# How would a person send something in the mail this fast, if possible?



## ironpony (Apr 15, 2018)

For my story, a cop has acquired evidence to get all the villains arrested, but he cannot turn over the evidence to his superiors, cause he got it without a warrant, thereby making it tainted.  So he has to get it to his superiors in a way, in which it will be untainted.  The only solution pretty much is to mail it to them anonymously.

The evidence is leverage that the leader of the gang of villains has on all his members, so none of them turn on him.  The main character finds out that the leader has leverage on all of them so he sets up a plan to manipulate the leader into being given a reason to go where he is keeping all the leverage, to get out the leverage on one of the members to turn into the police... thereby leading the MC to the leverage on the rest of them.

Now once the villain gets this piece of leverage, he is going to meet up with all the other villains to go over what to do next.  The MC wants to use this opportunity, cause he now has all the villains in the same place, at at the same time, so they can be busted and arrested at all at once now.

So he has to mail in all the leverage evidence, before the group of villains go there separate ways after meeting up.  Which means he has about 1 hour max to mail it in, and the police need time to examine the evidence, and figure out what it is really fast before all the villains split up as well.  But is there any type of mailing service that can deliver it to the police in less than an hour, after mailed?

In my research, the fastest service I could find was 24 hours, but is there service that can mail it in less than an hour?  I thought about a bike messenger service... however, the main character needs to mail it in anonymously so the police do not know it was him, otherwise it will not be tainted.

So is it possible to remain anonymous, without anyone seeing your face, when it comes to hiring a bike messenger service?  Or what would the MC have to do to male it in anonymously, so it cannot be traced back to him, in less than an hour?


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## sas (Apr 15, 2018)

Pigeon Carrier. Then shoot the pigeon.


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## Ralph Rotten (Apr 15, 2018)

There are delivery services in most towns that act as subcontractors for both UPS & fedex.  Here in Tucson we have Xcel storage & delivery.  They warehouse parts for UPS (who is warehousing parts for MY company).  If I need a part, I call UPS, and they call Excel, and Excel delivers the part wherever I need it, in about an hour.
It is possible that your MC either has a friend who works somewhere like Excel, or figured out a way to hide the evidence in a parts box that was intentionally placed in the storage bin by a friend of the MC. 
Never overlook the potential of having a best friend on the fringes of the story.  Best friends can create clever banter, fun interactions, and how they view the MC helps to illustrate the lead character.  Not only that, but best friends are a disposable plot devices.


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## ironpony (Apr 15, 2018)

Okay thanks.  I was thinking the MC's wife can help him out with that maybe, or something.  However, is it possible for the wife to never show her face while mailing it?  Cause the police are going to do everything they can to trace it back to the original mailer.  So can you have something delivered to the police without showing your face to anyone at all, at the parts company?

Cause if the police track down the friend, they are going to arrest her/him, and then pressure them to say who put them up to this, and the MC does not want to put a loved one in that position.


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## FireofDarkness (May 9, 2018)

While disguised give a homeless person 10 bucks to take the package in to the shipping officer, & 10 more bucks when he returns. All leads should end at the homeless person if the disguise was good. *make sure no fingerprints are on any of the documents, we check that when we get anonymous tips/evidence*


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## Bodes (May 21, 2018)

wait, isn't that the purpose of scanning documents then faxing things over?


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## ironpony (May 22, 2018)

The evidence that needs to be delivered to the police is video evidence, so it can't be faxed.  It can be emailed and it would take too long to upload the videos, in order to email them over.  The time it takes the villains will be gone, so their is a very short window to get it to the police.


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## moderan (May 23, 2018)

Using a crappy 1 MB connection, like you get in a typical public library or internet cafe, you can stuff something like that in a Dropbox folder or somewhere similar like a webroot or cloud storage in minutes, even if your mc had to sign up for the service under an assumed name, and preserve a copy on a thumb drive. An hour is long enough to go to lunch too, and maybe get a haircut or do some shopping, perhaps for a clue or two. You're greatly exaggerating file size if you think it takes an hour to upload mp4 files or wmvs or whatever. If they were that big, people would have to surf porn using the Cray. I just uploaded 700 megabytes of cat videos to my web site, using WS_FTP on a 15Mb connection. It took a minute and thirty seconds.
The thumb drive could be copied again or put in an envelope or whatever.


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## sarahvdan (May 23, 2018)

I was thinking along the lines of getting someone else to drop it in too. A kid who can slip in and out again without being noticed. Or someone who can drop the evidence onto a desk without being acknowledged. What about a post cart?? You know one of those things they used to deliver mail - are they still a real thing? Or create a distraction and drop it onto a desk. There'd be a lot of tension to be had about whether it would get discovered in time too.


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## ironpony (May 24, 2018)

Okay thanks.  I've used drop box before and it takes a few hours to upload a video in my experience.  I could do the uploading as long as the police cannot trace where it is being uploaded from.  As for a person delivering it, then I would just have to write another character, and I am trying to cut down on characters and not add more.

A lot of times, people's advice is to add new characters to solve problems, but is that always a good thing, or can it get to too many?


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## moderan (May 24, 2018)

Less is more, I'd say. The old adage is actually, "when in doubt, introduce a man with a gun," or something very similar to that, and comes from Raymond Chandler. There are plenty of ways to anonymously upload things. Google is your friend. 
The thing with dropbox is that it can take a while to update. The upload happens real quick, but the app updates slowly. I imagine those servers are pretty busy.


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## ironpony (May 24, 2018)

Do you think it would be much more simpler if I just write it so that the villain has all the leverage on the others, buried in the ground, like I had it before, and therefore, the hero doesn't need to sidestep this whole fruit of the poisonous tree, legal red tape, or is that too big of a plot hole for readers to overlook?


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## moderan (May 24, 2018)

I don't see where that's a plot hole, but then I don't know the plot. Keep it simple.


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## ironpony (May 24, 2018)

Oh some people told me it was a plot hole, because why would the villain bury it in the ground, when he can just keep it in a safe deposit box or something like that.  But keeping it in a safe deposit box, really over complicates things, cause the police would not be able to get a warrant to get it though, so the hero then has to steal it, and turn it into the police somehow, without them knowing it was him.  So I thought burying it in the ground kept things a lot more simple.


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## moderan (May 24, 2018)

Plotting isn't a thing you do very much, is it?


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## ironpony (May 24, 2018)

I thought it was or at least I have been doing a lot of it on this story.  Why?


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## moderan (May 24, 2018)

From my perspective, it looks like a maiden voyage into long-form writing. Could be wrong. It's a decent effort but there's too little preparation before putting pen to paper. This is some of the hardest stuff to do well, crime/suspense writing. Everyone assumes you can just sit down and do it, but conspiracy-based plotting and chronicling criminal behavior takes a heap of study.
Lots of moving parts in those plots, and they have to spin exactly right or the whole works is off-rhythm.


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## ironpony (May 24, 2018)

Okay thanks.  How is it too little before putting pen to paper? Is the villain burying the leverage videos in a secret place, not enough, plot wise?  If so, what is wrong with it exactly, that I need to prep more?

One thing I do in my writing of criminals, is I put myself in their situation and think what would I do if I were them?  Is that a bad way of creating the characters?


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## moderan (May 25, 2018)

You don't dig very deep. Everything is surface-level. It's just going through the motions instead of doing the exercise. 
To create a criminal personality that way takes a lot of life experience. There are situations and aspects that you'll not have experienced, and we've pretty much established that extrapolation is not your long suit, as you're asking the members of the forum here to do it for you.
I'm gonna stop there as it'll just be seen as me being cranky and petty again.


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## ironpony (May 25, 2018)

Okay thanks, but where can I get this experience?  I mean the criminals in my story are more like terrorist types, so am I suppose to interview real life terrorists, to try to get experience?  I mean where does one get this experience?


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## ironpony (May 25, 2018)

moderan said:


> Using a crappy 1 MB connection, like you get in a typical public library or internet cafe, you can stuff something like that in a Dropbox folder or somewhere similar like a webroot or cloud storage in minutes, even if your mc had to sign up for the service under an assumed name, and preserve a copy on a thumb drive. An hour is long enough to go to lunch too, and maybe get a haircut or do some shopping, perhaps for a clue or two. You're greatly exaggerating file size if you think it takes an hour to upload mp4 files or wmvs or whatever. If they were that big, people would have to surf porn using the Cray. I just uploaded 700 megabytes of cat videos to my web site, using WS_FTP on a 15Mb connection. It took a minute and thirty seconds.
> The thumb drive could be copied again or put in an envelope or whatever.



When you say 700 mb of cat videos, how long are these cat videos and were they HD or anything?


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## moderan (May 26, 2018)

That doesn't matter. File size is what matters.


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## ironpony (Jun 4, 2018)

moderan said:


> That doesn't matter. File size is what matters.



Okay thanks, but video length partially determines file size though.


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## Pete_C (Jun 8, 2018)

Why don’t you make a video, upload it and time the upload. That way you won’t have to ask other people to do it for you.


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## ironpony (Jun 10, 2018)

Oh but I did do that.  I uploaded to google drive and drop box, and a five minute long HD video takes a few hours to upload, which I felt was too long since all the villains will only be in the same place at the same time to be arrested all together, for only two hours max most likely.


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