Highly Effective Detective

Chapter One I'd had this dopey idea to be a detective ever since my mother gave me an illustrated Sherlock Holmes book for my tenth birthday. For months, I walked around the house with a bubble pipe and two baseball caps on my head, one turned backward so I would have that double-billed look. I outgrew the ball caps and the pipe, but never my dream of being a detective. Then when I was twelve, somebody gave me one of those Encyclopedia Brown books, about a boy detective who was smarter than his own father, the chief of police no less, and solved all the crimes for him. The answer to each mystery was in the back of the book for those people like me who wanted to play detective but could never figure out what the solution was. I liked that kid detective so much, I started calling myself "Dictionary Ruzak," because "Encyclopedia" was already taken. After high school, I went to the Police Academy, but they kicked me out. I couldn't run fast enough, and I never could pass the driving and the marksmanship tests. Then they put me in what they called "scenario training" and the bad guy always killed me. I must have a died a hundred times, and would have died a hundred more, but the Academy concluded I wasn't cut out for police work. After I flunked out of the Academy, I took a job as a guard with a company that provided security for a local bank. I wore a black uniform with a gold badge embroidered on the shoulder. I had the midnight shift, which I liked. It was quiet, I had a chance to read or listen to the radio, and nothing ever happened. I worked there for fourteen years. For ten of those years I lived with my parents, until Dad died of a heart attack and Mom told me if I didn't move out, I never would, because with him gone, the temptation would be too great to live with and take care of her as an excuse not to strike out on my own. She kept on me to go to college. I worked nights, so my days were free, but somehow, like a lot of things people plan for, I never got around to it. I also could never figure out how I was going to work a full-time job, go to college, and sleep. So the day came when I was thirty-three years old and was still doing the same thing I'd been doing when I was nineteen. I was hunkered down. Flunking out of the Police Academy had taken something out of me, a pretty big chunk of my resolve or spirit or whatever you want to call it, and I was waiting for something. I couldn't put my finger on what I was waiting for. Maybe it was some kind of mystical call to action, but I was never the type who believed we all have a destiny to fulfill, like a cosmic apple hanging from a tree that we wait till it's ripe to pluck. My outlook on life tended toward the prosaic. I wasn't much of a dreamer or go-getter, since the two usually go hand in hand. But sometimes, usually midway through my shift, about 3:00 a.m., when things were their most quiet and I was tired of reading and all the late-night radio talk shows had signed off, I would feel an aching somewhere in the vicinity of my heart, not in the heart itself, but about two or three inches below it, which I interpreted as some soft groaning of my unfulfilled soul, only I didn't know what to do about it except wait for it to go away. Copyright 2006 by Richard YanceyYancey, Rick is the author of 'Highly Effective Detective', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312347529 and ISBN 0312347529.