Day 296 - Perfectly Executed. - Chapter 1 (1283 Words)

Perfectly Executed.

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Still working on the War Corp, but I had this idea on the way to work this morning and I had to start it. I may flick back between the two ideas over the last couple of months of writing.

We'll see...

Perfectly Executed

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1

It was just like any other day and the man who he passed on the street was indistinguishable from any other.

Except.

That man was soon unforgettable, and the acts he took were unforgivable. It was easy to see these in hindsight but hindsight was only any good when you could actually do something about it.

If he had known then what he did now then a way to prevent the whole grisly affair might have presented itself, but that again was easy to see in hindsight. He struggled with the pain of his loss, but he had the clarity of purpose that it brought to him.

The phone call was unexpected; he did not recognize the number and ignored the call, sliding it into the red oblivion of his call screening. Except the person calling was persistent and called back again, immediately perhaps realizing that the call had been deferred and ringing back straight away.

There was that click, the cold feeling that something important or bad was digging into him, and that it would be advisable to front up and face whatever it was. He wracked his brain, had he paid all this months bills? Was there a problem with something? Did he have something on loan that he had forgotten to return? Was it the grant people?

None of these things seemed likely, and the number unfamiliar.

Answer slid to the right and there was the call, totally unexpected and surprising. Answering this call was like stepping in front of a bus, thumping into him like a moving wall and tossing him like a rag doll into the air. The ground beneath him fell away as the reality of what he was being told was hitting home.

There had been an incident at his house and the police were there now, he needed to get home as soon as possible, perhaps someone could drive him there? They would not give him all the details, just that they had been alerted by a neighbor about a break-in, that was the phrase they used, and that he needed to come to the house, now and they would explain it all then.

He called his wife’s number, her cell phone rang and rang and did not answer. Were the police in his house? Why was she not picking up? Would they ignore the phone if it were ringing like that? Would they see it was his ID calling and refuse to answer if Jane could not? Or would not?

Why was she not answering, his fingers fumbled on the phone and he thought in a cold sweat that everyone outside the glass doors was watching him fall apart. He felt embarrassed that it was potentially over something that was not worth the fear and terror, because it was unknown. He had to get out, before someone asked him what was happening, before any one in the lab outside his office, would talk to him. The white coats and glasses of his colleagues, the t-shirted cool of the researcher assistants and graduates ‘interning’ all indifferent to his agitated state as he tottered unsteadily, in his own mind, through the room and finding the door.

He spun and was dizzy in fear, needing to get there fast but barely able to walk straight the fifty or so feet from his desk to the parking lot. The office was on a busy street and taxis were plentiful, and waiting especially this time of day. He waved uncertainly at a driver, standing casually next to his car and then hurriedly stabbing his cigarette into the gutter, sign language ruling the implied contract between the two of them.

His address was given, and instructions flew on every step of the journey home, not waiting or allowing the driver to show his local knowledge or use his GPS system, the urgency in his voice was all the authority required.

The street was calm and quiet, even as his mind raced at the possible explanations, and he had just about managed to talk himself off the ledge, convince himself it was a storm in a teacup, that it was just a robbery and everyone was fine.

Then he saw the lights.

The trees that lined the middle section of Panorama Road, they hid the house from the street but they always obscured oncoming traffic until you were virtually in front of the house. Now when the taxi approached the street frontage, the trees gave up their hidden treasure, a sparkling and brightly colored cascade of bejeweled lights sitting atop a half dozen cars and an ambulance, no… two ambulances.

“Holy fuck.” He whispered to himself and pressed his face against the window, one hand on the glass as if he were a child in awe of a fireworks show seen from a bedroom late at night.

“Here? I don’t think I can stop here man?” The Taxi driver rolled to a halt as the policewoman who was directing traffic around a hastily erected cordon prevented him from pulling where the passenger had been pointing.

He did not look at the total on the machine, the clicking on the meter had been like a clock to him, it did not represent money totaling up but it was time slipping away that he was paying for, time was too precious a commodity, a physicist like him was all too aware of it’s fickle nature.

Time was not the constant that people said it was. Time was a bitch.

The money in his hand could have been any amount, he blindly grabbed notes and receipts, pieces of paper in his wallet and one lengthy scribbled equation he had been keeping there since he had thought of it. The wad of paper flew across the gap between the backseat and the driver in the front.

A flutter of wispy and unimportant things that made a mini storm in the car, and the driver exclaiming as they flew omnidirectional in the cab.

He did not wait, did not want to know and just opened the door even as he was throwing money and paper at the man, his gaze on the flashing lights, the orange red tape that cut off the pavement, part of the road and sectioned his house from the rest of reality.

The policewoman was trying to get the attention of the driver who was head down in the wheel well looking for the money, becoming aware that he had been given over fifty dollars for a less than twenty fare. He scooped it up and was going to object, half-heartedly that the man had overpaid but he was gone, the rear door left open in his haste to get out. The other side of him was the angry face of a woman in a hi-visibility police jacket yelling at him to move on, while he spluttered his confusion back at her.

He, the man whose home this was, ran stumbling over his own feet in an effort to find out what was going on, and right into the arms of a waiting officer. The wall of uniform and orders to not let anyone breach the barrier came up in front of him, and he dashed against it like the sea. Urgent and insistent, pushing at every possible way to get over the wall, but still rejected from his approach.

He had to come to a complete standstill in that moment, and faced the fact that since he answered the call he had not stopped moving for even a second, his legs and hands pumping even while seated in the taxi.

Now he was at a dead stop.