Romancing the Bomb (Blogophilia 23.7)

The sun began to reflect off the laptop screen.  Jeremy shifted to the left to be more comfortable.  It had been a long night. Trilling yellow warblers became noticeable to him as he glanced at the piles of written notes. Notes to go with notes. Thirty or forty pieces of 8”X 11” lined notebook paper grouped by research type, each with a web notation where the information came from. 

Bomb recipes and triggering devices had taken up most of the time.  Should they be 18” or 24”?  He had already settled on the 1-1/2” as being the best diameter, with PVC pipe being the easiest to work with.  He guessed the best thing to do would be build a few and test them at the farm.  After all, that was why he went out there, right? He decided to purchase most of the equipment at two local hardware stores, rather than at Home Depot.  The surveillance systems they used weren’t all that extensive.  Pipes would be purchased at one store and the end caps and glue at the other. 

One of the stores sold guns and reloading equipment.  Maybe a quick glance at their inventory, but that would be something purchased online.  It would be delivered to Mother’s old house.  There wasn’t a tenant and he could just drop by to sign for the package.  He’d used this method before for purchases of things he wasn’t supposed to have and it worked pretty well.  Ms. Harriet, the probation lady, was not the brightest bulb in the fixture and Jeremy did take advantage of it from time to time. 

Kind of like the computer.  He wasn’t supposed to have it.  When it was time for inspection, he would hide it in the bathroom ceiling. And of course he didn’t buy it.  It just happened to be on the table at Starbucks. In three hours, the old data was gone and he good.  He did see if any of the data was useful. There was nothing but credit cards that could be traced. He had other accounts that would work better for this project.  

Getting on the internet was even easier. The Starbucks Wifi site was strong enough to make it to his apartment and there were four other neighbors that never bothered to lock their internet accounts.  So it was just a matter of switching from one account to another to make tracing his steps harder for anyone who was nosy.  If something was really sensitive, he moved a few blocks up the street to tap a bank’s account from the patio of the Blind Canary, the bar in the lobby of their building. Yay for sloppy security people.

Tracing the Pigs became a pastime.  They had both transferred to the Gwinnett County police from Dekalb a few years ago.  Both were homicide detectives.  Did they still work together?  It looked like Murray was a Lieutenant, now.  But the fact they were in the same department made the trapping process a bit easier.  He had an idea how it was going to happen, but that was a later phase of the project.  “In every job that needs to be done, there is an element of fun.” Mary Poppins was right on that one.

Switching the machine over to another unsecured account, he researched effective blast ranges.  In unrestrained environments most of the blast force seemed to go up, rather than out. Jeremy understood immediately why cars were used.  Not only could they be driven to the location needed. The extra metal directing the blast force out would break into shrapnel.  There was a note saying the force of the explosion dissipated using an inverse square rule. The force at 50 feet away would be 25% of that at 25 feet. Testing will prove the ideal distance and that will start as soon as he gets the all the pieces.   

Pushing the chair back, he looked at the pile. The busyness was good for his soul. Revenge was a relentless spirit, pushing him past sleep. The ethereal vision of Sarah dressed as a Valkyrie in white shimmered in his eyes. Blinking the mirage away, he thought: she must be avenged and done proud.  

Stumbling over the bed, he fell fast asleep.  Sarah’s clothes came off in his dream.

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Topic-Kismet

Pic-Sallon Newlove

Pic guesses Ethereal (in blog) Valkyrie (in Blog), Mirage (In blog), Desert dream, Oasis, Dry love.