Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

After a time, she decided to go out for cigarettes.

Outside, the mess had been cleared out of the street, but the neighbors’ house was still in chaotic disarray, the missing wall along the front of the top floor covered by a flapping tarp. The place looked deserted, no sign of the family—the McBrides, she thought their name was. They must have gone to stay with relatives or friends.

She felt a slight twinge of guilt over what had happened to them, and to Mrs. Baumgartner, too, but quickly sloughed it off, focusing instead on planning ahead, running scenarios in her mind and picking them apart.

As she turned and headed down the block toward the liquor store, she lit the last cigarette left in the pack. The street seemed weirdly empty for midday. An occasional car trundled up the hill and past her. The only person in sight was a colorful bum that she saw almost every day, an eccentric local character nicknamed “Circles” by the people in the neighborhood.

He had a dozen colorful ribbons braided into his dirty beard and had earned his nickname because of his strange way of walking. Instead of moving in a straight line, he got from place to place by walking in a chain of tight circles. Sometimes it took him two or three hours just to travel the length of one block.

When he saw Nina, he executed a couple of agitated circles in her direction, waving his skinny arms.

“The man wants you!” he shouted. “You watch out! He’ll do it to you! I know!”

“How you doing, Circles?” she said with an indulgent smile, wrinkling her nose against the scent he emitted. She held up her cigarette. “I’d give you a smoke, but this is my last one. How about I give you one on the way back from the store, okay?”

“The man!” he said again. “He doesn’t think I know, but I know.” He tapped his temple with a black fingernail. “Nobody’s gonna tell me what I know!”

Clearly she wasn’t going to get through to him.

“See you later, Circles,” Nina said, waving with her cigarette hand and walking away, smoke trailing behind her.

Even though the streets were relatively empty, there was a small line at the liquor store, including an elderly woman who wanted to get input from everyone about which lottery numbers “felt most lucky.” Nina was about ready use a bottle of Tab to conk the old biddy on the back of her bouffanted head. But she wasn’t confident that the bottle would make a dent in that blue Aqua Net helmet.

The woman finally got her lucky numbers sorted out, and Nina finally got her two packs of Virginia Slims and her diet soda.

On her way out the jingling door, she stuffed the soda and one of the two packs of cigarettes into her purse, and then started to peel the cellophane off the second pack. She was planning to give one of the cigarettes to Circles, like she’d said she would, but as she turned to walk back to her house, she didn’t see him anywhere.

Strange, she thought.

Circles was so slow that it took him ages to get anywhere, and he had been in the middle of the block when Nina had talked to him. Yes, it had been a longer wait then she’d expected at the liquor store, but not more than ten or fifteen minutes. It would usually take Circles at least an hour to cycle his way from the middle of the block to one of the cross streets.

No one on the block would have invited him into their house or car, smelling the way he did. The only place he could have gone was up the driveway on the left side of the shabby apartment building across the street from her place.

Curious, she waited for a car to pass, then headed over, open pack of cigarettes in her hand. But when she reached the mouth of the driveway in question, she paused.

It was broad daylight, and while her neighborhood certainly wasn’t the safest in the world, it was hardly a crime-infested war zone. There was no reason why she should hesitate about entering the alley.

But she did.

It just didn’t feel right.

Circles wasn’t visible from where Nina was standing, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t in there. There were a large dumpster, some stray trash bags, and a stained, discarded twin mattress down at the far end. He easily could have been behind the debris. Probably just taking a piss. Or worse. And that was nothing she needed to see.

Nina looked down at the pack of cigarettes, then turned on her heel, tucking the smokes into her purse and heading back home.

* * *

“Aw, don’t go,” Allan whispered. “Come back and join us, Miss Nina Sharp.”

But she didn’t, and with conflicting emotion, he watched her walk away. On the one hand, he knew that the time wasn’t yet right for him to have her, and any deviation from the plan made him anxious, as if it might spiral wildly out of control. But there was another part of him that yearned for her without regard for all his cautious preparation.

He still knew next to nothing about the two hippies from Reiden Lake, but Nina Sharp, she had been easy to research. Starting with her registration for the cute little green Volkswagen Beetle, Allan had leapfrogged through her paper trail, eager to learn everything he could about her.

Nina Louise Sharp was twenty-eight, never married. Middle child of three daughters, born here in San Francisco to Sullivan and Marie Sharp. Abandoned by her philandering father and ignored by her overworked mother, Nina seemed to have thrown herself into achieving academic excellence. Her school records showed that she was a straight-A student and the valedictorian of her graduating class at Balboa High School.

From there she went on to be accepted at Stanford with full academic scholarship.

Allan had been surprised to find that Nina owned not only the ugly lavender house she lived in with those insufferable musicians, but also a second rental property that was bringing in a tidy little income. She had substantial resources, as well, from a variety of shrewd investments. Miss Nina Sharp was not only ambitious, she was extremely good with money and while she was far from wealthy now, he could see that she would be in the future.

Too bad she wouldn’t have a future.

Beneath Allan’s boot, the bum with the stupid ribbons in his beard writhed and choked, blood bubbling from the necklace of stab wounds around his filthy throat. He clutched weakly at Allan’s pant leg, and Allan kicked his shaking fingers away. Torturing the human vermin had seemed mildly amusing for a few moments, but now the bum’s agony just seemed pathetic and irritating.

He knelt down beside the useless bum and stared into his contorted, uncomprehending face. So much of the joy of killing was watching his victims come to the understanding that they would not survive. Torturing a mentally incompetent person like this man was never satisfying on that deeper level, because they had no idea what was happening to them.

Allan looked down at his hands. They were completely normal, not even the faintest hint of the sparks below the skin. The bum’s suffering had failed to invoke any reaction whatsoever.

With a weary sigh, he slid the blade of his knife into the creature’s right eye. He held it there for a moment, until the body stopped moving. When he was sure that the bum was dead, he pulled the knife out, wiped both sides of the blade on the man’s filthy purple shirt, and put it back in his jacket pocket.

Time to go see what Miss Nina Sharp and her two boyfriends were up to.

21

“Everything okay?” Bell asked when Nina walked back in to her room.

“Sure,” she replied, shrugging. “Just went for cigarettes.” She peered over his shoulder. “How’s it going?”

“Excellent,” Walter said, patting the newly assembled machine sitting on greasy newspaper in the center of her bedroom floor. “I could probably continue to play around with a variety of optional modifications, if time were not a factor, but I feel that the prototype is ready for its first trial run.”