King Acid

CLEOPATRA'S NOSE (PART 5)

Too many variables happened that day for her to let inertia drag her to her parking spot. Instead, she rushed to Alkali's car and inserted his key with surgical precision, breaking away and onto the road as soon as she got behind the wheel. Traffic was fluid by then. Everyone had already gotten to their jobs, none the wiser. Of the shift. Of the brink. She wondered if she had actually realized it, or whether she was just like them. Just going through the motions.

Lacking the garage remote, she pulled in next to the front garden of the house. She wore her coat hood over her head and a necktie rolled up to the bridge of her nose when she arrived at the entrance. She opened the door with the spare key Skyler had given her, and when she entered the dining room, she addressed Ace as soon as she saw him trotting towards her, neutralizing his scarce welcoming bark.

"Ace, zatknis," she whispered.

The dog hushed up and lowered his head. She darted her gaze toward any flat surface within reach, stopping for a moment to contemplate the figurines on the wall to the right, over the couch. Skyler had gathered hundreds of figures from different religions and mythologies there, each one on a squared ledge, making a sort of wooden graph paper, with each figure occupying a square. She stared at the rows, up and down and left to right, according to the chronological order of each religion, starting off with the Sumerian goddess Nammu at the top left, followed by more Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek gods. The list seemed endless. Right in the center of the grid was the golden triangle, the eye that sees all, followed by Adam, Eve, and the serpent, along with the gilded letters of Allah, followed by Muhammad—whose face was literally a black question mark over his shoulders—continuing down the rows by assorted Nordic deities and more minority religions, to end with the figure of Xenu from Scientology in the lower right corner.

She had always hated those tchotchkes, but now that they were about to be totaled, she thought of how much effort Skyler had put into bringing them together, and for a moment she felt pity. It was when she looked away from the grid to a separate, adjoining shelf, that she saw again the Daruma doll she had given him a while back as a reminder of his goals, and she recalled the time he assembled a separate shelf, since it wasn't a part of the official collection. She thought he would like to keep at least that figure, so she approached it, sticking close to the wall, and took it with feline precision so as not to be caught by any camera. Then she put it in her pocket and rushed up the stairs to his office.

She took a small backpack and put in it all the correspondence and propaganda she could find on the desktop, and then she used the lighter Colt had given her to burn the remaining papers, which she knew would be enough to start a fire in the house within minutes. eBelieving herself to be momentarily safe, she was unaware that her arrival had not gone unnoticed by the two neighbors whose only task was to monitor that house day and night.

                                             *****

"Page, you see that?" Clayton asked his radio as he watched from the side window of the left house.

"The hooded guy," replied Page, looking from the opposite window of the reflective right house.

"I'll go. Watch my back."

Clayton tucked his .44 Auto Mag in the back of his belt and grabbed the replica of Landau's key provided by the NSA in case of emergency. He looked out the window one last time, trying to make out through his binoculars any other occupant in the car. He thought he was sure. He stepped out of the house and walked casually past the car, glancing sideways. Now, he was sure. He shifted ninety degrees and pelted towards the entrance door, closed and not broken into. Who else could have a house key? he thought.