OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF AUTHOR
BENJAMIN LYON
Read the first three chapters of Wretch & Rally below.
1
The Beagle of lakewood
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in the paranormal.”
There was a rasp and crackle to the unsolicited, impromptu statement, as if Trucker had popped the clutch on his vocal cords after giving them a gentle nudge downhill.
Ed didn’t mean to be startled by the abrupt, and seemingly out-of-left-field, trivia about a long-since-dead English writer. But he and Trucker had been walking in silence all afternoon, surrounded by nothing but the slow hum of the suburban Los Angeles neighborhood of Lakewood. Some chirping birds. A few distant barking dogs. Rustling palm leaves. The occasional rumble of a delivery van.
So, Trucker’s odd declaration did catch Ed off guard and brought a touch of confusion.
“Um . . . excusy?” Ed asked.
Trucker cleared his throat and started over.
“Conan Doyle. The guy who created Sherlock Holmes. He believed in supernatural shit,” Trucker looked down, watched his feet step one in front of the other along the sidewalk, then continued, “Telepathy. Clairvoyance. Precognition. Talkin’ to the dead. Fairies.”
“Yeah?” Ed asked.
“Back in Doyle’s day, there were these two young girls who claimed that while they were playin’ in their garden, they’d been visited by fairies. Literal winged fairies. Like a bunch of Tinker Bells.” He paused. “Of course, all the sane grown-ups said, ‘That’s nice,’ and patted them on their heads, knowing the kids were lyin’. As kids tend to do.”
Ed offered nothing more than an “Mm-hmm” and let Trucker talk.
“But the hoaxin’ girls upped the ante. Next time they played in the garden, they had a little photo shoot. And the fairies were there.” Trucker continued, “Once again, all . . . well, maybe not all . . . but most . . . or at least, many . . . of the adults knew it was a trick. A lie. But not ol’ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the author’s mind, those little painted paper cutouts of pixie sprites propped up next to the trickster kids were proof positive of the existence of fairies.”
Ed glanced at Trucker as they kept walking through the Lakewood neighborhood. Past low ranch houses from the first post-war tracts. Tidy front yards, deep setbacks, and driveways holding a hybrid, a late-model Ford, and a half-tarped Chevy that hadn’t run since Reagan. The area was a cracked-open time capsule baking in the sun.
Ed gave an awkward friendly wave to an older couple walking by on the other side of the wide street and said to Trucker, “Well, in Doyle’s defense, it’s not like Photoshop was a thing. Gotta figure it was pretty easy to fool people back in the day. Heck, even now . . . people know Photoshop and all that AI stuff exists and still, once a week, I hafta tell Mom or Chuck a video they saw of stray cats shootin’ off machine guns in a pet store to free a family of chinchillas . . . or something equally bonkers . . . isn’t real.”
“I get that,” Trucker said, “but your mom and Chuck didn’t create an iconic character who, even a hundred years later, is still a household name for logical reasoning.”
“True. True,” Ed said.
“Half of Sherlock’s adventures involve him debunking the very beliefs Doyle held in real life. The character is the definition of uncovering the truth. So much so that, for the rest of time, people will say, ‘No shit, Sherlock’ when presented with something that’s obviously true.” Trucker took a breath, then kept going.
“If Doyle ran across the Hound of the Baskervilles or the Vampire of Sussex, he’d immediately buy into the bullshit about demons and bloodsucking monsters. Yet he could write a character who sees past his own blind spots?”
Ed didn’t interrupt Trucker’s mini-rant. He was actually happy to hear it. Because whenever he went on one, it felt like a step toward Trucker finding himself again. So they kept moving down the sidewalk together as Trucker continued.
“Conan Doyle believed so emphatically in a hodgepodge of nonsense that when his friend, the famous magician Harry Houdini, tried to prove the woo wrong . . . Doyle wasn’t having it. Refused to believe it. Even thought Houdini himself had actual mystical, magical powers. Instead of just being really, really good at breaking out of handcuffs.”
Ed perked up, “Oh! I know this part!”
“You do?” Trucker asked.
“Yeah,” Ed said. “They made a TV show about it. Houdini and Doyle. Or Doyle and Houdini. One or the other. Buddy-cop type of thing. Solving mysteries and stuff. Like The X-Files or Scooby-Doo.”
Trucker slowed, “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Was okay. Kinda fun. Cancelled after a season. Maybe it just had crappy marketing? I dunno.”
Ed kept walking, brow wrinkled, as he tried to remember the actors who had played the magician and author. But he was drawing blanks. Nothing. Not even a bad guess.
“I can’t remember who was in it. Maybe that was why it was cancelled?” he asked himself and then Trucker. “You haven’t seen it?”
Silence answered him.
Ed took three more steps before the quiet answered him again and he turned.
Trucker stood several yards back in the middle of the sidewalk, perfectly still.
“Hey?” Ed half-shouted. “Hey? Truck? You okay?”
Trucker was not okay.
It had been seven or so weeks since he had fled the clutches of cult leader Jennifer Smith and The Radiant Way with the help of Ed and his sister Ida. And in these last weeks, his brain and body had started to rebel against him in a wide variety of ways. It was all fallout from the coercive control he’d lived under.
Sometimes the dysregulation had a clear tripwire. Sometimes it just dropped out of nowhere. But when it hit, Trucker would say he was having a moment. Ed called it something else.
“Hey, buddy, are you having one of those episodes?” Ed asked as he moved gingerly by his friend’s side.
Trucker was having an episode. A moment.
The world had gone thin around him. The rows of ranch houses looked like stage props. Too flat. Too arranged. The palms barely moved, though he knew there was wind. Even Ed didn’t quite register as a person, more like the idea of Ed standing where a person should be.
Derealization.
Trucker knew the word.
That was the problem.
This wasn’t psychosis. He wasn’t confused. His mind was working perfectly fine while his senses refused to cooperate. Reality testing was currently intact, but there was a panic pending. Or worse.
Knowing exactly what was happening didn’t stop the feeling that he had slipped a half-step outside the world.
“I’m right here,” Ed said. “Take all the time ya need. You wanna do that five-four-three-two-one thingamajig? Name five things you can smell . . . four things you can hear . . . wait. I think it’s five things you can see. It’s gotta be five things you can see.” Ed paused to think, “I know it is ‘things you can see, smell, touch, taste, and hear.’ And it’s five, four, three, two, one. But I don’t know the order. Maybe it doesn’t matter?”
If it was anyone else talking numbers and senses at him, Trucker might’ve attempted to shake them silent. Or at least strongly consider it. But he was in no condition to shake anyone or consider much at all.
And it was Ed. The one who marched into the devil’s den to try and metaphorically shake some sense into Trucker and free him from the cult. Ed didn’t have to do that. He didn’t need to put himself at risk. But he did.
Trucker reached for a pair of mood rings that were linked to a simple chain that hung from his neck. He gripped them tight, closed his eyes, inhaled slowly, and exhaled even slower.
He knew this moment, the episode, would end. They always did. It was just hard to remember that from inside one.
He let the rings drop against his chest and opened his eyes.
Ed was there. With a crooked smile, shoulders relaxed, and radiating a positive empathy that could not be faked even if he tried.
Trucker thought he could feel the moment fading and the world settling back into place.
Then he saw her.
The cult leader.
Jennifer Smith.
She was coming up from behind Ed, walking straight toward them with one of her loyal followers, Sam of Sams, out in front like a human shield.
“Ed . . .” Trucker tried to warn but only managed a thin squeak of his name.
Sam of Sams looked exactly the same as the last day at the compound. Same sun-faded Hawaiian shirt hanging open over a tank top, same gym-built arms and protein-shaker swagger. Still very clearly a man who chose extra deadlifts over opening a single book.
He stopped a few feet in front of Trucker. Jennifer hovered just behind.
She hadn’t changed either.
Her eyes were the first thing that hit him. That unnerving, switchable intensity. Warm and shining one second, flat and appraising the next. Right now, they were locked on Trucker. Pupils a touch too wide, as if she were already two steps into a sermon only she could hear.
A loose, purplish sundress floated around her knees, the kind of soft, forgiving fabric she favored for her teachings. Her dark hair was still long, still carefully uncareful. A curtain of brunette waves spilling past her shoulders just like it had when she’d called herself his prophet and savior.
“How’d . . .” Trucker tried to speak. “How’d you find me?”
Ed watched with concern as Sam of Sams just stared at Trucker with a dumbfounded, curious look.
“Why can’t you leave me alone?” Trucker asked. “What do you want from me?”
“Umm, Truck,” Ed said. “He probably wants a treat. Or maybe some pets? Do you want some scritches?” he asked Sam of Sams.
Ed scratched behind Sam of Sams’ ears, and Jennifer Smith’s loyal henchman wiggled his head and barked.
Slowly, Trucker’s vision shifted. It wasn’t Sam of Sams and Jennifer Smith standing in front of him at all.
It was a friendly beagle mutt and a young, patient Hispanic woman out for an afternoon walk.
This was a new and unpleasant first. He’d already gotten used to the laundry list of dysregulating aftershocks from his ten years inside the cult. Flashbacks and floating. Brain fog. Dissociative states. Bouts of hypervigilance. But he had never before pasted a full, clear hallucination over real people.
“I apologize,” Trucker said to the beagle and its walker.
Ed added, “Tienes un perro precioso. ¿Niño o niña?”
“Gracias. Es un chico. Un buen chico,” she answered, and the two of them continued on their stroll.
“Well,” Trucker said, “this isn’t great.”
“We can go back home. No biggie,” Ed said.
“No. We’re already out. How much farther is it?”
Ed pulled his phone from the back pocket of his khakis and tapped an app. Up came the admin screen for Trucker S. Holmes Investigations.
Before Trucker’s decade-long detour as a high-level member of The Radiant Way, he’d been a private detective. While he was trapped in the cult, his app had stayed live, quietly collecting new cases. It had been Ed’s idea to start digging through the long-cold requests and see who they could still help.
In the last few weeks, they’d already learned a few lessons the hard way.
One “missing cat” case had ended with Mr. Whiskerson discovered in a cardboard box in his owner’s garage, snoring on top of the Christmas decorations. That request had come in four years ago and was solved via the applicant themselves, three years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days ago.
Another ticket in the queue had been a suspected-cheating-spouse job from nine years back. By the time they knocked on the client’s door, the man was long divorced, newly remarried, and furious to learn the detective he’d tried to hire was just now showing up to reopen scars he’d already paid a therapist to close.
And then there was the “lost inheritance” that wasn’t lost at all. Just a scam email from a fake prince. And Trucker and Ed had spent more time helping the victim lock down her passwords than actually investigating.
Ed looked over the current case information and pointed up the street, “It’s just a couple houses up on the right.”
“And what are we walking into?” Trucker asked.
“One Dorothy Bianchi,” Ed said, reading off his phone. “She’s reporting a missing person. Two missing persons, actually. Her granddaughter and great-granddaughter.”
“And when did she fill out this request?”
“Eight years ago.”
Trucker let out a sigh. “Really hope this only takes a minute. Hope Dorothy already found ’em. Long ago.”
Ed slid his phone back into his pocket. “Yeah. Me, too.”
2
The Old Man and the Seals
The exterior of Dorothy Bianchi’s home was meticulously well-kept in the way only something untouched can be. Very little had changed since its construction in 1950, and time appeared to have respected that decision. All except for the small, attached garage, which had clearly negotiated its way onto the property sometime later.
Trucker and Ed made their way around the tarp-covered land yacht taking up the entirety of the driveway, and the detective didn’t need to break out any kind of superhuman deductive skills to know it hadn’t been driven in decades.
The two stood at the front door.
“This reminds me of my mission days,” Ed said.
“Did a lot of proselytizing in the L.A. suburbs, did ya?”
“No,” Ed rang the doorbell, “Argentina.”
“That where you learned Spanish?”
“Nope. Fourth grade. Mrs. Johnson,” Ed paused. “Dontcha speak español?”
“I can,” Trucker said, “but you speak speak Spanish.”
No one had come to Dorothy’s door. Ed pressed the doorbell again, and the two waited in silence for a moment.
“If she’s not home, we can go get some ice cream instead,” Ed said.
The door opened slowly.
In the frame stood a very old man. Thin and slightly bowed, as though time had pressed its thumb into him and never let go. Yet nothing about him felt fragile. He held the doorway rather than leaned into it, and his eyes carried the steady alertness of someone who had simply decided to outlast things.
His voice arrived a half-second after expectation. Deep, patient, and sanded by time rather than weakened by it.
“Yes? May I help you, boys?” the old man asked. “Unless you are salesmen. Then you can wander on.”
“We’re not selling anything, sir,” Ed said. “My partner and I are private investigators. We’re following up on an application Dorothy Bianchi sent us. Is she here?”
“When did Dorothy contact you?”
Ed glanced down at the case information on his phone, “Eight years . . . yeah. Eight years ago.”
“You boys are very punctual,” the man said with a smirk. “Got some ID? Papers saying who you say you are?”
Trucker and Ed handed him their state-issued identification cards. Not their driver’s licenses. They didn’t have those. Not their California Bureau of Security and Investigation Services licenses. They didn’t have those either.
The man studied the cards, then looked at Trucker.
“That’s a first. Don’t get many of those anymore. Firsts. Never met a first name Trucker.”
“Yeah,” Trucker said, “I try to use it as little as possible.”
The man handed the IDs back and gave them both a careful once-over.
“Alright, boys. You can come in. Pretty sure if you two try anything funny, I could take ya.”
He swung the door open wider.
“Just foolin’. A stiff breeze could kick my ass. Don’t get old, boys.”
The front door opened directly into the living room. A corner of it doubled as a dining area that fed into a narrow kitchen, and a short hallway ran toward what were presumably bedrooms. A newer side door led into the attached garage. Which was the only visible surrender the house had made to modernity.
The rest of the home had surrendered to something else.
Seals.
Yes, seals.
They were everywhere.
Dozens, then hundreds, and possibly thousands, of them filled the room. Wooden seals. Ceramic seals. Resin and porcelain seals. Painted seals hung on the walls. A clock featured a smiling seal whose tail marked the minutes while its flippers pointed out the hours.
None of them were cluttered. None were stacked haphazardly or forgotten. Each had a place, arranged carefully, deliberately. Like a boutique gift shop devoted entirely to one extremely specific marine mammal.
“Whoa,” Ed said.
“Dorothy likes seals,” the old man explained.
“Clearly,” Trucker said as he examined a small grey granite seal figurine.
“Trucker likes rainbows,” Ed said while looking over Dorothy’s massive collection.
“Who doesn’t like rainbows?” the old man asked.
“Oh, lots. Spend a second online,” Ed said.
“I’d rather not,” the old man replied.
“Everyone likes rainbows. Even if they say they don’t,” Trucker said then asked, “What happens when someone, anyone, sees a rainbow? They tell the nearest person, ‘Hey, look at that rainbow.’ Wanna know why? Because everybody knows everyone loves rainbows.”
The old man looked between the two unlicensed private detectives.
“You two are special, ain’t cha?”
It wasn’t a harsh judgment. Just an observation.
Trucker and Ed did not respond. They simply stood with him in the home-turned-seal-gift-shop that would never open for business.
“Didn’t introduce myself,” the old man said. He shook their hands with a surprisingly strong grip. “Anthony Bianchi. Dorothy’s husband.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Bianchi,” Ed said.
“May we speak to Dorothy?” Trucker asked.
“Can you perform a séance?” Anthony asked back.
“Excuse me?” Ed said.
“She’s passed away, Ed,” Trucker said quietly.
“Oh,” Ed straightened. “Very sorry for your loss, Mr. Bianchi.”
“I appreciate that. But my life hasn’t been loss. It’s been lucky. Married Dotti right after the war, and we had been side by side ever since. Over seventy years. Wanting more seems greedy, doesn’t it?”
He smiled softly.
“She moved on a couple years ago. Can’t seem to get there myself. But I’ll see her beautiful soul again . . . soon enough.”
“That’s lovely,” Ed responded.
“Mr. Bianchi,” Trucker said, “your wife contacted me eight years ago about a missing person?”
“Two missing persons,” Ed added.
“Oh, yes,” Anthony said. “That has been sorted. Settled.”
He paused, drifting somewhere else for a moment before returning to them.
“But . . . there is something else you can help me with.”
“Well, okay,” Ed said, brightening. “What is that?”
Anthony led them to a glass case mounted near the living room’s picture window. Inside were six small hand-sculpted seal statues, each made from a different material: white marble, red clay, obsidian, pale bone, jade, and sparkling glass with a faint crack running through it. Beside them sat an empty space where a seventh should have been.
“Dotti loved all of her collection. But these . . . these are artisanal Simbolos.” He rested his hand gently against the glass, “These were very special to her.”
“They’re very nice,” Ed said, while Trucker gave him a quick glance.
“Seventh one is missing. Can’t find it anywhere,” Anthony said, frustration creeping into his voice. “I must’ve misplaced it while cleaning. Or . . . I just don’t know. You boys help me find it?”
“Sure thing. Trucker here’s the best at finding lost things,” Ed said quickly, while Trucker tilted his head back and surveyed the thousands of seals surrounding them, suppressing a groan.
“Thank you,” Anthony pulled out a wallet older than the detectives. “As they say . . . if you’re good at something, never do it for free.”
He handed them each a dollar bill.
Ed studied the single, “I’m good at mini-golf, and I have to pay to do that.”
They pocketed their fee.
“What does this missing seal look like?” Trucker asked. “Color? Material? Anything to distinguish it from the others?”
Ed jumped in. “Yeah, what’s this little bugger look like? Aside from the standard flippers?”
Anthony hesitated. “Strange thing is . . . I can’t rightly remember. I’m sorry.”
Trucker slowly turned to the ocean of seals around them.
“No worries,” Ed said.
No worries? Trucker mouthed silently, gesturing to the room.
“She’s unique,” Anthony added. “Exceptional. Should stand out among the others. We’ll know her when we see her.”
And with that, the search began.
Anthony and Trucker stayed in the living room, where the main congregation of collectables resided, while Ed bounced his particular brand of Ed-energy through the kitchen and hallway.
They sorted methodically through the collection.
There were the professional seals. Doctor seals with stethoscopes, chef seals with hats, firefighting seals mid-rescue. Astronaut seals launching toward space.
There were recreational seals. Baseball-bat-swinging seals. Football-kicking seals. Basketball-dunking seals.
There were artistic seals with brushes or guitars or pencils in their slippery flippers.
Farmers. Soldiers. Princes. Princesses.
Every possible life a person might live, real or imagined, lived instead by a seal.
Ed opened what he assumed was a bedroom and found instead a den.
Anthony’s den.
The walls were crowded but not decorated. They were filled. But not with seals.
Photographs layered decades over each other without hierarchy. A young man in an oversized uniform stood in grainy black and white near a landing craft. Another showed the same man, older, arm around a woman who appeared in frame after frame, aging at the exact same rate he did.
A folded flag rested in a triangular case beneath a shadowbox of medals that were neither polished nor dusty. Nearby sat a dented canteen and a pair of boots whose purpose had long since expired, but whose presence had not.
Children appeared next. Then more children. Then children holding children. School portraits, graduations, awkward holidays. And drawings clearly intended for a refrigerator but promoted to permanent display. One macaroni picture hung beside a wartime commendation without irony.
Nothing was staged. Nothing matched. Frames disagreed with each other. Some photos leaned slightly, others had yellowed under the glass.
It wasn’t decoration.
It was evidence.
Evidence of a century lived honestly. Not curated. Not revised. And not performed for anyone who might walk through the door.
Out in the living room, Trucker paused at a photograph resting behind a pair of porcelain seals touching noses.
The picture showed Anthony and a young woman, clearly Dotti, standing in the same living room decades earlier. The carpet was brighter, the walls bare, and the seals were nonexistent. They weren’t posing so much as confirming something had begun. Their first day in the house.
“I’ve had more lives than a dozen cats,” Anthony said gently beside him, “but only one love.”
“What did those lives tell you?” Trucker asked.
“Nothing neat enough to repeat.”
“Humor me.”
Anthony watched the photograph a moment longer.
“Most of life you’re just hanging on,” he said. “Then every once and a while you realize that hanging on isn’t the same as standing up.”
Trucker waited.
“So you stand,” Anthony said. “Usually late. Usually tired. Usually because somebody else needs you to.”
He shrugged lightly.
“That’s about all I figured out.”
He moved to a shelf of seals.
“Trust your gut if you’ve got one worth trusting. If not . . . borrow somebody’s that is.”
Ed had left Anthony’s den and wandered to the door leading to the attached garage. He tried to open it. But it resisted.
He braced his foot against the frame and forced it open.
He leaned inside.
“Whoa.”
3
The Determination of Dotti
“Um . . . Mr. Bianchi?” Ed started. “I noticed you don’t have a television, so I’m not gonna hit ya with a bunch of references you won’t get. And trust me . . . I’ve got a dozen in the chamber. This? This . . . this is uhhh . . . crazytown type stuff. This is —”
Trucker cut him off with a simple question.
“What’s going on here, Mr. Bianchi?”
Anthony, Trucker, and Ed stood in the middle of the garage.
And Ed was correct.
The room looked straight out of several television shows and movies featuring a character deep into unraveling a conspiracy. Photos of people and locations, along with newspaper clippings, taped to the walls; different-colored Sharpie lines and yarn connected one to the other; countless cardboard boxes labeled possibilities, evidence, suspects, and other investigative terms.
“This is Dorothy’s work,” Anthony said.
“This is Matthew McConaughey’s storage unit in True Detective,” Ed said. “Or Charlie Day’s mail room in It’s Always Sunny.”
“This is about the missing persons case Dorothy contacted me about, right, Mr. Bianchi?” Trucker asked.
“I mean, obviously,” Ed excitedly answered for Mr. Bianchi. “This is Kiefer Sutherland’s motel room in The Vanishing.”
Trucker politely held up his hand to Ed, “Mr. Bianchi?”
“Yes, it is why she contacted you,” Anthony confirmed. “Dotti contacted everyone she could find. Anyone who would listen.”
“Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Claire Danes in Homeland,” Ed kept on with the references that he said he wouldn’t bring up.
“Ed,” Trucker said. “Let’s focus, buddy.”
“Sorry. There really are so many,” Ed said. “So many.”
“Tell me what happened, Anthony,” Trucker said calmly.
“It’s been settled,” Anthony said plainly. “Dorothy looked into it and —”
“Yeah, she did,” Ed added spontaneously.
“Ed,” Trucker imitated taking a deep breath. “Please continue, Mr. Bianchi.”
“About eight or so years ago, our grand baby and great grand baby went missing,” Anthony explained. “We did the right things. They investigated. Dorothy wasn’t happy with their efforts, so she investigated as well,” Anthony rubbed his cheek.
Upon hearing the reality of who was missing, Ed’s excitement about possibly reenacting a movie or show about a conspiracy to solve was put into its proper perspective. He and Trucker quietly waited for Mr. Bianchi to continue.
“A year before Dotti passed on . . . she said she knew they were free. They were in heaven. She believed that. It made her happy. So, I believe that, too.”
Trucker very delicately asked, “You believe that now?”
“There was no proof or evidence of what may have happened to them,” Anthony said. “But, yes, I believe Dotti. I believe they are free.”
Ed moved about the garage, looking over the vast amount of information and details that Dorothy had accumulated during her investigation. On top of a stack of boxes was a large binder with a pink seal sticker on its cover. Ed flipped it open.
“That’s the lot of it,” Anthony said to Ed.
Ed held up the binder to Anthony, “This? The lot of it?”
“Yes. Her notes. All of the important information she found during her search.” Anthony paused, then asked, “Why did it take so long for you two to show up? Probably not the best way to go about business.”
“It’s not how I normally . . .” Trucker got hung up on the word.
“. . . it is not how I would normally go about things.”
“Oh, it’s a whole thing,” Ed said. “Trucker saved me and my sister from maybe joining a cult. But then he joined the cult! Crazy, right? Anyway, ten years went by, and my sister and I went to help get him out.”
Anthony did not seem remotely surprised.
Ed continued, “So, now that Trucker’s out, I thought it’d be fun . . . or, I mean, helpful . . . helpful and fun to go back and take on some of the cases he had piling up.
“And my sister agreed. She’s super smart and caring. A psychologist or psychiatrist or whatever she is. Like Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting.”
“Mm-hmm,” Anthony nodded as Ed’s phone rang.
Ed checked the caller ID and saw that it was his sister, Ida. “Oh my goodness. Speak of the devil . . . that’s nuts . . . or a sign. It’s a sign. These things happen all the time. God’s plan and all.”
Ed answered, “Hey, Sis! We were just talking about you.”
On the other end, “Is Trucker there?”
“Yeah, he’s here. Hello to you, too.”
“Am I on speaker?” Ida asked.
“No.”
“Put me on speaker.”
“Sure thing,” Ed tapped the phone so Ida’s voice could be heard by all.
Her voice boomed and echoed off the Bianchi garage walls.
“THAT RAGING COLOSSAL CRAZY CUN—”
Ed quickly hung up.
“I am so sorry,” he said awkwardly to Anthony as his phone rang again and again. He turned it to silent.
“No worries,” Anthony smirked. “You should probably talk to her. Seems like something important.” He raised his eyebrows, “Thank you both for helping me look for Dotti’s seal. I appreciate it. But it’ll turn up eventually.”
“Are you sure, Mr. Bianchi?” Trucker asked.
“I am,” Anthony said. “And thanks for the company. You can swing by again if you’d like. If you’re in the neighborhood.”
“We’ll do that,” Trucker said.
Ed, still clutching Dotti’s seal-stickered binder, held it up to Mr. Bianchi again, “Would you mind if I kept this for a while? I promise to return it.”
“If you’d like.”
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