The Exploding Detective (4 page)

The police liked
this new arrangement since it gave them more time to relax. Pretty soon the
only place you could find a policeman was on the lawn chairs set up outside of
the police station. All the actual crime busting was left up to me.

Since I had so
much to do, the Mayor decided I should have a sidekick, so he assigned one of
his younger staff members, a wise-cracking go-getter named Smitty to me. But I
had to spend too much time saying: “Quiet, Smitty.” So I finally fired him.

I wasn’t very
good at being a super hero at first. I know it sounds easy, and the comic books
make it look easy, but it’s not. I didn’t know how to do a lot of the things
super heroes are supposed to know how to do.

You’re expected
to stand there and let bullets bounce off your chest, for example. This is hard
to do. All my extra pairs of underwear I was wearing helped, and some of the
bullets did, in fact, bounce off. But most of them didn’t. I was usually up
half the night picking bullet-heads out of my chest with tweezers. I was also
expected to dodge the empty guns that were thrown at my head after all the
bullets had been fired. That wasn’t easy either. Some of those criminals have
good arms.

The Mayor liked
seeing the bullets bounce off me. That proved that I was for real. He even took
a few shots at me himself to show how I worked to some of his buddies from City
Hall. Once again, the empty gun nearly took my head off. But I didn’t mind.
You’ve got to keep the boss happy, if you want to keep those big paychecks
coming in.

Another thing I
was expected to be able to do was to crash through walls and bang people’s
heads together. I couldn’t even get all the way through most of those walls.
Usually a fire-truck would have to come and get me out. And almost every time I
banged two heads together, one of them turned out to be mine, and the other
turned out to be the Mayor’s. I’ve got to work on that. There must be some
trick to it.

Still, I managed
to do a fairly decent job as Central City’s resident super hero, mostly due to
the fearsome reputation the newspapers had given me. I’d streak out of the sky
or skid along the sidewalk on my belly towards the scene of a crime and more
often than not the criminals would take off before I’d even arrived. So I
managed to keep the peace without doing too much actual fighting.

As the days
passed, I became a familiar sight on the streets of Central City. And, of
course, familiarity breeds contempt. At least, everyone who is familiar with me
is pretty contemptuous. The citizens began losing a little of their awe of me.
That’s when the complaints started.

They complained
that I didn’t act the way super heroes were expected to act. They pointed out,
for example, that I didn’t keep my true identity secret. I didn’t keep changing
from one persona to the other all the time. I didn’t understand the point of
constantly changing back and forth from mild mannered Frank Burly to bad
mannered Flying Detective all day long. I mean, what’s the damned point? So I
wore my costume everywhere I went. People would give me strange looks when I
was sitting in a coffee shop, with my jet pack on idle, having some eggs. They
seemed to think I should go back home and change just to have lunch. Screw
that.

Since my identity
wasn’t a secret, people around me became targets. Criminals seemed to think
they could stop my interference in their affairs by kidnapping my friends. I
told them they weren’t very close friends anyway, just kill them. They called
my bluff and killed one, but I didn’t care, so they let the rest go. I didn’t
care about that either.

Each day there
were more complaints about the way I did my job. People were focusing more on
my failures than on my successes now. They complained about the innocent people
I had hurt, the stolen money that was found in my costume, and that little crippled
girl I was supposed to take on a goodwill flight around the world. Hey, I
forget where I dropped her, okay?

Still, despite
all the complaints, the citizens of Central City had to admit I was doing my
main job, which was to stop the raids on the industrial district. There hadn’t
been a raid since I started.

Then the super
villain Napoleon struck again, damn him. Another major raid was launched on the
city. The biggest one so far.

The Mayor was
delighted. Now the city would get some real value for its money. He shined the
Flying Detective Signal up in the sky and happily waited for me to come stop
the raid, as per our agreement

He had to wait
awhile.

When I saw the
signal in the sky, I admit I hesitated. While I was more than happy to accept
$1,500 a week to protect the city, I was kind of hoping that I wouldn’t really
have to.

The city thought
of me as their insurance policy, and that’s kind of the way I looked at it too.
I was there to give them a feeling of security – and you can’t put a price on
that feeling – and then when the time came to pay off, I would find a way to
weasel out of it, just like an insurance company. The last thing I wanted to do
was to actually try to capture an army of inhuman monsters, commanded by some
nut case who thought he was Napoleon. A guy could get hurt doing stuff like
that.

But now that the
time had come, I couldn’t think of a single way to weasel out of my
obligations. I guess that’s why insurance companies get the big bucks. They can
think on their feet. I can’t.

As I watched the
smiling outline of me flashing insistently in the sky, I realized I was in a
bind. If I didn’t at least make a token appearance during this crisis, I could
pretty much kiss my $1,500 a week goodbye. That, I decided, was out of the
question. So I climbed out from under my bed, fired up my jet pack and soared
out over the city, heading for the industrial district.

A great cheer
went up when I arrived at the scene of the raid. The streets were lined with
people happily waving pennants with my name on them, and holding up their
children so they could see me in action and watch the guts fly.

I took one look
at the size of the army I was expected to kick the living shit out of, and
realized I had no chance. There were at least two thousand of the mechanical
creatures looting the buildings, and another five hundred or so standing guard.
Those guards were now looking my way, and beginning to advance towards me.

There
was only one thing to do, and I did it. Suddenly roaring back up into the sky,
with a hearty “Up, Down, and Away!” I flew off to save myself, leaving the city
to its fate.

Twenty minutes
later, the Mayor and Commissioner Brenner were walking the streets looking for
me. They were, apparently, determined to get their money’s worth out of me.
When they got to a line of dumpsters near my office, they started looking in
those. Why do people always look for me in garbage cans? I mean, how do they
know?

They opened the
first dumpster in the line and immediately the last dumpster blasted open and
The Flying Detective roared out and spun through the sky.

By the time I
could orient myself, I found that I was spinning back towards the industrial
district. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like any of this. I had been hoping that
I could just lay low in a nice garbage can somewhere until this whole thing
blew over, then show up for work tomorrow morning and play dumb about the whole
thing. What robbery? What cowardice? Where’s my check? That sort of thing.

Once I managed to
straighten myself out in the sky, I looked down and saw that I was right over
the scene of the robbery, which was still in progress. And I saw that the
creatures down there had seen me. That didn’t alarm me too much. There was no
way I was going to go down to where they were. They could stand there until
they were fifty and we still wouldn’t be any closer to each other. Then I saw
about twenty of the newer shinier looking creatures suddenly roar up into the
sky, jet exhaust coming out of their rear ends. Obviously something new had
been added. Something I didn’t like one bit.

I frantically
tried to turn in about five directions at once, and somehow managed to throw
something out of whack on my jet pack. Suddenly I didn’t have any control over
the machine at all. I began making high speed figure eights in the sky, along
with barrel rolls, wing-overs, reverse Cuban eights, corkscrew rolls, outside
loops, stall turns, and flat spins. You name a way of being out of control in
an aircraft and I performed that maneuver. At one point I was actually hopping
across the sky like a grasshopper. I looked like the greatest trick flyer in
the world.

The creatures
tried to stay with me, doing their best to match me harebrained stunt for
harebrained stunt, all the while firing some kind of laser beams at me from
their eyes. But their obviously superior equipment and flying skills were no
match for my accidental acrobatics.

One by one my
pursuers came to grief. They would be corkscrewing right behind me as I went
between two buildings, and when I came out, after performing four high speed
right turns and an Immelman, I was alone. Every time one of them got on my
tail, I would end up miraculously surviving and he would end up with his
picture on the wall of some bar in the high desert.

Within ten minutes,
I was alone in the sky, clinging to the ledge of the Central City Bank
Building, my jet pack roaring, with no way to get down. All of my directional
controls were gone now. It’s like the whole machine was stuck in neutral.

I clung to the
ledge, calmly running through a mental checklist of all of the things I… then
lost my grip mid-list and plummeted to the ground, my jet pack still going full
blast. I hit the street and exploded, taking out one of the robbers’ getaway
trucks and scattering unconscious creatures in all directions.

I was hurt, but
not as hurt as I would have been if I wasn’t used to it. As I slowly got to my
feet, people rushed up to congratulate me. Never had any of them seen flying
like that before. And, though I hadn’t foiled the entire robbery, I had at
least stopped one of the trucks. And I had killed or captured twenty nine of
the creatures. I was the hero of the day.

I went
triumphantly along to the police station with my captured robbers, giving them
a little push when I felt they weren’t moving fast enough, and accepting
congratulations from all sides for the great job I did, and for being such a
helluva guy.

The police had
problems booking my captives because, for one thing, they didn’t have any
fingerprints. And their faces were all the same. How do you book guys like
that? How do you arrange them in a line-up? Modern police methods require
different faces. The police thought everybody knew that. These robbers made
them mad.

The creatures
didn’t have hearts or other internal organs either. What they did have was a
variety of propulsion mechanisms – electric motors, clockwork, steam power,
storage batteries and so on. They were also equipped with built-in radio
control receivers and rudimentary mechanical brains. I asked the police if they
always cut open people they arrested like this, and they asked if this was off
the record, and I said it wasn’t, so they didn’t say any more.

I tagged along as
my prisoners were taken down to the holding cells. On the way, I noticed they
were all wearing neat shiny black rings on their fingers. I asked about these
rings. What did they signify? One of them cleared his mechanical throat and
said in a mechanical voice that the rings had to do with a club they were all
in. I asked if I could join this club, because it sounded like fun, and
sometimes I get lonely, but he said no.

Everyone was
delighted by my heroic defense of the city - Mayor Safeton most of all. This
was exactly what he had hoped would happen when he had hired me. This was the
kind of thing that gets politicians votes they don’t deserve. He asked an aide
if there was any chance they could get the election moved up to tomorrow. The
aide said he’d look into it.

I was asked to
make dozens of public appearances and speeches over the next few weeks. I was
glad to do this because it made me feel like a big-shot, and there’s no better
feeling than that, scientists say, but unfortunately, I still wasn’t very good
at making speeches.

My first speech
was in front of a women’s group - The Pompous Asses For Values - and it didn’t
go over too well. My speech was too brief, for one thing, lasting only a couple
of minutes before I ran out of material and started to stare. And the question
and answer session afterwards got kind of dicey.

“What moral message
do you feel you are sending to the youth of this city?” asked a pompous ass in
the third row.

I scratched my
head. “Shit, lady, I dunno.”

Everyone got all
upset when I said this. I looked around at all the aged angry faces. “What the
shit is the problem now?”

Instead of
answering me, they just got more upset. I felt I was losing control of the
situation. I made an excuse and left early. “I’ve got to take a shit,” I told
them.

After a few more
speeches – to groups as varied as The Pompous Asses For Freedom, their great
rivals The Pompous Asses For Liberty, The Pompous Asses For Progress, and The
Pompous Asses For Change - I started to get the hang of public speaking. I
learned not to say anything except what they wanted to hear, like how important
their group was, and how right they were about everything. I learned to make
long speeches instead of short ones, so there wouldn’t be time for questions
afterwards. And I learned not to say “shit” so much. Or so loud.

While I was
making all these appearances, there were four more robbery attempts on Central
City’s industrial district by the “Napoleon of Crime,” as the papers had
cleverly begun to call him, and I’m proud to say I partially foiled them all.
Twice I fell out of the sky onto some of the raiders when I was trying to leave
town carrying too heavy of a suitcase. Once I blew up when I was approaching
them with a flag of truce and the plans for a nearby fort. And once my jet
exhaust caused a fire that burned down the part of the city they were attempting
to rob. They had to just turn around and go back where they came from,
empty-handed. All of these skirmishes were considered great victories by the
people of Central City. They were glad to be able to cheer about anything at
this point.