Nap Lapkin Needs a Hand

(This IS a Nap Lapkin story. But it was NOT written by me. The author would like to remain anonymous and I will respect their wishes. There is nothing cooler than to read fan art. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If anyone else has a Nap story they’d like to share, please send it in.)

The car swerved and without the benefit of lights, he could only surmise the proximity of the edge of the road by the sound of loose stones falling to unseen depths below. “Goddam rental!” he grumbled. “Pulling to the right. Just like…” and before he could make a derogatory comment about an ex, he yanked the wheel back but over-corrected and found himself in a spin, in the dark, on a narrow road on a mountain. Was this to be how it ended for superspy Nap Lapkin?

Of course not. That was a rhetorical question. Just because Nap didn’t always plan ahead well didn’t mean Nap couldn’t adapt to any situation in a way that would shame MacGyver, the Boy Scouts, or Chuck Norris. Nap was able to use the spin to push his way through some brush, tipping the car on an incline, and proceeded to drive on two wheels for about three miles until he saw a glow above him.

Why was Nap driving with no lights? That’s easy to answer. He needed to be able to see the flickering lights of a rare species of firefly that only graced the western side of a particular mountain in a remote part of Asia- one of only three places he hadn’t yet made his mark upon. And by mark, I mean one of the few places in Asia where he hadn’t plowed through its women. He was on his way to see a woman (one he had previously plowed) who happened to be living with a scientist who studied these fireflies (she had yet to be defiled by Nap). The reason he was on his way to see her is not as easy to explain. You see, the woman was a detective and a palm reader and Nap needed some answers.

A little background would be helpful here, I suppose. Nap Lapkin wasn’t always a superspy, but he remembered very little of the time before his adventures, mostly because middle-class middle-America was too dull a history to carry so he created his own and worked with that. Most of the time, that was enough. But one little memory from his youth niggled at him and he couldn’t quite excise it.

He had been at a bar, building up a tolerance and eventual immunity to Jägermeister when he found himself chatting with an older woman about the Himalayas. He was offering up what he knew about hiking (his knowledge at that point being mostly academic) when she grabbed his hand, glanced at his palm, and started cackling. “You’ll never see the mountains,” she sneered. “You’re going to die young -without seeing any of the world!”

Other than waking up hours later in an alley with cuts on his hands and blood on his pants, Nap couldn’t recall anything of the rest of that night, but the cackle and the prediction unsettled him just the same. He was reminded of that laugh a few times over the years- it was similar to a death rattle when he was slicing throats. He heard that same laugh/rattle just before he embarked on this trip to the mountains.

A recent case found Nap battling arms dealers, a camel, and a displaced Sherpa (too long a story to go into here; suffice it to say, the Sahara had a new oasis and it was filled with the blood of 79 villains). Before he decimated the entire camp, he had found a lock box with documents detailing illicit activities that frankly don’t matter to this story except that there was a detective looking for those very documents and she turned out to be the palm reader we were reading about earlier. Well, I was writing about her, you were reading… you know what I meant.

Late one night, Nap broke into a tent (I don’t know how you “break” into a tent… maybe rip it a little?) and was searching for information about the leader of this arms dealing gang of misfits when he heard the soft sound of a woman’s foot along the sand outside the tent. How he knew it was a woman is a ridiculous question- Nap knew more about the sensory effects of a woman than anyone, which was ironic since he knew less than nothing about their feelings. Anyway, he waited until she was just on the other side of the tent from him and since he ripped it without a noticeable tear, he was able to surprise her by reaching through, grabbing her, and pulling her inside and beneath him in less than ten seconds.

She surprised him right back by kneeing him in the balls as soon as she was under him and while he was cursing, she said, “Nap?” He stopped moaning for a second and looked down at her. “Madonna?” You see, he thought she was Madonna Axion, the world’s foremost female spy- sexy, smart, and tired of Nap’s shit while still being drawn to him just the same. But this wasn’t Madonna. For the second time in his life, Nap Lapkin had made a mistake.

“I’m Marilyn. Madonna’s my sister,” she whispered. “But I know all about you, Nap.”

I’m going to forward the story about seven minutes. The clutching, thrashing, and violating these two did to each other is gratuitous at best.

Marilyn, as it turns out, is a detective working for an international agency that even had Nap raising an eyebrow and nodding in respect. As much respect as he could bestow after doing various degrading things to the woman moments before. She was investigating the same hooligans as Nap but for different offences, as it turned out. She was on her way to meet a contact who would take her to Nepal where she was looking into some high-tech secret stuff that frankly, Nap tuned out as he was watching her mouth, daydreaming as she talked. They compared notes- and battle stories and scars and bodily fluids – well into the night. It wasn’t until dawn that things went both well and badly for Nap.

Marilyn was watching Nap stretch with his arms over his head (which would make some women swoon, but she was an Axion, made of hardier stuff) when she happened to glance at his open palms. She paled a moment but then sighed almost in relief. Nap asked many questions with just his eyebrow so with one look, he asked her what was wrong.

“I saw your palm and for a moment, I thought I read there that you would die young. But I realized two things…” and before she finished, he was on her again but this time, with a blade at her throat. She never knew where he had kept that blade. “What do you mean you read I would die young?!” he rasped angrily. She remained as calm as she could with a knife so close to her skin as she explained she had been taught to read palms as a cover for a former case and she noticed his life line looked cut short. “But then I remembered you mentioned the scar you have from a childhood bike accident,” she explained. “So I realized your life wasn’t going to be short, it was just the scar that made it look that way at first.”

“Wait… you’re Detective Palm Reader?!” Nap asked. “I’ve heard about you. Are you really able to read palms? Even severed ones? What would you say? ‘You’ll be a victim of violence’ or ‘you’ll no longer be able to play the violin?’” he laughed, which was rare since he had little to laugh about as he regularly had to save the world and all. Usually a serious business.

If Nap hadn’t already kissed and licked and nibbled every part of her curvy body, he would have started kissing her at that moment. Instead, he just stared- through her, not at her, which was a bit intimidating, almost as intimidating as the hardening length she felt growing along her leg as he stared at her. Of course, Nap wasn’t about to disclose how grateful he was to have his youthful fears erased. The joy he felt at having the burden of bad fortune-telling lifted from him was instead poured into another hour or so of intense pounding the woman below him in celebration. Nap, so elated and comforted, unfortunately passed out from exhaustion.

When he came to, Marilyn was gone. He breathed deeply of a night well spent then proceeded to decimate the camp as I mentioned before. The only hiccup he faced was a wiry old man who sat stoically amid the carnage as Nap systematically destroyed all in his path. Nap was aware as the man watched him shoot, lop, chop, and hit all the “bad guys” and was unsettled at the calm the man seemed to possess. As Nap was dealing with last few perpetrators, the old man started cackling and Nap swore he heard some babble about a Sherpa but before he could turn his attention to the man, there was an explosion from a device set off by the last of the arms dealers. He looked around, satisfied with the detritus of battle, and pressed a button on his watch to summon a chopper.

He was about to leave when he saw the lockbox in the burning rubble and kicked it, smiling, thinking about Marilyn. The box fell open (just like Marilyn had) and a top panel he had not seen before fell away and a photo dropped out. He picked up the photo and what he saw is what led him to his trip to remote mountains in Asia.

His rental car was back on four wheels and he slowed down, knowing he was getting to closer to Marilyn and the firefly scientist. He decided to pull over and walk the last half mile. He wanted to watch them to determine his next move. He got closer and saw the glow of fireflies which as it turned out, were gathered in some sort of greenhouse/hive. He heard voices… and possibly moans emanating from the nearby cabin. He drew closer and saw Marilyn leaning back in her chair at a table, moaning her delight- he knew the sounds of her delight after their night together in the desert. She was apparently orgasming over a piece of chocolate cake and thanking her friend across the table. The friend laughed, or I should say cackled and at that moment, Nap knew there would be trouble.

Nap didn’t know what instinct possessed him to rush in to the cabin- he was beyond questioning his unerring sense of what was right and what was not. All he knew was Marilyn’s breasts looked fantastic in her sweater and those melons were being threatened by an evil firefly scientist- and she didn’t even know it!

Nap learned three things as he was breaking the door off its hinges: the door wasn’t latched and was swinging wildly, that chocolate cake really did look good – had he eaten dinner?- and, there were actually three women in the cabin. He fell on his back and before he could stun with his speedy reflexes, he felt the unmistakable pinch of a stiletto heel on his chest. He knew who she was even before she could speak.

“Nap. What are you doing?! Do you ever not break doors?!” Madonna Axion looked down at Nap and he enjoyed the view of her long legs and heaving breasts above him. He heard a gasp and looked over at Marilyn- and her heaving breasts. He was almost afraid to look at the third woman. A man could only take so much heaving of sweater melons. He was a superspy, not superhuman.

He reached up and grabbed Madonna’s hand and as he winked at her, he quickly spun to the third woman in the room, the firefly scientist. She was younger than he thought she’d be. But there was no doubt, this was the woman in the photo he had found in the lock box in the desert – the photo that led him to Marilyn and fireflies. In the photo, this woman was standing with two known spies, one of whom Nap had dispatched before meeting Marilyn. The other spy had unexpectedly cracked upon interrogation, admitting the scientist used the study of fireflies as a cover and actually engineered tiny spy drones that looked like insects. He had heard she was some sort of child genius who had become unpredictable and was looking to sell her drones to the highest bidder but what Nap saw was a quirky cute girl with glasses and a cake knife and yes, lovely melons.

He pushed aside all mammary concerns and decided to relax his stance for a moment. His intel was usually spot on but this girl looked young and lost and not at all the evil scientist he thought he’d be facing. After a nod to Madonna and Marilyn, he turned to Dr. Goodacre and proceeded to ask about her work. After a brief show of surprise, she began that dreaded cackling Nap had heard through the window. He moved so fast, it took everyone a few seconds to register he had thrown her to the ground and was stretched on top of her, pinning her down.

“For fuck’s sake, Nap!” snapped Madonna. “Can’t that wait til later?”

But Marilyn stepped forward and kicked the knife Nap had wrested out of Dr. Goodacre’s hands. “What’s going on here?” asked Marilyn, a little breathlessly, watching Nap shift off of the scientist.

“I think the good doctor here is a bit confused and I don’t want her accidentally hurting anybody,” said Nap. “We need to figure out who’s hired her to make these drones and who’s trying to outdo the competition.” He explained the photo he found of the scientist with two spies. “This kid has made some bad friends lately and if she doesn’t want to end up like them, she needs to work with us.”

He mentioned he tracked the two spies and chuckled, saying “I told the bastards I needed a hand working out some equations. They each gave a hand… to begin with. I left the rest of their bodies…”

“We get it,” said Madonna.

So the scientist answered Nap’s questions and between them, they realized she was being used by different organizations for her expertise. Madonna and Marilyn, as it turned out, had had some training with Dr. Goodacre and this was a (spy) girls’ weekend, meant for wine and chocolate and comparing shrapnel stories. After a few hours of talking it through, they came to the only logical conclusion that would see the scientist safe. She decided to take steps to salvage her work and that meant leaving right away.

I may be rushing through what could be a most interesting spy story, but really, I’m following Nap’s train of thought which, as always, lingers long into explosions and cleavage- and there were no explosions at hand.

If I were to tell you that Nap was able to work out a plan with Dr. Goodacre to thwart the opposing governments trying to win her technology to their side, would you rather hear that plan or would you rather hear about the outlandish ménage that occurred with Nap and the Axion sisters? Uh huh. I thought so. I may need a hand finishing this story.