Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for November 25, 2018

Peter unmade by bills unpaid.

Tracy gave fair warning

Pony up the dough or else

The film fest we’ll be mourning.

Side scam so sweet. Out on the street

Brisk sales could not be finer

So much to do. Time for fresh brew

Quick stroll down to the diner.

Dastardly crimes are tougher than rhymes

Good help so hard to find

Who steps in to assist with a win?

A forceful criminal mind.

Striker seems to fill the bill

A fierce man who gets things done

See Austin undercover

If discovered he must run.

Looks like Lafayette’s been eating too many MCU doughnuts!

LOL!

The office looks like the history of telephones.

Where are the other regulars in this joint?

I have some questions.

1. How did Tracy know that Vortex would be in need of office help? PitchBlende would inform Tracy that Vortex was giving him the runaround about his money, but he would not be privy to the chaos in Vortex’s office.

2. Why would Vortex hire a stranger in a coffee shop just because he overheard him talking about how good he is at customer relations? Why didn’t Vortex contact a temp agency for help? Or seek out some contacts in the crime world?

3. Was Austin’s plan was to hang out at a coffee shop near Vortex’s office all day long, hoping he would eventually come in for some coffee? Then he would just start talking loudly about how great he is at customer relations? Great plan.

For all we know the MCU bugged his office…

even when polar first “accidentally ran into striker” the other day I knew it was Austin.

Somehow he goes from informant to undercover agent? wont Devil recognize him from the Police HQ when she turned on Polar?

Way back in the early 1960s, Brush and his cohort had a clever little scam going that was raking them in lots of money – more than a million, it turned out. They had a modest suite of offices and a legitimate looking “cover story”. Then Brush got all fancy and hired a PR man to work in the office, without letting him know that it was really a scam. Disaster ensued very quickly!

Devil is harassed and harried by multitasking demands on her time. So Lafayette Austin it is who is hired under the nom de guerre “Striker” by the reckless Piotr Volkov (Vorkov—a commonplace metathesis), a.k.a. Polar Vortex (although the HVAC seems to be localized around his part of the office and not Devil’s). Lafayette must have spent a lot of time doing coffee and donuts in that shop before he finally caught Piotr’s attention: he is certainly looking much pudgier than when we first met him. At least the MCU will be getting some good intel (Devil knows him, but only as a fellow book-ee, as she thinks)….

I’ve gotta say, I’m having a LOT of fun following this story. I’m kinda hoping Pitchblende comes out on top without Tracy’s help – pull a scam ON the scammers or something! ;-)

Striker! This is KAOS! In KAOS we do not say ‘hey’!