Lee Hacklyn 1980s Private Investigator in The Wild East: Lee Hacklyn, #1

By John Leister

Germany, West and East. 1989.

 

Lee, along with his fellow private eyes, Sid Phelps and Clint Courage, are posing

as CBC journalists and representatives from a charity agency called Save The

World, in search of American scientist Dr. Elias Fischer, who believes he can

create a force-field strong enough to withstand nuclear attack.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Leister
• Release date: Oct 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215874196

Book preview

Queens, New York City.  1969.

Benjamin Franklin High School

CHAPTER ONE

Say that again.

I’m not giving you my lunch money, Ross.  Enough.  My old man told me to stick up for myself and that’s what I’m gonna do.

Ass-wipe, if you keep on with this bitch attitude, what you’re gonna do is eat my fist.

Eli Fischer was blubbering so hard it tied my stomach into knots. 

Most of the kids around me were chanting, Cry, baby!  Cry, baby!

I’d just finished Lord of the Flies.  The first kid who was killed, SPOILER WARNING, on the island, was the smartest, but the weakest, Piggy.

Eli was a straight-A student, but he was a junk food addict and every time he kicked a soccer ball during gym, it either landed in his own team’s net or his foot landed in somebody’s shin or groin, one time, memorably, the latter, our gym teacher’s, the preposterously named Mr. Whistler.

Eli wasn’t just the last boy to get picked for a team.  The jocks at Ben Franklin, well, the bad ones, like Ross The Boss Coleman, saw him as good for only two things, one, a source of revenue and two, a pinata.

Ross grabbed Eli’s velour sweater—what would now be called, in the current parlance, if I’m not mistaken, an ugly Christmas sweater,—and brought his fist all the way back, which indicated to me that he didn’t know anything about fighting.

There was no time to change into a phone booth.  As the theme from The Adventures of Superman popped into my head, I dropped my math notebook and textbook to the floor and sprinted toward the impending shellacking.

CHAPTER TWO

My hand caught Ross’s fist just before it smashed Eli’s chubby, wet face.

Silence.

Tableaux.

I said, Ross, if you don’t leave him alone, I’m gonna hit you all the way back to kindergarten.

Whatever that meant.  It sounded cool to me, at the time.  I had to refine my most famous, in my mind’s-eye at least, catchphrase, which was this:

Don’t test me.  You’ll fail.

Ross hoarked up a loogie and spat in my face.

The reaction from our audience was a hodge-podge of whoas, cheers, ooohs, ahhhs, applause, a couple of boos and one uh-oh!

The uh-oh, came from my best friend, at the time, Chris Rivers, who was killed by a Vietcong soldier, while serving his country, which represented life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I hardly ever thought about him anymore because it was too agonizing.

I do what I do, ultimately, because for one thing, I’m good at it, and for another, there are too many good people who die at the hands and machinations of evil men; and too many villains, like Ross Coleman and that Vietcong soldier who, whether he agreed with it or not, wore a uniform that represented tyranny, oppression and genocide.

Chris’s dad, Owen Rivers, was the one of the first white guys to open a martial arts studio in the Big Apple.  Owen taught me how to box and showed me a few basic self-defense moves, too, that I still use and still find effective.

Like this one I was about to implement on Ross the Boss.

With my free hand, I grabbed his wrist, from the inside, and gave it a hard crack.  It cracked, like a dry twig.  A girl screamed.  There were some gasps. 

Ross, his hand dangling grotesquely, like a rag doll’s hand, fell to his knees and whimpered.

My dad was a carpenter.

One of HIS catchphrases, which he used with soul-crushing frequency, especially when he smacked my face, which was often, was For good measure.

Like father, like son.

I got ahold of Ross’s greasy—ugh—hair and said, For good measure, as I jabbed his face, multiple times, like a ping-pong paddle.

Many of the same kids who were salivating, in the hopes that Ross would beat Eli to a pulp were now cheering and applauding as I beat Ross to a pulp.

That William Golding really knew what he was writing about.

Chris pulled me off.

Lee, stop it, you’ll kill him.

So what?  What’s gonna become of him?  He’ll either be a bank robber or a serial killer or maybe both!

Ross was on his back, sobbing and wailing, like a baby waking up from the sounds of Mom and Dad arguing.

A thumb and a finger touched my ear and twisted it.  Ouch!

Mr. Hacklyn.  A word, please?  Eddie?  Go see Nurse Bellicose.  Tell her I told you to tell her to take you to the hospital and tell her to contact your mother.  She may want to file a charge against our Leland Hacklyn here with the local police.

Mr. Devlin, our school principal, was the spitting image of J. Jonah Jaimeson and was equally short-tempered.  He place heavy emphasis on the words local and police,  surely for what he thought might be my benefit.

I had to will myself not to slap his hand away.

As he dragged me by my ear to his office, I looked back, feeling like Lot’s wife and hoping that I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt.

Eli mouthed, thank you, Chris gave me a thumbs-up and Zelda Bauer, a girl I liked, hell, every freshman liked Zelda, winked at me, which made my heart skip a beat.

It’s funny how no good deed goes unpunished, but even funnier how things, sometimes, seem to even out, if you have the right mind-set.

CHAPTER THREE

QUEENS.  NEW YORK CITY.  1989.

Time doesn’t change, but our perception of it sure does.

I spent half of my grade, middle and high school years looking at the clock on the wall.

Every second felt like a minute.  Every minute felt like an hour.

Three pm was every kid’s happy hour.

Unless you had a bully to avoid on the way home from school.

After that day in 1969, one bully nobody had to worry about ever again, at least at our school, was Ross Coleman.

His wrist never properly healed and he had to learn to write with his left hand.

That he could write to start with was subject to question.

Last I heard, he was serving a life-sentence, with zero chance of parole, on Stryker’s Island, for a string of bank robberies and the murder of five bank employees. 

I guessed right about his future, twice.

I sure wish I’d been wrong, twice.

The heat was out in my office.  I was wearing my red goose-down vest, just