He’s adulting and set on building a squad… starting with an Executive Assistant!  That’s the easiest way to promote oneself… form your own company!  File the LLC and boom! You’re your own boss!  Even if that’s a little Sus…

Throwing cash around like he has it to throw around! Lookin’ for a little Respeck!  Plus a Rad and Savage “burner cell phone,” right out of the pages of Breaking Bad!  Gus and others would go through one or two an episode!  Little flip phones that they would snap in half and throw away after finishing a conversation to avoid detection and traceability… the production company probably bought them by the gross…

Other observations… Nipples.  You don’t see them often in the comics, there they are… once you see them, you can’t avert your gaze. Amiright?  Dirty’s and Semo’s physiques.  They are getting more swol by the day.  That grin.  If that isn’t shade, I don’t know what is!  The eyepatch… on fleek!

Finally, in an attempt to appeal to the Millennial Generation, and the vernacular that goes with them, I’m done chillin for now on the Trail, and it’s time to bounce… if you want to know what the heck I’m saying, go here…

What is his supposed pedigree?  Upon the word of a waiter (or, hey, he might be the proprietor…) he gets an invite to Valhalla for the Angry and Disenfranchised Rich?

Just who is this resident?  A former mercenary?  Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner?  Former CIA a la Mitch Rapp?

And why, for the love of Mike, do we have words like discreet?  And its cousin discrete?  Complete Homonyms, or homographs re-ordering two letters at the end, resulting in completely different meanings??  Pity the soul who has to learn English as a second language!  We claim to live by rules and laws, but as with most things in life, we are governed by the exceptions!

As we are drawn by intrigue (dare I admit it?) over what is going on here, we are brought closer to the conversation and potentially the inner workings of the Dirty Mind…

Let’s see…  vamos a ver…  Weapons for Dummies (doesn’t exist,) Calvin and Hobbes (pick one, right?) and To Serve Man… which apparently is a cookbook?  So this fellow addressing Dirty isn’t just any service industry lackey, he obviously has multiple useless degrees under his belt and looks for opportunities to… well… “show off” a bit…

With the help playing the role of the messenger, and getting a dressing down for his trouble, Chris “Dirty” Dyer is relaxing and resting up for a big event… “a special occasion” funded by the gold bars in King Tut’s carelessly left open safegold bars in King Tut’s carelessly left open safe…

But Gunshots in the Jungle?  Didn’t Dirty allude to going someplace for “training?”  Wouldn’t that allow someone to fire off rounds with impunity?

…we really prefer that our guests wear clothing…  If it’s a nude beach you want, it’s at the other end of the island…

Knife throwing!  Ha!  Will the gags never end?!  For what it’s worth, though, looks like Ol’ Dirty has gotten pretty good at it if the target in the background is any indication…

Ah, at last.  we are removed from Lost Forest and deposited on what appears to be a tropical island complete with Seabirds, a too-close-for-comfort prop jet and a distant shot of a man being served…  Dirty Dyer under a particularly creative alias…

Harbour Island, Bahamas… boy what I wouldn’t give to be there after the 20″ of snow that has been deposited in the Twin Cities over the weekend!

I wonder what’s in a “Gun Club Punch…”  Rum, to be sure…

Wow, well that didn’t take long.  It seems that screech of Gulls was our indication that that Dirty offed Tut and now has his cash in a duffel bag, origins unknown…

…and we are now clear that his real intention is to visit Trail to get a little (or a lot of) payback.  Boy, talk about holding a grudge!! Yikes!

Weapons Training?  How many plot points are we setting up in this one installment??

Harbour Island does look pretty awesome, though…

… and a snarl.  The words “Trust” and “Dirty” apparently only go so far together, so far as you acquiesce to his expectations…

One really has to wonder how the “Fat Man” can be so stupid?  But there’s always tomorrow…

Start with 20 grand, he offers you 15…  Blurt out 10, all you get is 5!

5 Grand?  Really?  Why, he’d have to turn that trick every quarter just to get to the poverty line.  Take a vacation?  That’s a joke.  A criminal’s work is never done… It’s not like they have Paid Time Off or a retirement plan…  The pressure to always have a new plan, a next caper… That’s gotta suck.  I was self-employed for a while in my storied career and I know how that feels.  Engaged on day and scraping the next!  And what I was doing was legal!

Is it my imagination, or is Tut getting more and more rotund?

But wait!  Dirty has something up his sleeve, or down his shorts, as it were…  What’s he reaching for?  Is that a Rhino Horn?

As Terminator Dirty makes his full anger known, King Tut goes to his safe and, with the door already open, (huh?) we see fat stacks and a solid gold falcon…

But wait!  Why is the door already open, and more importantly where the heck did the safe come from??

It certainly wasn’t there before, as evidenced by the earlier installment below…  unless there is more than a single mount in the room, but I am pretty sure that’s the only one…

I know… picky, picky, picky.   But c’mon.  Let’s employ a little continuity here, shall we?

$10,000?

What millennium are we living in here?  We have to be looking at in excess of 2o total carat weight, here…  And Dirty, you have committed the classic negotiating blunder…  you shouldn’t lead with your final offer/ request…  Mr. Lemur-tail Chin is playing you like I would image you are used to being played, except you don’t even realize it.  Let’s at least hope you stole these diamonds, otherwise your cost of goods leaves you little in the way of actual profit…  even if you do find someone to fence these for you…

As we return to the coastline of sunny Southern Florida, we find Dirty Dyer trying to turn his ill gotten booty into some ready cash…

…only to find that, to his great shock, surprise and disappointment, King Tut/Victor Buono isn’t prepared to help him do that…  What? Has he suddenly “Broken Good?”  Gotten out of the business?  Is he on parole and afraid of getting thrown back in the can?  Well, let’s hope that Dirty has a ‘Plan B’ in mind…

There’s really only one sure way to get contraband through customs… and that’s up one’s arse.  I am sure that’s what is being referenced here:

The vague (or not so vague) reference to “passing stones” could also apply to the kidney variety (ouch!) but I am sure we are closer to this:

The classic scene in Pulp Fiction where Christopher Walken passes the gold watch on to Bruce Willis’ character as a young boy…  What an awesome movie… What a wonderful cameo!  And the fact that Tarantino, as director, has done a cameo in most (all?) of his own movies is a ready topic for discussion.

Always scheming, always with a trick up his sleeve!

I still can’t quite get over that Lemur tail that is hanging off this guy’s chin, though!  I mean, really?  What kind of a statement are we making here??  And I can’t quite place that headgear either…  Is it middle-eastern?  Not quite… Some level of regalness about it, that’s for sure…

Looks like a Ringtail Lemur gave up its tail for the benefit of this guy’s “look..”

Are they “blood diamonds?”  One can only imagine… however it may be a bit odd that they are already cut and polished.  At least they are a bit easier to transport than Rhino Horns!  And how did he manage to get them through customs?  OK, I don’t want to know.  Too much information there…

Non-verbal clowns… named after German Kaisers… making (again) front page news… “Set to retire?”  Who even tracks or cares about such things??

But enter, stage left, who?  Shake-ya-booty?  He looks like Victor Buono, the guy who played the evil King Tut on the original Batman TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward??

“Unexpectedly Extended…?”  As usual, who in the world talks like that??  But it’s clear that these two have history…  which we will no doubt learn more about in the coming weeks!

As Dirty is beckoned up and into this mysterious apartment, complete with an African-derived mount, he is surprised to see (once again) a newspaper!!

One can only assume (by the mount, anyway) that we has come to see his old business associate from the Rhino horn caper… perhaps to collect on his end of the enterprise… since he did deliver some horns (ultimately, I would suppose) before meeting an untimely end at the hands of Trail…

OK, so I guess one “Bizzes” in order to get “Buzzed” in… “What?  It’s me… Dirty!”  His outstretch palm seems to indicate…

As the magnet holding the door releases, Dirty finds himself looking up a flight of dimly-to-unlit stairs.  Clearly if there is a low rent section of Miami Beach, he has found it…

Well, that didn’t take very long- for Chris “Dirty” Dyer-Smith to go from wistful to resentful- his default mode, after all.  Here’s a guy who could probably star in one of those awful pistachio commercials…

Yea!  I don’t have the time to waste on current events, or newspapers that have as page one/above the fold/lead story the fact that the circus is dying out… I have things to do and people to see!

Considering that in the Trailverse only about 3 days have ticked off the calendar since we saw Dirty in his Safari get-up and the airport, this is still in real time…  and for some reason has himself in Sunny Southern Florida…  Oh the suspense…

I mean, how would they assume otherwise when your self-determined sobriquet is “Dirty??”  And isn’t there a law concerning the self appointment of one’s own nickname?  Sort of like in Seinfeld when George thought it would be great to have the nick-name “T-Bone…”  and despite his best efforts it not only didn’t take but got attached to someone else!!  And he ends up with the nickname “Koko” after a monkey someone knew!

Really?  The “Tingling Bros. Circus?”  That your parents used to take you to?  Considering the amount of care you were showing the Native Rhinoceros population, I find it a little difficult to buy that you have a love for circuses!  Unless of course it was the fact that the animals were caged and abused… so maybe this does all fit…

Well, anyway, welcome back Dirty.  If this is actually the start of a story line, and not a head fake, settle in folks. It wont be resolved until late summer or early fall…