Daniel Ganninger - Icarus Investigations 01 - Flapjack Read Online Free PDF Page B

recommend driving at the guy with our car and then make him leap to safety, proving he was not injured,” I told Dan, regaling him with my best plan.  This course of action did not sit well with him, however.
    “ If the guy wasn’t faking and then we popped him with our car, then what?”  Galveston inquired.  I still had a lot to learn about the investigation business.
    Galveston approached the case much more deliberately.  In two days Galveston had enough information to know when this guy blew his nose or flushed his toilet.
    We sat in front of Rick’s house for hours, just waiting to take a picture of him doing something out of line for his injuries.  At one point, Galveston became impatient and ordered me to knock on his door and run away.  A seemingly simple plan, but one I was not willing to do.
    “ Why don’t I just kick him in the jaw?  He’d chase me then,” I joked.
    “ Don’t question, just do, lesson eighteen,” Dan snapped back.  Obviously he wasn’t thrilled with my idea.
    I must mention something about Galveston’s rules, his “lessons in insanity” as I liked to call them.  They rarely made sense.  He would commonly throw out a random lesson number and follow it with some mundane advice.  The scary part was, to him, these weren’t random numbers.  I had a frightening thought that he actually had these written down somewhere, or they were actually encased in his brain.
    I would have wr itten them down if I would have known that later they would prove useful.  I also didn’t realize that this seemingly simple operation was a test case for future operations.  This was our pregame warm-up.
    I decided to follow the order and gingerly stepped out of the car and made my way around it, crouching and looking both directions.  I made my way across the street, stooped over looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, doing a half step in each direction.
    “ What are you doing?  Dodging gunfire?” Dan yelled.  “Just go over there like a normal human being and knock on the door.  That lurching walk doesn’t look out of place at all,” he said sarcastically.
    I immediately stood up and composed myself.  I ran over and knocked on the door of the house, as Galveston had instructed.  I quickly looked both ways down the street and scurried back, jumping headfirst into the passenger seat of the car, hunching down.
    “ You looked like a wounded horse,” Dan laughed, making bobbing motions with his head.
    “ You’re sitting there yelling at me while I’m doing the grunt work.  You’re telling the whole world that we’re up to something,” I exclaimed and then fell back in the seat, exhausted.
    “ Look around.  This is a working class neighborhood with a median age of 103.  You could set off a nuclear bomb here and nobody would notice or care.  Now just sit and wait.”  I sat in the seat looking straight ahead, feeling burned and embarrassed.  I was a greenhorn, but what was this berating going to prove.
    “ I just want to see what he’ll do.  We could wait here all day, but this is quicker and has a little more pizzazz,” Galveston threw his arms up and gave me the jazz hands.
    Nobody came to the door after ten minutes of waiting and Galveston was becoming even more impatient.
    “ Okay, do it again,”
    “ Are you serious?  I’m not running over there again,” I pleaded.
    “ Sure you are, and this time, yell that you’re from the Department of Water and Power.”
    I tried to explain my case, but Galveston would have nothing of it until I reluctantly agree.  As I ran across the road, I crouched low, swinging my arms wildly as if avoiding bees doing my best wounded horse on acid routine.  I raced over to the door, knocked hard and yelled, “Water and Power Company!”  I then nervously turned the other direction, found the nearest pair of bushes, and jumped behind them, panting
    I noticed that Galveston had crept around the car and was growing impatient.  Before