(EPISODE FIVE - FAREWELL, ABERDOVEY.)

 

Viv had gone!
I think some wise-ass once said, “Smile. Things could be worse.”
Well I did.
And they are.
Readers, Hank Conan is at a low ebb. My uncanny cognition, honed by countless daring exploits behind many enemy lines - and Spring Sales in Harrods - adapted and implemented, time and time again in every kind of scenario possible, is giving me the strangest feedback. I can divine some grotesque foreboding. If I was to make a bizarre analogy, it’s like I was a character in some kind of play or film, with the choc-ices and Kia-Ora fast approaching.
Ridiculous, I know, but who can fathom the deeper levels of meaning of the human brain and psyche? Or even my brain and psyche?
And how did I end up here? Where I stand now, readers, would chill your soul.
Before I tell you my location, I suppose I should use the old film-noir technique of flashback to bring you up to speed.
Viv had gone!
She’d managed, though, in what undoubtedly had been mayhem and bullet-ridden carnage, to frantically scribble an obviously hasty letter detailing how the ‘mob’ knew she’d taken up with me and wanted to take me out (Hah! Someone should’ve told them that flattery won’t get you anywhere with Hank Conan. I’m not that easily impressed - unless they were talking serious wining and dining at a real swank joint!).
Brave soul that she is, Viv’d taken the heartrending decision (on page 17) that, even though turning her back on me was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do, if she didn’t leave now, and save my life in the process, she’d regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But sometime, and for the rest of her life. After all, as she said in her booklet, “...we’d always have Parris.” (That’s the island used to train U.S. Marines, and where I’d planned to have a paintball reception after the wedding.)
She also mentioned, somewhat cryptically, something about going to Yemen (More correctly, 18 Yemen Road, Yemen, if my friends in high places had decrypted it accurately.).
I thought about the sacrifices on going up against the sewer-sucking scum-buckets and the low-lives; the loneliness, the lost opportunities, the gambles, the losses.
I’ve noticed that people I meet often end up departing in strange circumstances. I suppose it’s one of the hazards of this job.
How could some losers call me a sad loner when I’ve known countless people throughout the years who’ve taken on new identities at a moment’s notice so they could be relocated and moved thousands of miles away from me to protect me from the ‘mob’?
Yeh, I’d lost plenty in the past through following this lonesome, lawful path. In this game, when you decide that you won’t be pushed around by anyone, that no one owns you, and no one can deny you your own little piece of God’s green patch, that’s when things get tough. That’s when you realise that things can go down hard for you sticking to the straight and narrow and deciding that you’re your own man.
Yeh, readers, I can tell you, I’ve lost a lot of things since I stopped kissing ass. Mainly this funny taste I used to get in my mouth first thing in a morning.
Even though Viv had implored me (on page 111) to save myself and not to follow her, what was life without a woman the required three paces behind you? Who would clean the john? How do you cook cereal?
I thought about Viv’s cute, turned up nose. The way her hair swirled and framed her face when she coyly giggled and shook her head. I remembered the infectious little chuckle that began somewhere near her diaphragm and languorously, sensually, wriggled upwards, hitching a ride on the phlegm her smoker’s cough engendered, until it burst forth into the air with a sound like a riotous cacophony of metal plates falling on to tarmacadam.
My mind swam in the remembrances of her. Like the time she’d taken up jogging, but then had to stop after the friction between the tops of her thighs kept melting her pantyhose and sticking her legs together.
My mind was filled with visions of her lithe body bent over my prone form, her elegantly manicured, scarlet-glossed nails stroking the exposed skin above my midriff with smooth, deft movements - targeting the exact location, like all women, she knew was the male’s weak spot.
After lulling me into a post-coital, hypnagogic, doze with that old fashioned ploy of rutting, she’d plunge those nails through the flesh, breaking and discarding the ribs like long forgotten and worm-eaten planks of a redundant jetty. The grasping, writhing hands jerking and fluttering through my entrails until they found their prize.
With one swift, well-practised, movement the she-vixen would tear out and hold aloft the still beating heart of her quarry, letting the droplets of life purge the dry thirst of anticipation from her throat as her screams of orgasmic satisfaction climaxed in union with the sounds of the death rattle rasping from the still warm and scarlet-smeared throat and chest of the poor wretch who now lay twitching at her feet.....

 

Excuse me a moment.........................