The Implosion Job

Comedy Fiction

A 71-year-old retired vault installer learns her late husband's stolen pension is sitting in gold bars inside a Houston tower set for implosion in ten days, locked in a vault she built herself in 1983. With a bad hip, a retired blaster, a grandnephew with a taco truck, and the only safecracker who ever failed to beat her door, Birdie Fontenot has until the building falls to take it back. A 10-episode heist comedy, told one day at a time. Hypothetically. Voices, music and sound are AI-generated.

Episode 1: The Plate

Seven hours after the Rutledge Tower comes down, an FBI agent sits across from a sweet old lady with a tin of pralines and asks where eight hundred pounds of gold went. Birdie Fontenot is happy to tell her, hypothetically. It started ten days ago with a roux, a stranger at the door, and a photograph of a brass plate with Birdie's name on it.

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Episode 2: The Blaster

Birdie needs someone who knows how a building falls, so she goes looking for Hollis Duckworth on the Galveston jetty. He's a retired blaster who has brought down forty-one towers and hasn't caught a fish in years. He doesn't say yes, exactly. He says he has concerns about the delay pattern. Then he walks the demolition site and finds something in the basement that isn't on any plan.

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Episode 3: El Cohete

A janitor who remembers the one thing everyone else forgot. A grandnephew who sells tacos to the demolition crew and knows every guard's lunch order. And a head of security named Buck, who orders barbacoa with no onions at 11:40 every day and pays twenty dollars for information.

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Episode 4: The Ear

Birdie drives to a Galveston nursing home to ask a favor of Salvatore Castellano, the only safecracker who ever spent eleven hours on one of her doors and lost. He wants her to say please. He also has an idea about tungsten.

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Episode 5: The Culvert

Tiny Boudreaux has to decide between his daughter's surgery and his best friend's widow. Then, at eleven at night, five people wade into a hundred-year-old freight tunnel under Bagby Street, and Birdie puts her stethoscope to a brick wall.

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Episode 6: Noise

Teo talks his way into the basement to fix Buck's camera. A thirty-nine-dollar baby monitor turns the vault room into a radio play. Birdie hears her own dial turn from forty feet away. Then Clay Rutledge changes his plans.

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Episode 7: The Leak

Buck finds the crew's weak spot, and it's the biggest heart on the team. Birdie visits a grave, tells one man one secret, and waits to see who hears it.

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Episode 8: Friday Night

Twenty-nine bars of Beaumont's finest tungsten arrive in a horse trailer. The crew goes in at one in the morning, with Sal listening on the radio from Galveston. Everything goes perfectly until the lights go out.

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Episode 9: Saturday

Locked inside her own vault in the dark, Birdie finally tells Sal the secret he's waited thirty-seven years to hear. Then a Gulf storm fills the tunnel, Buck springs his trap on an empty basement, and a police officer walks up to a flatbed truck on the Northwest Freeway.

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Episode 10: Seven A.M.

The countdown ends. Hollis calls one more shot, and for eleven seconds nobody in Houston looks at anything else. The gold ends up in the one place nobody thought to look. The finale.

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