Valerie Ronns, Explosives Expert

by Hannah Mathilde Little

July 21, 2006

A bead of sweat made its weary way down the lines that gravity and time had engraved upon Valerie Ronns’ concentrating expression. “It has been so long since the unsuspecting public last called upon me. Let’s see… thirty years, yeah, I think that’s enough to be called long.” Valerie was good, very good… at her prime. A 5.7 second average for defusing any bomb was enough to make her the top in the tri-state area.

Her subconscious was so confident that she might have attempted the job blindfolded. “Whoever set up this explosive was obviously an amateur and not even one of the good amateurs with electricity conducting duct tape.” As Valerie defused the devise several things flowed through her mind. Among the thoughts: “I’m too old for this. Sixty, I mean, come on, who defuses bombs at sixty? Silly President Barron: I think it was unwise of him to train such hyper-active blood as that Toryn kid as my early replacement. I have half a mind to defuse this and set it up in his living room. Barron’s older than I am. What could the guy be thinking; hiring an old lady like me to defuse this mess? Perhaps he’s hoping I blow myself up from an arthritis related mistake. I’d only take, what, the whole state park with me. He wouldn’t care about the natural habitat being blown though, the crazy little man.”

“There we go: all clear.”

Valerie Ronns was in the parking lot of a state park. The state troopers had kindly evacuated the area of pedestrians, put up construction tape, and fled the scene themselves. The bomb had been secured underneath a cheap little sedan. Conveniently, Valerie wasn’t very large in build, so she was able to slip underneath the car and slip back out bomb in hand. The parking lot was deserted, save a few cars that had been left on account of the troopers evacuating so “efficiently.”

Valerie’s vehicle, a deep red Hummer, was parked confidently a few spaces away from the poor little suicide car. The police needed to examine the unfortunate vehicle for evidence, so she opened the unlocked door and tossed the bomb into the back seat. She sat in the front seat and leaned over the arm rest to open the glove box. There was a manual. “How convenient,” she pulled it out and rifled through the pages until she caught something about towing. “Aha.” She set her finger on a diagram showing a place to hook onto.

After moving her Hummer to the front of the suicide car she took out the tow hook in one hand and consulted the manual which she was still holding open to the diagram in her other hand. She knelt down and, upon looking for the designated tow hook, found that there was no such hook. “Arg, why is it that something has to go wrong? Every time!” Seeing nothing in the front that would work well as a makeshift tow hook she looked under the back. “Aha, this should work.”

Valerie stuffed the manual back in the glove box, shifted the car to neutral, and closed the door of the vehicle before climbing into her Hummer. She backed around, the tow line automatically retracting as she got closer to the car until she got to the desired distance where a sensor stopped the line from over-retracting. Now satisfactorily aligned with the suicide vehicle, she switched to first gear and headed for the gate. “Hmm, the police closed the gate, how kind of them. Maybe they thought it would help save the town in the event of an explosion. How shall I get out? …Ah, that clearing over there should work fine.” There was a patch of grass between a couple trees a little ways away from the gate. The exit road was on the other side. It would just be… a shortcut.

The suicide car seemed to be towing reasonably well on the highway. Well enough that Valerie’s concerns were set aside. She turned on some music and jived for about an hour before she glanced in her side mirror and took her foot off the gas. She turned the wheel and hit the brakes spinning for a quick 180. The car wasn’t in site. She drove for a good fifteen minutes before seeing the pitiful looking hunk of metal sitting in the road, the four-ways blinking forlornly. A light smile crossed Valerie’s face, like she saw a pet that she had somehow misplaced. “I must have bumped those four-ways somehow.” Cars passed by it, each driver whirling his or her head around once he had passed the vehicle in question, probably wondering if he had just imagined a vehicle stopped in the middle of the lane facing the wrong way.

After Valerie had stopped in front of the suicide vehicle she checked the tow hook and found that the part she had hooked onto had come clear off, and that the tow line had retracted so as not to drag. This time she rigged the hook so it came from up by the roof of her Hummer and jacked the front tires of the suicide vehicle off the ground while hooked onto the front axle. It wouldn’t fall off now.

When she got to the police station she released the car in the small parking lot, wrote a note, filled out a couple forms, and put them in a nice crisp manila folder that she placed on the front seat. Being of no more use to the public until her next call, Valerie headed back to her cottage by the academy. As she entered her cottage she was greeted by her cat, Cotton, who was purring luxuriously and comfortingly.

Valerie had a small but organized cottage. She sat at her drawing table and continued what she had been doing before she had received the police department’s plea. She had been working on a simple cartoon of her life, and was just now starting on the part about her first three exciting years out of the academy.

Val conveyed in her cartoon how she had gotten out of the academy and spent three years in the field before the academy got a new president who hired a young man, Toryn, as an unnecessary replacement for her. Valerie wrote of how she was set aside, demoted to a regional sector of the academy where they paid her to lecture to the students for thirty years. She also drew the incident where Toryn got himself blown up, of course. Interesting how Val was now replacing Toryn; as old as she was, she was still better than he.

A few days after the action had occurred, a knock at the door disturbed Valerie from her reverie. When she opened the door she found a man with a sheet of paper on a clip board. Behind him a tow truck with the suicide vehicle was visible. As Valerie signed the sheet she said, “Thank you. Would you please unload it out back with the others?”

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