Our second night in Wan Chai, and it might have been our first, about midnight, Leah let out a high-pitched yelp. She not only is a flincher and a jumper, she is a yelper as she flinches and jumps. Which makes me flinch and jump.

The cause of her yelping?

A cockroach of heroic proportions. Big (like, approaching two inches), almost purple, and apparently fearless.

It scurried out from beneath the couch where we were sitting, and began reconnoitering the living room. And as I looked around for some means of dispatching the thing, short of using my bare hands (or feet) … it scuttled back across the room and beneath the couch.

And I knew that a day when come when somebody — the cockroach or me — would go down. Hard.

That was the last I saw of the cockroach, for several days. But it made an impression on me. It was so big, I was tempted to name it. “Bob,” is what I came up with. Leah preferred “Archy,” after an ancient cartoon character.

I suggested we could buy a leash and attempt to domesticate it. Well, it already lives indoors and eats our food, so Bob was halfway there. But, then, it’s hard to see much personality in a cockroach. Can’t really read its eyes — wherever its eyes are. You don’t want it sitting in your lap. And wagging antennae aren’t quite as cute as a wagging tail.

Actually, cockroaches are filthy. They spread disease. They spoil food, if they can get at it. Bob would have to go, even given his willingness to come visit in the middle of a night.

Hong Kong is a perfect place for cockroaches. It’s warm and humid, and it’s densely populated, with open food stalls all over the place, and edibles (for cockroaches) just about everywhere, in the streets, or up in the apartments. So it wasn’t as if I saw the only cockroach in town.

(Actually, I told a co-worker about Bob’s first appearance, and mocked the convention about surprise meetings with unpleasant forms of life by announcing, “he was probably as scared as I was” … but my co-worker said, “I wouldn’t count on that.”)

Turns out, Bob wasn’t going away. It wasn’t his first and only appearance. He was squatting in the apartment, and it’s already small enough. Leah revealed other appearances by Bob in subsequent nights. In once case, she chased him out the door. Literally. Dude squeezed beneath the bottom of the door and the jamb. He came back, and scooted under the fridge.

So, I was mentally prepared to act the next time Leah’s yelp announced Bob’s visit.

Last night, he came strolling out about midnight, again, as we were watching an old episode of “Friends.” We hadn’t gotten around to buying a swatter or bug spray (and we’d probably poison ourselves if we actually got out a lethal dose of spray on a creature with that hard exoskeleton).

So … I removed one of my flip-flops. With murder on my mind. Even if meant blood/cockroach parts on the tile.

I pursued Bob toward the door. He halted. Almost as if he was thinking, “What are you gonna do, punk?”

And then I brought down the sole of my flip-flop.

Bob never saw it coming. It stunned him.

I raised my arm and brought it down again. And once more. A blood-lust was upon me.

Bob stopped moving.

But cockroaches, like people, are harder to kill than is widely imagined. I stared at him. He didn’t move. At the least, he was knocked out. Maybe I had broken his spine — or whatever passes for a main nervous-system conduit in a vile insect.

I ran to the tiny bathroom, and got some paper, hefted Bob off the floor and flushed his remains down the toilet. That should be the end of him. I think.

The good thing about the execution? Bob didn’t much “bleed out,” as they say on CSI shows. In fact, the mess I expected to have to clean up … was basically nonexistent. No gruesome mopping up necessary.

I assume this won’t be my last life-or-death encounter with a cockroach the size of a beagle. I’m living in cockroach heaven.

But the next meeting won’t be with Bob, anyway.