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.
CHAPTER FIVE
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 scari
ng 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.
CHAPTER SIX
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.”
“You’re very observant, Miss…”
“Hemple. I would have seen more but it was dark. And he knocked me down when I tried to get his underpants off.”
“And you only saw him that one time?”
“Yes. He doesn’t come down this block anymore. He goes around it.”
So I had one lead already. But I wasn’t sure I was going to bother to follow up on it. It didn’t sound like the guy with the blue underwear was the guy I was looking for. Super villains don’t usually let themselves be manhandled and stripped by old women like that. It was nice to know somebody else wears underwear like mine though.
I spent the rest of the afternoon checking around in one of the rougher areas of the industrial district, to see if I could turn up anything useful there. I ended up learning a lot: I learned that I should mind my own business, that I was asking for it, that I didn’t seem to be getting the message, that if I didn’t think they meant it I was sorely mistaken, and that the same thing would happen to me again if I ever came back. It wasn’t the kind of information I was looking for exactly, but at least I hadn’t wasted my day entirely. I’d picked up some useful tips. Tips about me.
Then a crook who owed me a favor – it was my confused testimony on the stand that had saved him from the chair and gotten him elected Lt. Governor – told me that I should check out a certain unlisted building on the South Side. He wouldn’t tell me any more than that. Just said I should check it out. Then he went back to ripping off the public and vomiting on our freedoms, like he had been elected to do.
When I got to the mysterious building he had mentioned, I found all the rooms and offices locked and apparently empty, until I got to the penthouse. There was sinister music coming from inside, so I opened the door and walked in.
I was immediately intercepted by a white haired impeccably dressed old gentleman.
“Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “May I have today’s password, please?”
“I don’t think I know today’s password,” I replied. “Yesterday’s either.”
He nodded amiably as if I had said the right thing, but began loading a small silver pistol. “I’d have a stab at it, if I were you, sir.”
“Shoehorn.”
“Very good, sir. Come right in.”
I tried not to look as surprised as I was. I followed him into the room.
“You don’t have to keep saying ‘shoehorn,’ sir,” he told me as he hung up my coat. “Once is sufficient.”
The main room was like one of those Gentlemen’s Clubs you read about in long novels. High backed chairs, thick rugs, antique weapons and sporting prints on the walls, small discrete signs that said “No Loud Talking” and “No Pepper,” and so on. All very traditional.
What was untraditional about this particular club was its members. The snatches of conversation I heard as I walked through the room told me exactly where I was.
“Where young super villains go wrong,” one was saying, “is they kill everybody. You’ve got to leave somebody alive to pay you.”
Another was reliving an old battle from his past. “An entire army against me and all I had was my weather machine and my lust for gold.”
“What did you do?”
“I kicked their ass, that’s what I did.”
“Gosh!”
“You’ve fallen into my trap!” giggled one of the younger members, as he wrestled with his neighbor.
“No, no, you’ve fallen into my trap!”
Another had a handful of maps and charts he was showing to the man next to him. “So after I make it snow, you make time stop moving.”
“Gotcha.”
“With every
body stopped and wet, we can make our move.”
“Oh boy!”
They were all super villains. I was in the Super Villain Club.
I made the rounds, shaking hands with the various members and telling them “shoehorn.” They asked if I was a new super villain in town, as they had not seen me around before. I said I was new to the club, but not to the business. I had conquered the planet once already, when I was younger. That raised me in their estimation. Not many of them had done that.
I sat down next to one of the older members, who was snoozing in a leather chair by the fire. His legs were moving, as if he were dreaming he was running away from good people. I coughed discretely to attract his attention, which unfortunately set off a fit of severe coughing that made all of my guns fall out of my pockets. This attracted everyone else’s attention except his, so I moved away to talk to someone else.
I saw what appeared to be the Devil sitting in the corner of the room looking bored and flipping souls into a hat. They made an “oh woe!” sound as they flew through the air. I went up to him.
“Devil, eh?” I said, a little uneasily. “Do I get three wishes now? I forget how it works.”
“You’ve got me confused with someone else.”
I nodded. “I do that a lot.” I watched him flip a few more souls into the hat.
He lit a cigarette with his breath and looked me over as he puffed.
“You’re a detective, aren’t you?”
I couldn’t admit that, of course. I was here incognito. “Yes, I’m a detective,” I heard myself saying. “And a rotten one I am, too.”
“How would you like to be the greatest detective in the world? To be able to solve the most complicated crime in seconds, run like the wind, and shoot like Aaron Burr? Would you like that, Frank?”
“Hell, yes. Wait a minute, though. Is there some catch?”
The Exploding Detective Page 4