The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy, Part 2 of 6

Official Royce Freeman has been called in on a strange killing in the District of Columbia. A deadly shootout in a swanky hotel ends with a body on a slab. That would be routine, except this particular corpse is bright blue.

Then, back in Idlers Gap, a young man who’s grown up sheltered from the outside world gets the worst wake-up call in his life when he finds a strange man dangling half-dead from a tree.

This is Part 2 of The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy, the fourth story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth. In order to avoid spoilers, start with Part 1.

It is a stand-alone story spanning decades and features some familiar faces, such as Royce Freeman, last seen in The Case of the Broken Fixers.

Content warnings: gun violence, death, gore, gaslighting, creeps, tobacco use, drug use, mild swearing, Nazis, creeps.

SATURDAY MORNING, JUNE 5, 1943
THE ADMIRALTY ROYALE HOTEL
FOGGY BOTTOM, WASHINGTON, D.C.

“Bet you’re happy, my chief ripped me new one,” Detective Graham grunted as he and Detective Scott hauled Deputy Regional Inspector Royce Freeman to his feet.

“Happy as a clam,” Freeman replied, then jangled his restrained hands.

One of the D.C. cops was stooped and turkey-necked with wispy, thin hair, the other was bald as a baby with sausage rolls stacked atop his collar and teeth too big for his head. Both were genuine assholes.

Graham kept muttering to himself as he unhooked Freeman’s hands then pocketed his ‘cuffs. Scott gave Freeman the saddest, most vacant, wall-eyed excuse for a tough-guy stare-down he’d had ever seen, then relinquished his confiscated pistol.

A look passed between the cops.

“You heard your boss: get,” Freeman said.

They shared a look but didn’t budge.

“‘Get’ as in ‘get the Hell out of my crime scene before you screw it up even worse,’” Freeman snapped. The pair bristled. Freeman kept running his trap: “You boys are bucking up like you’re fixing to shoot a second person in this hotel room today. Get to steppin’.”

The pair were practically glowing red, but they stalked out nonetheless, silent in a way that Freeman knew the only thing keeping his teeth in his head was their fear of their chief. He slammed the bullet-pocked door behind them.

It was finally just him and corpse.

Well, him, the corpse, and the eight bullets buried in it.

All-in-all, it looked like something the locals should have handled. Except Freeman wasn’t one to have the cops investigating themselves. He had to figure out why the dead guy was willing to go out guns blazing with the Metropolitan Police Department.

Freeman wished he could have asked the cops more questions, but that bridge was about burned to the ground. He sat on the foot of the bed and laid out the officers’ initial notes on his lap. He wasn’t in a rush, the corpse wasn’t going anywhere.

He hoped.

The deceased, a boy generously seventeen years of age, no place of origin listed, checked into the hotel at five PM the day before under the name ‘Haskell Moute.’ Nothing notable about him, really. The boy was five-seven, on the thin side at a buck-forty, he was impatient at the desk, and almost quiet enough to cover up a country accent. He only had a few dollars on him and a couple cases of out-of-style clothes. No one saw him bring in any other bags and no one noticed anyone with him.

About three in the morning, some guests smelled smoke in the building. Staff tracked it to room eight-eighteen and found the lights on and the door barricaded. Mister Moute threatened them with a pistol and refused to open up. That’s when they rang the police.

Two officers arrived fifteen minutes later. When they kicked in the door, Haskell Moute got off a single shot. They each emptied their revolvers.

When the smoke cleared, they were left with one dead boy, a stack of hand-edited Bibles, several documents disintegrating in the tub, and enough left-over bomb-making detritus to convince responding detectives that Mister Moute had constructed at least a dozen large explosive devices.

Problem was, they didn’t find a single one of ‘em.

Still, that could have been a call to Hoover’s troop.

What got the call kicked over to the Office for the Cataloguing of Unusual Occurrences was the simple fact that Haskell Moute’s skin was blue. Not as in bruised, not as a symptom of hypoxia, not tattooed over. Blue blue. The boy was blue as a blue jay.

The rest of him looked typical and healthy. He was of average height and weight, which was a feat considering how many young men came out of the Depression shrunk from malnourishment. Judging by his close-cropped brown hair and angular features, he looked like he’d been white once.

In fact, he’d been white when he checked in. The beige paint lining the sink showed where he’d washed a thick layer of make-up off. He’d gone to great lengths to conceal his peculiar hue.

Royce Freeman had seen a lot of weird shit with the Office, from carnivorous plants the size of cars to secret societies that worshipped lobsters to not-secret societies that worshipped Hitler. But he’d never seen a blue boy before.

“What the Hell does that?” he wondered to himself. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack and lit it, thinking while he puffed.

He’d come in too hot and needed a moment to start fresh. He’d been distracted since before he even got eyes on the scene. Getting handcuffed by a pair of racist dicks within minutes of walking in the door would do that.

Freeman closed his eyes, took one of those deep breaths like the Office yogis had taught him in Canada, a breath that filled him from his collarbones down to his ankles. He held it for a moment, letting his heart clear and his head slow down, then exhaled and opened his eyes.

A cool breezed whispered in through the busted window, drawing his gaze away from the body. The hotel had a wide view of the National Mall. He had an unobstructed line-of-sight from the Washington Monument to Capitol Hill. Moute had spent big bucks for that view, and Freeman understood. The morning sun was just hitting the towering white obelisk’s eastern face, illuminating it in volcanic red.

It was almost peaceful.

“Weird place to build a bomb,” he pointed out to no one. The soldiering iron had burned a gash into the dresser. Moute had left empty fertilizer bags and petroleum jelly tins piled on the floor. It was no wonder everyone in the building could smell what was cooking. His was not an especially subtle art. “There’s a reason people do this shit in basements.”

He slid on his gloves and began going through the dead boy’s billfold. A few dollars, a decrepit driver’s license, and a folded page that looked like it had been ripped out of one of the Bibles.

The corpse’s I.D. was ancient and didn’t quite match the corpse’s face. He would have had to have been thirty years older. The dead boy was the son or nephew of the man in the picture, a man who was conspicuously not blue.

“Speck County, Virginia,” Freeman read aloud. He thought he’d heard of it, somewhere out in the sticks. He’d have to drive through Virginia to get back to Charlotte anyway so it was worth checking out. Although the only things that came out of that end of the Old Dominion were coal and moonshine. If the Green Book didn’t have anything suspect to say about the place, it wouldn’t be too much of a detour to take a solo run through to ask after a blue boy.

He set the I.D. aside and examined the folded scripture. One verse had been gone over again and again with an ink pen. The writer had even capitalized some of the words to emphasize them. It was from the Book of John.

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and THE BLOOD OF JESUS, his son, PURIFIES US from all sin.

“Well then,” Freeman muttered. He picked up the closest dog-earred Bible, set it on his lap, and let it fall open. The verse that starred up at him was from the Book of Lamentations. It was underlined and circled like the other one.

As for us, our eyes as yet failed for our vain help: in our watching we have watched for A NATION COULD NOT SAVE US.

“Odd sentiments for a Washington tourist,” Freeman said. He flipped through, seeing similar verses circled and edited and re-written over and over. The recurring themes were cleanliness, purity, bravery, and independence. “Odd, but consistent.”

He’d seen some of that same selective interpretation before. The Abwehr called it the ‘Manifest Creed,’ and they’d been passing the drivel around in churches for almost three years. They took the good book and twisted it to fit their narrative. What had been about community, patience, understanding, and charity became something selfish, violent, and dangerous. Wherever it took hold, a Silver Legion cell was bound to pop up.

Speck County was suddenly looking pretty interesting.

“What else you got, Moute?” Freeman wondered. He set the Bible aside and grabbed one of the suitcases. It had some ratty shirts and slacks inside, some wool socks that had been darned and re-darned. There was a brush set with paint pot half-full of W.A.S.P. white rolled up in a bib. He set that aside and beneath he found the robes. They were white and Freeman recoiled like they were on fire.

“God damn Klan!” he snarled. He snagged them out and threw them on the floor. “Wait…”

The robes were longer than the goofy smocks the Klan wore, and closer to gauze than anything else. Instead of a pointy witch hat, Moute had packed a face mask and head wrap, with matching white gloves and boot covers. He didn’t spot any emblems on the entire get-up, and claiming their heritage was one of the Klan’s favorite pastimes. All-in-all, the boy would end up looking more like a beekeeper than a two-bit terrorist.

Something glimmered in the bottom of the suitcase and Freeman hooked it with his pen and held it up. It was an armband, the kind goose steppers wore, but not in the blood red, gray, or stars and stripes that he was familiar with. This one was a strange fabric, stretchy and impermeable and mirrored like chrome. He’d never seen the material before.

Between that, the bomb-making gear, and the Nazi-edited Bibles encouraging violent government overthrow, Moute’s get-up went from half-assed costume to full-on distressing.

“What are you going after?” Freeman asked the body. Wherever Moute was planning to bomb, the infernal devices were likely already there.

He got up and stretched his legs, strolling into the bathroom. The floor was wet. When the cops busted in, the tub had been overflowing. Moute had doused his papers in there and they’d gone to mush in minutes. He could see scraps of what looked like blueprints and maps, but touching them turned them into liquid. Freeman left the sodden mess in the bathroom.

“Why two suitcases?” he wondered. He sat back down on the bed and grabbed the second bag. He found another set of clothes in there, complete with a full set of robes, mask, gloves, chrome arm band, and boot covers, and another face-painting set. He laid them out “Nobody needs two sets.”

He groaned as he stood to hold the robe out like it would offer more information unfolded. A waft of chlorine washed over him. He looked it up and down and noticed something strange. It was way too long to fit on five-foot-six Haskell Moute.

“There’s another one out there,” Freeman realized. Somewhere between building their bombs and Moute getting shot to Hell, his accomplice high-tailed it with the bombs. He sighed and tried to calm the hammering heartbeat in his head. “Where the Hell are you?”

He balled up the tall man’s robes and threw them across the room. They hit the wall, dislodging a wadded piece of paper from a pocket. Freeman ambled across the room and scoop it off the blood-stained carpet.

It was another handwritten note that simply said ‘EZ-26-9.’

“Okay, fine,” Freeman groaned. He picked up the worn Bible once more, flipping to the Old Testament. It was from one of Ezekiel’s visions.

And he shall set engines of war against thy walls, and with his axes he shall break down thy towers.

“Okay, Moute,” Freeman said, staring out the window and it’s amazing view of the National Mall, “What tower were you trying to - !”

He cut himself off when his gaze landed on the Washington Monument.

“Oh. Shit.”

MONDAY EVENING, APRIL 12, 1943
WEST CORINTH HALL OF LIFE AND HEALTH
IDLERS GAP, VIRGINIA

No one welcomed the smell of fresh blood under those dark rafters again, least of all Parcival Roust’s father.

“Burn it,” Sheriff Gunston Roust ordered. He wouldn’t step anywhere near the altar nor the strange man laid out upon it. One gloved hand stayed clamped over his wrapped nose and mouth, the other wrapped around his pistol’s grip.

“He’s alive,” Parcival tried. The strange man laid still as a stone, his ghostly pale flesh stark upon the walnut altar.

“Cleanse yourself,” the sheriff snarled. What little of his face that Parce could see was practically glowing purple. “Who knows what kind of ill humors that thing brought with it.”

“He’s a miracle,” Parcival said, but marched himself to the cleansing apse and began the rite. He peeled off his gloves and threw them in the boiling vat, followed by his mask, hood, boot covers, robe, and trousers. Widow Ames nodded to him and churned his infected clothes with a worn smooth stir paddle. She did not seem to mind the caustic fumes or his nakedness.

“He is befouled,” the sheriff hissed. He was staring at the still man, trying to decide whether to simply burn him alive or raze the whole hall with him.

“He should have been dead,” Parcival objected. He ignored the Widow Clydler as she washed him down with a cloth and warm water: “I found him run right through, sheriff, an elm branch right through his back, sticking out of his chest. I had to rope him up to Aggie’s saddle just to haul him out the tree.”

Parcival reached for a purified robe but his father interrupted him:

“A full cleanse.”

The sheriff did not even look at him when he condemned him to it. Parvical clenched his jaw but did not object.

Widow Clydler poured grain alcohol from a white ewer onto another abrasive cloth and scrubbed him from feet to scalp. He’d long before learned to bear through the stinging when the cleansing liquid found his every scrape, cut, and orifice. He managed not to yelp when a drop trickled into the corner of his eye.

After five minutes of being scraped raw, he stood pure and fresh, naked and shivering, puffy and blue.

He opened his mouth to speak, only to be silenced by a gesture from the sheriff.

“Armor yourself.”

Parcival took a deep breath, then found Widow Clydler waiting, holding a tray of salvatives. He allowed her to administer his communion. First the bitter quinine, then the frigid colloidal silver, then his salts, tinctures, oils, and anti-inflammatories. It was a process, one every citizen partook of every morning. It was rare to commune twice in a day, but it was a rare day.

Men did not often appear impaled on trees in Idlers Gap.

Parcival took purified vestments from Widow Ames, draping and masking himself in bleached white. The first few breaths through the mask were harsh, but he had been breathing chlorine since he was a boy. He hadn’t passed out in years.

“I see no miracle, boy,” the sheriff finally said. He kept three paces’ distance from the unconscious man, even further than the two paces required by the town charter. “I see a carrier of foul humors. A viper in our midst.”

“Look at his injury, please,” Parcival said. “I found him speaking. He was fully aware. And that branch was piercing him like a nail to the cross.”

“Do not compare this fiend to the Savior, boy.”

“I know he is not the Savior, nor is he a fiend.”

“I shall be the judge of that,” the sheriff huffed.

“I have his stuff outside,” Parcival told him. “Please, tell me what he is.”

The nod the sheriff gave him for leaving the stranger’s effects outside the hall was as close as he had gotten to his father’s approval in some time. When he saw the small pile at the foot of the remembrance plaque, he almost slugged his son then and there. Parcival’s mother had died because some fool with ill intent had brought strangers into the town. Beneath her name was not the place to leave infected trash.

A circle of boys had gathered around the items Parcival had stripped off the stranger.

“Go on, get!” Parcival shouted. The three ran off giggling, trailing white frocks behind them. They did not wear the full regalia that Parcival was required as the sheriff’s son. Their bare blue legs pounded the dirt road until they were out of sight.

“You’ll have to cleanse Agatha,” the sheriff grunted. Parcival had hitched his horse nearby. Her entire haunch was red with the stranger’s blood. It would take hours to scrub her pure. He didn’t have time to think about that, he had to know what he had found.

The sheriff picked up a broom stick and hooked it beneath the blood-soaked garment Parcival had recovered. It was an unmarked single-piece jumpsuit made from a reflective, gleaming silver unlike anything they had ever seen. It had neither stitches nor texture. It seemed to flow as they looked at it. The tree branch had not ripped the material as it penetrated, it stretched it until it punctured. The stranger’s blood was crusted upon its surface. He had been wearing a helmet, as well, a glass globe tinted gold on the outside. Like the jumpsuit, they could not see any seams on its face.

“What is this?” he asked.

“I do not know, sir,” Parcival replied. “You ever seen anything like that?”

“I have not,” the sheriff replied.

The pale man had fallen unconscious when Aggie ripped him from that tree branch, but he had not died. The hole in his back went clear through his chest, inches wide, and had pulverized part of his spine.

He did not wake when Parcival stripped him down, nor when he poured alcohol in the yawning wound, nor when he wrapped the bandages around his body. He could not tell them what the strange items he carried were.

The sheriff poked at a small box with his covered boot, an item that had been demolished before Parcival had found the man. copper unfurled from it like worms emerging from a rotten corpse. The sheriff scoffed and let it be.

He’d long since ripped the telephone lines down. Things with wires only brought trouble to Idlers Gap. They had their uses on the outside, but they were cancers to be cut out to keep the town safe.

“Was he armed?” the sheriff asked after a moment.

“No, sir,” Parcival replied.

“Foolish to enter these mountains without your hands filled,” the sheriff said.

“I don’t think he needed them, sir.”

“How’s that? There’s bears and all manner of infected cretins he’d have to walk past to get here,” the sheriff replied. “He came from somewhere, tripped his sorry rear down a slope, and got himself stuck on a tree.”

“He fell, sir, but not down a slope,” Parcival said. “That ain’t possible.”

“How the Hell else would this happen, boy?”

Parcival took a breath and looked around. A gaggle of congregants had gathered, spaced far enough apart to avoid possible transmission but close enough to see the silver fabric and to listen. He answered as best he could, with what little confidence he could muster:

“He fell from the sky, sir.”

The sheriff’s blue cheeks flushed purple with ire. The milling townsfolk whispered to each other, their shock muffled by their masks.

Parcival continued:

“The tree I found him in was the old elm sticking out of the top of Pigsback, the one everyone rests at on the eastern perimeter loop. I stopped to water Aggie and there he was, dangling, asking for me to help him down. He was fifteen feet in the air, hooked through the chest like a ham in the smoker. You can go yourself, sir, and see the broken branch. And his blood, it’s still up there. Ain’t nowhere to fall from up there ‘cept the sky.”

“He is incorrect, you know,” an unfamiliar voice. Several of those gathered gasped. They found that strange man on the hall’s front steps, holding himself up against a post. He was wheezing and had nearly bled through his bandages. His legs were splayed out behind him, as if he’d dragged the lifeless things from the altar. The widows haunted the open door behind him, unsure of what to do. He was gray and pale as a June afternoon and his bald head was smooth as ice. His skin stood out like a ghost among the silvered-blue flesh of the town. He smiled up at them, a pink glint flashing in his grey eyes: “I am not from the sky: I fell from beyond it.”

Parcival had been living in the same small town all his life. He hadn’t heard anyone speak that wasn’t raised there in almost fifteen years. The man’s flat accent was jarring to his inexperienced ears, nearly as jarring as what he was actually saying.

“Beyond the sky?” the sheriff asked, incredulous. His hand was latched onto the pistol on his hip

“Yes, brothers and sisters, I was sent here to help you navigate the difficult path ahead,” the stranger replied, speaking up and over the sheriff’s head to the gathered crowd. “The world beyond these mountains is crumbling. Due to your diligence, you will be the true inheritors of this world.”

“This is horse shit,” the sheriff grunted. “He’s an outsider, and he’s rife with germs.”

“Look at me, sir, and tell me that those contemptible plagues have ravaged me,” the stranger said. Beside the gaping wound in his chest and the way his legs were splayed on the steps, only his strange complexion gave any indication that he was anything other than a hale man at his physical peak. “The All-Highest found the means to defeat the banes and poisons wrought out there. He taught us the means to treat ourselves, as I see His whispers have found you as well.”

He indicated his ashen skin, suddenly making Parcival uncomfortable in his own. The same colloidal silver that he ingested daily to make him immune to the flu’s foul humors also gradually transubstantiated his skin a deep, vibrant blue. Everyone in the Gap partook in communion. If they refused, they were winnowed before they drew the ravenous flu to the rest of them.

There was blue skin in Idlers Gap, or there was none.

“Sacrifices must be made for our faith, and our survival,” the stranger added. That got the crowd nodding and murmuring. Their consecrated skin and lost loved ones testified to that. “Only those allow for prosperity.”

“You don’t look so hot right now,” the sheriff grunted, silencing the whispers.

“Even the All-Highest cannot solve everything,” the stranger replied. “He has taken my legs, but I feel no pain. I will not die from this, but I will need help to thrive.”

“We ain’t here to throw scraps to strays,” the sheriff snarled. “We aren’t surviving whatever Hell is on the other side of those mountains by accident. We do that by being smart. By not listening to serpents..”

He drew his pistol and leveled it at the bleeding man’s forehead.

“Give me one good reason I don’t put you down like a rabid dog.”

“I am no stray, sir, I am exactly where I need to be: among those with the heart and strength to reclaim this world,” the stranger said. “Nor am I a serpent. Have I scales? Or fangs? What danger do I pose? I cannot even walk, and I would have died had it not been for your son. I owe you everything. You have been a good steward of this community, sir, let me repay you and help you navigate what lies beyond.”

The sheriff’s aim did not waver until Parcival placed his hand atop the revolver. Together they lowered it.

“Sheriff, dad, don’t,” he said quietly. “This man survived for a reason. Just like us.”

“Boy, he ain’t even told you his name,” the sheriff pointed out.

“In my family, we do not need them. We all know each other, we have worked and grown and worshipped side-by-side since before any of us could remember,” the stranger replied. He smiled wide, showing off his perfect teeth and pale gums. “Where I come from, they simply call me ‘Brother.’ ‘Brother Three.’”

“‘Three?’ There’s more of you?” the sheriff asked. He almost jerked the pistol up again, if not for his son stopping him.

“More, but fewer every day,” Brother Three said quietly. “It is a horrible world out there. You were right to keep them at bay, sir. Many suffer while others dictate their doom from a white tower. Only their downfall may lead the way to that Golden Realm, to a Heaven on Earth.”

“We have our place, here, safe,” the sheriff said. “I ain’t about to cause no downfalls.”

“Sir, you have done well by your people here. But I was sent from above, on silver wings, to deliver a message unto you: all of His children are drowning, sinking into the dreck. Those with the will to save them, must.”

“You calling yourself an angel?” the sheriff demanded, but he knew that whatever slick shit the pale man said next did not matter; he could see the wonder and determination in the town’s eyes. They were hanging on the crippled man’s every word.

Even Parcival.

“I am no angel,” Three replied, the venom behind his manipulations sweet enough to ask for seconds. “I am a person, a believer, who heard His word and acted. Prosperity must be shared. You all have the strength and faith to show others the way.”

The pale stranger sat up straighter. The sheriff could’ve put a bullet through his head right then and there but it was already too late. The folks of Idlers Gap had suffered and lost so much, all at the sheriff’s insistence. He offered them no end, no reprieve. All he had for them was more suffering.

But the stranger, he would make them prophets and heroes.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.