Ken Goddard - Double blind

"I know, and I told him you'd probably say something like that," Bennington replied, then hurriedly added, "since I'd heard you say that to him before."

"And what did he say?"

"He promised to FedEx everything to us tomorrow, so it'll get here Wednesday morning."

"He can't get it out until tomorrow?" Simon Whatley visibly winced.

"I told him it was really important," Bennington hastened to assure his superior, "but he said that was the best he could do."

That wasn't exactly true, but the young congressional aide had no intention of telling Whatley what his congressional aide counterpart from Smallsreed's Washington, D.C., office had really said, because Bennington knew that such a revelation would get them both fired.

Keith Bennington wasn't the smartest congressional aide in the state of Oregon — or in the county of Jasper, for that matter — but he had managed to learn at least that much about big-league politics.

"Okay," Simon Whatley sighed, "here's what you do. The minute that package arrives, you immediately deliver it to the Loggerhead City Post Office out at the intersection of Brandywine Road and Loggerhead Creek, box fourteen. You got that?"

"You want me to send it out by overnight mail to a post office box?" Keith Bennington struggled to control his disbelief at the asinine request.

"No, I don't want you to send it overnight to a post office box, because you can't do that," Whatley explained the obvious impatiently. "Which is why I want you to deliver it to the post office in person."

"Drive all the way out to Loggerhead City?" The young congressional aide looked dismayed. "Why — ?"

"Because I told you to," the congressional district office manager interrupted firmly. "Is there anything else?" Simon Whatley's way of dismissing his subordinate staff.

"Uh, no, except… uh, do you know if Maria's coming in this morning?"

"I told her to take the day off, get some rest," Whatley reported without the slightest trace of emotion. "It was a tiring weekend for everyone."

"Does this mean we've got to paint red knees on all the giant spiders that just have brown legs?" Special Agent/Pilot Thomas Woeshack asked plaintively, looking up from his copy of the fifty-two-page briefing document Deputy Special Ops Chief Freddy Moore had left with the covert team at seven-thirty that morning, along with specific instructions to read it thoroughly and be ready to discuss options by ten.

"Paint the — what the hell are you reading?… here, gimme that!" Larry Paxton demanded, lunging out of his chair and ripping the thick document out of the visibly concerned agent/pilot's hands.

"I mean, how could you hold them still long enough do that?" Woeshack asked, turning to Henry Lightstone, who was laughing so hard tears ran down his face as he and the other members of Bravo Team watched their team leader frantically flip through Woeshack's copy of the document. "All spiders have eight legs, don't they? Does that mean four of us would each have to hold two legs while somebody else…?"

"It does say here in the Wildlife Inspector ID Manual that unscrupulous dealers will frequently paint the knees of — what? — plain old brown-kneed giant tarantulas, I suppose, to pass them off as the exotic and endangered red-kneed kind to unsophisticated buyers.. although it also says that the red knees are actually more of a reddish orange," Technical Agent Mike Takahara noted, looking up from the screen of his notebook computer. "Does it say anything in there about us being unscrupulous, too, or do we just get to be unsophisticated?"

"Either way, I'll bet you anything at least one of us is going to get bit," Woeshack predicted.

"Thomas may have a point there, guys," Takahara agreed, as he continued scanning the digitized identification manual. "It also says here, and I quote, 'all tarantulas have fangs, and certain subspecies are more aggressive than others. In fact, some are actually known to stalk and attack humans if they are sufficiently stimulated.' I wonder if that means…"

"I am not holding any giant spider legs, Paxton," Dwight Stoner, the huge ex-Oakland Raider offensive-tackle-turned-agent warned. "I'll stuff boas and pythons back in their cages all day long if I have to, but I draw the line at tarantulas. That sounds like a team leader's job to me. And not that I really care one way or the other, but just how big are these things anyway?"

"According to the manual, about like this." Mike Takahara spread the fingers of his right hand as far as he could, and then dropped his fingertips down on the surface of the nearby table.

"Jesus."

"You know," Henry Lightstone finally composed himself enough to examine the opened map of Oregon, "there may actually be a bright side to all of this."

"Oh yeah?" Dwight Stoner grumbled skeptically. "What's that?"

"You remember my buddy, Bobby LaGrange?"

"Yeah, sure. He's kind of a hard man to forget, seeing as how we damned near got him killed along with the rest of us on that Cayman Islands deal."

"Well, I got a letter from him a couple of months ago saying that he and Susan were fed up with humidity and cockroaches and drug dealers, and Justin was starting to talk seriously about buying a sailboat and going out looking for that little kid nurse — you remember her, don't you, Paxton… the one who thought you were kinda cute?"

"Oh yeah, I remember her all right," Paxton rolled his eyes heavenward. "And how old's that boy now?"

"About thirteen, I think."

"Then Bobby'd better either chain him to the house, take away his bank account, or move the hell away from the East Coast, or he's gonna end up being a grandfather a whole lot sooner than he expected," the Bravo Team leader predicted as he went back to flipping through the briefing document, searching for the part about painting tarantula legs.

"You think Loggerhead City in Jasper County, Oregon's far enough?"

Larry Paxton's lower jaw dropped.

"You're kidding."

"Not if this map's right. Bobby said his place is on the outskirts of a little town called Loggerhead City, and about a half hour drive from Loggerhead Lake, both of which are definitely in Jasper County according to the map. So if I'm reading this thing correctly, it looks like we're going to be setting up shop about twenty miles or so from his ranch. Which means, if nothing else, we've always got a place to hang out, drink beer, and bum an occasional home-cooked meal."

"Sounds like a good deal to me." Paxton nodded approvingly as he went back to his determined search for references to spider knees.

"Wait a minute." Dwight Stoner looked at Lightstone suspiciously. "This is the same guy who invited us out on his brand-new super-expensive yacht, and then got it blown right out from under his ass, right? What makes you think he's gonna let us anywhere near him and his family, let alone his brand-new ranch?"

"No problem." Lightstone smiled cheerfully. "Bobby's not the type to hold a grudge. And besides, according to his letter, he and Susan used what he described as a ridiculously inflated insurance settlement to buy what he also described as a piece of God's country, so he ought to be happy about the way things worked out. Especially since now that all he has to worry about are the local Oregon girls getting Justin mutually pregnant."

"Not to mention us coming into town to infest the place with poisonous snakes and giant spiders," Stoner reminded him.

"Wow, that's right!" Woeshack exclaimed. "Say, you know, this whole deal's beginning to sound just like that movie — remember, Rack-no-phobia, or something like that — where this young doctor and his family move to this little town in the country, and this really scary tarantula from South America falls out of a tree and accidentally gets smuggled into the town in a coffin, and everybody it bites dies?"