Bob Moore: No Hero

Bob Moore: No Hero

By Tom Andry

Published by Tom Andry

Copyright 2011 Tom Andry

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An exciting excerpt from the full-length follow up to Bob Moore: No Hero is included at the end. In Bob Moore: Desperate Times, Bob finds himself working with his super-powered ex-wife to foil a terrorist plot. But a new super, the most powerful anyone has ever seen, arrives with catastrophic results. Can Bob, a Private Eye with no super powers, survive when so many supers have perished?

Chapter 1

I snapped the last picture and glanced down just as the base of the tree burst into flames.

There are a lot of reasons to wear flame-resistant clothing. In my line of work, unfortunately, it is often because the tree I'm sitting in catches fire. Well, maybe that's not exactly true; it isn't like it spontaneously combusts or anything. It's generally set on fire. Generally by the people I'm trying to photograph. Generally.

As you might have guessed, I'm a private eye. As a PI, one of my most common jobs is figuring out if a spouse or partner is cheating. While, for most PIs, this doesn't involve a heck of a lot of tree immolation, I'm a specialist. The people I investigate almost exclusively have powers. Power to fly, power to throw cars at me and, way too often I find, power to set the tree I’m sitting in on fire from a great distance.

It's part of the job. I’ve gotten used to it.

This particular job was run of the mill. Fire dude, what's-his-name (it's always something like Sunburst or Inferno), was worried that his sidekick (yet another in a long line of barely legal, barely clothed, large-breasted supers with tangentially related powers) was cheating on him.

Regardless of whether people have super powers or not, the fact is, if they are worried enough to hire someone, they might as well save their money for a lawyer.

I'm generally a bit more on top of the name thing, but this was a rush job. With the stack of cash he set in front of me, I wasn't all that worried about his name. Of course, part of it was just getting out of the office and away from my phone. Some cop had been calling me every day for the past week. Bitter experience had taught me that no good came from accepting job offers from cops. Still, I couldn't ignore him forever, so I had promised to take his call just as Mr. Flame-dude walked in. That was all the excuse I'd needed to stall a little while longer – even though I was fuzzy on the details. I should, however, have been a bit more curious about her powers.

In this particular case, the sidekick (Flamette or something) was cavorting with another super chick I'd never seen before. Apparently, her fling had some sort of super hearing or ESP because the minute I started snapping pictures of the two of them in a passionate embrace, she looked right at me. Shortly thereafter, the aforementioned fire started when what looked to be a lump of flaming, blue coal materialized in the client’s sidekick’s palm and shot directly toward me.