Written to the prompt R is for Round
The Cobra Crown
Sweat dampened her hair and trickled down her neck as she slung a shoulder bag across her body. The red light in the darkroom didn’t help, intensifying the heat surging through her. Urgency drove her racing pulse, and the vital importance of her mission made her clammy hands tremble.
She looked at the timer, willing it to speed up as running water cleaned the photo of chemicals.
She’d developed and printed film so many times before, but now the process seemed interminable. Perhaps because there’d never been so much at stake. One image would either see her filthy rich for the rest of her life, or in a back alley somewhere, face down inside a chalk outline.
The photo showed two men standing by a car exchanging a briefcase full of money for a simple circlet of gold, hammered to resemble snakeskin, culminating in the enamelled and jewelled figure of a hooded cobra about to strike. Cleopatra’s fabled Cobra Crown, stolen in the 1920s from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, missing for decades and believed lost.
But most important thing in the picture was not the crown. It was who the two men were – and who was sitting in the car watching.
She stowed the negatives in the shoulder bag and zipped it up. Lose them and she could kiss her payday – and probably her life – goodbye.
The pounding on the outer door made her stomach turn.
So. He’d betrayed her after all.
Heart thumping, she glanced at the timer. Two minutes to go. That might be a minute too long. Come on, come on.
More pounding, and hard, heartless voices barked her name.
She frantically pulled boxes of prints and negatives from the shelves and upended them behind the darkroom door along with unused film rolls and reams of photographic paper. She grabbed two bottles of whisky from a cupboard and emptied one all over the avalanche of paper and film.
She twisted the top from the second bottle, poured some onto an old cleaning rag and stuffed it in the neck of the bottle. It wouldn’t be long until—
There it was. The crash and splintering of wood. They’d broken the outer door down. She wrenched open two tall, solid shutters masking a pair of French doors which she kicked open. She snatched the precious photo from the water, and threw it on the ground outside. She pulled a lighter from her pocket, ignited the whisky-soaked rag and hurled the bottle against the darkroom door where it exploded into a fireball. That should buy her some time.
© Carol Carman 2024
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