#i think a meth lab just exploded down the street | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

piratefalls · 8 years ago

Note

“I gotta go, I left my toaster in the oven!"

Listen, I wanted this to be Root but you requested Reese so HERE GOES:

–

This, John thinks, as he closes the door behind him, is what happens when everybody but him gets to take the night off.

The Machine had popped out a new number three days ago after almost a week of silence, and Reese had jumped at the opportunity to do something that didn’t involve throwing Bear his ball for hours on end. The recon is simple enough: Daniel Sumner, 32, makes a decent enough living as a paper pusher at an insurance company, no wife or kids. So far, all signs point to him being a victim, not a perpetrator. Normally this wouldn’t disappoint Reese, but he hasn’t shot anyone in two weeks and his trigger finger is getting itchy.

For the first two days Reese follows him from home to work, out to a cafe around the corner from his office, back to work, and back to a modestly sized apartment for TV dinners and ESPN highlights. After all is said and done, the only person John wants to kneecap is himself so that he’ll have a reason to stop tailing this guy. He goes back to his own apartment that night with no idea where to go, who to ask, and wonders if maybe he should just…go up to the guy and scare him into admitting something.

The next day, things get interesting.

Sumner’s day goes on as it usually does - work, cafe, work, dinner - but then he leaves his apartment a little after 9, and catches the train to one of the more sketchy abandoned warehouse districts in the city. There isn’t another soul in sight, so tailing him gets a little difficult for John, having to keep a larger than usual distance to avoid being spotted. It’s a ten minute walk from the station to Sumner’s destination. He keys himself into the building after looking both ways, and John taps his earpiece.

“Finch, are you sure this guy isn’t into anything weird?”

He hears Harold sigh on the other end. “I have looked through his finances multiple times and found nothing questionable. What else would you have me do?”

“Any chance the Machine can spot purchases the average insurance man wouldn’t usually be making?”

“Perhaps,” he replies. For a long moment all Reese can bear is the steady tapping of Finch’s fingers across his keyboard, his steady breathing as he writes some sort of complicated code to narrow down the Machine’s parameters. After a few moments, Finch sighs, and Reese perks up a little. Maybe he’ll get to shoot someone after all.

“It seems that Mr. Sumner has been purchasing a number of sinus medications recently. Normally this wouldn’t raise any red flags, but he hasn’t missed a day of work in three years and consistently receives a clean bill of health from his doctor.” A few more keystrokes. “Oh my.”

“What is it, Finch?”

“He’s also made a few purchases, scattered over time as they are, for other ammonia hydroxide and a number of other chemicals.”

John sighs. “It’s a meth lab.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Well,” John replies. “I suppose I should take a peek inside.”

“Now, Mr. Reese, I know that this sort of troubling situation makes you particularly gleeful, but I must remind you to exercise caution. We don’t have Carter or Fusco for backup tonight, so I’m afraid you’re in your own.”

He smiles. “You say that as though it’s a bad thing.”

He waits for Sumner to leave for the night, carefully following him all the way back to the subway stop before he himself doubles back to break into the lab.

It’s a crude setup, one he’d seen a number of times while working with the Company. Of course, he normally arrived at the scene after it had already exploded, but this is generally what it looks like beforehand. Cheap materials, poor ventilation, nowhere to safely store the waste produced during the cooking process. One wrong step and this place goes up in flames.

“Finch, can you tell if Sumner has already put this out on the streets? Maybe one of the local cartels is trying to take him out for selling in their territory.”

“I’ve found nothing to indicate that he’s made a profit from his little side project. His finances are as they should be, for someone if his status.”

“Excellent.”

There’s a long pause on the other end before Finch responds. “Mr. Reese, must you do it this way?”

Reese cuts the line and grins. He may not get to shoot anyone, but faking a meth lab explosion isn’t exactly boring.

It takes him an hour, all told, to really make it believable. One carefully placed hole in a container of chemicals that are just close enough to a hot plate that Sumner may have forgotten to turn off before leaving for the night, and voila. By the time the room smells heavily enough of gas, he knows he has about five minutes to get out of the blast zone before it ignites.

He opens the connection to Finch as he’s locking the door to the warehouse. “Do you want me to pick up Thai or Indian on the way back?”

Finch sighs. “What kind of damage are we expecting from your little chemistry experiment?”

“Probably just the building itself, with residual damage to the surrounding area. Minimal, all things considered.”

It’s then that the warehouse explodes two blocks behind him, the bright lights of a chemical fire illuminating the otherwise dark alley in front of him. Sumner won’t be very pleased, but Reese allows himself a quiet moment of joy for a job well done.

“I’m assuming that was your handiwork?”

“Sorry, Finch,” Reese replies, smug. “It seems I left my toaster in my oven.”

Finch sighs. “Indian will do for tonight, Mr. Reese.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” he says, before disconnecting the line.

He gets a double order of his usual and makes his way for the library. There’s something about orchestrating explosions that really gets his appetite up.

#person of interest #kelly watches Person of Interest #poi #my fic

6 notes · View notes

originaldetectivesheep · 7 years ago

Text

The Thirty and One Nights' Momentary Diversion - Within Every Angle And Absorbed By The Matrix Of Reflection

The denizens of the Applied Physics lab, at least some of them, are back from "Nodejacked" for another tale of crazy angles and crazier consequences -- and siqq burns on Gravitational Distortion, H.P. Lovecraft, and the author.

Within Every Angle And Absorbed By The Matrix Of Reflection

"Okay," I said, "I can help Carolína out with this; it's no problem, I don't have anything this afternoon anyway. But… are you really sure that you really want to run this Stan your notes like in a third-rate moeshit iincho plot flag? We're in college. He's a big boy. If he wants to get credit, he can go to class like a normal person. It'd be one thing if he was sick, but he's just hikkied, isn't he? I don't think I've seen him show up all semester."

Riley set something down on the shelf with a clunk and a huff and a weary hunch of the shoulders, and turned away from a long open-sided metal gearbox with a wide fan like an artillery elevator sticking out of it, and locked on to me with a look of long-suffering resignation. "Sajitha, welcome to the wide and wonderful world of the apartment reference. Back when I first moved out of the freshman dorms, Stan and I lived together in Adelard Towers. You remember, that condo village out in the sticks where the Guatemalan mafia had the meth lab that burned down, and the property manager fled to Norway to escape prosecution, and everybody in the developer's office got deported to India? Well, what that means is that I have this property on my record, and Stan has it on his record, and the only people who can tell a prospective landlord that we weren't involved in this gangbang of drugs, corruption, and seven-alarm three-acre fires, and are actually good tenants despite living there, are us – everyone else is in jail or out of the country or both. So I am stuck to him, and he is stuck to me, and if he fails out of school and my landlord raises the rent again, I am going to have a hell of a time finding a place that I can afford. As long as I have anything to say about it, Stan is going to pass his exams and not flunk out – at least until I can get through a couple more tenancies without any other buildings exploding or catching on fire." Riley's face was grim: this was for real.

"Fine," I said, hands up. "Okay; I don't want you to get in trouble either, so I guess that's good enough. Are we set to go, or is he super weird about notes on a thumb drive and do we need to go by the library and print everything out?"

Riley sighed and squinted. "You'd think he would be, with how time-cube weird he is about everything else, but when I sent Leo over, he said that Stan had this triambic icosahedron thing that he used to purify the thumb drive and it was ok. Leo didn't get his thumb drive back, but at least Stan passed the damn midterm." Something creaked on the shelf, and Riley quickly turned around to make sure the gearbox or Bofors action or whatever wasn't going to rip it off the wall.

"So, like a razor pyramid, but for the kind of very special whackos who can also pass algebraic topology courses if someone makes sure they get all the notes," I said, rolling my eyes. "All right; not a problem. The drive's just a burner from the last career fair, and I'll be careful, when we're over his place, not to talk about anything against a four-corner day. Jesus." I stuffed the drive in my pocket, picked up my bag, and hustled through the door to the applied physics lab so that Carolína could reset the EMO drop bars behind us.

"So wait," I said to Carolína, as we climbed up into the bus to head from the engineering quad back downtown, "you know where we're going already. How do you know where this Stan lives? Have you taken him notes before? What's his apartment like? Is he going to hurf at us? Does he smell?"

She shook her head. "No, I just have him on Facebook and in an old group text. I was in a set theory class with him last semester – he goes to his math classes. He… no, Stan is definitely not normal, but he'll go to class if he cares about it, and if you find him there, he's not more weird than like any other weird guy who is into math. I don't know about his apartment – when he was in class, though, he didn't smell so bad you noticed."

I nodded, slowly. Okay. So this wasn't probably going to be that bad; you got a lot of weird guys in engineering, and some of the ones who didn't go to class were like actual live-under-a-bridge trolls with body odor that would break windows, but if Stan wasn't, then this would be just a pain rather than dangerous. I should have known – Riley said they'd roomed together out in that complex before it burned down, and Riley wouldn't've put up with trollishness. "Okay. So what's his deal then? Why does he go to math classes but can't drag himself up to Fields and Waves? It's in the same building – on days he has math classes he's got to go up to campus anyway, and it's not like he's a damn grad student who has one class a day, tops. If he goes to math classes, it's got to be something other than being lazy or trollish if he skips the other ones on purpose."

Carolína furrowed her brow. "I don't know, but I think I remember that he was working on some big project, something math, that was way more important than anything else. He got real, real weird when he was talking about it – like it was almost a religious thing for him."

I shook my head back and forth. Guh. So that was his deal. Utterly unsurprising. "Uuuuugh. One of those. Another one of those. All listening to bizarre IDM. All writing tech-death-metal lyrics on the walls. All putting stellated polyhedra on everything. All running David Icke but the reptoids are being controlled by intelligent shades of vibrating nanoscale colors from higher-order dimensions. All living on hot pockets and freaking out about how one can turn into a Klein bottle." I knocked my head against the bus window.

"Come on – he can't be that bad. Riley used to live with him."

"Yeah – used to; maybe he's gotten weirder since, or they split because he was getting too weird and hotboxing the entire house. Personally, I blame the writers," I said, sitting back up because our stop was coming up. "Anybody who's ever mentioned a 'shining trapezohedron' or used a Szilassi torus as a gateway to another dimension ought to get punted off a bridge, because it convinces guys with poor social skills that if they keep grinding on geometry and do enough of the right drugs, they can become an actual wizard instead of just an internet one. It's got to be the writing: when people just do tons of DMT and smoke weed, they turn out fine. Well, yeah, they go stoner and drop out of anything useful, but they don't get weird about math like the ones who read weird fiction do." Carolína rolled her eyes and shook her head as she stood up; this was our stop, and it wouldn't be too far to get to Stan's place, give him the notes, and then just forget about him forever.

According to Carolína's phone's check-in cloud, Stan's place was a little out of the way; it was a couple streets off the main drag, an old triple-decker next to an abandoned auto body shop with weeds growing through some old truck frames in the back, where she finally climbed up the steps and looked over the mailbox: Stanislav Faldyna, apartment three and a half. There was no doorbell for apartment three and a half.

I shrugged. "So what do you want to do? Do we ring the doorbells for everyone else and ask how we get to apartment 3.5?"

Carolína squinted. "I… guess? I don't know, I mean, probably everybody is out, and I don't know how I'd feel about some random ringing my doorbell to ask about somebody else in the building, but I guess we got to? I don't really know him that well that I can text him and ask him to come let us in, and I don't want to like creeply-crawl around the house to look for another doorbell." She pulled out her phone like she was trying to decide if she should wake up that old group text, or maybe call Riley to see what we were supposed to do.

"Hey," a woman said behind us, "are you looking for someone? Are you looking for Javier? He doesn't live here any more." I turned around and looked her over; a black woman, about our age, probably a student like us, her braids twisted high up on top of her head, holding textbooks in front of herself defensively, like she was wary of the randoms who were standing on her porch looking over the mailboxes and checking their phones.

"Yeah, and no – we don't know this Javier, we're actually looking for this Stan Faldyna, but there isn't a bell or a door for three and a half. Do you live here? Do you know how three and a half works?"

The woman made an uck face. "Stan? He lives in the basement. I guess you want the side door." She nodded vaguely over at the driveway along the fence separating the lot from the weeds of the body shop, and almost shuddered as she came up past us to her own door, hauling out her keys.

"Thanks, I guess," I said after her, as she ignored us and went through the door to apartment 1. "We'll try not to disturb you too much, and if Stan's being a dick we'll tell him to cut the shit." Nobody was listening and it felt empty and futile. I was starting to get a bad feeling about Stan again, and I shook my head as I followed Carolína back down the front steps and around to the side door.

The side door was a squat five-foot slab of wood almost ducked into the ground next to the driveway. No bell, but it did have a 3.5 on it. I banged on the door; if he wasn't in, we could leave the drive in his mailbox and send him a note. Nothing. I banged on the door again, and this time it opened barely a second later.

The door yanked in on a dead-pale, sunken-eyed, sleep-deprived-looking shrimp with sandy brown hair sticking up this way, that way, and every other which way. He looked like he needed a sandwich, or like he was strung out on heroin, or maybe both; I shot a look at Carolína, and she nodded. This was Stan, and this was his deal, and we'd have to take it from here. I swung my bag around and fished the drive out.

"Hey," I said, pushing it over on him, "you don't know us – or at least you don't know me – but Riley sent us over with the notes for Fields and Waves. This is it, so purify it or whatever, and make sure that you show up for the final." I pushed the thumb drive into his chest, and he finally reached up a hand, taking it like he wasn't sure what a USB drive was, or maybe like his depth perception was super bad. He took it at last, and I turned to go.

"Wait," he said, in a voice that sounded like it had cobwebs and an inch-thick layer of dust on it. "Thanks. But since you're here, can you help me with something? I don't want to bother you, but I can't do it by myself."

I stopped. Going down into weird basement apartments with weird dudes was hazardous to your health, but Riley needed Stan intact and passing his classes, and he looked like even Carolína could beat him up with one hand behind her back if he tried anything funny. "Well, maybe. What is it?"

He was looking flat at us. "I need to move my bookcase. It's big. It's too heavy to lift myself." It was an innocent enough request, and looking at him it didn't look like he even knew how to lie like a creep. I looked at Carolína, and she shrugged; I guess this was okay.

"All right," I said. "If it'll help you study, we can help you move your bookcase. It'll be easier with all three of us." He nodded, and went back down the steps; we followed him down into the basement.

Stan's basement apartment smelled like weed and Pot Noodle and unwashed laundry, but it wasn't really that much of a sty; Stan didn't have a lot in the way of stuff. He wasn't big on lights, either, and I nearly tripped coming down the stairs in the dark. He opened up a couple panels in an origami ball with a bunch of short stellated facets, and put the drive inside, closing the paper up around it. Stan motioned over at the far wall, under a low ground-level window. "That's it. It needs to move."

I took a step closer, then another, moving around some kind of trash pile or extremely large origami subassembly in the middle of the floor. The bookcase was empty, but still long and heavy-looking. "Okay," I said. "Just let me and Carolína put our bags down somewhere and we'll help move it. Is the futon okay? Where does it need to go?" I'd set my bag down on a cleanish-looking part of the futon without waiting for an answer.

Stan walked over and grabbed one end of the bookcase, not really pointing anything out. "It just needs to move – back in the kitchen would probably be all right. As long as it's here, the muoctahedron can't spread. And it must spread, so that it can replace the wall." I didn't follow, but I took the other end, and Carolína got in the middle, and by waiting for a cue we finally convinced Stan to lift up and guide the bookcase where it needed to go: the middle of the kitchen floor, where he just left it with a thump. I went back to get our bags, and saw some kind of tiled pattern sticking out of the wall in the corner, back behind where the bookcase had been. It was mold, or tiles, or some kind of garbage thrown in the corner: Stan wasn't growing some kind of infinte theoretical lattice in this basement, and if he was it certainly wouldn't be blocked by a bookcase.

Carolína was less sure. "I'm sorry, Stan, the what? Are you trying to extend your apartment by replacing the walls with a theoretical geometric construct? Besides the part where that can't happen, this is the basement: you're messing with the foundation. If you replace the walls, the house will fall down."

He shook his head. "The muoctahedron is an accident: it's the herald of the change to come. It follows the completion of my great disnub dirhomidodecahedron – it arises from its resonances, even incomplete. When it's completed, the pattern will fold forever." He made just the least little motion in the direction of the origami trashpile on his floor, and there was a weird, unnatural light in his eyes – they seemed to be shining from within in the dark.

I shouldered my bag and tugged at Carolína's sleeve. "Okay; well, we've moved your bookcase, so you can get back to building your impossible figure and studying for Fields and Waves when that drive's vibrations are right. Enjoy your lattice, bye." I sidled over to the steps, and went up them sideways to the door, making sure to keep an eye on Stan as we got the hell out of his place before he got any weirder.

"I give it two weeks before he gets arrested beating up the clerk at a 7-11 because nothing comes in a Klein bottle," I said as we hustled to the bus stop. "I don't want to be the one who has to tell Riley about it, but ya boy Stan is cuckoo nutterbutters."

"As long as he's just doing origami, he's not going to beat anybody up," Carolína put in, a little hurt. "And he's going to be doing it for a while – he said he was building a great disnub dirhomidodecahedron, right?"

"Yeah, and he said he had an infinite lattice 'growing' on his back wall. He's a few vacuum cleaners short of a jam band."

"No, that origami thing – that origami thing in the midle of the floor. It definitely looked like it was big enough to be part of a Skilling's figure, to actually make all the vertices with those pieces of paper. And if he's really making one of those, he'll never finish."

I stopped dead on the sidewalk. "I don't get you. Should I, or is this something that you only get in the advanced geometry classes that you and he did?"

Carolína paused for a second, thinking. "It's pretty hard, and it's pretty obscure. The great disnub dirhombidodecahedron is a hidden uniform polyhedron – it doesn't follow the rules of all the other ones, so it gets called out as 'degenerate', but it's still the only shape in the universe that behaves like it. And it's probably impossible to actually build – it's degenerate because some of its edges are double edges, where four polygons meet on a single line instead of two. You can make it in Mathematica, but physically making out of paper on your floor, I don't think it's possible." She looked disturbed. "If he can do it, it'll be almost as big a deal as when John Skilling discovered the thing, but if he can't do it and gets stuck – and that thing about the muoctahedron –"

"Well, I guess we've got to hope he finishes it, and gets prizes and props for being a math genius," I said, pulling out my phone. "I'm going to call Riley to report in; after that you want to go to the Indonesian popup place and get some satay sticks, or do you have lab?"

Carolína nodded. "Sure, I can hang out; I mean, it's not like he's going to burn the neighborhood down with a polyhedron or anything." I scrolled down to Riley's number, and we went left on Franks to get to Lombok Bali rather than the bus.

I completely forgot about Stan, and his Skilling figure and his muoctahedron, and the part where he was either a genius or totally crazypants, for most of another two weeks, until Carolína called me out of the blue while I was bagging up my groceries at the party store. "Sajitha," she said, "You still have your GPS heat map, right? I'm trying to get to Stan's to take him another thumb drive for Riley, but I can't find his place."

That threw me for a loop. "Carolína, didn't you lead us over there the last time? He lives in that eggshell-white triple-decker next to the abandoned auto body lot right off Whitlock, right? Are you over there now?"

"That's just it – there is no Whitlock Street. Where it should join Macnamara there is nothing – the house numbers are messed up, and it's on the map, but I can't get there. I walk around, and my map pin goes squiggly, and then I end up on the other side." She sounded nervous – maybe even afraid, like she knew but was hoping it was just her going crazy.

"Carolína, just calm down," I said. "You probably just got turned around on one of those streets that isn't marked right, or they were putting in a new Dunkins and you had to go an unfamiliar way round. You're just lost; it's not like the whole neighborhood folded up around some kind of weird topological anomaly and bent itself out of three-space or anything, right? Right? Carolína? Are you there? Carolína? Carolína?"

#fiction #30and1nights

0 notes