Amazon
Stan Arnold Books
Category:
Humor
ISBN-10: B00G0T3M96
Type: Fiction
Pages: 350
Copyright: Nov 1, 2013
Price: $3.58 (eBook)
Mick and Jim are coerced into videoing the dangerous international exploits of their svelte, hyper-fit, 60-year-old office cleaning lady who is also a self-taught martial arts and dangerous sports expert.
Daring Dooz is a very funny thriller. Mick and Jim are two unsuccessful video producers who drink too much, don't earn enough and receive too many death threats. Mrs Hathaway, their svelte, hyper-fit, 60-year-old office cleaning lady does martial arts and extreme sports courses via video and online. Daring Dooz is a global magazine, run by wimp, Giles Montagu-Scott (formerly Cyril Tweedy). The magazine features the totally fictitious adventures of scantily-clad women. But Mrs Hathaway is the real thing. She becomes world-famous because of the spectacular way she disarms a bank robber in London.
This leads to her being tracked down by Giles who sees her as a way of giving his magazine some legitimacy, at last. She meets with Giles at the Shard in London, initially thinking he wants to talk about an £8 an hour cleaning contract. But he offers her £2 million to take on a series of challenges around the world. Mick and Jim are coerced into filming, and sharing, her unbelievably dangerous exploits.
Love interest is provided by Aubrey Capability Brown - gofer for the ruthless, international crime boss, Charley Sumkins. Aubrey is basically a pig-ignorant, self-obsessed, devious, regularly-beaten-up, little rat. But he manages to provide a romantic spark.
The challenges - Atlantic, Caribbean, Amazon - completed, events on the return journey will make headline news around the world and change everybody's lives in ways that none of them could imagine in their wildest dreams.
Excerpt
Daring Dooz
Chapter 1
James Redfern Chartwell was asleep in paradise. For someone who had been chased half-way round the world by an international crime syndicate, and managed to persuade the top man to cancel the contract on his life using his meager knowledge of Ealing comedies, you might well think he deserved a kip.
But this was no ordinary snooze. Jim’s chin was resting on the top of a post at the end of a simple wooden pier which jutted out into the shallow, turquoise lagoon. The early morning sun was bright, and reflections were dancing like diamonds. The spectacular white beach was lined with lush, green palm trees, interrupted only by a small beach bar with a palm frond roof. The breezes were balmy, like gentle kisses that had travelled a thousand miles just to make things seem better.
A seagull, floating lazily on the warm air, landed gently on Jim’s immobile form and, without so much as a pause, emptied the contents of its bowels over his head. He didn’t stir. The uric acid dribbled out from his hair and ran down the side of his unshaven face. Suitably refreshed, and five or six ounces lighter, the seagull flew off again in pursuit of a rather nice female seagull it had seen on the roof of the beach bar.
A couple of yards away, the chin of Jim’s lifelong friend, video cameraman and would-be bon viveur, Michael Selwyn Barton, was resting on a nearby post. The squawk made by the seagull, as it unloaded itself onto the hapless Jim, woke Mick up.
Through bloodshot eyes, he managed to see what had happened, and thought how embarrassing it would be for Jim when he eventually woke up. And with that unkind rumination over, he gently smirked himself back into a state of unconsciousness.
If Mick had been able to look down at his reflection in the water below the pier, he’d have seen he had nothing to laugh at. His head, chest, shoulders and back were covered in seagull crap, so that, with his yellow baggies, sunburnt body and green Crocs, he looked like a 16-stone knickerbocker glory.
The previous night at the beach hut, they’d had more than a few Dom Perignons too many, and ended up tombstoning off the end of the pier, at midnight. The beach bar staff took pride in their ability to out-drink anyone, but realised they’d entered a different league. The girls from the local lap-dancing club, who thought they’d seen and done everything, learned a few more tricks. And by three in the morning, they’d all given up, and, rather than drag Mick and Jim’s lifeless bodies back up the pier for the umpteenth time that month, they’d decided on an innovative, if rather mean-spirited, solution.
They’d simply sat Jim down on the pier decking with his arms and legs on either side of a supporting post. Then it was just a matter of tying his hands together, tying his feet together and placing his chin on the top of the post and, there he was - safe and sound for the night. Providing the same sleeping arrangements for Mick was a no-brainer.
And so, morning came. Neither Jim nor Mick had moved an inch during the night. They sat with closed eyes, staring impassively out to sea. If you can image a couple of Easter Island heads carved by ancient stonemasons after a night out on the piss, you would be getting close to the mark.
They were still unconscious, when, at around mid-morning, the yacht arrived.
It slid with silky, ocean-going assurance through the lagoon - with a woman of about sixty at the helm. She was deeply tanned and wearing a yellow polka dot bikini - and yes, it was itsy-bitsy and yes, it was teeny-weeny. She was lean and toned with long, silver hair and clear, penetrating, light blue eyes.
The yacht drew alongside the pier. She stepped off confidently and surveyed the scene, which essentially consisted of the dead-drunk, fully harnessed, former directors of Soho corporate video company, Implosion Productions. She looked at them with a strange degree of inevitability. Several empty champagne bottles littered the pier decking. The bikini-clad lady picked up the bottles, went back on board her immaculate vessel and placed them in a Brabantia bin.
On the deck of the yacht was a small tarpaulin sheet. As she walked by, she lifted the sheet and kissed something.
She came back onto the pier with a large Sabatier kitchen knife and cut Jim loose, looking with some distaste at the rapidly forming guano on his head. Then, with remarkable ease, she turned him upside down and, holding his ankles, dunked him several times, headfirst, into the lagoon.
Throughout the cleansing operation, Jim showed no signs of regaining consciousness.
She pulled him out of the water, laid him on the pier, then went back on board, stopping to kiss under the tarpaulin again. When she returned, she was carrying a blue plastic bucket and a roll of duct tape.
After placing the bucket on Jim’s head, she secured it by running the duct tape, three or four times round the top of the bucket and under his armpits, then, taking a firm grip on his ankles, began dragging his body, including his well-protected head, along the pier and into the shade of the beach hut.
She returned to deal with Mick, and wisely decided to abandon the idea of dunking him in the lagoon and dragging his bulky form back along the pier. She simply cut him free and pushed him into the water. As Mick began to drown, she dived elegantly into the lagoon, grabbed his body in exactly the way they illustrate in lifeguard training manuals, and began to swim powerfully to the shore. She dragged Mick up the beach and propped his semi-guano-free body next to Jim.
Tutting slightly, she returned to the yacht and removed the tarpaulin to reveal a small man curled up in the foetal position. He had a very thin, green face, sunken eyes and a Hawaiian shirt that was too big. He wore extra large, cerise baggies, and his scrawny arms and legs were deathly white. He looked as though he’d been under the tarpaulin, eating wallpaper paste, for at least a year. There was a small flicker of recognition before he closed his eyes again and abandoned himself to his fate.
She picked him up gently under one arm, holding him round the waist, so his arms and legs hung vertically downwards. She carried him along the pier to the beach bar, where she gave him another little kiss and sat his limp body down on the ground, next to Jim and Mick.
She stared at the three of them, deep in silent thought. The only sound came from two seagulls which were shagging unnecessarily noisily on the roof of the beach hut.
The silence was broken further by the ‘ting ting’ of a bicycle bell. A man wearing a khaki shirt and shorts, and whose great-grandparents had obviously made the long journey from Africa two hundred years ago, was having difficulty making the short journey from his office in the police station to the beach hut. This particular trip was made more difficult than usual, thanks to a serious night on the rum with some of the inhabitants of the cells.
He was a big man and came cycling round the corner much too fast. His eyes popped out of his head, twice. First they popped as he caught a glimpse of the svelte, sun-tanned vision in the bikini. Then they popped again, a split second later, as, distracted by the yellow polka dots, he braked too hard and went straight over the handlebars and head-butted the solid support post of the beach hut.
The captain of the yacht picked him up, humped his unconscious body over her shoulder, carried him behind the bar, poured some beach bar whisky on his head wound and dragged him over to sit next to Jim, Mick and the green-faced man.
She could see from the nametag on his shirt, that the trick cyclist was Roberto Velazquez, the island’s Chief of Police. Hm! thought Mrs Hathaway, he might be useful - though obviously not in his current condition.
The sun was arching higher, the palm trees were getting ready for another roasting, the water in the lagoon was already becoming too hot to swim in and there was not a single cloud in the sky.
She looked around. These were potentially tough conditions, if you didn’t know how to handle them.
But for what she had planned, the conditions would be far more dangerous, far more unpredictable and far more deadly. She would be testing human endurance and resourcefulness to the absolute limits, and beyond. There would be no room for even the slightest error, and any failure would, at best, result in an unpleasant and agonising death.
She stood, hands on bronzed hips, and gazed down at the four unconscious men propped up against the rattan bar. She looked with growing apprehension from face to face - one with alcohol poisoning and wearing a blue bucket on his head, one overweight and still covered in seagull crap, one green with extreme sea-sickness and one blood-stained, concussed and unable to ride a bicycle properly.
Were these men of the right calibre? she mused. Did they have the inherent toughness to cope with extreme physical challenges and excruciating mental pressures? In short, were they the dynamic, self-assured, hyper-energised, Alpha males she needed for her mission.
She walked behind the bar, poured herself half a tumbler of whisky, knocked it back in one go, and began to have some serious thoughts.
|
