Date:         Fri, 28 Apr 95 04:45:05 -0600
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         wself@viking.emcmt.edu (Will Self)
Subject:      [f] Story!  Conclusion!


CONCLUSION of the gripping detective story, the Case of the Counterfeit 
Emblems.

Story so far:  Jokker Von Wokker, the Stolen VW Emblem King, got the blonde 
dame to lure me to his apartment.  Turns out he just wanted to talk.

  "Look, Wokker," I said, why not just be reasonable and come to my office and 
talk?  Why all this cheap mystery-story fol-de-rol with the gat?  The gat 
looked amazingly like a fuel pump from an 84 Vanagon.
  Wokker waved the pistol.  "Willy, he intoned, "I know from sad experience 
that this is the only kind of reason you are going to listen to from me."  He 
waved it again.  "Remember?"
  "Put that damned thing away," I growled.  He had his point.
  Jokker got up out of his chair.  "What I've got to tell you can't leave this 
room,"  he said darkly.  He started going all around the apartment, looking 
behind furniture, looking in the closet, frowning like a new bus owner 
searching for rust spots after an East Coast winter.
   "Are the paranoids out to get you?"  I quipped.  Count on Willy for a
quip.
   "Look, Willy," Von Wokker croaked--his version of a whisper. "If this gets 
out we're done for."
   "Von Dub, you old thief," I sneered.  "If you can't take the compression get
out of the combustion chamber."
   "But Willy, that's just it.  I am not a thief."
   "Yeah, you and Richard Nixon," I quipped.  Clip and save these quips, hey?
"And stop calling me Willy.  I got enough the willies already."
   The blonde cut in.  "What Jokk is trying to tell you in his own clumsy way,"
she crooned, "is that none of those stolen Vanagon emblems we've been selling 
were really stolen."
   "Not any?"  I cried, bewildered.  (No big deal on bewildered, you can 
bewilder me with high beams.)
   "Well, hardly any," she said.  "We've been manufacturing them.  But we've 
got to pretend they're stolen so that people will buy them.  Folks want the 
real thing."

   My teeth clattered out of my mouth sounding like a blown engine in Bozeman, 
Montana.

   "Here's the scoop," Von explained.  "I got the moxie and the dame's got the 
front desk but we ain't got nobody with the brains."
   "Ho hum, tell me something I don't already know,"  I yawned.
   "We gotta have somebody with brains to run the emblem machines.  They keep
breaking down.  We gotta have you, Willy.  You run the machines."
   "Are you suggesting," I rasped, "that I should give up my lucrative 
Automotive Detective business to play Knick Knack on your Mechanisms?"
   "We gotta have ya, Willy."  Von Wokker was pleading.  I'd never seen him
like this before.  As unexpected as the feeling you get when you give your old 
van a new engine and a paint job.
   "Well, I'm gonna have to think," I enunciated thoughtfully.  "I can't make a 
big decision like this in a day."
   "Willy, this is the concluding episode!  You gotta decide now!"  Von Wokker 
was waving his arms, looking like a freshly blown-out tire on hot pavement.
   "No, I don't," I said firmly.  "I'll give you my answer in a week."
   "A week!"  Von Wokker was turning purple with dispoplopsia or what the hell 
that is.  "Willy!  THIS IS THE LAST INSTALLMENT!"
   "Next week," I said quietly.

---------------------To be post-concluded, or what?-----------------------