ESCAPE FROM THE FUTURE

Chapter 1 - Part 1

Gordy Lamont’s shoe leather tapped out a soulful S.O.S. as he paced the floor of his detective agency.  He sidled over to his cinema-screen expanse of a window, wringing his mop of oily hair dry, anxiously waiting for something to happen.  He soon gave up.  Accompanied by agitated breathing, he traced another lap across the strips of hardwood.

Saks, with three hundred pounds pressing mightily against his pinstripe suit, effeminately filed his nails.  Fair skinned and baby faced, he eyed Gordy with impatience.

Having completed his latest circuit, Gordy stopped dead in his tracks at the window.  Suspicious, he surveyed the sight right out of a Norman Rockwell painting of a family driving ever-so-safely to church in their Hupmobile sedan.  As for the little girl in the back seat, dressed like a rag doll, her knees couldn’t quite catch the lip of the seat, so she sat with her legs straight out in front of her.  The wife in her mail order patterned dress with the extended collar clasped her purse in her lap as if it held the piggy bank’s coins for the church offering.  And the husband behind the wheel, in his straw hat and buttoned up collar, looked as stiff as his starched shirt.

Just one thing ruined the picture.

The father lobbed a flaming Molotov cocktail from the driver's seat.

The shop across the street exploded, blowing the poor sap reading the paper just outside the store up against Gordy’s window.  The newspaper he was reading, plastered against the bulletproof glass, proclaimed, "Capone's Chicago heats up."

The family in the Hupmobile drove away from the scene of the devastation as serenely and innocently as before the incident.

Gordy snapped himself out of his shocked stupor.  “Boys, we're back in business!”

Gordy, Saks, and the rest of the gang, yanked their .32 pistols out of desk drawers, or reached into their shoulder holsters to check the lead count.  Then they grabbed their trench coats and Tommy guns, and made for the door.  All except for Heller.

“It’s time to put down the drawings, kid,” Gordy said.  “Finally, a compelling reason to look up from your desk.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Heller said.

The rookie Heller threw down his doodling pencil, rushed for his trench coat, as Gordy and the others waited impatiently for him to catch up.  Accoutrements in hand, Heller posed before the full length mirror.  “What do you think?  The Tommy gun in the right hand, and the .32 in the left?  It doesn’t feel balanced somehow.  Maybe I should go with two Tommy guns, one in each hand.”

Gordy shook his head.  “This isn’t a dress rehearsal, kid.”  He grabbed Heller by the collar and pushed him out the door.  

Moments later, from across the street, Gordy and the boys mulled over the charred remains.  Sirens wailed with the same attention-getting quality as babies seeking their mothers.  When the ambulances finally pulled up, Gordy couldn’t help thinking how much they looked like school buses arriving to take the dead souls to their first day of classes on how to survive on the other side. 

Numbers, spaghetti thin and skyscraper tall, was the only one able to piece together the body-parts from the complex picture puzzle of debris.

The orderlies waited just out of range of the still falling blackened timbers until he signaled that the body-puzzles were solved and ready to be taken out.  Dodging the falling bric-a-brac, the medics rushed in with their stretchers, and hurriedly carted away the reassembled bits.

Numbers froze, noticing something that didn’t fit.  The charred beams were lying all wrong for the explosion that took place here.  He started peeling them away.  Underneath was a charcoaled body, stiff as a board, but a little too intact.  “Get up,” Numbers said.  The “corpse” opened an eye, the white of which shone all the more brightly against the black char coating him.  Numbers extended his hand.  The guy took the lift up the way a track star takes to a backrest for his feet and darted off down the street.