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The best laid plans...........
I was pinned down under a hail of gunfire. Stein had bought it. How could this have happened? Only Stein, ‘The Paper Lady’, Hal Itosis and yours truly knew the heist was going down.
Then it dawned on me. Viv had still been in the bathroom when Stein had dished the dirt. She must have overheard. Then someone must have scaled the outside of the building. The whole thirty floors. Then got into the bathroom. Then they must have tortured Viv beyond endurance. Then, poor girl, she must have cracked and told them everything. The reason Stein and me hadn’t heard a thing was because Viv’s torturers must have been professionals. That means they must have been from the ‘mob’. Viv hadn’t made a sound during her hideous ordeal. She mustn’t have wanted to let on that we were in the other room, knowing that the ‘mob’ were after me and would have tried to take me out. She suffered all that to save me. It was the only explanation.
What a girl!
If the worst happened, I could die a happy, contented, partnered man. And not a virgin. Obviously. Conquests, pah! If temporal linearity was efficacious I could regale you with narrative renditions that would precipitate a hormonal deficiency in the bulbiferous epidermal layer of the scalp, resulting in a counter- or clock-wise gyration of the germinatory output of your follicles.
My cerebral cortex glowed with bursts of furious neurone activity as my organic modem flexed its File Transfer Protocols, pumped its bandwidth, and formatted my floppy while it downloaded plan after plan in the hope of finding a way out of this fix.
YES! I had it.
I whipped out my Nokia and speed-dialled Hal’s mobile. Luck was with me, he answered. I feigned an Italian accent. "Pizza-a for-a Mr-a. Itosis-a. We’re-a at-a the door-a." I crooned.
He thanked me and stopped firing. Standing up to answer the non-existent delivery, he was framed long enough for me to draw a bead and let him have it.
BLA-A-AM!
Huh, hold the anchovies!
That’d show the ‘mob’ what I thought about the extra-deep-pan jobbies.
That was it. I was out of there. With one bound, I was free and ready to rush back to meet my other half and walk off into the sunset.
I love a happy ending.
What?
‘The Paper Lady’?
Ah, she got blown away.
THE END.
Hank will return in:
HANK CONAN - PRIVATE EYE.
EPISODE FIVE – FAREWELL, ABERDOVEY.
SEE BELOW
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