Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: And A Bloody Mary Xmas To All

The smoldering city blocks of London in the Blitz were like spent matches compared to what was happening in my skull after an evening getting stripped and revarnished on Fijian Mai Tais with some cowflop-brained actor named Reagan and his slutty wife Jane at Charlie Low's Forbidden City, and as I stumbled out the door at 4 am with a "bon soit" from Charlie and my hat down stuffed my trousers and fifteen paper tropical umbrellas decorating my lapels from the attentions of an animated Austro-Chinese chippy named Helga Li who was now hanging off my arm like a bouquet of lilies from a sea-tossed chum bucket, a huge black and green '36 Dussenberg rolled up alongside us, matching our speed, if you didn't count the lampost collisions. One of the suicide doors swung open, and the light from the car smacked Helga in the face, showing the slight scar she'd received fighting off opium pirates in the Java Straight.

The hand from a silhouetted figure beckoned: "Need a Lift, Mack?"

"Do I know you, Bub, or is that just a sort general name you use for people?"

I noticed oil -or was it blood?- dripping off the Dusie onto the street just as an lowland organutan in a black suit and club tie leapt out of the far side of the car and jumped over the hood, pulling out a blackjack while another dark shape of goonitude made a grab for Helga, who simply stabbed him in the abdomen with a pearl-handled dagger. While Goon 2 writhed and bled and screamed an aria from what sounded like La Boheme, Orangagoon took a swing with the blackjack when I grabbed that arm and shoved it down on the running board while breaking it with my foot and then crammed a mai tai umbrella up his left nostril. He was lucky I was drunk and out of practice ripping off arms and beating people when drunk. Panting on the car's floor he reached for the gun he no longer had because Helga had lifted it deftly and put the barrel against the throat of the driver -

"Wait, wait, I'm Marbles, FBI!! FBI!! I'm a fed, godammit!" he flopped his arm around like a dead salmon with gold cufflinks.

"Hey look, Baby, A G-Man," I said. I tossed the little umbrellas at him, which was entertaining because he was too scared to brush them off. "Where's your camisole?" I'd heard the rumors.

"Gee, a G-Man. Maybe I should ashcan this spent tuna tin of federal fish paste." Helga had some kind of Kong-poo or some such training she'd picked up in Stockholm or Mau-Mau that made her both as deadly as a Bowery wolverine and as svelte as an ballerina otter, but instead she simply pistol-whipped him.

A huge blue police van rolled up like a barrel of the total absence of laughs, and without so much as a how-dye-do, I noted the extremely distinct sound of the complete edition of the .45 Thompson novels indent themselves on the remaindered bookshelf of the Dusenberg bookshop of action-adventure detectivec novels. But I wasn't sticking around to see how this one turned out, shifting into 1st with my hand still wrapped around my 4lb blackpowder Navy and Helga bending low enough on the running board to look down her dress, stomping on the go juice like a a African hissong cockroach working with an collection agency, and roared down

BLIMPS AND HOOVER REVEALED,=