Serge A. Storms - Murder Methods

Murder Methods

Serge's methods of killing people are frequently quite inventive, and often provide a highly improbable— but technically possible— escape route. As an example, in Triggerfish Twist Storms ties up a man in a garden shed so that he can stand but not walk. Placing a hula hoop around the man's waist, Serge soaks the surrounding ground with gasoline and connects a floodlight (with the glass removed) to a motion sensor. Thus, the trap is set: if the man stops twirling the hoop, the motion sensor will activate the floodlight, igniting the gasoline. If the man can maintain the hula hoop's motion for several hours, the gasoline will evaporate, and he will eventually be rescued. (Needless to say, the victim fails to display the necessary endurance and perishes in the ensuing fire.) Other methods include putting the tube from a can of Fix-A-Flat down a would be killer's trachea and pushing the trigger, kidnapping a man spying on him and killing him through alcohol poisoning. he inserts a funnel in the man's rectum, pours a liberal amount of rum into the funnel and into the man's colon, then corking up his victim with a bar of soap. He then releases the victim who runs screaming for help down the street. Because the alcohol is absorbed rapidly through the colon walls, the man quickly becomes increasingly intoxicated, and pedestrians laugh at him as merely being drunk. eventually he is unable to speak or stand, and collapses in an alcohol-induced coma, and dies shortly thereafter. His BAC goes from 0.0 to 0.3 in a matter of minutes.

As the series progresses, however, Serge seems to begin to abandon these overly intricate methods. In Torpedo Juice, he kills a petty mugger by forcing him to swallow a handful of bullets, then subjecting him to a MRI (leaving police to marvel at a corpse featuring numerous exit wounds but no visible entry wounds). Later in the same novel, however, Serge kills a boorish drunk via the relatively mundane method of kicking him to death. Still later, he fills an obnoxious man's scuba tank with nitrous oxide, leading to his death during Serge's underwater wedding (fittingly enough, to the strains of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb).

In Atomic Lobster Serge and Coleman are kept very busy in and around Tampa and on a cruise ship as Serge continues to clean up Florida by dispatching many members of the criminal element. Serge employs many innovative methods of terminating Florida low-life using common household items available at neighborhood hardware or sporting goods stores. Serge's methods reflect attention to physics, chemistry and news stories of true crime and popular science.

In Gator-a-go-go Serge once again utilizes some creative methodology in his killings. In one instance, he removes the lap bar from an enormous bungee swing ride and places a gangster whom he has bound and gagged in the seat. When the ride activates, the man is hurled hundreds of feet in the air and eventually lands on top of a building.