This is a tale of two thieves and a dead guy. Actually three dead guys and a bike, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. The Biddle brothers were the thieves, and a guy named Eddie was the dead guy. For the time being anyway.

Big Barry Biddle was a self-made bad-ass, by reputation if not in fact. Lester Biddle was an ass of the candy variety, having little going for him other than a gorilla-sized brother. Together, they were the sleaziest after dark pair in the whole of Little Chicago, and folks who knew ‘em generally invested in some good deadbolts, chains, cable-locks and the like. Why nobody had shot ‘em was anybody’s guess. The most likely explanation was luck, wet powder, or lack of moonlight.

Being average thieves, the Biddle boys weren’t out boosting Hummers from the Sheraton parking lot, but they weren’t above siphoning all the gas out of your mother’s car, or swiping the occasional pig out of a dark field for a ‘private’ BBQ. They were thieves of opportunity, not cunning. The kind of guys who’d steal a kid’s bike if left on the curb, but lacked the balls to pull off a convenience store robbery. You get the picture.

Not being real country folks, the Biddle boys didn’t spend too much time in the woods, but one night last January they were deep in Daniel Boone territory, having dashed towards the woods from their attempted Volkswagen hotwiring exercise at the first sign of a porch light snapping on. Not being former Boy Scouts, they were pretty well lost for the first hour, but eventually walked out of the woods onto the rear field of a large chunk of farmland. There was no house in view, but across the field some hundred yards away was a tottering old farm outbuilding, big enough for an average tractor shed. As the boys were getting a bit damp from the drizzle they thought would cover their thieving butts, something with a roof looked pretty inviting, and offered the potential for further isolated mischief and/or thievery. So it was that around 2 a.m. that cold winter morning, the Biddle boys met up with the dead guy.

Figuratively speaking of course, so don’t get your drawers in a wad. They didn’t creep into the old rickety outbuilding and stumble on a scene from CSI. They did, however, stumble onto something they instantly recognized as a ‘hot item’. For in that old dusty ramshackle of an shed was an old dusty relic of the past with Harley-Davidson glittering dully in the glow of Lester’s tiny flashlight. Since neither Biddle was actually brain-dead, they were quickly beside themselves with glee at their discovery. While a bike wasn’t outside their realm of thievery, they both lacked the prerequisite guts or panache to be out in the real world of bikers trying to boost big buck bikes, and had a healthy respect – fear actually – of the Hog scene and most of the players therein. Here, apparently, was their long overdue reward from the God of Cowardice. A dusty Harley in a remote barn, and nobody around for seemingly miles. Just what the chickenshit brothers would have ordered, had a menu been available. By 4 a.m., they were loading the old treasure into their van, having pushed it a mile or so thru the fields to a copse of trees by a back road where they could retrieve it unseen. It’s safe to assume they were happier than they would have been with the Volkswagen.

Lest we forget, there’s a dead guy in here somewhere, so let’s tend to it. The bike belonged to the dead guy, inasmuch as a dead guy can own something. It was, entirely unbeknownst to the Biddle boys, a 1965 Panhead. The last of it’s kind. A buck toothed and grinning Eddie had gotten it as a graduation present from his daddy, known around those parts as Bad Luck Bill. Some of that bad luck must have rubbed off, as Eddie only made the rounds thru the local drive-ins (theatre and eateries) that one summer after graduating before traveling to the Exotic Land of Vietnam, shortly thereafter to perish on a boat that wasn’t quite as swift as it could have been.

There wasn’t much of a funeral, as RPG’s tended to create ‘closed casket’ ceremonies, but after daddy Bill keeled over at the graveside from a massive coronary, Eddie’s momma tenderly placed her son’s bike in the makeshift memorial barn, sold Bill’s hot-rod Lincoln, and doddered off in the direction of senility on her lonesome. She’s still alive, word has it, but missing enough upstairs to be able to hide her own Easter Eggs. Odds are she never knew her baby boy’s bike went missing.

But back to the Biddles, just a-chucklin’ and shining up their new stolen toy in their hide-away garage, sluggin’ down cold beers and cackling like a couple of hens. As each layer of dust polished off the silent panhead, and each beer went down their gullets, the visions of grandeur and wealth swelled in their conniving skulls, and the questions flew fast and furious. How to sell it? Where to sell it? How to make it run! Who rides first! The Biddle boys squabbled long and hard, until finally the beer and dawn’s light shut down the party, and the two thieves finally passed out after a hard nights’ work. No rest for the wicked indeed! Ha!

Big Barry opened his scummy eyes around noon, hawked up a clam or two, and stretched his big arse up off the floor. Lester was back at it; rag in hand, sitting on a crate next to the bike with a thoughtful look on his normally vapid face.

“Hey, Barry…” he motioned his brother over, “What do you reckon this is?”

Barry wandered over to see what Lester was pointing at – an oval-ish ‘box’ sort of contraption bolted to the backside of the frame – metal, and about the size of the air cleaner on the same side. Barry too was clueless. He tapped on it with a wrench, and it sounded hollow but solid at the same time. “Is that a keyhole?” he asked Lester.

“Don’t look like no keyhole I ever saw!” replied his bro’, squinting at the two tiny square indentations. “Lemme see that thing!” Barry said, squatting down closer to the mystery box. “Hmmm…” he considered his options.

Not wanting to tear up their newest ‘toy’, eventually his weasel brain went to work and he wandered over to a workbench, and started filing on an old screwdriver, ignoring Lester’s questions. Between the pair, they managed to create a crappy little ‘tool’ which fit the slots on the oval’s side, and with a little twisting and some oil, the box eventually popped open, and a two-fisted size wad of something-in-a-rag tumbled out to the floor. The Biddles jumped back as if a snake had slithered out, and stood staring with mouths open. There on the floor, lying partially exposed in the old rag, was the butt of a gun. And a large rolled up wad of greasy bills. Money!

“Holy crap, Barry!” Lester finally mouthed. “Lookit that!” Barry, a bit quicker on the draw, was already snatching up the bundle, and spreading it out on the bench, they realized they were looking at a tidy sum of money and an old .38 six shooter, loaded to the hilt with some nasty dum-dums. Counting furiously, Barry saw quickly they were in possession of several thousand dollars worth of ‘silver certificates’, primarily in 20’s, 50’s and 100’s. A bit oily, but none the worse for wear. “Hot damn!” he breathed. The two brothers eyed each other like weasels in a henhouse, and began plotting how best to divvy up their newfound wealth. The old Harley panhead sat quietly in the background. Watching, maybe.

Once the initial greed-shock had worn off, they decided for the sake of ‘business as usual’ that their next step would be to visit the local Harley dealer, pick up a battery for the pilfered bike, and see if they could get it to run. After all, in the long-term thieving picture, a running hot bike was worth more than a not-running hot bike. The boys were at their finest when maximizing profits from the misery of others.

So off they went, pockets stuffed with ill-gotten gains, to the local Harley shop, to seek out the seed of ignition – a big bike battery. Being thrifty thieves, they took the old one in case someone brought up a core charge. Lester, being the gopher, got the job of standing at the parts counter, and while Barry browsed the showroom, admiring the shiny bikes and trying to chat up the cute sales chick with his less than great breath – Lester dutifully conducted the battery transaction, filling out the warranty registration card for the almost hundred dollar battery and handing the clerk two greasy fifty dollar bills. The brothers walked out with a new purpose in life – reviving their stolen motorcycle from its decades of silence. Some electricity, a little gas – shouldn’t be long now!

Back at the Harley shop, Burt the Parts Guy called over a customer, Randall the off-duty cop, who Burt knew was a coin collector and generally hip guy.

“Hey, Randall!” Burt said, “When’s the last time you saw one of these?” and as he asked, slid the two $50 silver certificates across the counter. “Been awhile, eh?”

“No kiddin!” observed Randall, and being a generally hip guy, offered Burt a fresh new hundred-dollar bill and lunch on him at the Greasy Spoon of local renown, for the two nasty antique bills. They both had the Jumbo BBQ. Burt got dessert out of it too.

Time marches on, and back at the ‘den of thieves’ the two brothers were still cackling, polishing, and otherwise servicing the stolen bike. This wire goes here, that one goes there, hand me another beer, etc.

Randall went in second shift, and being a generally hip guy, showed his trick old $50 bills to the Lieutenant, who was also a numismatist, but slightly more forensically minded. The Lieutenant fed the serial numbers thru a big Federal database, and noticed they got a hit on a bank robbery from 1965 on a town a few counties over that left a few folks shot, and hadn’t ever been solved.

Randall (did I mention he was a hip guy?) called Burt up at the dealer as he was shrugging on his coat against the January chill, and Burt went and looked up the battery warranty card that Lester had filled out, and gave Randall the pertinent information over the phone. Lester, it could be argued, was not a very hip guy.

Later that evening, some four hours short of an entire day of captivity for the stolen hog, the biggest part of the local S.W.A.T. team arrived outside of the Biddle brothers garage, announcing their arrival with all the nifty stuff cops carry around – sirens, bullhorns, tires screeching – the whole nine yards.

Lester and Barry went into a full-blown tizzy, running around like the proverbial chicken-with-it’s-head-cut-off, nowhere to go but jail. Not that they made it that far. Barry, in his frenzy, knocked the old .38 off the workbench, where it landed hammer first on the floor, discharging a 40 year old dum-dum bullet thru the garage door, and into Randall’s arm just outside the vest. Randall, being slightly pissed, rapped off a few dozen rounds from an H&K MP-5, followed very closely by a few hundred rounds from his concerned fellow officers.

While the Biddles were instantly retired from their blossoming careers as n’er-do-wells, there was not a single hole in the panhead. Before Randall was hustled away by the paramedics, he saw the Lieutenant pick up a ragged old registration card lying on the ground beneath the open toolbox.

“Hmmm...” the LT reflected, “Looks like the old cops on this case had the right suspect in mind. Says ‘Eddie Pandora’ right here on this registration...”

So there ya’ have it. Two thieves, a stolen Harley, someone opens Pandora’s box, and boom! Three dead guys, all things considered. Kind’ a makes yer skin crawl, doesn’t it?