'Showdown' Part 15: 'New Meat'
by Jean
FBI Special Agent John Doggett was having
a good day, as would anyone
living inside a Kodak moment. Fresh from solving the mysterious
and distasteful death of long-haul trucker and apprentice door-to-door
drywall salesman, Earl Elvis Detweiler (apparently a self inflicted
bris gone horribly wrong), Doggett gazed over his new domain,
a landscape choked with harried bureaucrats, thoroughfares clogged
with tourist buses, sanitation workers noisily striking amidst
reeking debris, the smog and pigeon infested air enshrouding gridlocked
shimmering limos. He whizzed past them all on his carbon-steel-composite
and pin striped dual-carb Schwinn 'Roadcrusher', peddling at a
merciless speed towards the hotbed of fulminating global power
( and fortuitously, the attendant exercise maintaining his government
issued white-bread flanks as trim and tight as lumber), his new
office in the sub-basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Rubber
Hose and Taffeta Annex.
Visions of acclaim, awards, trophies, recognition, promotions,
and tenure as Assistant Special Assistant to the Associate Secretary
of the newly formed Michaud Bomb Squad Demolition Team/Pepsi Distribution
League/Spender Memorial Organ Donor Coalition danced through his
ingot-keen brain, with the largesse of a corresponding bump in
pay not far from his bottom line calculations.
Doggett was not unrealistic in his ambitions, as past service
to all that was good, holy, and media friendly, as outlined in
the Official FBI Action Figure Handbook, had consumed him from
birth. He had proven his innate bravery with liturgical precision
many times over, so that no superior who mattered could doubt
the dedication and patriotism that drove Doggett towards ever
more superhuman exploits, as the siren song of Vegas might beckon
to a triple-bypassed, retired, and elderly vacuum-lint recycling
center manager.
Doggett's reputation among his adoring colleagues was untarnished
as a galvanized Poptart. His adventures were not only legion,
but frequently recounted in the pious, hushed tones normally reserved
for bath time on 'Survivor'. There was the time he cleared the
shipping lanes of glaciers and icebergs with only spatulas and
a Bic. He had stoically bored his way, undetected, through the
sand dunes of Kuwait wielding only a melon scoop. Dimpled chads
had been saved from obscurity forever when he valiantly volunteered
to pilot a near foundering C-130 transport safely to its destination
deep inside NORAD. Doggett had not hesitated to navigate his way
through the Hindu Kush using sprinkler pivots and a pencil when
his Apache helicopter trainee confused the terrain charts with
a backgammon board. Crime scenes in his jurisdiction were taped
at a prodigious rate while he simultaneously recited the applicable
forensic procedures as outlined in Article 4, Section C, paragraph
10/4, subordinate clause WD 40z umlaut.
He frequently indulged, for fun, in sniffing out controlled substances
better than a re-habbed dachshund, had once frisked Dennis Rodman,
and accumulated enough field experience to sod the back nine at
Pebble Beach. When in public repose, Doggett was often confused
with one of the ubiquitous granite obelisks commemorating, oh,
the bloody Skirmish of Idaho. His sentimental attachment to Parris
Island just for the cuisine was well known and noted in the graduate
archives, and eight of the Ten Most Wanted sweat-soaked their
jammies on a regular basis when he was within an arcsecond of
their vicinity. His effigy was often and happily torched during
the lawless celebrations of most tyrannical equatorial nations.
Because of his lone efforts, half of Washington D. C. was now
on parole.
His personal life was equally as worthy of emulation, and he radiated
competence like a brass chandelier. The ranks of Bureau newbies
were steadied and given his encouragement when attempting to properly
deploy a piece of chalk around dismembered innocent bystanders.
Saddam Hussein was convinced to keep kosher with one riveting
light blue stare from that Doggett noggin. Special Agent Doggett
was often observed folding his laundry with calipers. He filed
his nails with a bayonet, flossed with rawhide, dreamt in khaki,
thought that employing less than an AK-47 for body piercing was
for wusses, vowed to repel any invasion, foreign or domestic,
and exercised the loquacity of a pyramid. He revered his personal
heroes, Tennyson, Hemingway, and John Boy Walton, and was an ex-marine
down to his pores, leading such a scrupled existence that, in
comparison, the Pope could pose as a hallmark of rap star debauchery.
Doggett, however, was not without his vulnerabilities, and, though
he did not dwell on them, spent many unhappy moments musing on
opportunities untaken or delayed. If necessary, he would have
commandeered the leaky and capsized Edmund Fitzgerald in order
to slap the cuffs on that sniveling sissy, Tom Hanks, for mail
tampering. Both Richard Kimball *and* Hannibal Lector would now
be rotting in the slammer, no matter how many needy widows with
traumatized doe-eyed children offered up a chianti warehouse or
fava bean ranch. If Apollo 13 had blown a fuse on his watch, he
would have personally tugged it down to Fra Mauro slung on his
back.
All in all, an admirable disposition for someone who had attended
Camp Lejeune on a John Wayne scholarship, wouldn't smudge his
Docker's if he dog paddled through a Freightliner crankcase, thought
pastels were a global conspiracy, that tofu was a martial art,
and had grown up in a cannon.
In this balanced and wholesome frame of mind, Doggett welded his
Schwinn to the Top Gun Memorial Bicycle Rack, adjusted his Generic
G-man dark taupe suit, and prepared to spend the first day in
his latest assigned capacity, shooting the breeze and sharing
a tub of buttered Jiffy Pop with his new partner, Special Agent
Dana Scully.
To be continued...........