The Grone Protocol: N Is For Murder, Chapter 007

Like most of you, I am a popular writer of highbrow thrillers and suspense novels in my spare time. For your entertainment and erudition (both of which I care about so much it stings), I will be serializing my latest work, THE GRONE PROTOCOL, here in my “blog” (short for “web blog”) every week (unless I forget or something like last week). Here’s the seventh chapter, which should more than fill your daily quota of gripping intrigue. If not, well boy howdy... I'm fresh out of ideas.

007

Fender Davenport was a man at the end of his rope. It was not a very long rope, nor was it extremely thick. He had been at the end of it for a long time, longer than he would have liked to admit. And there was no other rope anywhere in sight that he could transfer to. It was a blue rope. Navy blue. A man's blue. Fender Davenport was a man. A man's man. At the end of his rope. A man's man's rope. Man man rope ropey rope man rope ram mope.

For seventeen years, Fender had served as Executive Administrative Executive for Vermillion and Felch, the largest ad agency in the contiguous 48 states (there was a larger firm in Hawaii, and seven even larger than that in Alaska) and a subsidiary of the Grone Corporation. He had overseen dozens of ad campaigns in his time, including Nike's "We Make You Run Good" TV spots, Arby's "Forty Pounds Of Undigestable Roast Beef In Your Colon = Sexy Town" radio promos, and Coca-Cola's award-winning "Fuck Pepsi To Hell" billboards. In later years, he even picked up a few government contracts, not the least of which was the Food and Drug Administration's "Got Food and Drugs?" campaign.

With a list of achievements longer than the rope at the end of which he was, Fender Davenport should have been on Cloud Nine, snorting blow off an angel's titties. Instead, he was at the end of his rope. Still, no matter how at the end of his rope Fender was, he didn't have a snowball's chance in a fat guy's pants to predict, let alone prevent, what was about to happen.