A look of disgust came on Larry Drake's face as he walked into the bank. Larry hated banks, he worked in one during High School; he vowed never to work in one again. He had to come to this one, though, because of a reported gas leak. Larry now worked for Samson Gas Inc. As he walked across the lobby, a short, bald man in a suit approached him.

"Hello, you must be Larry Drake," the man said, "I'm Charles Ronur, owner of The Second National."

Larry immediately took a disliking of the man, because he was exactly like his old boss. The same sweet but don't mess with me tone of voice, the same prim, gray pinstripe suit, and that little white flower in the lapel that always needed to be straightened, and poofed to make it look exactly symmetrical to the pinstripes. That flower always pissed him off to no end.

"Hello Mr. Ronur," Larry replied cordially, but with no feeling, "If you show me where you're having problems I'll get right to them."

"Over here in the safe deposit boxes," Mr. Ronur said leading Larry past the teller booths and into a small steel doored room. The walls were lined with small boxes that had numbers imprinted on them.

"If you don't mind," Mr. Ronur asked, in a voice that said he was going to do whatever he wanted and didn't care what you thought about it, "I'm pretty busy, so I'll just leave you here and let you take care of things."

Larry considered asking him to stay, just to fluster him, but Larry liked working alone, so instead Larry told Mr. Ronur that it was fine, and he walked out of the door.

The room was like a coffin, long, narrow, and airless. The gas smell got increasingly worse and worse, as Larry walked farther down the room. At the far wall the smell was so bad he had to put on a face mask to keep from passing out. The funny thing was that Larry couldn't find any heating devices in the room, and he knew that there wasn't a Gas Main running under the bank either. Larry started to get edgy, and fidget nervously. He scanned the wall of safe deposit boxes. There was gas slowly flowing out from the keyhole of a box on the top row. It ran down the tightly sealed boxes, and into one that was slightly ajar. Larry knew that he had to open the box, but one thing made him hesitate, he knew he had to ask Mr. Ronur first. Another thing he realized though, was that Mr. Ronur then had to ask a teller to call the owner, who would then call and ask the owner of the box if it was OK to open it. That might take over an hour. One more thing that Larry knew was that gasoline was running freely-worst case scenario. He turned the situation over in his mind, and decided to throw caution to the wind. Larry opened the box. The box was empty, except for a slowly burning cigar at the back-with a pool a gasoline about to envelope it. Larry turned, and ran for the door. It exploded. The shock wave propelled his body through the open doorway, and onto the plush, red carpet of the lobby. It took him a minute, (two more explosions), to finally open his eyes. Half the people were already out of the building, the other half on their way. He tried to move, but his body seemed lifeless. While he lay there contemplating the inevitable doom, he was picked up by Mr. Ronur and carried out the door.

As Larry sat against the building of Quick Clean Dry Cleaners, across the street, watching The Second National slowly burn to the ground, he changed his mind about Mr. Ronur-maybe he wasn't so bad.