The Exploding Detective (5 page)

I was enjoying my
new found celebrity, and my bank account was bulging with all the speaking fees
I had been getting, not to mention my hefty weekly salary. And the value of my
autograph had gone up to $180 now. I thought my life couldn’t get any better.
Unfortunately, I was right. My life suddenly got much worse.

I had just gotten
home one night after serving as Grand Marshal of the Pompous Ass Parade, when
there was a metallic knock on my door. When I answered it, I found a creature
standing there with a note. The note was unsigned, but the writer said that if
I kept meddling in his affairs, and didn’t drop the whole Flying Detective
thing right now, the next raid wouldn’t be against Central City. It would be
against me. The last five pages of the note were just graphic descriptions of
what was going to happen to me if I didn’t heed this warning. It wasn’t
pleasant reading. It almost made me sick.

I asked the
creature who the message was from. Did Napoleon write this? But he didn’t
reply. He was waiting for me to sign a piece of paper indicating I had received
the message, and for any tip I might feel he had earned. As I signed the
receipt, and stiffed him as far as the tip was concerned, I noticed there was a
faint whirring noise coming from him.

“You should see a
doctor about that whirring noise,” I advised.

He looked a
little alarmed, then defiant. He took the receipt book I had signed, pocketed
his pen and walked quickly away, the propeller on his ass whirring even louder.

In a case of
unfortunate timing, the next day was the day I was to be given the Key to the
City for my unstinting efforts to protect life and property in Central City. I
would have preferred to have made my announcement at some other time, when
there weren’t so many smiling faces looking up at me, but it had to be done
now. I don’t believe in ignoring warnings from super villains. It isn’t
healthy.

So, after they
had given me the Key, and I had made a long rambling self-congratulatory
acceptance speech, I announced my retirement. The Flying Detective, I told
them, was no more.

“My job here is
done,” I told the stunned audience. “Up, Down, Away, and Goodbye.”

As
I was leaving the podium, they took back the Key To The City I had just been
given. I was disappointed about that. I figured it would have opened some doors
for me. Not professionally, you understand. Just some doors.

So my career as
The Flying Detective was over. And it was only Chapter Five. It was with a
trace of sadness that I packed away my costume, my extra pairs of underwear, and
my junior grappling hooks. They were useless now, except for whatever
historical importance they might have.

I didn’t put away
my jet pack. I still wanted to use that for occasional flights down to the post
office to mail letters, or for quick trips to the bathroom. It beats walking.

It was while I
was packing these things away that the Mayor and Police Commissioner Brenner
stormed into my office.

“I can’t believe
what I’ve heard,” said the Mayor. “You’re quitting? I can’t believe I heard
that.”

“You want to hear
it again?”

“No.”

The Commissioner
eyed me bleakly. “Why are you quitting?”

I showed them the
threatening message I had received, and held my hand up in the air to show how
big the creature was who had delivered it.

“But you’ve got
super powers!” protested the Mayor. “Nothing can harm you. You said so yourself
when we hired you.” He crumpled up the threatening message and threw it in the
wastebasket. “Now get back to work.”

I was about to
tell him that I didn’t really have super powers, that I’d been playing them for
suckers all this time, and that every one of those bullets that had been fired
into me had really hurt, but I changed my mind at the last moment. Telling the
truth, though the right thing to do, kids, has never worked out too well for me.
I figured I’d better stick with lying on this one.

“He also
possesses super powers and abilities,” I informed them somberly. “Powers even
greater than my own. I cannot defeat him. So get yourself another boy. I quit.”

Important people
don’t like taking “no” for an answer. That’s how you can tell they’re
important. The two men stamped around my office for nearly an hour, yelling at
me. They said they’d sue me, jail me, denounce me, disgrace me, even revoke my
P.I. license and throw it in my super face. I said that was better than killing
me, which is what the super villain was going to do. I said if they couldn’t
top killing me, they were wasting their breath. Finally they gave up and left,
shouting threats back over their shoulders at me all the way to the elevator.

I didn’t worry
too much about them making a big public stink about my retirement. After all,
they had hired me, giving me a great deal of the taxpayer’s money, and taking a
10% “agent’s fee” for themselves under the table. That wasn’t the sort of thing
you wanted to splash all over the newspapers. That was the sort of thing you
wanted to sweep under the rug and put a chair on it. And sweep they did. I
didn’t hear any more squawks from City Hall about my quitting. I didn’t get my
last paycheck, they hung on to that, but I chalked that up to experience and
forgot about it.

The problem was,
none of the citizenry believed The Flying Detective had retired. Super heroes
didn’t retire. They fought the forces of evil until they triumphed. Oh, sure,
they could be put out of commission temporarily by being injured, or weakened
by some rare alien metal, or imprisoned in a different dimension by the Evil
Doctor Somebody, or sent off on a wild goose chase by The Wise-Cracker, or
something like that. The public could lose the use of them in that way. But
super heroes couldn’t just quit. That never happened. Not in any comic book.
The public wasn’t falling for that.

The media treated
the whole thing like it was a joke. The greatest crime fighter in the history
of Central City retire? Don’t make the media laugh. It was obviously a ruse of
some kind. They knew I must have something up my sleeve, and they knew if they
talked to each other long enough they’d find out what it was.

All this, of
course, made me more than a little uncomfortable. I was retired. Out of the
business for good. And I wanted everyone, but especially that one person, to
know it.

I made it a
point, whenever I encountered a person in trouble, to leave them that way, or
if possible, get them into more trouble. If I saw a bank being robbed, I
crossed to the other side of the street and pulled my hat down farther over my
eyes. If I saw a cop chasing a criminal, I would tackle that cop. And if a dog
showed up with some story about somebody being trapped in a mine or something,
I would pretend not to understand him.

I stopped signing
8X10 photographs of The Flying Detective when they were handed to me by fans. I
offered to sign 8X10s of me in my Frank Burly detective outfit, a nice shot of
me looking the other way in a crisis, or a moodily lit 5X7 of me letting
everybody down, but nobody wanted those pictures.

This approach
gradually began to show results. The smiles that greeted me when I walked down
the street were turning to sneers. The cheers to snorts. The requests for autographs
to requests that I get out of the way and let the decent people through.

Then disaster
struck. I saved the damned city again.

Napoleon had
launched another one of his raids on the industrial district. This one was the
biggest one yet. Entire warehouses were being loaded onto giant getaway trucks.
The police had been slapped aside with even more ease than usual, and were
already on their way to their session with the police psychiatrists. The
citizens were in a state of panic.

Immediately my
phone started ringing and people started banging on my door, saying I should
come out and save them because I was their only hope, and they didn’t mean the
things they said about me before. But I didn’t hear them because I was already
at 14,000 feet and climbing, with a suitcase in either hand, heading for a
different state. This was something I just didn’t want to get involved in.

I guess I
shouldn’t have tried to get out of town so fast. I had so many booster rockets
on my back there was no way to balance them right for level flight. You’re
probably wondering whether that’s important or not. Well, I’m here to tell you
it is.

The raiders had
just finished packing the last of the city’s polyvinylchloride and model
airplane glue into their getaway trucks and were about to leave, when a distant
screaming sound made them look up. I was pinwheeling across the sky, shooting
out sparks like a one-man Fourth of July celebration. Suddenly I exploded in a
shower of sparks, jet fuel, speedometers and swastikas, high above them, and
plummeted screaming to earth onto their leader.

As the dismayed
and suddenly leaderless creatures beat a hasty retreat, the crowd rushed up to
congratulate me.

I struggled,
cursing, to my feet, amidst handshakes and claps on the back, and looked around
for my suitcases. I had to get out of here.

Or did I?
Suddenly I noticed that the super villain who had been scaring me half to death
all this time was lying on the street, unconscious, with my foot in his mouth.

As thrilled
citizens crowded around me and flashbulbs went off in my face, catching and
preserving for future generations my every blink and twitch, the Mayor rushed
up, put one of his feet in Napoleon’s mouth also, and pumped my hand.

“Wonderful!
Wonderful, my boy! You, that is to say ‘we,’ have done it! We’re heroes!”

We posed for more
pictures, this time with our feet on Napoleon’s eyes. The crowd cheered. Hey, I
thought, this is working out all right.

Unfortunately,
all was not as it seemed. Just after I had finished telling a group of awestruck
reporters all about how I had faked my own retirement and lured the super
villain to his Waterloo, ha ha, word came that the police had examined the body
of Napoleon and found that he wasn’t unconscious, as everyone had thought. He
wasn’t dead either. He was plastic.

His body was
found to contain the same radio control receivers the other creatures had,
though his were a little bigger and slightly more advanced. So he wasn’t the
super villain after all. Someone else was. And I had probably just made that
someone else very angry.

I had.

The next week
was, for me, a nonstop series of assassination attempts. The super villain,
whoever he really was, stopped raiding Central City entirely, and began
expending all his energy in a single minded effort to blot me out of existence.
He threw everything he had at me.

There were car
bombs, letter bombs, all kinds of bombs. Practically everything I touched blew
up. Riflemen fired at me from rooftops, alley-ways, even from Presidential
motorcades. Everywhere I went I was confronted with specially designed
creatures sent to assassinate me. Super thin assassins would slither under my
bedroom door when I was asleep. Sugar coated assassins would somehow get into
the box of cereal I was about to have for breakfast. The super villain even got
the weather to turn against me. Lightning strikes followed me wherever I went,
and tornados hung around outside of my office all day waiting for me to come
out.

I managed to
survive each assassination attempt, more or less, you know me, but I felt that
one of them was bound to get me eventually. An odds-maker I knew said that
mathematically I had to have been killed at least eight times already. He was
willing to bet me $500 I was already dead. I figured I’d better do something.
Quick.

I took out an ad
in the paper with an open letter to the super villain, explaining that there
was no need for him to expend all this energy assassinating me because I wasn’t
in the super hero business anymore. I had quit. I was sorry for any
inconvenience I had caused him in the past, and I wished him nothing but
success in all his future criminal endeavors. I added that I hoped his family
was well, and wished him a very merry Christmas.

Either he didn’t
believe what I had written in my letter, or he hadn’t seen it. I probably
should have bought a full page ad, now that I think about it.

I
finally decided that the only chance I had of convincing the super villain that
I was no threat to him, was to meet him face to face and talk to him. And maybe
kill him.

The skies over
Central City were full of flying creatures out looking for me, so I had to be
careful when I began my search for the super villain. I couldn’t use my jet
pack. I wouldn’t last five seconds up there. I had out-flown the creatures the
first time, but there were more of them now. And you can’t always count on
going out of control when you need to. Plus, I felt it might send the wrong
message. The story was, The Flying Detective was retired. So I set out on foot,
keeping to back-alleys as much as possible.

I began asking
around at the scenes of recent robberies, to see if any of the residents had
spotted any suspicious-looking super criminals hanging around the area.

Most people don’t
notice things like that, they don’t notice much of anything, I’m surprised
they’ve lived so long, but one old lady said she’d seen someone suspicious
hanging around all right. She’d seen him good. I pressed her for details. She
turned out to be a more observant witness than I usually run into. Most of the
people I question usually say things like: “He was tall and short.” Inadequate
descriptions like that. But this lady was very observant.

“He was six feet
tall,” she informed me, “182 pounds, wearing a brown coat, checkered socks, and
blue boxer shorts.”