…o, my! o poor me, mauled into a tiny spec, this bubble… what for?. why me?

…whois me…

* * *

12

It took V a couple minutes, at most, to see that he easily could cut it, keeping his lips like a distended puffy rim of a rubber funnel. Like by that… what’s her name, again? the current upper-dog bitch of celebrity’s?

He snapped his fingers for his memory recall and retrieval system to giddy up, in vain though. Could it be the blonde wig retards his usually quick wit? His train of thought had switched already over the points to soundlessly ramble towards chromosome mutations—why? in a generation or two those beauty queens would turn pretty froggy and no Prince Charming’s kisses at their puffy rims would ever bring back their fair looks… V sighed making for the elevator.

On the way down in between 4 walls perpendicular to each other, a jock in the thickening group of their fellow-travelers put to use all the vocabulary from his body language to emphasize how deeply he was hooked by V’s wig and stuff.

V just ignored the asshole’s advances, however, while traversing the building’s lobby, he marked infinitesimal changes, involuntary, to his, V’s, gait. The purposeful pace got inexplicable addition of circus vector embellishments beyond the range of his usual straightforwardness.

He recollected a lost work by a medieval monk theorizing that the attire licks us into shape of this or that modus vivendi more than any moral instruction could ever do. The order of Bareheeled Versaccesistorians or something, the monk belonged to.

Anyway, it came like a kinda alleviation, 5 minutes later by the row of garbage containers in a nook of a some project’s backyard, while cramming the wig and sunglasses into a unisex shoulder bag farmed out by Leya, to him.

Then he returned to the street sidewalk to stroll on in the stream of busily flowing crowd, each marching to their destination, presumably. Only V and a negligible number of vagabond loiterers had no particular place to steer to. They just kept walking in the waves of pedestrians. And that served a good therapy for V bringing his walking style back to normal.

Way ahead starboard he spotted an islet of green and crossed the the road at the traffic lights to enter, presently, a medium sized common. An empty bench seat became V’s anchorage. His back to the supporting back of slender long beams, V outstretched his legs full length, heels onto the walk, and his palms flew up and down, the digits interlocked, to accommodate the back of his head in the receptacle of restfully concave hand-calyx.

Time to relax and analyze the situation. Lucky as always, is he basking here on this bench and not zipped up in a dead body bag neither in a coagulating blood-puddle until they come to collect it.

He had avoided a trap, the deadly trap, alerted by 2ic’s call. How come?. The guy got arrested yesterday. Too little data for a guess work. Impossible to figure out. Still, thanks to him, V is alive yet, by the skin of his teeth.

Then followed 2 hours of waiting at Leya’s while dust settles. Lucky again. But where to move next so as to get any idea what kind of shit he’s got into?

V fetched out his phone and for one whole minute stared at the only number in the list of registered calls he had, then tapped it.

‘Yeah’, the husky thick bass narcissistically protracted to relish its own resonance had nothing to do with the 2ic’s hasty falcetto.

‘Can I talk to Mr. Taylor?’

‘Wrong number, pardner,’ responded the same oafish drawl in a Don’t-mess-with-Texas manner and was off.

And now neither deductive, nor inductive, nor prepositional, nor any other logic from their herd would do any good to add details to the dim picture of 2ic calling from the wrong number pilfered for a little sec off the sheriff in a western. In utter consternation V sagged back on the hard bench. Bury Me Not On The Lone Praire…

Now his task was to solve the enigma with just one puzzle piece disclosed, the call of 2ic that saved his life. Being an experienced thinker, V knew perfectly well – you hardly ever accomplish the job by wain straining. When aspiring to make a glorious discovery in any walk of common knowledge, your foremost and only tool is patient waiting, leave veni-vidi-vici to Harry Potter and smug fuhrers.

To wait was all he had to do, which also is not as easy as it might seem. Any discovery, solution, right decision takes a good deal of waiting before they happen. You cannot find no solution, you have to let it find you. Which calls for waiting. At times it’s a life-long wait. It’s like a fisherman waiting for the catch to strike. A split sec back it was not there, now you see it, the solution. Your waiting was the bait, you can’t catch a a thing with a bare hook, right? Except for a ruined shoe or a gaping tin can. You have to wait and be ready till it dawns on you all of a sudden. Where from? Maybe from you waiting, I dunno…

A united brainstorming, huh? A bunch of freaks swapping crumbs of stuff they’ve read in this or that book of solutions that visited other guys, before them; a knot of kids fishing from the same raft; a band of Amero-Americans seated on beast skins in a tepee, whose forefathers had no idea they were American citizens before the sail ships pop up in search of routes to the fabulous treasures of India. They knew a few tricks to wait collectively for the right decision passing the stuffed pipe in the council sitting. Till it strikes…

Something from without drew V up from