The sergeant dragged her up the stairs and into her office. Horne peered around at them as they burst through the door.
“Good evening, officer. Some joke, wasn’t it?”
Dr. Saari stopped in mid-step and stared at him. In spite of herself she shot a glance at the locked medicine cabinet which contained some bottles of whiskey. Charles followed her glance and grinned impudently at her.
“Never touched your precious golden liquid, Elizabeth, but thanks for telling me where you keep it.”
She sat down across the room from him but said nothing. Instead, she opened the black bag and began to fill a needle with a colorless fluid.
Sergeant Wiedenbeck walked around the examining table and looked at the casualty. He put his balled fists on his hips, elbows askew, and tried his best to express bitter disappointment.
“Too bad they missed. Better luck next time.”
Horne didn’t hear what he said but could follow the lip movements with sufficient ease to get the idea.
He snapped back, “Oh, go to hell.”
Dr. Saari cut in from across the office.
“He can’t hear a thing you say, sergeant. The blast affected his ears. He’ll recover in a day or two, I believe.”
“He can’t hear? Then how did he know what I said?”
She smiled. “Your face told him as much, sergeant.”
The resulting interview was something of a three-way conversation with Wiedenbeck putting the questions to Dr. Saari, who penciled them on paper in a fast long-hand. Horne answered his questions in what he thought was his normal voice. It wasn’t. The sergeant twice made motions with his hands, imploring the patient to not make so much noise.
Dr. Saari explained it. Now that he could no longer hear his own voice, could only “feel” it in his throat, the suddenly-deafened man was unconsciously stepping up the vocal power to compensate for the unnatural loss. A lot of permanently deaf people do it constantly.
The sergeant had come up with his inevitable notebook and pencil, and had asked a fool question. He instantly saw his error; Horne had him there. He had to eliminate the fool questions police love to ask for fool questions look damned foolish when written on paper.
On the other hand he hardly expected some of the answers the private detective began giving him; the astonished expression on his face showed that plainly enough. He began to regard Horne — openly — as something of a fool.
The pencil moved slowly and spasmodically across the pages of the notebook, jotting down a fragment of a fact or sentence, a rough outline of the oral whole. Horne knew Wiedenbeck, knew him well. He had known him from the time the man had come in from Battle Creek to join the force as a rookie. Wiedenbeck’s physical appearance wasn’t such as to cause any maiden to leave home but everyone who knew him had a healthy respect for his intelligence.
Wiedenbeck was keenly interested in the story.
What police officer, intelligent or otherwise, could fail to be interested, Horne asked himself without humor. Here was Charles Horne talking, confidential investigator, protector of the common man (for a fee), the prize sucker of the twentieth century.
His license hanging on the wall said he was a detective. The identification papers he carried in his wallet also mentioned it. His friends and acquaintances assumed he was just that. But he knew a police sergeant who was beginning to suspect otherwise.
Policemen sat at his feet... so to speak... and listened in awe as he poured out his astonishing story. What had this super-mortal, this alert, keenly vigilant protector of the common man (for a fee), done? Nothing much. He had only perched on his thin-boned posterior and somewhat musingly watched a beautiful redhead blow a man to hell with a stick of dynamite.
All without so much as a gently waging finger lifted to reprove her, mind you. To be sure, his face had been pushed around some in the blowing to hell process, but pshaw, that was a mere bagatelle.
The police sergeant’s eyes were unduly expressive, studying the supine man, counteracting the blankness of his face. They were so expressive the eyewitness struck out in self-defense.
“Well, dammit, how was I to know it was dynamite? I thought she had a screech bomb.”
The sergeant answered, and the doctor wrote, “Not dynamite. Probably TNT.”
“Yeah? Where can a girl get TNT these days?”
“Where can any Tom, Dick or Harry get it? We don’t know. We intend to find out.”
“That stuff was damned powerful. Even for TNT.”
A worried frown creased the sergeant’s forehead and he changed the subject.
“I don’t see why you didn’t stop the woman.”
“I told you, sergeant, I thought it was a joke. And besides, so did the other guy.”
“What other guy?”
“The guy that was standing on the stairs. Downstairs, below my office window.”
The sergeant searched his face. “I just come up those stairs,” he said. “I didn’t see any guy.”
“He was there, all right. He was peeking around the corner of the stairway, watching the girl.”
Wiedenbeck glanced at the doctor. Horne didn’t follow his glance and missed whatever took place.
“Describe this girl,” the police sergeant ordered, “as fully as possible.”
That wasn’t too difficult. In her high, clacking heels she stood about five-foot-nine. The build was wonderful and she weighed perhaps a hundred and thirty to forty pounds. There was no excess fat, only well-rounded curves. She had been wearing a thin, white blouse that shown like nylon. The skirt was a shade which Horne judged to be nile green. The hose were probably nylon as well. Black, open-toed shoes. And spiked heels.
And that, he explained with a spread of his hands, was the best he could do. After all it had been rather dark.
Dr. Saari made a remark to the sergeant which she neglected to write down and pass to the witness. The sergeant grinned but it was more of a leer.
After that had come the shot in the arm. The doctor drove him home and he had put himself to bed.
With the late morning sun shining in his eyes, Horne jammed the telegram in his pajama pocket and hopped out of bed. The bedpost saved him from hitting the floor. He clung there weakly until the dizzy spell had passed.
While he was dressing he heard Mother Hubbard in the kitchen below him. Heard Mother Hubbard!
“Hey!” he said aloud. “Well whaddya know? I can hear again!”
Going downtown on the streetcar he read the morning newspaper over the shoulder of the passenger seated in front of him. The worm’s glorious departure was a front page sensation. Boone had seen nothing like it in all history.
The paper even mentioned the only other dynamiting within memory of Boone’s oldest inhabitant, a bit of business about a tool shed being blown up during a labor dispute long before the first world war. It had ultimately been proven the owners of the shed had themselves dynamited the building to discredit the striking workmen. The incident had nothing at all to do with the current explosion, but then that was Boone and Boone’s newspaper. Too, the relatives of the oldest living inhabitant bought extra copies to see grandpapa’s name in print.
Charles Horne climbed the stairs to find his office door standing open. The building janitor and a man from the paint and glass store were putting new windows into place. Most of the rubble had been haphazardly swept into a pile near the door. Horne stooped down to pick up a piece of anonymous metal lying in the pile and pocketed it as a souvenir.
The janitor looked around at him and said good morning. Horne returned the greeting and picked up the mail lying on his desk. There were two letters and a post card. The post card offered him a thousand-dollar life insurance policy for only one dollar per month, and no medical examination. He crumpled it and dropped it on the pile of rubbish.