The Exploding Detective (2 page)

I went out to a
vacant lot near my office and set up a plywood criminal to apprehend, then
fired up my jet pack and started the countdown on my rockets. I understand why
I blew up. I had a hundred gallons of jet fuel on my back. But why did the
plywood criminal explode? And where did the vacant lot go?

They say any
crash you can walk away from is a good crash, though I’ve never heard anyone
involved in the crash say that. It’s just the people across the street who say
stuff like that. I’m not even sure why we’re listening to them. They can’t even
see very well from over there. Anyway, I’m glad to say I walked away from that
one.

“Is there a
fireman in the house?” I asked passersby. “Anyone know how to put me out?”

A couple of young
men walking by thought they knew what to do in a situation like this. They
confidently set to work putting out the fire.

It took them
awhile to extinguish all the flames, because they had to make sure none of the
sparks in my crotch flared up again. They must have stamped on that fire for
twenty minutes. But they finally got it out to their satisfaction. As they were
leaving, I remembered the two men. They were a couple of bullies from my high
school who never had liked me. It was nice to see they didn’t hold any grudges.

I made some
adjustments to my equipment when I got home from the hospital. The instructions
were in German, so I could only guess at what they said. In fact, I’m only
guessing they were in German. Then I took another practice run.

After I was
released from the Emergency Burn Unit, and the doctors said I could go home if
I didn’t move around too much or overly excite myself, I decided I was ready.

I began making
daily patrols over the city – partly to look for crimes that needed solving and
potential clients who might need my help, but mostly to advertise my business.
I figured once people saw me up there soaring through the clouds, they wouldn’t
be satisfied with ordinary detectives anymore. They would want one that could
fly.

Unfortunately, my
daily patrols weren’t so much patrols as they were a series of spectacular air
tragedies, reminding some old timers of the Hindenburg, others of the Akron. I
don’t think I’ve slid down the sides of so many buildings in my life. Or
skidded along so many sidewalks on my belly. But with each flight I got a
little better at adjusting my altitude, speed, and general direction. All of
these factors are important when you are jet-propelled and covered in rockets.

I was glad I had
added the rockets. The rocket assisted takeoffs not only increased my speed,
they made the whole thing more exciting. There was an explosion when I took off
and another one when I arrived, so it was like I was a magician or something.
It was such a dazzling effect people seldom noticed the blood running down my
face.

These initial
flights didn’t get me any business, but they did attract attention. A local
supermarket tabloid newspaper was the first to do a feature story about me. “He
Flies!!!!” screamed their banner headline. The next day a slightly smaller
headline said: “He Still Flies.” And a week later a story on page three was
headlined: “Still flying. Day 6.” A couple of days later the story was back on
the front page: “Another Flying Man!” showing that same picture of me. Finally
they contacted me and asked if I could do anything else besides fly. Something
new. Their readers already knew about my flying. They wanted something fresh
from me. Swimming, maybe. I told them my job was battling the dark forces, not
helping them fill up their newspaper. They said they didn’t get it.

After that, I
didn’t get any publicity at all, except when something went wrong with one of
my flights. “Flying Detective In Flagpole Drama,” “Flying Detective Fouls
City’s Windshields,” and “Flying Detective Clinging To Life – Again,” are a few
headlines that I remember. Oh well, as long as they spell your name right, as
Hitler said.

Despite all my
promotional flights, I wasn’t getting any business. Nobody seemed to need or want
a jet-propelled detective. I was starting to think that maybe I should have
checked out the market for such a concept before I started investing my time
and money so heavily in it. I was starting to think I might have picked the
wrong gimmick. Maybe I should have gone with that other idea I had – those
stilts. But it turns out I needn’t have worried. My gimmick was about to pay
off big-time, in a way I hadn’t expected.

Those strange
criminals, whose robbery I had accidentally broken up on my first test flight,
had returned for another try. But this time they weren’t unsupervised as they
had been before. They had a leader now. He was a dead ringer for Napoleon
Bonaparte. And he ran the operation like a pro. No wasted motions. No
diversions. And, above all, no panicking when something unexpected, like me,
happened.

The police
arrived on the scene quickly, but couldn’t do anything to stop the robbery.
Under “Napoleon’s” direction, some of the robbers advanced to attack the police
in the center, then wheeled and took out first one flank, then the other.

“The Battle of
Austerlitz, begorra!” said one historical minded cop, as he was being
outflanked.

With the police
forces badly scattered, and now arguing among themselves over whether it was
The Battle of Austerlitz or The Battle of the Three Emperors, the robbers
quickly finished loading up their trucks and drove away. Total elapsed time for
the whole operation - less than thirty minutes. And not one of the raiders had
been killed or captured.

The police were
stunned. They knew they weren’t geniuses - geniuses didn’t apply for jobs at
the police station, they walked right past it - but they weren’t used to being
so easily outmaneuvered. Police psychiatrists had to work overtime for days
straightening the policemen out.

The public was
fascinated by this raid. For one thing, only chemicals were stolen, when the
company payroll was there for the taking. And the robbers themselves were even
more intriguing: with their expressionless faces, the mechanical way they went
about their business, the RC antennas and smoke stacks some of them had, and
the way they would occasionally stop to change each others’ batteries, or take
their heads off and use them to bang open a crate. These weren’t the kinds of
robbers Central City usually got. These robbers were something new.

But the thing
that fascinated, and vaguely worried, the public most, was the presence of
Napoleon Bonaparte at the head of this criminal gang. It had been their
impression that Napoleon was dead, and had been dead since 1821. With
everything else they had to worry about in their daily lives, they didn’t
expect to have to worry about dead guys too.

The tabloids had
a field day, of course. “Dead Midget Menaces Central City!” “Frenchmen Won’t
Stay Dead!” and “Everybody From 1821 Returning From Grave!” were some of the
milder headlines.

Apparently
emboldened by his success, “Napoleon” began raiding Central City’s industrial
district on an almost daily basis. Soon, businesses in the area stopped
bothering to unload their shipments. They just left them on their pallets
outside for the raiders to pick up. It saved time. They could go out of
business faster that way.

The police did
their best, but there was nothing they could do to stop the raids. Napoleon not
only outmanned and outgunned them, he outmaneuvered them every time. He made
monkeys out of them. And nobody likes paying big tax dollars to be protected by
monkeys. Nobody does. Complaints about the lack of adequate protection began
flooding into City Hall.

Mayor Happy
Safeton (born Pernell Slyme), who had just been elected on his promise to “Keep
Our Town Safe And Happy With Happy Safeton” (a slogan that had fascinated
voters because of its cleverness and double – some said triple – meaning), was
very unhappy. A crime wave like this made his administration look bad. It made
a mockery of his slogan. He wasn’t going to get re-elected if this kept up. And
it wasn’t even his fault. It was the Police Commissioner’s fault.

He stormed into
Police Commissioner Brenner’s office, waving a fistful of citizen’s complaints
and demanded the Commissioner do something about the whole mess. The
Commissioner said he would, and promptly stormed into the Police Chief’s office
and yelled at him. And so on. Eventually somebody stormed into my office, and I
went and yelled at the old guy who ran the elevator. I don’t know who he yelled
at, but I do know that eventually the buck ended up being passed back to the
Mayor, which didn’t make him happy at all.

Everybody in town
was demanding action, but nobody knew what to do. Then one day they got an
idea. The idea they got was me.

It happened
during one of Napoleon’s daily raids. Just as the last getaway truck was
pulling away, loaded with propylene oxide, red dye #6 and lithium batteries, I
suddenly fell out of the sky from 4000 feet and exploded in front of the truck,
tipping it over. The creatures inside the truck got away, but the cargo was
saved.

A crowd quickly
gathered around my smoking remains.

“Hey! It’s the
Exploding Detective!” said one wag.

“Flying
Detective,” I corrected him, slowly and painfully rising to my feet - though I
had to admit his description of what I did was better than mine.

Everybody was
surprised to see that I had survived the fall, and the explosion, and the truck
rolling over onto me, and all the people in the crowd stepping on me so they
could see better, but I’d been hurt a lot worse than that before. I guess they
thought they were dealing with an amateur.

I groggily looked
around for the letters I had been taking to the post office, but most of them
had been incinerated in the blast. Grumbling, I walked over and laid down on a
gurney and waited for my life to be saved.

My spectacular
foiling of the big robbery caused much excited comment and speculation around town
over the next few days. Who was this Flying Detective anyway, they wondered.
What was his story?

Everybody had
seen me around, of course. I was nothing new. In fact, nearly a tenth of the
population had stamped me out at one time or another. But a growing number of
people were beginning to think that I might be something more than I appeared
to be. The way they had it figured out, any normal man who flew like I did
would have been dead long ago. And yet I still lived. Maybe I wasn’t just some
old idiot in a jet pack. Maybe I was secretly a genuine super hero, with super
powers that would make your eyes pop out. After all, didn’t Clark Kent and
Bruce Wayne seem like blundering fools? And didn’t they always deny being super
heroes? And yet they were the greatest of them all. That might be what was
happening here, too. It was the only thing that made sense, when you thought
about it in a certain way, and overlooked a few things.

The newspapers
picked up on this idea and expanded on it, not only speculating about my super
powers, but actually confirming them, and listing them. The Tribune said I
could run faster and jump higher than lightning, and crush a piece of coal into
whatever you want. The Chronicle said I could out-smart a battleship. The Post
said I was half man, half rattlesnake, and half nuclear bomb, explaining that I
was the happy result of a man and a snake screwing a box of dynamite. These
sensational new revelations about me greatly excited the public.

You’re probably
wondering what I thought of all this super hero stuff. Actually, I hadn’t heard
anything about it. I had been in the observation ward at the hospital since my
most recent crash and had just gotten out. I noticed people were looking at me
strangely all the way home on the bus, but I assumed it was because of the
bones that were sticking out of my cheek.

When I got to my
office I decided to sit down and take stock of my situation. It was time for me
to figure out, in actual dollars and cents, exactly how this Flying Detective
gimmick of mine was working out so far. When I totaled everything up, I was
staggered. The numbers were staggering. I was losing a staggering amount of
money. I was doing even worse as The Flying Detective than I was as Frank
Burly.

I ran the numbers
again, and now I was doing even worse! I decided that that was it. I wasn’t
going to run those numbers ever again. And I was going to send the jet pack
back to Nazi Germany tomorrow. No more gimmicks for me. I was through being The
Flying Detective.

As I made this
decision and was starting to erase “Flying” from my business cards,
letterheads, and complimentary calendars, my door opened and two men walked in.
It was the Mayor of Central City and the Police Commissioner. I wondered what
I’d done now, and if I should make a run for it.

“How do you do,
Mr. Burly,” said the Mayor. “I’m Happy Safeton. Perhaps you’ve voted for me.”

“Nah.”

His smile tailed
off a little, then rallied back. “I understand you’re a super hero, with powers
and abilities beyond my understanding.”

“Who told you
that?”

“Everyone told
me. We all know about it. It’s true, isn’t it? You can tell me. I’m the Mayor.”

Before I could
think of a nice way to tell a Mayor that he’s stupid - while I was still trying
to remember what Emily Post had said about that – Commissioner Brenner broke
into the conversation: “There’s a job in it for you if you are a super hero.”

“Huh?”

“Yes,” said the
Mayor, “We’re looking for someone to save Central City.”

“From what?”

“From the gang
that’s been terrorizing the industrial district. And from this nut case who’s
been leading the raids who thinks he’s Napoleon.”

“At what rate of
payment?”

“What?”

“How much does
this job you’re talking about pay?”