The shorts were scratchy. There was no way around it. I now understood why my father had such a fetish for Goldbond medicated powder. The itch.

We were neck deep in a holly hedge behind the Murkle's house, when Gerald pinched my forearm, the signal, apparently, for "freeze right where you are".

"There," he said.

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He'd been staring at the dryer vent coming out of the back wall of their finished garage for twenty minutes.

"Did you see it?" he asked.

In this case, the signal we were watching for was a waver in the steam from the vent. Supposedly a clear indication that someone had opened the dryer door, just long enough to sneak a sock, without interrupting the cycle.

I hadn't seen anything. According to Gerald, the way to catch Hose heisters in the act, was to spot the moment at which they removed the socks from the laundry cycle. Without catching them redhanded, the international espionage tribunal, did such a thing really exist? Would merely give them a stern talking to.

On the other foot (I was thinking in sock humor already) if they had carried a sock over a property line, they were apparently breaking about seventeen international laws, and subjecting themselves to the full "Patriot Act" treatment.

"I hate that they renamed it," he'd said, when I'd mentioned they didn't call it that any more. "It felt good to get the recognition we patriots deserve."

We'd been staking out the neighborhood for six days. And I'd been carrying the mail, all of it, almost seventeen miles. It was supposed to be 14, but I apparently didn't catch on to the most efficient delivery patterns.

We'd narrowed it down. Three blocks had been hit since my dad's untimely demise. My mother was putting the pressure on, she needed her freezer for the Easter ham, which she bought inexplicably, four weeks early, and my father needed to be cremated.

As I watched, Mrs. Murkle passed the back sliding glass door, laundry basket in hand, headed for the garage. From the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of purple, and there, looking like a Russian mobster from a Dick Tracy movie, was our Hose heister. He had one bright blue striped sock in his hands, as he sniffed it.

From inside the house, a cry of anguish.

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