"What are you talking about?" I asked. "You know you sound completely nuts right now, right?"

"It had to do with your father's work," she said. "I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to tell you."

"He was a postman, mom, what's to tell?"

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I knelt beside him to check his pulse, but he was cold already. She must have dragged him here, then called me. How was I going to explain this?

There was a click, and a grinding noise as the garage door went up. Silhouetted in the bright Spring sunset were two figures. Oddly, they looked like federal agents from a TV show. Couldn't be. One was a tall man, with blond hair, the other a black woman, short, but powerful. She looked like she could bench press me.

The two figures simultaneously removed dark glasses, then looked around, as if ascertaining there was no "tail" and closed the garage door.

"William Jefferson Clinton Jones?" the man asked.

"Unfortunately," I said, standing up from beside my dead father.

The woman knelt beside him, "It is Fred, and he's definitely deceased," she said, into a microcassette recorder.

"Wow," I said. "Haven't seen one of those since Smart Phones."

She didn't laugh.

"When global security is on the line, you can never trust cloud backup to keep your data safe," she said.

"Excuse me, who are you people?" I asked.

The man held out a badge. "USPS, special ops," he said.

I laughed.

"Something caught in your throat, son? Because I didn't say anything funny," the man said.

"Uh, yeah, sorry, just a little choked up," I said.

"Funny, so's your dad," the woman said.

"What?" I asked. Had she really just said that?

"With a sock, from the looks of it," she said.

"Ma'am, you did good getting the operative off the street. If the opposition hears about this, well, I don't have to tell you," he said.

"You might," I said.

"It wouldn't be pretty," he said.

"I found the murder weapon," my mother said.

"Mind if I have a look?" the woman asked.

"I left it on the dryer, figured it would blend in," my mother said.

"Good thinking."

The woman walked to the dryer, parked between the workbench and the water heater, along one wall of the garage.She drew a long tube sock from an otherwise empty basket on top of the dryer and ran her nose along it.

"Polyester blend," she said. "Looks like bandbxo88's been here."

"Sick bastards," the man said. "That would account for the friction burns. Seriously, amateurs, those things can get stuck, slowly choking the life out of a victim, silk hose, my friend, that's the merciful choice."

"Wait. What are we talking about?" I asked.

"Murder," the man said.

"With a sock?" I asked.

"You seem to think this is all some kind of joke," he said. "You think we just came out here to give our condolences and see your dead father's body? Don't you think your mother would have liked to just call the police, have this body in the morgue by now? Don't you get it son? Something bigger is at play here, bigger than all of us."

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