It's not over 'til it's over.

First off, I have to admit that when I read the balloon in the first panel, the first thing that came to mind was the "There will be no whining in my Empire!" quote that always pops into my head at the end of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith.  I just wanted to mention that, even though it has nothing to do with what is to come.  (We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog post.)

And so, just when we think that things are starting to wrap up, who should appear but The King Of Clubs!  (Dun, dun, duuuuuuuuun!)  Let what happened to Jack be a lesson to us all.  If you are going to go against the powers that be and seek revenge rather than cash, thus disregarding the plan that no doubt took weeks to craft, much of that time spent under the harsh glare of a single glowing light bulb suspended above a card table in an otherwise empty room, don't wear clothes that happen to have what looks like an arrow pointing to a place on your body likely to cause sudden, instant, and even immediate death should you be shot there.  With Jack now out of the way, we can turn our attention to the King, who somehow managed to sneak past all of those policemen.  (Way to go, guys!)  On the positive side, he hasn't uttered a single bad pun, but on the negative side, it looks like this story might not be wrapping up after all.  It also makes me kind of wonder about the power structure in this organization.  You see, I always assumed that if there was going to be a King, he would be the mastermind behind everything.  Here, though, it seems as if Ace is the mastermind and that, for the moment at least, King seems to be more of an assassin/cleaner who fixes the mistakes of those lower in the organization by making sure they'll never make those mistakes again.  (I do feel kind of sorry for the guy that he couldn't have longer sleeves, but I guess if you're doing the dirty work, you might prefer to have shorter ones because then there's a far less likely chance of them accidentally getting splattered or dirty when you reach down to make sure that the guy is dead.)  Still, for all of my thoughts that the story was starting to run on fumes, I must admit that I am genuinely interested again and actually want to know what's going to happen next.  (Oh Dick Tracy, always pulling me back into your crazy world the moment I think about leaving.  Whatever am I going to do with you?)