Vacation Raymond Chandler Style

I was laying on a sunny Florida beach when trouble blocked the sun. Trouble was a big, a shave-tailed smart-ass with a smarmy smile and spit and polish shoes. The over-priced seer-sucker suit that draped over his shoulders flapped slightly in the slow breeze. He also held a silencer about six inches from my head.

"You Tortelli?" he asked in a slithering tongue.

"Sure, and Suzy sells sea-shells."

I'm not too courageous, even when facing down a stuffed animal with plastic doe eyes, but there must have been something in the suntan lotion sizzling on the back of my neck. In a kick straight out of cirque de soleil my shin split open his skinny scrotum and smashed his tropical testes. He dropped to the ground like a groaning bad guy in an old Scorecese film.

I ran to the nearest phone and called my friend Zigman Zibanski.

"I'm down in Florida," I told him. "Some local dumb-$hit tried to kill me with a silencer."

"You better come home," he suggested. "Sounds like you been the victim of a mistaken identity."

Like I keep saying, I gotta stay away from these budget vacations on lowly beaches. I also should keep away from Zigman Zibanski types, but that's the topic of another post all together.