After that, Kelly didn’t just get promoted, he got turned into a one-man training academy. Since he couldn’t be everywhere in the city at once, he got handed a crew of assistants who were there to work as his eyes and ears—and, of course, his nose. It might sound glamorous, learning from this legendary, superhuman figure, but you have to remember that this wasn’t some grand Karate Kid life lesson thing: The whole reason you’d be doing it would be the “wax on, wax off.”
These were laborers whose jobs were all about plugging up leaking shit and polluted waters, All they got for it, other than a salary that was as subterranean as the job, was all the dead fish they could carry. Before anyone had the revolutionary idea of putting a grating over sewer pipes, anything living in the city’s rivers could just find its scaly little ass stuck in a drainpipe or flopping around on a subway track.
Kelly himself caught enough sea creatures to amass a whole sewage-covered aquarium over the years, though everything he caught was long dead when he found it: Everything from a school of minnows to a champion-size trout to a nearly three-foot-long eel found itself plugging up the works for Kelly to fish it out.
When it comes to mementos, a professional shit-sniffer can’t exactly put together a trophy room with the vital evidence from his greatest cases, and if he ever tried, one of his assistants would probably shove it down the nearest sewer to give Pennywise a nice dinner.
Instead, Smelly Kelly had a whole suite of specialized tools he used to stay one step ahead of the city’s water and air, back in the day when the best air quality index you could get was “smoking or less smoking.” The list ranged from the obvious, like matches for checking if the air was flammable, to the arcane, like a map of the city from before the Revolutionary War, to the stuff Kelly had to invent himself. Some of his custom tools included the “aquaphone,” a modified sound amplifier for listening to water currents through walls, an extra-strength stethoscope that could pick up a subway train coming from all the way up on the surface.