Amanda, My Girlfriend With The Nose Ring

Do you really think you know who I am?

Has your best friend ever helped you bury a body?

You see, I travel both incognito and out in-the-know.

Last night, staying at the Baymont Suites on the supposition that snow and ice would restrict my movement this morning, I arranged a special meeting with an associate on the West Coast this afternoon.

My good friend, Elizabeth, fulfilled her promise to me.

It started with transporting a set of secret documents attached to a bag belonging to Homer Hickam who, right on schedule, took the same flight as me.

Just as expected, the Delta jet stopped on the tarmac to deice the plane while an agent of mine slipped the papers into Hickam's luggage.

Then, where you must pass before leaving the South for heaven or hell, a colleague grabbed the package out of Hickam's tote as the pink-tagged baggage passed upward in a freight elevator and just before a Delta agent opened the elevator door.

None the wiser, Hickam nodded at me and walked with his wife on their innocent way through the airport.

Meanwhile, I had to miss my next connection to give a tail the slip, leaving her on the 8:40 a.m. flight without me. Allan, a courteous, friendly Delta agent, assisted my plot unknowingly.

Safely settled on the next flight to witness the execution in L.A. later today, I passed a note to another passenger by way of the lavatory, the signal being another deicing before we departed ATL.

The passenger verified receipt of the message in a specially-coded package of King Nut pretzels handed to me out of a Diethelm Keller Aviation PTE LTD specifically serialised cart by Somsak, the polite flight attendant who had once delivered, fully unaware, a message to Ronnie, another flight attendant through the old reliable MORTIE network. Ken the pilot might or might not have been involved.

A guy opened his MacBook Air to show me a document with the hidden phrase, "fail fast and fail often, " a trigger that released a deeply ingrained memory from my early days in the future prediction and carnival barker boot camp/dehumanising days where we were grossly rewarded for taking bigger and bigger risks.

Only after Tom from Torrance at the self-help Hertz counter used subliminal voice intonation and quantum synchronisation techniques to tell me the execution was slated to take place sometime after 3 p.m. local time did I rush up the 405 and 101 to greet my wife.

By telling her about the woman who remarked that walking the old part of LAX made her feel like home, I opened up a scenario for what seemed like the random act of driving my wife down the PCH to stop for beach photos while, instead, sending laser signals from my innocuous, inoculated, optically-challenged binocular digital camera.

Amanda, manning the checkout counter at Neptune's Net, didn't know my laser signals would cause her to ring up an Alaskan beer for me; in the credit card receipt, she informed Elizabeth that the execution would look like an accidental surfing accident or drowning.

Elizabeth pulled the surfer underwater, chopped him up and placed his halves in two suitcases that she transported to LAX.

The secret codeword for the surfer, a rival rogue associate revealed in the secret documents I read as a fake Kindle ebook on the ATL-LAX flight, was "Dad."

Elizabeth stopped her car, an old Mercedes wagon, at the passenger dropoff and unloaded the suitcases.

"Come on, Dad," she huffed as she dragged the bags into the airport and abandoned the car, which was covered with the fingerprints of Cindy, a flight attendant completely out of the picture.

To solidify my alibi, I drove my wife down Sunset Boulevard (nodding at a female driver to establish my public location), over to Rodeo Drive and spun around Santa Monica Boulevard to show our faces and stuff them with sweets for our sweethearts amidst the sweet, smiling faces at Sprinkles Cupcakes in Beverly Hills.

Amanda, the folks at Beverly Hills Porsche owe you big this time. How about a Tesla?

Homer, thanks for your inspiration for this version of "The American."

Versace and Chanel, we'll catch you next time. Maybe you can restore the Getty Villa for future party thrillas in Malibu!