Happy Ending

March 30th, 1998 Posted in Short Stories

And they all lived happily ever after.

John Slade hadn’t really expected anything different. When the squad of terrorists with thick foreign accents had originally hijacked that subway car, John Slade hadn’t even thought twice about jumping on board through an open manhole, landing on the ceiling of the moving subway car and letting himself inside through a side window in a daring feat that could easily have been captured in slow motion from five different angles. That was just the way John Slade did his damned business.

That was probably why the chief had called him out of retirement in the first place. He may have been a boozer, a gambler, a high risk, a loose cannon. But he was also a damn good cop. “You retired me, chief,” John had said, catching his badge as it arced over the chief’s desk in a perfect underhanded throw. “Consider yourself UN-retired,” his chief had barked, mouth gumming a cheap cigar. John was back in business, and those terrorists had their hands full.

He was, after all, an ex-Marine, and a damn good ex-cop, to boot. He had a gut feeling the terrorists, despite their methodical planning and exacting precision, would be powerless against his homespun American know-how and inventiveness. His instincts, naturally, had paid off. Many was the time where Slade, perched in the air ducts of the speeding subway car, had heard the enraged howl of supervillain Julius Diabolo: “What do you mean you can’t find him?” or “What do you mean he’s stolen the bomb?” or “He’s just one American cop! Find him, you useless fools!”

Later, when the terrorists had rigged the C-4 to the subway car housing the state-wide orphan convention, Slade had been just as ready to stop them. He hadn’t even minded taking that bullet in the arm while trying to dismantle it. Sacrifice was what being a good cop was all about, after all. Plus, he noted, it must have looked absolutely fantastic, him taking the bullet like that. He didn’t even slow down or stop shooting or anything.

Sacrifices like that had even cost him his marriage. John Slade knew his ex-wife still loved him, though. “Every night you’re out there laying your damn life on the line,” she had whispered though a veil of tears. “How do you think I felt all those nights, waiting for you to come home, wondering if it would be in a damned bodybag?” John had to admit he didn’t know how that felt. He had always been too busy pulling the pins out of grenades, dropping them in the pants of notorious super-criminals, and pushing them off fifty-story buildings.

So when Slade later discovered that his ex-wife was a passenger on the very subway he was trying to liberate from terrorists, he knew it was business as usual. “John!” she yelled, as he jumped out of an air duct into the subway car holding all the hostages. “John, you damn bastard!” she yelled, running towards him. “You’re cut! Are you alright?” And she had patched up his wounds, and he had kissed her.

That the mood had been destroyed ten seconds later by a bazooka missile shot through the room was unfortunate. John casually ducked the missile as it blew out a subway wall. Grabbing his ex-wife’s arm as she hung out of the gaping hole. The subway whistling by at a billion miles an hour. Him clutching her arm, trying to save her from being ground up in the wheels below. Suffering the innumerable chest shots he was taking from the samurai terrorist’s roundhouse kicks.

Mere seconds later, having ripped a round metal pole from its moorings in the floor (one-handed), John rammed it home into the samurai’s chest just as he came in for the kill with the nun-chukas. Taking the momentum, pushing the samurai back into the subway car wall with the pole, so that he hung there limply, skewered like a kabob. “Don’t go anywhere,” John remembered whispering as he had pulled his ex-wife back on board. Whispered with dry-cool ease, proving to himself and anyone within earshot how calm and in control of the situation he truly was.

Then, in a rare peaceful moment, John leaning up against a wall, blood and sweat mingling on his face in a not unattractive way, cigarette dangling limply from parched limps like an extension of his upper cuspid, whispering to himself: “Now I remember why I retired in the first place.” It had been a good line. If he had had one regret over the entire ordeal, it would have been that no one had heard him say this.

Finally, the climactic showdown, the supervillain telling him as he held his ex-wife at knifepoint that John Slade had been a thorn in his side for long enough. John with his hands over his head, about to be shot, the situation hopeless. Then, BLAM! the bomb that John Slade had stolen earlier, detonating in the engineer’s cabin. The subway car loosing itself from the rails, careening out of the earth and down a crowded New York street.

Had anyone been watching at the time, John reflected, he had little doubt how immensely entertained they would have been by the whole “exploding-the-stolen-C4-in-the-engineer’s-cabin” idea, since any theoretical viewer would long since have forgotten about that stolen C-4 he stole way back at the beginning of the adventure. Quite the action-acked climax. Not that John Slade had in any way planned anything like that. No, his red-blooded American instincts had simply taken over, propelling him once again to inevitable victory.

John and his ex-wife Janet jumping out of the subway train at the last second. That same subway train, supervillain shrieking out of a side window, plummeting off the Brooklyn Bridge into the choppy waters below.

“Are you alright, Janet?”

“Shut up and kiss me, John.”

“Alrighty.”

“Damnit.”

An embrace, a long long kiss. John almost fancied he could see himself holding her, with a slow pan out to reveal a smouldering Brooklyn Bridge, a New York skyline framing that perfect kiss as John Slade’s great adventure came to an end. And everyone, he thought at the time, would surely have lived happily ever after.

Skipping forward a day, Janet and he back together, John remembering why they’d separated in the first place. Janet complaining that he never did anything anymore, that he just sat at home all day, drinking, gambling, not playing by the house rules, a loose (and very bored) cannon careening off the walls. Sitting in the study, gulping gin till his cheeks bulged, cutting out newspaper clipping after newspaper clipping and pasting it into his scrapbook. HERO COP GIVEN KEY TO CITY. HERO COP TO APPEAR ON LETTERMAN. HERO COP SPOTTED WALKING DOG. NEW YORK TO CELEBRATE NEW STATE HOLIDAY: HERO COP DAY.

It was a dull life, maybe, and Janet’s nagging was really starting to get on his nerves. He’d accidentally left his Colt .45 on the sofa the night before, and Janet exploded when she saw the stain the gun oil had left. Plus, she constantly reminded him that this had originally been her apartment, and that the landlord inevitably came to her whenever John dove through a plate glass window to answer a door, or roughed up their German neighbor for, as John called it, “information”, though it looked to anyone else more like the man’s newspaper.

“Stop acting like a hero all the time!” she yelled at him, pulling at her hair in frustration. John noticed she’d stopped saying “damn” as much as she used to. But at least he had his headlines. The city, unlike Janet, certainly approved of his heroism.

The next day there were no headlines. John flipped through the paper slowly at first, then frantically, a knotted ball of condensed acid in his stomach as the realization dawned on him. Nothing. The world had moved on. The Hero Cop was no more. “But I saved millions!” he protested to the paper.

“Months ago,” muttered Janet behind him as she put a pot of coffee on. “Could you pick up a thing of Maxwell House next time you’re out, John?”

Hero Cop Day came and went. Hardly anyone bothered to celebrate it. Even the convenience store down the block, where he always bought his unfiltered cigarettes, remained steadfastly and mockingly open.

And none of this would have mattered, John convinced himself, if he wasn’t still a damn ex-cop. The stupid fatheaded chief, the fat cigar-sucking bastard, had asked for the badge back.

“Good job with the terrorists, Slade,” he’d grunted with a pat on the back.

“Thanks, sir,” beamed John, still holding Janet, still covered in grime and sweat and blood. Back on the Brooklyn Bridge now, the bus still smouldering. “Loose cannon, huh, sir?” he laughed.

“Sometimes a loose cannon’s the best cannon to have,” laughed the chief, chucking John on the shoulder. “Alrighty, let’s have the badge back.”

Janet began squirming. “John, ow. You’re squeezing me.”

“What?” John stared with burning eyes at the chief.

“I’ll need the badge back, John. The terrorists are all dead. You did a super job. Now give the badge back. You’re back off the force.” He held out his hand, looked into John’s wide unbelieving eyes, and chortled. “What? John, come on, now. We kicked you off the force because you were a psychotic drunk. You’re still a psychotic drunk. Look around you, man!” He gestured towards the smoking, wreckage-filled craters behind them. “Do you think this is how most police officers operate? You just blew up a New York subway, and —” he stopped to laugh at the ridiculousness of it ” —careened it off a bridge, John!” John noted with dismay that Janet started to laugh at this too.

“You told me I was un-retired, chief!” John said.

“Consider yourself RE-retired.”

John shuffled off towards his apartment, Janet by his side. “Thanks for the help, though,” he heard behind him. “Um, the badge, John? The badge?”

Getting drunker, fatter, more of him and less of him at the same time. No longer a character-developmental drinking problem, but full-blown alcoholism. Puffy face, red eyes, weak, flabby arms, sallow eye sockets staring in the morning mirror. Janet’s cute clock on the kitchen wall, the happy cat with the tick-tock eyes. Time slipping away. More gin. Janet telling him to get a job, to get back out there. Him being unable to explain: he needed excitement and danger, or he was nothing. He needed to be jumping out of windows onto jets, or he just curled up. Just curled up and—

“Look,” said Janet, pushing a newspaper into his face. “See? ‘Secretary Needed. Light Typing.’ Call the number, John! You’re wasting away in here!” She stood up. “Plus, the apartment’s starting to smell.”

“Go away, Janet.”

“Okay.”

John sipped at his gin.

“I mean it’s really starting to reek, John, is why I mention it—”

“Go. Away. Janet.”

After a while, Janet simply stopped trying. He could hardly blame her. The drinking had made him sullen and boring. He sat in his leather chair like a reupholstered cow trying to get his skin back by osmosis. A steady diet of Price is Right convinced John he’d be an excellent food shopper, as he’d guessed the right price on a tin of salmon. Janet had said she didn’t care, he’d get her bank card over her dead body.

Janet hardly ever said “damn” anymore. And when she did, he could tell it was for his benefit.

That night he made an experimental lunge over the sofa, just to see if he still had it. Flying through the air, making a last-minute throw to Janet of the Coke she’d asked him to get, as he sailed over the television into what he hoped would be a perfect crouching position.

Janet drove him to the hospital, so doctors could extricate the glass shards from the coffee table out of his feet. The entire time she never said a word.

Janet stopped talking to him much at all, he noticed. Tight-lipped smiles on her way to work. She stopped asking him how the job hunt was going. She stopped asking him anything.

When he found the motel matches while going through her purse looking for cigarettes, he didn’t even have the nerve to confront her about it. Three weeks later, she told him it was over, bags already packed and at the door.

“I’m gone, John,” she said. “I’m a ghost.”

“Did you get my cigarettes like I asked?”

“Yes, I got your cigarettes, John.” She tossed them casually over to him, an underhanded perfect arc across the chaise-lounge into John’s awaiting grasp. “I really think you should listen to me here.”

“I’ll have to owe you the smoke money. I’m a little short this week.”

“Don’t worry about it. John, I’m leaving you. I’m leaving you for Marty.”

This burned worse than the affair. Marty? Marty, the sass-talking black taxi cab driver. Marty, the unwilling citizen aide who’d driven John all over New York intercepting the bombs during the subway crisis, had driven at full speed through crowded city streets while terrorists in black cars traded gunfire with John with German automatics through shot-out windshields. Marty, who’d had nothing to say but “Damn!” and “The goddamn fare ain’t worth THIS shit!” and “John, you one crazy motherFUCKER, you know that?”

John, now one mad and hurt and angry motherfucker, sat up. He poked his head over the sofa to see Janet framed in the doorway, bags surrounding her like soldiers awaiting their orders. “But he’s the comic relief, Janet!” Slade protested weakly. “He stayed in the cab the entire time!”

“All I know is he makes me laugh, John.” She left soon after. He was out of cigarettes the next day.

And the next morning John was arrested. He’d been out shopping for new white cotton undershirts at Sears when the police nabbed him, coming out of the shirt racks, warrant waved like a flag, tackling him to the linoleum.

“You’re under arrest, Slade,” said an overly tall cop, slapping cuffs on John’s wrists.

“What for?” yelled Slade.

“The murder of twelve terrorists, one supervillain, and nine hundred and fifty-six civilians. You monster.”

He at least thought he’d beat the terrorist rap. Yeah, maybe a few citizens had got in the way when they shouldn’t have, he could see that. But the terrorists? Come on. After all, every one of those murders had been in self-defense, for the good of the populace. If a few of the populace hadn’t actually survived long enough to congratulate him, well, there were the broken eggs in the omelette of life.

The first day of the trial, the prosecution took one of the terrorist’s weepy mothers to the stand. Crying and wailing, she told a shocked and disgusted jury of the way Slade had desecrated her son’s body, impaling her dearest Wing to a subway wall with a steel rail. Her son, a practicing samurai and, John learned at the trial, an Olympic Judo hopeful.

“He would have brought back the gold,” she wailed.

“I don’t doubt it for a second, ma’am,” said the prosecuting attorney, tsk-tsking at John and hoping the jury noticed.

Slade had thought the mother’s Poor Russian Widow costume was particularly contrived. He’d accidentally come across the attorney in the men’s bathroom, handing the woman a box that said Nancy’s Costume Shoppe: Russian Widow Costume. He helped her into the rags and tied the filthy handkerchief around her head while she liberally doused her eyes in onion juice.

The hearings for the nine hundred and fifty-six civilians went even worse. Slade took to the stand each and every time, trying desperately to recall the face of the civilian in question. One was killed in a terrorist’s attempt to impress upon Slade, over walkie-talkie, that the terrorists meant business. Another five had been in a car that had apparently been run into a narrow alley during Slade’s heroic car chase to dump a bomb into the New York harbor. Apparently a gas leak in the car suffocated them.

“But I saved the lives of millions!” he protested. “Minus 956,” shouted back the prosecuting attorney, who then made a big show with a calculator to show how one million minus 956 was 999,044 civilians saved. Slade felt the point could have been made in a more subtle manner.

“And why were you taken off the force in the first place, Mister Slade?” probed the prosecution.

“Drinking. Gambling. Smoking. Depression.”

“Those are some pretty cool, devil-may-care problems you have there,” noted the prosecution.

Slade reluctantly agreed that, yes, the problems had in the past been deemed pretty cool. Pretty damned cool indeed.

In the end, a lenient judge acquitted him of nine hundred and sixty -nine counts of murder, but subsequent battles in small claims court took Slade to the cleaners, and his name was run through the mud for three weeks in the press. He declared bankruptcy soon after. The repo men, he noted sadly, even bothered to take the stained cotton undershirt from his back, the lucky last bullet he kept in his pocket (for Hail Mary last-ditch shots at the fuel lines of helicopters). They also took his badge, which he’d never bothered to give back to the chief, who phoned a few times leaving messages but who’d eventually decided to just let him keep it.

John found the best places to get half-smoked cigarettes from were mall cafeterias.

A boot kicked John Slade in the side — in the same exact place a samurai had many years ago. John winced, more from the memory than the impact. He slowly woke up from his sleep (dreams full of broken glass flying at all angles and bullets just missing as he dove out of buildings hanging onto curtains so cool). He belched loudly.

“What?” he said, not opening his eyes. “S’my grate. I claimed it. No prollems here.” He tried to fall back asleep, his Salvation Army blanket tucked haggardly around him. A tapping now on his shoulder, a voice whispering “John. John.” The chief’s voice. The chief. John Slade bolted upright.

The fat, rumpled form of the chief stood over him, hands on hips. “We need you, John.”

“Terrorists?” Shaky hands rubbing sleep out of eyes.

“Worse,” said the chief. “We’re dealing with e-terrorists, John. They’ve taken over a battle cruiser with nuclear missiles strapped to the side of it. The S.S. Royal. You heard of it?” He glanced down.

“Heard of it?” John gritted his teeth against a light wind that was just starting to blow. “I used to drive it.”

“That’s what I thought. Now pay attention, John. What I’m about to tell you is Mach 12 classified.” The chief unpacked a film screen, set it up, and began showing slides in rapid procession. John shifted a bit to his side on the grating, propping his head up with his hand. Slides depicting a missile aimed right for Silicon Valley gave way to slides showing total economic collapse throughout all the economic poles of the civilized world. John particularly liked the attention to detail in the slide of Wall Street crashing to rubble. The looks on the faces of the day-traders running from the ashes were very realistic.

“Alright, I’ll do it,” John said when the chief’s presentation was finished.

“I knew you would, John. But—” his face darkened. “There’s just one more thing.”

John stiffened. Would they want an investigation into his alcoholi— his drinking problem? Was the chief concerned about all the murder trials? Would he have to mention the acquittals — well over a thousand of them?

“Your ex-wife’s being held hostage by the e-terrorists, John. I’m sorry.”

He untensed. Now he was back on familiar ground. John didn’t even bother to ask how his wife happened to be on a Navy ship carrying nuclear warheads. Last he had checked, she was the senior vice-president in charge of acquisitions at LonTech.

But to hell with it. If there was one thing cooler than a loose cannon cop who doesn’t play by the rules it was a loose cannon cop who doesn’t play by the rules and is out for revenge. He’d be unstoppable.

As he was about to get up, he heard the chief cough expectantly. John squinted up at him, his form a dark shadow in front of the morning sun. John could just make out the chief’s face. It was a look of eager expectation. Like the chief was expecting something. But what?

Oh.

“But I thought I was re-retired,” John said dutifully.

“Consider yourself UN-re-retired,” said the chief, dropping a second gleaming badge onto John’s chest.

John smiled, grabbed the badge, stood up, tucked in his shirt, felt at the just-so stubble on his cheeks.

“Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit drinking,” he said to big laughs, though in truth he’d had no intention of quitting drinking that morning. No one seemed to mind. John was so happy he shot some German passerby on the way to the squad car, to warm up a little. He was back in business.