It’s a dark winter night. The air is as sharp as needles. I’m on my eighth cup of coffee as I sit in my car waiting…and waiting. The radio crackles and cackles a Christmas song sung by a long-dead crooner. I wait. Merry Christmas? We’ll see.

The waiting is the job. The chasing? That’s the fun. It’s been two hours without a sign. But I know better than to give up. I check my watch. I check my pistol. I check my knife. It’s habit.

Then a flash of headlights. I hear the wet grumble of filthy street snow as the weighty van approaches. I stiffen. And then I relax. No good getting tight. You get tight, you get killed. That’s the rule.

The van stops. The driver steps out. I don’t know him. And if it all goes as planned, I never will. But sometimes the plan fades away in the fog of a discharged firearm. Not today. Today is a good day.

I see what I need to see. I see it all go down. I’ve seen enough. I start the engine. I drive away casually. No cause for alarm. I reach my favorite pay phone, the one at Reggie’s Diner where the food all tastes like nicotine and regret.

I send a dime into the phone. A woman’s voice answers on the first ring. This dame is frantic. I tell her to take a drink. I tell her to take a breath. And I tell her what I saw.

I saw the package. And her item has been received by the local post office. It should arrive tomorrow

It’s gonna be a merry Christmas…for someone.

And I go back out into the night. Another box to hunt. Another gift to spot.

I’m a package tracker.

It’s the job.

I don’t carry a badge. I carry scars. And a scanner.

Excerpt from my hard crime novel Death on a Doorstep: The Gavin Hurlock Files.

Anyway. Lego!

Today we get… Continue reading →

Spend this week however you’d like.

Go all in on the holidays. Do nothing at all. Bake cookies. Bake leftover pizza. Read quietly in bed. Binge Schitt’s Creek. Sit in the dark drinking room temperature coffee. Start to suspect your neighbor of treason based on the number of times he checked the mail which correlates directly to the number of times you’ve been stung by a bee. Make brownies. Sing carols. Shout carols. Whisper carols.

Whatever you do is good and great. You don’t owe this holiday anything.

You don’t need to go shopping. You don’t need to wear the special pajamas if you don’t want. You don’t need to count the number of shingles on your neighbor’s roof and in doing so decipher coordinates to “The Mongoose.”

You do you.

I do I.

And I do Lego. Today we find…

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I had to go to Target yesterday and buy a strand of lights for my Christmas tree. (Never buy a pre-lit Christmas tree. I did and now, ten years later, I have a tree with a full strand of dead lights that are woven and welded and fused with the tree in such a manner that it would take Dumbledore and the Infinity Gauntlet working in tandem to separate the lights from the tree.)

Purchasing lights at Target should have been easy, but thanks to shopping carts it turned into a nine-hour battle. These wheeled road blocks made navigating the aisles impossible. I was trapped in the corridors of commerce and if I stopped to weep, I would hear the hungry roar of the Minotaur as it hunted in its labyrinth made not of stone but reasonably-priced merchandise! Or maybe I was just cranky.

I understand the need for shopping carts, but it’s a common courtesy to park your cart along the side of the aisle. If you leave your cart in the middle of the aisle, perpendicular to the walls, then yes, I will toss a raw egg into your cart. And what can you do about that? Call the police? Ha!

Today the Lego calendar coughs up… Continue reading →