The Man with the Tiny Head by Roger Longrigg

Author:Roger Longrigg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Man with the Tiny Head
ISBN: 9780755135073
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The officer in the pine tree was called Harvey Snell. He was frightened but happy.

In his farm boyhood – a life dominated by potatoes and tractor-oil – he had devoured the crime comics (preferring The Phantom and Doctor Fate) and the pulp-magazine stories about gangsters and cops. Westerns left him cold. The others could have the war. He lived in a dream-world of prowl-cars and the Homicide Squad.

On a fine day, across the flat untidy New Jersey farmland, you could see the shining towers of Manhattan.

‘Captain Snell, Homicide . ’ The sirens would wail as the wheels screamed on the wet streets.

When he joined the Force, and did well in the written tests, and became a medal-winning rifle shot, his mother had been scared but his father said his prayers and was resigned.

Today was Harvey’s first time on an operation like this. The youngest man in this hand-picked detail. The one they put up into the pine tree. The front-line eyes of the whole State Force.

His tiny radio bleeped. Warren’s Caddy was two miles from the intersection, travelling at twenty-six.

Harvey Snell had once brought his girl to this beach. Myrna. She had married, in the event, the son of a motel manager from Newark – a sharp dresser, a man with shady friends. Maybe she was happy; Harvey thought not. Either way, he well remembered the day when she had still been his girl. Three hundred people on the beach. Peanuts, popcorn, beer, ice-cream sodas and sundaes. Cars had honked up one a minute all day. The sea was dotted with heads and with canoes and little sailboats. There were lifeguards with beautiful tans. A fat young Jewish housewife gave Harvey the eye. A good day. The high spot of that romance.

Today the place could hardly look more different. Metallic sky. Lead-grey sea sullenly rustling over the shingle. The beach-huts, the tatty umbrellas, the Coke booth, the peanut stand folded away till summer. Sand blew across the concrete and the boardwalks. Someone had left a small, stained flag on a flagpole; it tugged and fluttered, a sad little vestige of summer. Harvey guessed that the man who was supposed to pull it down found the pulleys rusted and thought: the hell with it, a fifty-cent flag. Loudspeakers yawned to all four points of the compass from a pole by the clapboard office. Harvey remembered the Hit Parade numbers of the moment blaring from those gaping mouths, that nice summer day with his girl. They decided one of the songs was ‘their song’. Harvey remembered the song without pain. He hummed it, excited at the prospect of action, keyed up, a little scared.

Bleep. A Mercury wagon with a trailer had turned off the highway on to the dirt road.

Harvey shifted in his little cocoon of camouflaged canvas. He had binoculars, rifle, earphone, neck microphone. He knew that, to anyone unsuspicious of his particular tree at his particular height, he was virtually invisible.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.