he could keep that side of himself from other people. Cheryl had caught glimpses of him like that, but for whatever reason had chosen to ignore it.
Michael tried to imagine what Rachel would look like naked and what he would do to her body, but he was starting to feel too unsettled to hold that image in his mind. An anxiousness had been working in his stomach for days now and he was finding it harder to withstand. He hadn’t called Cheryl since supposedly leaving for Atlantic City three days ago, and as much as he dreaded calling her now he didn’t feel like he could put it off any longer. On his way to Cape Cod, he had stopped in Boston for a disposable cell phone. He used this to call Cheryl. When she answered, he apologized for not calling her earlier. “School put my head in a weird place. I needed some time alone to decompress and become human again,” he told her.
“Okay,” she said.
Her voice sounded so unnaturally brittle that it alarmed him. It was possible she was just sounding hurt because he didn’t take her with him on his supposed trip to Atlantic City, or because he hadn’t called her in three days, but it was also possible it was something else entirely. He felt his chest tightening as he waited for her to give him a clue which it was. When she didn’t, he told her he missed her.
“How about I come down then and keep you company?” she asked with that same painful brittleness.
“It wouldn’t be worth it,” he told her. “I’ll be home in a couple of days.”
There was another long hesitation, which he could barely stand. Was Cheryl sincere or was there something going on? A numbness filled his head as he tried to figure it out.
“How come caller ID is showing your cell phone as unavailable?” she asked.
“I lost my phone and bought a disposable one,” he lied. He still had his cell, and if everything worked out, he would tell her later how he found it in his car when he was driving home.
Her voice sounded normal again as she told him how she had tried calling him and was getting upset that he hadn’t returned any of her calls. So that was it. He couldn’t afford to keep his cell phone on since he knew he could be traced by it, so he didn’t know that she had tried calling him. He should’ve guessed that was the case. So the police hadn’t called her yet. He felt some relief realizing this, but only some. Still, he couldn’t help asking whether anyone was looking for him.
“Why would anyone be looking for you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of my professors or classmates.”
“No one has called for you.”
He told her he was hungry and was going to head down to the casino’s buffet for dinner, but that he missed her and was looking forward to seeing her soon, and she told him the same. After disconnecting the call, he had another beer and found himself absently rubbing his right wrist. He rolled up his shirtsleeve and saw that the scratches along his wrist were still red and ugly. Not nearly as bad as they had looked three days ago, but still pretty bad. He kept a tube of hydrocortisone cream near the chair, and he squeezed some out to rub on the scratch wounds. Hopefully in a few days they’d be gone.
The scratches were part of the reason he had taken off to the Cape without Cheryl. He couldn’t afford to let anyone see them, especially not her. But the trip had also been to get some breathing room, so that no one would know where he was in case the police were looking for him. If the story broke that they were after him, he wanted a chance to run. He wasn’t sure yet where he’d run, but he at least wanted that chance. He couldn’t imagine letting the police arrest him.
Michael opened another beer and drank it slowly as he thought about the woman he had killed. She’d been a dancer in a strip club in East Boston. Five foot one, ninety pounds, she’d been a dark-haired beauty with smoldering eyes that still remained remote and distant. It was clear why the patrons in the strip club would stare at her. With her near perfect body and face and long flowing black hair, she was a creature of pure sexual