst the scattered dead.
Lon didn’t even have time to be scared. By the time the explosions ringed away and the wails of bloodcurdling screams faded out, his eyes were no longer moving—later describing them to a military doctor as “golf balls glued to his skull, stuck facing forward”. On taking out the remaining sniper posts in the side of the chalky-white hills ahead, Omaha had been claimed. Lon wouldn’t know how many were lost until the end of the war. But he knew it neared a thousand at least. Too many half-moving mounds. Too many screams of poor boys who didn’t know they were already dead, slumped on the ground in their own organs while begging someone to find their boot. But, in being honest to himself, he knew he couldn’t even comprehend a thousand men dead in a single morning. Or how anyone survived in the first place.
Two hours later, Lon was covered in blood (most of it not his), sweat, sand lining his crotch and waistband, and his dented M1 Garand.
His newly appointed captain, who arrived on the first, and somehow much more hellish wave, Joe Briggs lit up a cigar and sat perched on a scorched-to-a-crisp Nazi munitions crate. A Kraut crate, he had called them. His brown eyes squinted as he inhaled the milky smoke that filled the bunker in a haze. He wasn’t the smartest in the company but he was always there to grab you when you stumbled over. He had that big brute ‘Lennie’ from Of Mice and Men quality to him. A gentle giant until he got pissed off or inspired.
“Corporal Raines, you’ve been in since Pearl Harbor, right?” Briggs asked, closing his eyes as the intense fog circled him and hid him in the darkness of the unlit bunker.
Lon responded with a unrevealing nod.
Briggs adjusted the sandy suspenders on his uniform, his burly shape nearly bursting through the sweat-soaked green shirt. The sounds of men marching about, hauling kraut crates onto trucks, and yelling orders was quickly drowned out by the emptiness of the singed bunker—four or five Germans had been smoked out by a direct fire bomb hit through the front window slit in the concrete just an hour earlier.
“What do you think of these guys we’re fighting? Honestly. The Krauts? The Japs? And anyone in between.”
“I… I don’t know what you mean.” Lon replied. His throat was sore. He had been swallowing sand and smoke for most of the morning. His cheek ached from the cut along his sideburns, blood drying against the scruff of his five o’ clock shadow.
“People say they’re evil. Like the Devil kind of evil.” Briggs stretched his shooting arm, pulling it behind his head with the other and pressing down on his right elbow tightly. “That’s why we’re here, right? To snuff out the evil and bring justice and peace and that bullshit back to the world?”
“Yeah. I mean, I guess. They’ve done a lot of bad things.” Lon replied, rubbing through his drying, blond hair and scratching the thin slice at the top that had just scabbed over.
“And we haven’t? Shit. When I was growing up, they hanged a bunch of black boys in my town just for being black. Strung ‘em up in a tree at the local park. Where kids played. We got bank robbers gunning down cops in the streets. And now because of Pearl Harbor, FDR’s rounding up people in camps for being slant-eyed. I mean… I don’t wanna invite them to the cookout or nothin’ but they took children out of their homes! Grandmas and such! It ain’t right in my book. But we’re the good guys? Because we aren’t like them, supposed to be. But then… I’ve watched some of my fellow men go off and burn down some German village for no other reason than plain old fear. We do it just as often as they do.”
Lon was silent. There wasn’t a word he felt he could add to the conversation. His stomach always flipped when he saw another headline talking about racists, mobsters, or psychos killing innocents. But to him, at least while in basic and during his brief stint with the OSS, the message was loud and clear. The Nazis and everything they stood for was a sacrilegious nightmare for the entire world. A possessed army of demons who were going to conquer the world if America didn’t step in to finish the job nobody else could do. Pearl Harbor had been the last straw for many Americans. Lon included. They had messed with the wrong people and with the victory here at Normandy, it seemed that good would prevail. But still, Lon could see the gears turning in Briggs’ dull Montana brain. Something did not feel right. The flesh of a man searing and sizzling didn’t sound heroic. Victories didn’t taste as good with smoke and blood layering the tongue.
“Whenever I shoot one of these men… whether I see the white of their eyes or not… I just keep thinking to myself,” Briggs said low, sucking deeply on the cigar like an adult pacifier and closing his eyes. “That was somebody’s boy. Somebody probably held onto that kid and hugged him tight, you know? Read him a story, kissed his head at night, and prayed for him to live long, healthy and happy. And then… bam! He’s gone. Just like that.”
Still, Lon couldn’t speak. His mouth felt drier now than ever before.
“I don’t know, kid. I don’t feel that even the Krauts are nothing but pure evil. And if they aren’t,” Briggs said, a sly tear sliding through the grime and wrinkles at his eye.
“What the hell does that evil look like?”
****
Stick zipping up his fly and wiping off his wet hands brought Lon back to the D.C. office. His partner sat back down at his desk and resumed eating the horrendous sandwich. He chewed loudly. Always. With his mouth open. Always. But Lon loved him like a brother. Which meant a lot of the time, he hated him as well. He looked over at the thin man, his thinning black hair oiled and slicked back behind his ears, tuffs sticking out like radio antennas. He watched him finish the sandwich in silence, becoming lost in the trance of the autonomous chewing and non-blinking eyes scanning the mountain of paperwork on Lon’s desk.
“Want the last bite, handyman? Jesus, stop eyeing me like that. You haven’t moved since I went to take a whizz.” Stick said, finally noticed his gaze.
“Sorry. Can’t concentrate with all the chewing.” Lon smarted, crushing his dying cigarette into the ashtray next to the nearly-finished pile of paperwork.
“No excuse. How’s the investigating going? Find anything interesting?” Stick grabbed a napkin and wiped mustard from the corners of his mouth, balling it up and tossing it in Lon’s direction.
“No. Not really. Just been thinking about old times.” He rubbed his eyes and blew hot air up at his face, hoping it would cool it off. It didn’t work.
“Nightmares again? You’re not pounding the bottle again, are you?”
“No, Stick. Not since Jeanie’s birthday.”
“What’s that? Four months now? I’m just saying. That’s a good thing! I never liked peeling your face off some bar floor while you soil your trousers.”
Lon stood up, ignoring the last comment. Because it was embarrassing. And true. “I’m going to check the mailbox. Maybe we got something in there to entertain me for the rest of the evening.”
“Okay. I’ll be here.” Stick said, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes for his daily three o’ clock nap, work day or not.
Lon headed out of the cramped office on the third floor of the HEW-South Building on 330 C Street. The Pentagon had given them the small office a year earlier in ‘47, crammed right in the middle of dozens of offices for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Almost as punishment for proving the government wrong during the whole Pierce debacle.
Now every time Lon thought about those hellish days in West Virginia and the near-death experience and the wolf man suicide attempt, it made his heart race. Thank God they had made a good impression on President Truman. One minute away from life in prison, Masterson had whispered to him on the tarmac. Masterson. That prick of a government official. Not that it was much of an insult. Requirement for the job, really.
Lon smiled at the cute older secretary at the front desk as he made his way to the mailroom. Cynthia, with grandmother-wide hips and a sweet cherry-red face, was one of the only people in the building that gave Lon and his team the time of day when they came in for work. They were the misfits. The supposed ‘bad boys’ of the C.I.A. who couldn’t be controlled during field missions but too impatient to sit at an official desk job either. So the former janitor’s office/lodging turned into their new headquarters. It was pitiful living a lie. But Lon had made his mind up nearly a year ago— This job is necessary. It will not be praised. It will not spoke of. But, despite that, you need to understand that the world will be thanking you by not falling into fear. Not anymore than it has.
Those words had become his mantra. Whether or not it was a shut-up-about-this-sensitive-intelligence speech, Lon still felt the words were true. He had to. He had sacrificed a good government job for the truth that no one else wanted to face. And now, this was the pit he was in for now.
He fished the single greasy key from his pocket and fit it into the lock on the N.A.P.’s mailbox. Of course, it wasn’t actually labeled as such. The idea was to remain hidden. Labeling a mailbox in the ownership of the National Agency of Paranormal Investigations didn’t sound very subtle. Instead, it simply read Lon’s last name.
“Three? Nice.” Lon said with a small smirk, excitement making his stomach flutter. This was more than the last two months combined. He grabbed the letters quickly and had more than one spring in his step as he returned to the office. He closed the door to get Stick’s attention, ripping through the first one coming from a weird-sounding town in Louisiana.
“We got mail? Actual mail?” Stick exclaimed, leaping up from his napping post and standing beside Lon as he leaned against his desk.
Lon pulled out the letter and shook his head at the stamp posted on top of the addressed to block: REDIRECT TO P.O. BOX 34 330 C STREET, WASHINGTON D.C.
One of Masterson’s conditions when Lon proposed to the letter request option was that any mail sent to the Supernatural Incidents Request Line advertised in several newspaper outlets across the country was that there was no direct connection to Lon’s agency, out of fear of embarrassment to the United States Government. Lon had tried to fight against it but Stick and his other partner, Bill Haynes had persuaded him to roll with the punches and be thankful that it was being approved in the first place. It was a blessing to have good friends. Other-wise, Lon would’ve been living that prison life Masterson talked about.
The actual letter was even more frustrating. The handwriting was very poor and gave vague details about a ‘demonic swamp monster’ living in the bayous outside of the writer’s crawfish shack in a town called Allowana. It sounded like something out of a pulp fiction book Lon would pick up occasionally at Peebles’ Drug Store. His enthusiasm quickly waned and he could tell that Stick felt the same way by the way he cleared his throat.
“Leafman Red? Blood of the innocent? Swamp hell hounds? Sounds like a folk tale I’d tell Georgie to keep him away from the woods when we were kids.” Stick said.
“What do you think?” Lon asked. Damn, he thought. Just some kid trying to get a story published in a ten-cent magazine.
“Sounds like somebody wants to be in a comic book editorial mention. Creative, though.”
Sometimes I really hate Stick. But this is why I love him.
Lon tossed the letter into the trash and groaned loudly. Stick’s eyes got wide and he patted his back. He lit a cigarette and handed the pack to Lon. “Disappointing, handyman. But we knew this kind of crap was going to happen. Roll with the punches, right? There’s still two more. I’ll read them after I get this budget paper in to Masterson’s office.”
Lon slammed the pack of Stick’s Lucky Strike cigarettes on top of the finished papers stack and grabbed his lighter while sitting down. “Not like we’re spending that much anyhow.” he said through mostly closed lips, lighting the end and breathing in the silky menthol flavor.
“Just on ink for the typewriters because you never got the chance to be Mark Twain.” Stick whispered to himself. Lon eyed him and pulled the cigarette away from his mouth.
“I like a thorough report. I do it for both our sakes, you see? I make it concise so nobody has to call with a list of questions. Don’t hate on me because you can’t read, Stick. You grew up in a dirt shack. It’s okay.” Lon smiled, his spirits lifted a little from their banter.
“Asshole.” his friend chuckled while searching through the other two letters.
Lon started scribbling on the budget sheet, checking off the used supplies for the month and circling the items that needed to be replenished. There was only one item that had never needed a resupply: the ammunition for their service pistols. Lon, Sticks, and Haynes hadn’t seen action since the initial mission that founded the agency. Not that Lon complained. Action was fine here and there. But being in constant danger wasn’t his forte. In fact, his pistol reminded him of the fact that Briggs had killed himself with Lon’s exact model a year after the war ended. Right through the chin. It seemed like whatever devil existed had finally gotten to his old comrade.
A damn shame. To go through Hell and back, fighting for your life and watching friends die all around you. And then, you come back home and can’t handle the normalcy of everyday life. Because you got used to Hell. Lon supposed that was why he drank often. Once the whiskey hit his lips, he couldn’t help but fall in the hole.
“Hey, Lon. Come take a look at this.” Stick remarked after a few minutes of mundane box checking.
“Send it in Weird Tales. Get a few bucks out of it.” Lon replied, sharpening his bite mark-ridden pencil and staring at the crisp, new stationary with the N.A.P. letterhead at the top, just begging to be sent to Head Office.
“No, pal. You need to take a look at this one.”
Lon poked his head above the stacks and blew a cloud of smoke out the top, cocking an eye-brow. He slowly rose from the chair and walked over to Stick, whose eyes were still glued to the yellowed letter with deep ink spots all over, bleeding through to the back. He was also holding a small Polaroid the size of a wallet in his other hand. The words on the letter were tightly crammed together, mashed in as if the page was squished on its way to the office. Lon could tell that the handwriting was poor, most likely from a child. Chicken scratch and desperation rang out on the single page. The letter was just one long paragraph and stretched down to the very bottom of the page, the final sentence smudged with ink and very small.
Lon grabbed the letter from Stick who looked confounded at the words. “I don’t know about this one. It sounds… too crazy to be fake.” Stick stopped talking and kept staring at the picture. Lon decided to hold his anticipation until after his reading.
What kind of statement is that? Too crazy to be fake? Lon thought. He shook the stick paper to flatten it out and immediately noticed that the letter was written on some ancient paper. It felt like a newspaper that had been rained on and then dried repeatedly for a month or so. Lon was worried he would break it; it felt so brittle like a scroll in some adventure film about raiding tombs. Not to mention, it reeked of moth-balls.
“Who wrote on this? The Egyptians?” he commented before looking at the envelope.
He turned it over to see the address heading. Gregory Reddefer- 4th Johnson Street- Hedler, Illinois. Farm country, mostly. When Lon worked directly with the C.I.A., all those months before he made his big proposal for the N.A.P., he found dozens of police reports and strange newspaper headings that formed into a strange pattern. Weird phenomena had been reported in those sparsely populated areas of the U.S. but more often than not, it seemed to be the product of massive boredom induced by simple country living. Nothing but flat land and wheat for miles. But rarely, as Lon had witnessed through reports and legends passed down through generations… some strange creeping thing prowled the lonely plains, waiting for a victim to eat or scare.
He slowed his busy brain and shut off all the possibilities and finally dove into the crude letter:
To who it may concern,
My name is Gregory Harris Reddefer, I am 12 years old and live in the farmin town of Hedler in Illinois. I saw your poster when I went to Chicago last week to visit my grandmother and thought your company would be the perfect fit to help us with our problem. We have a monstir in Hedler. We call em the big man. He has been round for 2 years now and we are starting to run low on all are stuff like bricks and stone and wood and water. The town has wirked hard to keep em trapped becuz he keeps breakin out of the cages and walls and killin people. Last week he killed a bunch of hunting dogs and two boys who tryed shootin em. Shooting em doesnit wirk even if you shoot em in the hed like my dad did. No mattir what they do he just finds a way out and he never screems even when they bern em or hang em. He just wont die. I hope your compa-ny can help us becuz dad says the town is gonna go bankrupt. He sed we could starve if we go bankrupt. I dont want to starve. Plees help.
Sincerlee, Gregory Reddefer.
P.S. I also got a picture of the big man in one of the hallways to show you he is reel. My uncle took it with his fansee camra. It brok after he took it.
“The hell?” Lon said, raising his bead to see Stick aiming the photograph at his eyes.
His fluttering, thumping heart skipped a beat and he looked at the crisp yet washed-out image in awe. His eyes had become glued golf balls like in Normandy. The photo showed a large burly figure, clothed in a shredded one-piece mechanic suit, wielding a very bloody wrench that was bent and twisted into a swirl shape. While the head area was blurry (probably from a quick turn), it was easy to tell that a potato sack was over the entire head, no eye holes present. The background was clearly a brick-layered hallway, a dusty dirt floor seen below. The ‘big man’ didn’t wear shoes, giant feet showing through ripped pant legs covered with either oil or blood. The skin was extremely pale, with black veins trailing on the sole of a raised right foot.
Whoever the photographer was must have been on the ground as the camera was pointed up at him, making the ‘big man’ look enormous. The flash bulb lit up enough of the scene to show the details of the mechanic suit. “Are those… bullet holes?” Lon asked, looking at the pockmarked chest area, the inside of the holes a black void.
“I gotta’ say…” Stick began.
“This is a lot of effort for some fake letter. What do you think?” he continued, looking at the photo again and picking up his forgotten cigarette resting in the ashtray.
Lon was speechless. What the hell is going on? How could a town keep a secret that big? With a body count? Low supplies due to a monster trap? It all sounded too fantastic to be true. But why would somebody take the time to write a letter and send in a pretty authentic picture? Sure, fake photographs were popular nowadays, with every Chuck and Jerry wanting their shot at the front page. But something about the letter sounded real. The innocent spelling mistakes. The bad handwriting. The sheer bluntness associated with children right there on the crinkly page. And that chilling picture. Lon had never seen anything like it.
On impulse, Lon reached into the second lowest drawer on the right side of his desk. The stainless steel container slid from the back of the drawer and shined in his eyes, worn with scratches and scuffs from many nights of diving deep into potential cases and neglecting the rest of the world. Lon stared at the flask with a sudden burst of warmth at the back of his head.
But then, he saw the crawling mounds of Omaha. Briggs crying in the dark French bunker tomb of several unidentifiable Germans. And he wanted a drink. To fill the pit that had opened almost seven years earlier, when the country had been weeks from Christmas, despite the looming certainty that America would soon be forced into the war.
And with another impulse, another warmth came over him. The rush of opening his eyes almost a year ago. Another war was brewing. With the same tone as the boy’s letter.
Lon shut the drawer.
“I think we’ve got something.” he said finally, turning to his partner.
“What’s the number to Head Office again?”
****
Three hours later, the N.A.P. was headed to Washington National on a private flight to Midway Air-port on the south side of Chicago. They had to stir the third member of the N.A.P., a ginger-haired former WWII bomber tech Bill Haynes from his evening slumber after getting off the phone with Masterson’s secretary.
Masterson didn’t even speak to them, claiming he was “busy with some actual intelligence work”. Lon and company took that as the sacred seal of approval. After grabbing three hundred in cash from the cashier’s office downstairs (and being reminded that they had already used twenty-five percent of their annual operations budget), they rushed to Haynes’ house and got him cleaned up. He was currently sick with a cold. But Lon hoped the new case would brighten his day.
It didn’t.
“I feel like death hisself, gentlemen. Thanks for barging into my house. I could’ve shot you two.” Haynes said with a stuffy nose and clogged throat, putting on his weathered gray fedora and rubbing his mouth so hard his cheeks made noise.
Haynes slammed his door shut with his briefcase and sat it on the front porch next to the three steps, taking a moment to loudly blow his nose with a pocket handkerchief. He observed the contents before balling up the soft blue cloth and tossing it behind the prickly hedges next to the porch. “Good God. That’s not a color you want to see before going on a trip.”
“Shut up, you giant baby. We finally got a case!” Lon said.
“And I finally had a day off.” Haynes muttered.
Lon ignored him, picking up his partner’s briefcase and rushing toward the black charter car. He looked out to the left, the D.C. skyline from Arlington pressed against a darkening sky. Thunder was looming to the east in Delaware. A storm was on its way. Good thing they were headed in the opposite direction.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .