Miguel was on the verge of tears. The banging on the door was getting louder and louder until the PFA storming his house lost their patience. The next sound was not the angry rap of fists and shouts of the Agentes, for they decided to play nice no longer, but a thundering boom that informed Miguel that they had blasted the door open and stormed inside.
He ran for the basement, moving with a speed that surprised even himself. He was beyond certain that the merchandise could not be salvaged. It was too late. He flung the hatch open, and ignoring the ladder just jumped in, his girth almost making him stuck in the opening. He landed badly on his ankle and limped towards the lab. All this precious equipment that made him a moderately rich man for the last four years, would alone be his life sentence if he did not get rid of it, never mind the fifty neatly packed bags of meth already stored for sale. He’d rather torch it all than let the Policia find it, his prison time was already going to be in the upper double digits without it.
Hands shaking with desperation, he opened a five-gallon pail of acetone and threw it onto a bench. The whole place was splashed. His lungs immediately burned and his eyes felt as if they were on fire, but he did not care. He kicked several random pails blindly, hoping the spilled chemicals would add to a pretty combustible cocktail, and ran back towards the hatch.
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Just before climbing up the ladder, he turned around, lit a match, and tossed it towards the fumes. The pool next to his feet ignited, but lazily. He did not waste time and climbed as fast as he could. He burst out of the hatch, and barely crossed half of the hallway when his path crossed with that of an armed and armor-clad officer of the Special Group of The Argentine Federal Police.
"Stop!", shouted the cop, but Miguel turned around with adrenaline-fuelled grace and leaped back towards the hatch.
"Stop! On the floor!", shouted the officer again, and this time Miguel pretended to comply. He tossed himself forward so that his outstretched fingers reached the edge of the hatch. With the last of his strength, he pulled himself towards the hole and half-fell into the basement, when the cop slammed a knee into his kidney and grabbed him by the collar.
"Motherfucker! Stop running! You are under ar…" the officer’s words and Miguel’s anguished cry of pain choked in their mouths as an ominous whoosh sound came from deep in the basement, followed by a bright yellow fireball. “Oh.", was the last of Miguel’s thoughts. "The flames must have reached the red phosphorus on the top shelf…”
Approximately half of a second later both Miguel “Gordo” Aguirre, a formerly successful meth-cooking chemist, and Raul Martinez, a rising star of the Grupo Especial de Operaciones Federales, were destroyed in an event that was barely registered by their minds.