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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