Supporting Cast:

When Frank Grace was ten, growing up in Spearfish, South Dakota, he spent five bucks of his birthday money on fireworks. Fireworks are legal throughout the Midwest. You can buy cherry bombs, M-80s, Roman candles, buzz bombs, better rockets than the Palestinians build. Agricultural co-ops sell M-80s and punk rope year round for crop control. Farmers lay a strip of M-80s around their freshly planted fields. The periodic explosions keep the crows away. Frank took his goody bag of Black Cats and cherry bombs to an abandoned quarry to experiment. With the glowing punk clenched between his teeth he looked like FDR. He tossed M-80s into the pellucid water and watched them explode into foaming baskets.

He spotted what appeared to be an empty fifty-gallon oil drum lying on its side. What would be the effect, Frank wondered, of inserting a single Black Cat into that space and watching it explode? Anticipating a great whump, Frank knelt at one end, black bunghole staring at his gut. He lit a firecracker and inserted it in the bunghole. The reaction was instantaneous. A gout of flame erupted from the bunghole straight into Frank’s stomach. The barrel skittered forward five feet, sides bulging like a marshmallow.

Frank lay on the ground writhing in pain. When he was able to sit up, he found his T-shirt burned clear through, cotton fibers mixing with his charred skin. He had suffered third degree burns. He staggered to the county road where a farmer found him and delivered him to Four County Hospital.

 

Frank learned several things: how a rocket works, the instantaneous force of expanding gas, and oil barrels that appear to be empty often aren’t. They are filled with the fumes of whatever they contained, even years later.

 

His experience might have discouraged other young men. It only made Frank curious. Detonator is about where his curiosity leads him.

Detonator

Sling Blade

Lily

 

Former secretary for the Hong Kong Corporation, Lily and her father are on the run from Grincorp for helping Frank escape after the blowing up their office that was in the same building Lily worked in.

Herman Manglebaum

 

Former Stassi, East German Police. He is believed to be responsible for the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, in 1990. Hired by Grindcorps to kill Frank Grace.

McGill Green

 

Detective from San Francisco who suspects Frank of being a terrorist and involved in the Phil Davis Federal Building bombing, where McGill’s sister died.