The Exploding Detective Read Online Free PDF Page A

The ones who already
had my autograph were pleased about this. The value of their collections had
just gone through the roof. The rest of them thought it was bullshit, though
they couldn’t say so until they were older.
    But I didn’t get
to stand around looking pretty all day. There was work to be done, the Mayor
informed me. He said I wasn’t just there to protect the city from super
villains. $1,500 bought more than that, even these days. I was there to protect
the city period. He said I should re-read my contract if there was any
confusion about this. I was getting kind of bored just standing around anyway,
so I started patrolling the city - crashing into small time crooks, sliding
sideways through gambling dens and auction houses, getting dead cats down from
trees, changing street lights that had burned out, and so on.
    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