Once again, Decoder Ring Theater presents another page from the casebook of that Master of Mystery,

that's Sultan of Sleothing, Martin Bracknell's immortal detective Black Jack Justice,

starring Christopher Mott as Jack and Andrea Lyons as Trixie Dixon Girl Detective.

The name's Justice.

Jack Justice.

There are a few places in the world as unrelentingly hot as a city in a late July heat wave.

Oh, those who have the chance to see the world without a rifle in their hands may speak in hushed, awed tones of the

great Gobi Desert with its vast tracks of arid, empty space, or of the steaming Amazon jungle,

rife with strange and exotic life. Nuts to them, I say. The sky above had been clear and blue

and postcard perfect for nine straight days. The sun beat down

from above as if it had just remembered our little, often gray corner of the globe and was making

up for lost time. Every morning it pierced the low-hanging haze with a deep amber fire and

began anew the task of baking everything in range to a delicate crisp. By two in the

afternoon, the pavement below had absorbed so much heat that there was no shelter from it, however far

a fell a ducked into whatever trickles of shade still ran. By the time the sun rolled west in another

explosion of blood-red fire, the heat trails from the streets and sidewalks brought an

underwater quality to the cityscape and completed the illusion that you were a lobster well on

your way to meeting your maker or a guy in a paper bib, whichever came first. The million stories in

the naked city were as one voice, praying for the very winter winds they had finally wished away last April.

There were times when it paid to be your own boss, even if it meant you worked for a skinflint

who never once made with the fat Christmas bonus. And on the ninth straight day of heat and haze,

a small card appeared in the doorway of the mighty world headquarters of Justice and Dixon private investigations,

...